Chethan S.'s questions

I have installed Oneiric Beta on my laptop. As my Mobile Broadband refused to connect to Internet through network manager I'm now using wvdial to connect. Hence the network manager shows I'm not connected to any networks. When I try to install software from Ubuntu Software Center the 'Install' option remains disabled and under reviews section it says no network connection! As a workaround I kept installing applications from terminal which works fine.

Therefore, my question is how to make Software Center recognize that I am connected to Internet?

Other than LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org Impress what good presentation making tools are available for Ubuntu? I prefer a GUI tool which can export to PDF as I have to make presentation in Windows PC. Can PDF support animations with Adobe Reader 8/9?

I remember reading HTML presentations are often attractive but don't know how to create one. Are there nice tools for that purpose? Can such a presentation run with all effects on an older browser, say IE6/7?

Can wine as a whole or the windows applications installed via wine pose some kind of risk to an Ubuntu installation? This question arose in my mind when I read this answer to my earlier question Accessing IE only sites:

Try installing PlayonLinux from playonlinux.org and install IE via PlayonLinux. and use IE only for those pesky sites :) - Received 1 downvote

And enjoying the risks of IE? No thanks - This comment received 2 upvotes

I believe this PlayOnLinux works as a frontend to wine making installing tasks easier.

In totality, I want to know if it is safe to install Internet connecting applications like IE via Wine? Is there any remote possibility of being subject to more online attacks and virus threats this route. I plan to use IE only for browsing websites not accessible with other browsers, like the one in earlier question.

Still there are companies who believe Windows is the only OS and IE is the only browser around. This prompts them to make sites which can be accessed only in IE. Though I have dual-boot system I boot into Windows only once in several days. I don't want to boot into Windows just to check my internet usage(yes, it is my ISP's site - http://selfcare.sdc.bsnl.co.in/). The site does not allow me to enter my username and password in Firefox/Chrome in Ubuntu. When I take my mouse pointer over it, it just keeps circling! And now it has started showing Bad Gateway. The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. Ironically it seems to use Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server. So there they need Linux! Is there any way out for such issues other than installing Windows on a Virtual PC?

Since I started using Natty I experience a strange situation at times. When I leave my system idle for 30+ mins., the screensaver Ant Spotlight remains active for specified time, then the monitor turns off after a while. Later when I am back to work on moving mouse/pressing keys on keyboard monitor powers on but I am greeted with a stuck up Ant in the screen. I won't be able to access open applications in any way. No key/mouse click works. I tried going to terminal with Ctrl+Alt+F1 and killing gnome-screensav but the Ant doesn't budge. Only way out I take is to log out with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace which works causing to lose my unsaved work.

Initially when I installed Natty, JRE was not installed for libreoffice. Later I came to know installing JRE i.e., libreoffice-java-common will lead to performance improvements. So installed it and in LO options selected enable java runtime. But I noticed a heavy degradation in the performance. LO was taking more time to load, scrolling through pages became very slow and what not!

So now I wonder what purpose does JRE in LO serve?

I have been trying to use English-UK thesaurus in LibreOffice but so far cannot get it to work. I have installed mythes-en-us as only it was available in repos. As suggested in some forums I searched for openoffice.org thesaurus, but again US version was available. As a result I can't enable thesaurus when I choose English UK:

As instructed elsewhere I tried this:

cd /usr/share/myspell/dicts
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.dat th_en_GB_v2.dat
sudo ln -s th_en_US_v2.idx th_en_GB_v2.idx

Still the result is same as shown in above screenshots.

What can be done now?

I just installed 64-bit Google Earth from .deb file downloaded from the official site. Now when I open Google Earth it looks all weird. Here's a screenshot: .

How to get it right?

Today when I went ahead with Natty installation I had selected btrfs for root filesystem. To my utter surprise I was presented with the screen

Unknown filesystem
grub rescue >

None of the options I tried like Y, yes did not work. Later I again installed Natty with ext4 filesystem.

Why do such errors appear?

Just now I made a fresh installation of Natty on my desktop. Earlier I was using Maverick with a separate home partition. While installing I selected / for maverick partition and selected nothing for earlier home. Now I noticed that earlier home is recognized as just another partition and a new home has been created. How can I set earlier home as home for natty?

After I copy say 50+ GB(30,000 files including different formats) of files from an internal hard drive to an external drive is there any way to find out if everything has been copied correctly? Also if I stop in between by canceling the operation and later say merge when continuing the operation will the correctness take a hit?

I could use applications like back-in-time but I am very choosy in copying files and for the next time I intend to use copy operation and say merge instead of replace. Is it advisable when copying large number of files?

What command I can use to check my graphics card's memory? I have an on-board Intel Graphics card, and I am unsure if it's memory is 128 MB or 256 MB!

I just backed up the contents of my home partition onto my external hard drive using Back In Time. I browsed to the backed up contents in the external drive and under properties it showed me the size as 9.6 GB.

As I read that in next snapshots I create, Back In Time does not backup everything but creates hard links for older contents and saves newer contents, I wanted to test it. So I copied two small files into my home partition and ran 'Take Snapshot' again.

The operation completed within a minute - first it checked previous snapshot, assessed the changes, detected two new files and synced them. After this when I browsed to the backed up contents, I was surprised to see the newer and older backup taking up 9.6 GB each.

Isn't this a waste of hard drive space? Or did I interpret something wrongly?

I have some photos taken with a digital camera. Which software under Ubuntu can I use to make a photo CD out of it, which can be read on standard CD/DVD players for TV sets?

Since yesterday, the title bars of windows are missing. I haven't changed any configuration.

I noticed 'Desktop Effects' set to none. Changing it back to 'Extra' made everything proper. I had to customize my desktop effects again in CompizConfig manager too. Now this problem reappears after every restart.

I must also say that, once I change Compiz settings all the three radio buttons in 'Desktop Effects' remain unselected. But when this problem arises, it will be set to 'None'.

I have a PDF document with over 300 pages. I need to add 15 pages in between - after page 180. How can I do it?

A friend of mine had Windows 7 and Windows XP running in his Sony Vaio. I replaced Windows XP with Ubuntu 10.10. After that the laptop directly boots into Ubuntu. Even the grub menu does not appear during startup. I tried sudo update-grub, sudo update-burg but windows was not recognized.

How can I solve this issue?

In a PC where I need to install Ubuntu, I have the following disk partitions from the left side of partition table as of now:

1. NTFS - Primary windows vista
2. Extended - 3 Nos. all NTFS - middle one contains data
3. Unallocated space
4. NTFS - Primary
5. NTFS - Primary HP Recovery

My intention is to add unallocated space to the extended partition. Will I be able to use Gparted to do it?

Also, can I install Ubuntu in one of the extended partitions and make this unallocated partition the home partition for Ubuntu. I am not able to add new partition in this unallocated space as disk manager in vista throws up an error no free disk space to complete the operation. I read in some forum that OEM installations allow only 3 primary partitions and one extended or 4 primary ones. Is it true for OEM's only or its a universal rule?

I am trying to install the latest stable release of GRASS GIS from SVN. In the stage of running configure command I get the following error at the last stage.

checking for location of Tcl/Tk includes... /usr/include/tcl8.5
checking for tcl.h... yes
checking for tk.h... no
configure: error: *** Unable to locate Tk includes.

The command I run for configuration is -

./configure --with-tcltk-includes=/usr/include/tcl8.5 --with-proj-share=/usr/share/proj

Can anyone suggest me what I am missing?

Though its nearly a year since I started using Ubuntu, I have not attempted installing software from source. I didn't actually find the need to do so. But now I am working on a software which is at the release candidate stage in the repositories but the latest stable version's source code is available at the software home page.

I learnt that installing from source code may be difficult if the software has many dependencies. However if I tackle that, I can be happy with the latest version. But I keep wondering if such a software can automatically update itself or will I have to run some scripts to update the package. Or still worse will I have to reinstall each update from scratch?

Also I am eager to know if there is any specific advantage of installing from source other than the above.