Ubuntu Unity tweaks

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The scroll bars are sometimes hard to grab in Unity. To get the “classic” scroll bars back, just remove the respective package and re-login to the desktop:

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar

While you’re at it, if you don’t dig the global menu bar tweak, that can be removed as well:

sudo apt-get remove indicator-appmenu

Notice that the notification panel (system tray) doesn’t show all the icons you might expect? Skype, pidgin, etc are not in the default whitelist. To remove the filtering use this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

You may also be interested in a package called myunity in the repos.

 

Peer to Peer Web Search

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Tinkering with YaCy, a P2P search engine. Check it out:

http://natetron.net:8090/

From their homepage: “YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”

http://yacy.net/images/screenshot_searchresult.png

Web-based Remote Administration

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Sometimes you might not have access to local applications, like ssh and vncviewer, to remotely administer your machine(s). You almost always, however, retain the use of a web browser. For ssh via the web, gateone comes to the rescue:

http://liftoffsoftware.com/Products/GateOne

http://liftoffsoftware.com/sites/default/files/full_color_support_0.png

And if you can get tomcat running, you can install an applet that can be configured as a web-based vnc viewer by using guacamole:

http://guac-dev.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guacamole/screenshots/297467

Very handy, in a pinch.

 

EXT4 on SSD

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Mount options (in /etc/fstab) for EXT4 SSD partitions should include “noatime,discard” which reduces io and enables TRIM support, respectively.

Also, you should add these to /etc/rc.local to change the scheduler to something better suited to non-spinning disks (change sda as appropriate):

echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch

Don’t forget the tmpfs tricks: http://natetron.net/b/?p=204

 

Gaming on Linux

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The Linux video game sub-industry is strong:

http://www.desura.com/

http://www.lgdb.org/games/metarating

http://www.penguspy.com/#/All/free_and_commercial/open_closed/sort=1/view=1/limit=0

http://www.gameolith.com/

http://gamingonlinux.com/index.php

http://linuxgamecast.com/

http://www.linuxgames.com/

http://www.linux-gamers.net/

http://www.bestubuntu.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/

To whit:

http://i.imgur.com/Z9LHr.jpg

My Lubuntu based gaming box