Posted in Geekery on Nov 17th, 2010
Despite using Gnome for ages, I’ve never bothered to work out how to type special characters, like ™ or ©. I’ve normally just opened the Character Map application and copied from there – obviously this is a bit of a round about process. I finally decided to look it up and it’s as simple as: [...]
Posted in Geekery on Nov 5th, 2010
LUKS is the standard for Linux hard disk encryption. The following few commands are all you need to encrypt your next external hard disk or USB key on a Debian-based distribution like Ubuntu. Installation Install the required software and load the module into the running kernel without restarting: 12sudo aptitude install cryptsetup sudo modprobe dm_crypt [...]
Posted in Geekery on Oct 11th, 2010
I just upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 on my ThinkPad and the only issue so far is that TrackPoint scrolling had stopped working. To re-enable it I used GPointingDeviceSettings and set the following settings: The important change was to set the wheel emulation’s button to 2, not 4 as it appeared to have been set to. [...]
Posted in Geekery on Jun 24th, 2010
Wireshark is a network protocol analyser, or packet sniffer, available for Ubuntu 10.04 via a simple sudo apt-get install wireshark. However to use it correctly, we need to change some permissions to ensure we’re not running the whole application as root. The following commands will let the adm group run Wireshark without elevated privileges – [...]
Posted in Geekery on Jun 9th, 2010
If you’re like me and love your nipple, you might prefer to disable the touchpad on your ThinkPad. In openSUSE this is a trivial affair of opening up the Gnome mouse preferences and unchecking the Enable Touchpad option. When I went searching for this option in Ubuntu 10.04 I couldn’t find it, so I searched [...]
More from OpenAustralia.org