The Geeky Linux :: Ubuntu/Linux blog :: Open source Tips and Tricks :: Linux Howtos and Tutorials

There is a fun easter egg in gnome. Gnome panel has a utility called 'fish'. You can let this fish swim in your desktop and give company to you in your loneliness. It is a cute fish and its name is 'wanda'. So let's free the wanda fish in gnome.

Press Alt+F2 key combination and it will open "run application" utility. Then type "free the fish" (without quotes) and press Enter key.

Today I was testing the kubuntu 11.04 beta 2 from usb. I am using kde after 2 years. I always wanted to test the latest changes brought by kde 4.6 and now only I actually ventured into it. This was really a refreshing experience for me and I liked the recent changes in kde. The thing which most interested me in kubuntu is its new default browser rekonq.

Rekonq is the default browser is kde for the good. I used konqueror before but can't stick with it. Even though konqueror is different it had many quirks and irks which made me switch to firefox. But the new default browser rekonq has rectified all the drawbacks of konqueror. I am not going to write a review about rekonq here but I am going to talk how to install adobe flash player 64 bit in rekonq.

Today I have learned a great lesson from internet. I am using a 4 year old computer. I have recently came to know that it does not support booting from usb. I wanted to test so many linux distros. I have used Virtual Box before. But I was not not satisfied in trying the various distros in a VM. The interesting changes happening in the linux world urged me to test them in real environment rather than a VM.

Ubuntu 11.04 is switching to unity and gnome is shifting to gnome shell. I wanted to  try these myself. But there is a problem. The Ubuntu unity and gnome shell does not work on a VM. It will switch to classsic gnome in unity and gnome without the new gnome shell in  gnome 3 in a VM. And much more, these are extremely slow in a VM. This was really irritating to me and I wanted to test them using a bootable usb image. But my pc does not support booting from usb.

The severe problem that linux suffer on a desktop is the bad performance of flash. Adobe is not much interested in improving the flash performance in linux as they are concentrating on improving their market share on mobiles. And our major source of online videos is youtube. So would it be great if we have a native desktop app for linux to view the youtube videos without flash? Yes, the developer of Minitube, Flavio Tordini also thought like that. And he has created Minitube.

Postr is a simple flickr photo uploader tool for the gnome desktop. If you are a flickr addict this is going to a very useful tool for you. It is specially designed for the gnome desktop. It was originally developed by Ross Burton and now maintained by Germán Póo-Caamaño who is also using this project for mentoring and encouraging new contributors for GNOME.

Let's have a look at the features of postr now:

Most of the people will be familiar with the top command that is used to check the processes running in our linux distro and it also gives vital information like memory usage, cpu usage etc. But most of the cases it seems that the top command itself is not enough and I often feel that the top utility is not that much accurate. This started me looking for a better command line alternative for top. Thus I stumbled upon an awesome command line system monitor utility called "htop".

Htop is, according to its website is "an interactive process viewer for linux". It is written in C programming language and it uses ncurses library. It is created to overcome the usability issues and limitations of the top utility in linux. It is created by Hisham H. Muhammad and he has named it after him. That is htop is the short name for Hisham's top.

In short we can tell that htop is an advanced version of top which we can even use mouse to control it. There are many more options given in htop which is easy to use. I always felt that htop is much more accurate than top. Let's have a look at the differences between top and htop and other functionalities.

In this post we will see how to view the UTC/GMT (Coordinated Universal Time/Greenwich Mean TIme) in our terminal. We will be living in different time zones and we are using Greenwich Mean Time as the standard time to calculate time in other time zones. For example, I'm in Indian Standard Time and it is 5.30 hours ahead of GMT. So it is very common in internet to use UTC/GMT as a standard to tell about the time as people are in different time zones. So what if you do not know the time difference between your time zone and UTC/GMT?

We can find the UTC/GMT time from the terminal itself. For finding the UTC/GMT time type the following command in the terminal.

• date -u

Thu Apr  7 20:14:20 UTC 2011

We can easily find the free space in our hard disk using command line. Command line, once we master it, is a lot easier than using Graphical User Interface(GUI), especially in linux. In linux, we have different Desktop Environment(DE) like Gnome,KDE,XFCE,Enlightenment etc which may be using different GUI based programs to find this simple free disk space. It may even change from distro to distro. So if we came from an entirely different linux distro or DE we will have to search for the specific program to view the free disk space. So what is the simplest and universal solution? Yes, it is command line which available in all the linux distros and have the same command to perform a specific task. So let's find out how find the free space using command line.

Naturally if we want to use the commands you have entered on the terminal, you can choose them by using up arrow and it will cycle through the previously used commands. Otherwise you can use the "history" command to see the full commands entered in terminal. But what if you want to hide certain commands from showing up in command line history? To find out read on!

I have used a tried a lot of bit torrent clients in linux in my quest to find the best bit torrent client.Actually I have migrated from Windows so I was in search for the utorrent alternative. At that time utorrent was only available for windows.

I have switched to Ubuntu and the default bit torrent client is Transmission. As I have used utorrent, I was really confused about how to use Transmission. In short, I was never happy with Ubuntu's default bit torrent client. In my search for utorrent alternative, I have met Deluge, which fairly satisfied me, Ktorrent which confused me with its hell lot of configuration settings,Vuze which I felt that it is an operating system of its own rather than bit torrent client.

I have written a post about viewing the system information in linux using the command line way. It will work on all linux distributions and more over you do not need to install any other softwares. But if you are using Ubuntu/Linux Mint and want to view the system information in a more comfortable graphical interface (GUI) way? Let's find out how to achieve this.

Some times we may need to use a stop watch timer in order to calculate the time taken by something against some other thing to compare between two things. For example, if you need to check the speed of loading pages between Firefox 4 and Google chrome in linux.

As you are using linux, there is always a simple and better way to do this. For doing this you do not have to install a separate software. You can use your terminal as a stop watch timer. Yes, you have heard it right. I repeat " You can use your terminal as a stop watch timer". Let's have a look at how to use the terminal as stop watch timer.