Tag Archives: HowTo

Reset GRUB Default System After OS Installation

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From time to time I like to test out a new Linux distribution or just an updated version of my current distribution. I’ve created extra partitions on my hard drive for these test installations. All of the distributions I’ve tried so far require a boot loader to be installed to the hard drive as part of the process. This creates the minor problem of the test installation taking over the boot process. I prefer to have my main Linux installation handle the booting process. The following steps will show how to hand boot control back to your main Linux installation with the GRUB 2 boot loader. Continue reading →

Install Unity Tweak Tool in Ubuntu

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The Unity Desktop Shell for GNOME 3 on Ubuntu Linux has created a lot of controversy in the desktop Linux world. Some users love the new forward looking vision of Unity while others long for a more traditional desktop layout. One of the criticisms of Unity has been its lack of configuration settings. While many configuration settings have been added to Unity since the initial release, most of them remain hidden from regular users. That’s where the Unity Tweak Tool comes in. It provides GUI access to many of Unity’s hidden settings and collects them together under one convenient application.  Continue reading →

Keeping Track of My IP Address

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My main computer at home acts as a file and media server for the whole house, so it’s pretty much turned on all the time. There are times when I’m away from home that I want to remotely access or download a file from my home computer. My home internet service uses a dynamic IP address and every once in a while we get a short interruption to our power that forces the modem to reset. Of course, when that happens, the modem pulls a new IP address. I thought it would be handy if I could come up with a script to keep track of my current IP address for me. Continue reading →

Fixing My CD/DVD Drive on Kubuntu 12.04

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I’ve been having problems with my optical drive on my Kubuntu 12.04 machine. Certain applications couldn’t find the CD/DVD drive because they look for specific device names in /dev. My SATA optical drive would show up as /dev/sr0, however the normal symlinks to cdrom, cdrw, dvd, dvdrw were not there. I would go to the terminal and manually create the symlink and things would work fine, but after a reboot my symlinks would be gone! I found the fix in an old bug report on LaunchPad.
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Send Gmail from the Linux Command Line

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In this post I’m going to show how to send an email from the Linux command line through your Gmail account. This can be handy if you’re a command line junkie. The real power, however, is in being able to send an email automatically from a script. I’ll be doing another post where I use this in a script to notify me when something has changed on my system. For now though, I’ll just show the setup so you can send an email from the command line.  This process has been tested on Ubuntu 12.04 and Linux Mint 13. Continue reading →