binW's questions

Where I live, there is power outage every few hours. This means my DSL WIFI routergets reset after 2-3 hours max. The network is secured and requires password to connect. So when the router resets and comes backup after a few minutes, my laptop (Ubuntu 10.04) doesnt auto reconnect to it. Instead I am presented with a password entry dialog box to connect to the network. How can this re-connection be made automatic? Is there some retry counts or timeout that I can set somewhere so that the network manager will try for at least 10 minutes to connect to this network before popping this dialog box.

Thanks.

Is it possible to undo all changes made by "aptitude build-dep xxxxxx" i.e to un-install all dependencies installed by this command?

I have few python scripts which were written by someone else in Windows. These scripts use double backslash as path separator but when run in Ubuntu they don't work because of this. I can change all \ to / and scripts will work but there are lot of scripts and its a lot of effort to change each \ to /

So my question is: Is it possible to add \ as path separator in Ubuntu or only in Bash so that I dont have to modify these scripts?

Example code:

# Append Common directory to the Python search path
sys.path.append('..\\..\\..' + os.sep + 'Common')

I want to limit the number of torrents that are simultaneously being downloaded in Transmission. I could find any such option in transmission preferences. How can I do this?

I use Google Chrome at home and recently I installed AngryBirds from the webstore but to my surprise it wasn't available on my wife's account. Is it possible to install Chrome apps such that they are available on all user accounts on the system and doesn't require installing for individual users. This will save some disk space and help me save time by not installing every app twice.

Update:
I am not talking about app shortcuts that we can create with chrome. I am talking about Chrome Apps which can be installed from Chrome Web Store https://chrome.google.com/webstore?hl=en-US e.g Angry Birds, Pacman and others

I want to completely remove open office from my system. What packages do I need to uninstall to remove it completely?
I am using Ubuntu 10.10.

Is there any GUI available for patch command? I need it because sometime I need to see the actual file before applying patch to it and it is very cumbersome to open patch file and then open the individual files listed in there. Even if I do that I cant compare the modified i.e patched file and unmodified/unpatched file.

I am compiling a program using make and want the output of make to be written to a file. I have tried using > operator like

make > build_log.txt

and using tee command like

make | tee build_log.txt

but the problem is that some of the ouput goes into the file but rest keeps appearing on the screen.

I can simply copy/paste the text from terminal into a file after running make but that is not a solution.

So my question is how do I save i.e redirect all the output to file so that it goes into file only without appearing on screen.

When I right click on Main Menu and select Edit Menus nothing happens. I want to edit few of the menu items and I am stuck. How do I edit main menu now?

Possible Duplicate:
Is a /boot partition necessary anymore?

Well, the question title says it all. Are there any benefits of creating a separate directory for /boot. Is there any kind of grub/any-other-bootloader crash that can corrupt the partition it is installed on? or any dual-boot scenarios where having separate /boot partition can save me?

What is the difference between executing a script (e.g. /some/script) with source /some/script and . /some/script in Bash?

I know Grub is the one installed by default when installing Ubuntu but I am faced with an embedded system running 9.10 Desktop Edition. Following are the contents of lsb-release file

ubuntu@ubuntu-desktop:/boot$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=karmic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.10"

but this system does not have Grub bootloader and I want to find out which one its using. So any ideas?

I like Ubuntu and I don't use Windows except at office but I have always felt that every thing in Ubuntu/Gnome is a bit bigger than it should be i.e the fonts, desktop icons, the window borders and every thing else. This thing really annoys me when I am working in Eclipse. As a developer, desktop real estate is really important for me and I cant afford to waste it.

So the question is how can I make things look more like Windows i.e crispier and smaller?

I have attached the screen shot of same version of Eclipse running on Windows and Ubuntu at same resolution (1400*900)

UPDATE: I am actually using Ubuntu 10.10 but at the time when I wrote this question I only had 9.10 machine available to me so I used it to get screen shot.

I want things to be compact, not exactly windows like. I say windows because it looks lot more space efficient and I don't like the wasted space. Also I know that I can tweak almost every aspect of GNOME seperately but I want something that can do this for me like some theme or some thing else that can later be easily undone (if I dont like it)

I do not use Ubuntu One but that Ubuntu One ribbon keeps appearing when I open some folders. As I don't use Ubuntu One and don't intend to use it in near future, is there a way that Ubuntu One support completely goes away from my laptop? Something like apt-get remove u1-support so I no longer see that ribbon nor the preferences menu entry?

My HDD is partitioned into two equal sized partitions. First is being used for Windows and Second for Ubuntu. Everything is working fine. But now I want to remove Windows and use the disk completely for Ubuntu. I can easily boot from live cd and use GParted to delete Windows partition and then expand Ubuntu partition to use the whole hard disk.

1. I want to know if its safe
2. Will resizing Ubuntu partition change any thing else like the partition UUID or any thing else?
3. Do I need to reinstall grub after resizing the root partition?

It would be great if some one who has already done this can give their advice here.

After a recent update, I get multiple entries for same linux kernel version in the boot menu. I have tried running update-grub2 but it also lists the same linux-image version twice i.e

adnan@adnan-laptop:/boot$ sudo update-grub2
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-26-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-26-generic
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-26-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-26-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
done

As you can see vmlinuz and initrd are found multiple times. But there is only one vmlinuz and initrd file in /boot

adnan@adnan-laptop:/boot$ ls -l
total 15120
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  646144 2010-11-24 15:58 abi-2.6.32-26-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  110601 2010-11-24 15:58 config-2.6.32-26-generic
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    4096 2011-01-01 18:59 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8335528 2010-12-20 23:36 initrd.img-2.6.32-26-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  160280 2010-03-23 14:40 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2156100 2010-11-24 15:58 System.map-2.6.32-26-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    1336 2010-11-24 16:00 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-26-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4050080 2010-11-24 15:58 vmlinuz-2.6.32-26-generic

Can some one tell me why does update-grub2 finds vmlinuz and initrd twice? and how to stop this from happening.

UPDATE: Find grub.cfg here

When I install a software using apt-get it installs to default locations i.e to /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share and etc. For example when I install "Meld Diff Viewer" using

sudo apt-get install meld

and use whereis command to find its location, I get the following output

adnan@adnan-laptop:~$ whereis meld
meld: /usr/bin/meld /usr/lib/meld /usr/share/meld /usr/share/man/man1/meld.1.gz

Is there any way to change the install location. Lets say if I want to install it in /usr/local/ can I do it using apt-get or aptitude? I know I can compile it from source and specify prefix option to configure script or make install but it would be better (and really easier) if I could do it using apt-get as I would be able to use uninstall, upgrade and other stuff that apt-get offers

My laptop restarted because the battery ran out of juice. Now the Gnome settings are gone. The panels are looking very bad. I am hearing sounds that were not there before restart. Menus are not appearing nor are the launchers that I added to the panel. How do I get my previous settings back?

Can some one suggest a software for a small home network to monitor the amount uploaded / download from the internet but not the local traffic on the LAN. I know there are similar questions like these

How can you monitor internet data usage?

Monitoring inbound and outbound internet traffic

but the suggested softwares in these questions like vnstat dont consider if the traffic is for local network or internet which means that I can not know if I am reaching my ISPs monthly cap on bandwidth. I have googled for this and found only one software i.e ipac-ng but it is not straight forward. I need something that I a normal user can use easily i.e without changing iptables rules or adding routes.

I use GNOME and it first executes commands from /etc/profile and then from ~/.profile. This I have found by putting statements like echo 'something' > test in all files that i could think of like .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile, /etc/profile and others.

What I am curious about is to know if there is any standard file that all Desktop Managers are required to execute commands from? is there any agreement between Desktop Mangers in this regard or do they use which ever file they want.