I’m back on a Mac OS X system for work (this or Windows; Linux only on servers). Found this post which offers a very nice list of apps for people like me migrating from Ubuntu.
Posts Tagged: Ubuntu
Screen brightness after suspend in Ubuntu
Many laptops have their screens dimmed after returning from “suspend” and cannot get back to their original brightness. The bug hasn’t been fixed for 3 years. A fix is provided in the bug report by putting something like the following in /etc/rc.local: brt=`cat /sys/devices/virtual/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness` abrt=`cat /sys/devices/virtual/backlight/acpi_video0/actual_brightness` if (( $brt != $abrt )) ; then echo… Read more »
Enable root account in Ubuntu?
After my recent experience with broken su and sudo commands in a failed system upgrade, I realized that although disabling the root account has many advantages, one of the disadvantage is that I can’t login as root in the terminal when I’m physically in front of the system. This is a major issue if su,… Read more »
Flipping the classroom: creating screencast lectures in Linux
I’m debating the idea (hype) of flipping the classroom for one of my classes next Fall where students watch lecture videos at home (or elsewhere) so I could spend class time doing more hands-on activities like discussing the art of data analysis and how to solve problems with statistics. I think Khan Academy, Udacity, and… Read more »
Test ram with Memtest86+ and ignore bad parts with badram in grub
Recently, my computer kept freezing whenever I started conkeror (with 100+ buffers loading from a previous session). Folks over at #conkeror on freenode suggested that the problem might be due to faulty ram. They suggested testing my ram with Memtest86+. It is installed by default on Ubuntu. If you have multiple sticks of ram, test… Read more »
Build 32 bit R on 64 bit Ubuntu by utilizing chroot
In the past, I’ve described how one could build multiarch (64 bit and 32 bit) versions of R on a 64 bit Ubuntu machine. The method based on this thread no longer works as of R 2.13 or 2.14 I believe. I received advice from someone on #R over on freenode (forgot who) a few… Read more »
Encrypted zip files on Linux with PeaZip
I recently had the need to encrypt zip files. Ubuntu’s default archive manager, File Roller, has a password option. However, I was not able to find documentation on what is its encryption algorithm. To be on the safe side, I opted for PeaZip per this post. It works natively with KDE, but I’m using Gnome…. Read more »
Annotate or write on top of a pdf file
Sometimes I need to annotate a pdf file, either to take notes or to fill it out as a form since I have ugly handwriting; for the latter, I’m referring to the case where the pdf file does not have form fields you can type in with Adobe Reader. This post describes some programs for… Read more »
List open ports on computer using netstat
When you want to know what ports/services are opened on your computer, type the following in the command line: netstat -tunelp | less
Emacs 24 crashing when launched with Synapse and an emacsclient window is closed
I’m currently using Emacs 24 (pre-release) installed from this repository on Ubuntu 11.04. An error (crash: segmentation fault) that arose after moving from Emacs 23 to Emacs 24 is as follow (could stem from the pre-release repository; might not be the case if I compile from source). I launch emacs via Synapse. I start the… Read more »