Firefox by default has smooth scrolling enabled on Ubuntu. With smooth scrolling, if you turn the mouse wheel, the page scrolls by some percentage not in a single moment, but taking some time like an animation. It gives a similar effect as if the page is being scrolled by fingers on a touch device. Google chrome does not yet have a direct setting to enable/disable smooth scrolling. However the setting is hidden inside. To access [...]

Securing confidential data We often need to put some confidential data on the hard drive, in which case it becomes essential to have some kind of security mechanism to keep it hidden from unauthorised access of any kind. It could contain credit card numbers, bank statements and list of passwords for various online services. One way to protect such data with security is to put them in a directory that is password protected or is [...]

Command Line The zip command can be used to create password protected zip files easily. Here is a quick example $ zip -P *secret* compressed.zip file.txt Note that the P is capital. Can also type “–password” instead of the “-P”. $ zip –password *secret* compressed.zip file.txt The above approach might be a bit insecure since the password is visible and the command is stored in the terminal history and can be retrieved. Another option is [...]

The following error came up when I tried to run Adobe Acrobat Reader on ubuntu 12.10 error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory To fix this, simple install the package ia32-libs-gtk $ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-gtk Now run the application again and the error should go away. Last Updated On : 4th March 2013

In a previous article we saw how a windows netbook/laptop can be used to share a tata photon connection with other computers on a LAN. Now we shall do the same thing on Ubuntu. The technique is very simple and uses a tool called firestarter. Internet connection sharing can be setup on linux by adding rules to iptables, however it is not very user friendly and difficult for users with no previous experience of Linux. [...]

Gwoffice is a desktop client for accessing google drive (docs) from the desktop. It actually runs a web browser inside and opens the google docs in it. Allows to save docs to local drive easily. The features include – HUD support for any keyboard bound command – theming according to the current Gtk+ theme – shortcuts for quickly creating documents – drop to upload (and edit, if you enable it..) Has a neat gtk based [...]

The more common way to manage packages or softwares is from Synaptic Package Manager. However for those who prefer the console, there are plenty of tools to do the job as easily. In this tutorial we are going to look into apt, the package management tool used on ubuntu. On ubuntu there are 3 main commands to manage packages. These are dpkg, apt-* and aptitude. So lets start experimenting with these one by one. Dpkg [...]

Master pdf editor is a “Cross-platform PDF and XPS Editor” that is free for non commercial use. Download from the following url The features according to the website are as follows : With this easy-to-use and cost efficient application you can create, edit, preview, encrypt, sign and print XPS and interactive PDF documents with just a few clicks. Our robust and rich set of features includes the full support of PDF and XPS files, import/export [...]

Lubuntu is the lxde desktop variant of the same ubuntu linux. The lxde desktop is itself lightweight and can run on machines that are low on hardware resources like ram and cpu. Netbooks are lightweight (in terms of features, not actual mass) laptops that have limited hardware resources. So lubuntu can add the power of linux to such machines very well. I had one called Samsung N110 which is somewhere around 2011 model. Some of [...]

First run the following commands in the terminal Update the system $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade Install required software $ sudo apt-get install build-essential module-assistant Prepare kernel $ sudo m-a prepare Now in the virtualbox window click Devices > Install Guest Additions. It will mount it inside ubuntu. In the terminal go to the directory of guest additions. For example on my system it is at /media/silver/VBOXADDITIONS_4.2.6_82870 Then run the Linux installer [...]