Upgrading Version 2 Thunderbird to Version 3

Introduction

If you have updated recently your version of Linux Distro in Ubuntu, Mint and others you might have hit on a couple of upgrade problems associated with the Thunderbird Version released with the distro. This howto covers the instructions needed to overcome these problems. At least one of the fixes is very simple the other is only slightly more complex.

Installing the latest OpenOffice Suite for Debian and Ubuntu Systems

Introduction

Most of the time you will want to use the installed package manager with the likes of (apt-get or Synaptic) to use for Open Office, using this method whilst it ensures an easy to install solution does not give you the latest version installation, the latest version is harder to install partly because it comes as a tarball and there are several individual Debian packages within it and apparently no setup script of obvious means of installation.

Find out your UUID for an attached drive

For quite some time now the likes of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have used UUID to determine any attached storage devices for mounting, for many of us whilst we see the value of such things finding out how the UUID is derived or for that matter checking the UUID is a bit of a mystery. Well rest easy because by using the command below can can quickly and easily find out this information yourself.

#> sudo blkid

Clever control sequence for pre-used console commands

You know how it is, you open a new terminal window assured you know the command you want to use you make a cup of coffee and then you forget the command you where to use. Obviously you need better coffee!

Or you can press the "Control Key + r" and your command prompt is replaced with this

(reverse-i-search)`':

A Distribution Query Howto

Here is a very quick and easy tip to find out what distribution of Linux your system is running, open a new terminal window and type the command below at your prompt.

#> lsb_release -a

Please be aware #> is a prompt do not type this in your terminal window just the command

You should get something like this

#> lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Release: 10.04
Codename: lucid

What On Earth is Grep

As a tool "grep" is just one of those commands that once you begin to use you just can't do without, nothing in it name suggests what this command does. Grep Wikipedia documents grep as a command line text search utility originally written for Unix. The name is taken from the first letters in global / regular expression / print, a series of instructions for the ed text editor.

W32Codecs - Howto

I recently needed to come to the rescue of one of our club members the other day having some trouble playing some video content, so thought I would spell out what you need to add to get things working properly for both 32bit and 64bit systems for Jaunty Jackalope. Having the Flash Plugin now working on 32bit Firefox is great in Jauty Jackalope and only requires the installation of ubuntu-restricted-extras.

The problem

Whilst trying out new Conky config files on Crunchbang Linux (wiki to follow about this) I had a few problems that turned out to be fonts that were needed that I did not have installed.
A quick web search later and the fonts were downloaded, but how do I install them so the system knows about them??

Different Background Images for each Cube Surface

This has been bugging us at SoSLUG for some time well ok then, me. In compizconfig-settings-manager >> Desktop Cube if you set your number of desktop surfaces to four (4) this gives you your basic cube and quite naturally you would assume given that you can define each of the chosen images for each face, that each desktop image would display the selected image you have chosen. You would think that wouldn't you I know I did.

Mounting USB external drives in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

I don't believe the data here in is any longer relevant and can be safely archived

We came across this interesting problem with Hardy Heron the other day, we wanted to insert a USB flash drive into a computer running the latest Linux distro and access it's contents. It obviously tried to mount the device into the file system but something was stopping it.