Docking Stuff with Kdocker

I have just discovered an awesome little application called Kdocker.  Kdocker allows you to minimize applications to the notification area.  It’s similar to Alltray, however I’ve found Kdocker to have more features and a bit lighter on the RAM usage.  To install it just run

sudo apt-get install kdocker

Then press Alt+F2 and run

kdocker

The mouse cursor will turn into a little box, then just click on a window to put it in the notification area.  You can also modify a menu entry for an application so that it will go to the notification area whenever it is launched.  Just right click on the Applications menu and select “Edit Menus”.  Find the entry for the application and right click on it and select “Properties”.  Then just prefix the command with kdocker.  This will actually put it in the notification area immediately.  If you want it to open but not go immediately to the notification area, use the -m option.  That will open the application but not hide it immediately.  See

man kdocker

For many other useful options.

I’ve found this particularly useful for Evolution since Evolution can’t put itself in the notification area natively.  This is a nice workaround for that.

The possibilities are endless with the app.  You can dock just about anything, like Firefox or even a terminal

Changing GDM’s GTK Theme

I’m surprised I didn’t figure this out a while ago because the answer has been staring at me in the face this whole time.

Have you ever gotten a very nice looking GDM theme only to be disappointed because the widgets and highlights were still themed in the Human theme and it clashed horribly?  Like this?

Ugh.

Well there’s actually a very simple solution to this.  If you go under System→Administration→Login Window, the General tab contains a check box that says “GtkRC file:”.  This is where you can specify a gtkrc file for GDM to use so it will use a different GTK theme.

Most themes can be found in /usr/share/themes/ and the gtkrc file will be located in the gtk-2.0 directory under the theme name.  In the example I used the Clearlooks gtkrc and afterwards my GDM looked like this:

Ah, much better. Happy theming!

Suspend!

Haha! After two years I finally got suspend to work on my Dell Inspiron 8200. Apparently the Nvidia binary driver causes a lot of problems with suspend.  But not in all cases.  I have another laptop (HP dv6500t) with a GeForce 8400 and suspend works fine without any tweaking.  Back to my Dell.  I found out that by adding

Option      “NvAGP”    “1″

to my xorg.conf and tweaking /etc/default/acpi-support as described here, made suspend work!  But I hit a little problem.  Adding the NvAGP option to xorg.conf killed my performance.  The entire desktop responsiveness went down the drain.  Then I found out the reason was because there was no AGP being loaded due to a conflict between the kernel’s AGP (AGPGART) and Nvidia’s AGP (NVAGP).  The solution I found was to blacklist the AGPGART module to prevent it from loading so NVAGP could load.  To do this I did

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

And added these two lines to the end of the list.

blacklist agpgart
blacklist intel_agp

Rebooted and the responsiveness of the system was back as well as being able to suspend and hibernate flawlessly.  Even the wireless works on resume!  You can always check the status of AGP with the Legacy Nvidia drivers with

cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status

And you should get something like

Status:             Enabled
Driver:              NVIDIA
AGP Rate:          4x
Fast Writes:      Disabled
SBA:                Disabled

The Driver will say either AGPGART or NVIDIA depending on what AGP you are using.

Now if I could just figure out how to use CPU frequency scalling with the Nvidia driver, I could report on a laptop that works 100% perfectly with Ubuntu.

Busy Busy Busy

Well, I’ve been very busy lately, which is why I haven’t blogged about anything recently.  It’s coming down to the last few weeks of the school quarter here, which means exams, which also means everything just gets more hectic.  I have two projects coming up this week and on top of that, I have to study for exams.  There’s only two more weeks of this madness after which I will have a nice break and have time to blog about some stuff.  Possibly about a home server which I plan to re-set up during my break.

I already have something sort of setup on this server, but it’s not really serving anything.  I pretty much just have SSH setup so I can remote admin it, and throw files on it, but that’s about it.  I would like to make it a full fledged home server, but I’ve learned the hard way that servers on wireless don’t work too well. So I’ll have to find a way to run some cable or something since this will be second computer on a hard line to the router.

Anyways, I’ll give a shoutout to all my online buddies who I haven’t had time to chat with much lately because of all this work.

w00t! 2 more weeks of madness

Making Intel Wireless 3945ABG Work Better on Ubuntu Hardy

In Ubuntu 8.04 the Intel wireless cards have switched from the ipw driver to the iwl driver.  The version of the iwl driver that ships with Hardy is slightly buggered.  The driver does not support SCAN_CAPA = 0×0 which prevents it from connecting to hidden networks.  Though Network Manager has been pachted with a workaround for this.  It also doesn’t have any support for controlling the LED light.  Luckily a new version of the iwl driver has been backported in the linux-backports-modules-hardy-generic package.

To install this package, first go System→Administration→Software Sources.  Go to the Updates tab and enable the Hardy Backports repository.

Click Close then click the Reload button when prompted.  After that is done open a termianl and enter

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-hardy-generic

Afterwards, reboot and you should have your LED light working as well as possibly better wireless performance.

I still have some problems connecting to my network.  Sometimes it won’t connect when I boot the computer and I have to fool around with Network Manager by disabling wireless, enabling wireless, disabling networking, enabling networking, and a number of combinations of those things with some waiting thrown in there too.  So if you’re having problems connecting to the network, play around with Network Manager for a while. It might take a lot of tries.

Getting Scroll Lock to Work in Ubuntu

For some odd reason the Scroll Lock button doesn’t work in an Xsession in Ubuntu. There’s an old bug report here. However it works as it should in a virtual terminal. The interesting thing though is that Xev will detect the key press. So how do you get the Scroll Lock functioning again? Well first let’s run this command

xmodmap -pm

You should get an output like this

xmodmap:  up to 3 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses):

shift       Shift_L (0×32),  Shift_R (0×3e)
lock        Caps_Lock (0×42)
control     Control_L (0×25),  Control_R (0×6d)
mod1        Alt_L (0×40),  Alt_L (0×7d),  Meta_L (0×9c)
mod2        Num_Lock (0×4d)
mod3
mod4        Super_L (0×7f),  Hyper_L (0×80)
mod5        Mode_switch (0×5d),  ISO_Level3_Shift (0×7c)

Notice mod3 has nothing listed.  This will be what we will use to assign Scroll Lock.  It may be a different mod for some people.  Either way use the one that has nothing listed.

Before we do anything else let’s test this to make sure it works.  We’re going to run this command

xmodmap -e ‘add mod3 = Scroll_Lock’

Replace mod3 with whatever the blank mod listing was.  Your Scroll Lock should work now.

I hate making changes like this locally to only my user, so I’m going to do this globally.

Now we need to create a file in /etc/X11 called Xmodmap.  So start up Gedit or your favorite text editor

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/Xmodmap

Now add this to the file

add mod3 = Scroll_Lock

again, change mod3 to the one that was empty from the first command.  Now the Scroll Lock key should get set when X starts now.

HP Photosmart C7280 with Ubuntu

You’ve got to love HP for their printer support under Linux. It’s unmatched as far as I can tell. Well I just picked up an HP Photosmart C7280 printer/copier/fax machine. It’s listed here as compatible with HPLIP and sure enough it worked out of the box, well almost. HPLIP wasn’t giving me the correct driver when I was trying to set it up. I found out I needed to install the hpijs-ppds package. Then I tried again and I was given the correct driver. I have it hooked up wirelessly. Yes this printer is wireless! HP Toolbox contains a load of tools from fax stuff to scanning and everything in between. And I can access this printer from any of the computers on my little network. Another great new hardware experience in Linux.

I say that if you don’t want a hardware nightmare in Linux do your research first.

Wow! Windows Vista!!

I just bought Vista Ultimate and I must say it p0wns Linux. It’s better in every aspect, even security! It’s got a much better implementation of sudo called UAC. I love it. It makes sure I don’t accidentally do something to my system or install rogue software. Whoever says UAC is annoying should check out sudo, now that’s annoying. And the Aero interface, wow! Aero totally owns Compiz Fusion. I mean just look at this blurry shiny glassy interface, there’s nothing like it! And when it comes to hardware, nothing beats Vista. And I can get my work done so much faster with Vista. And I find the EULA much better than the GPL. I’m sorry but Linux isn’t ready for the desktop. I’m going back to Windows.

Paint Samples

I don’t want paint samples at the top of my blog

Any suggestions?

Ok, that was totally random

Bring Back Download Complete Notification in Firefox

I know the Windows version of Firefox has this activated by default and I know the Linux version used to as well, until some time ago. I’m not quite sure when, but it got disabled by default and I’ve always wondered what happened to it. At first I thought it was removed from Firefox as I couldn’t find any option for it anywhere. But it’s still there, just needs some digging around in good old about:config.

If you want to turn it back on, type in

about:config

in the address bar. In the Filter box type in

browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete

Double click on “false” to change it to “true”

Now the next time you download something you will get that little popup notification in the corner of your screen.

Yes I like to blog about really oddball stuff