Here is how to do it in Ubuntu (Tested on Ubuntu 10.04):

1. Right click the panel, choose “properties”.

2. In “General” tab, uncheck “expand”.

3. Drag the panel from its left or right edge to the other monitor.

4. Right click the panel, choose “properties”, in “General” tab recheck “expand”.

You’re done. Have fun

Found the tip here.

Update:

An easier way, is just to hold “Alt” key, and drag the panel from one monitor to the other. No need to play with the “expand” setting.

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Move Gnome Panel To The Second Monitor – Ubuntu

Using colormake, colorgcc and colordiff, you can have the output of make, gcc, diff (respectively) coloured.

To install in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install colorgcc colormake colordiff

You might want to use aliases to override the normal make/gcc/diff commands.

Original tip from here.

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Colorize Make, GCC and Diff’s Output

For example, if you want to remind yourself to submit an assignment at 15:20, you’ll be able to run this command to do it:

tdr “submit assignment” 15:20

This will send an Email to you, with the subject: [TODO] submit assignment. Email will be sent at 15:20.

To be able to do this, you migh need to configure your mail command (see my post about this).

Then, add this function to your ~/.bashrc file (or any file sources in bashrc):

function tdr {echo “mail -s \”[TODO] $1\” your.mail@domain.com < /dev/null” | at “$2″ 2> /dev/null;}

tdr stands for: TODO reminders. Of course you can choose any other name for the function.

No execute this:

source ~/.bashrc

That’s it, now you can try it:

tdr “Testing” 15:30

The [TODO] label in the subject is added to let you easily use Gmail filters to apply a specific label to your TODO items.

Based on a tip at Tips4Linux

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Send Self Reminders To Your Email From The Command Line

sudo mount -o loop image_file.iso /path/to/mount/folder

Via Tips4Linux

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Mount ISO Images From the Command Line

In Ubuntu

Open the file /etc/event.d/control-alt-delete  (You need supper user privileges)

You should see a line similar to this:

exec /sbin/shutdown -r now “Control-Alt-Delete pressed”

Which binds ctrl-alt-del to rebooting your computer. Change it to execute any other program you want. Of course you can disable it completely by commenting the whole file.

Other Distros (via Tips4Linux)

In other distros, open /etc/inittab.

You should see something like this:

ca:12345:ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t1 -a -r now

To disable ctrl-alt-del, just comment this line. To bind it with other program, just replace “/sbin/shutdown -t1 -a -r now” with the program you want to execute.

Enjoy!

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Modify Ctrl-Alt-Del Behavior in Linux

The first step was to check why diff failed. Normally, you cannot see these control characters, and one might be surprised that the comparison fails thought the files are exactly the same. In order to see these characters, one should use “-A” flag with the cat command:

cat -A textfile

Next step is to removc these characters. This wasn’t easy, and I asked a friend who referred me to the program “dos2unix” which converts text files generated in dos/widows into their Linux counterparts (and vice versa).

This worked!

Recently, I found another way to do this, using “sed”. The trick was to type the control character “^M” in the terminal.

This is how we’d want the sed command to look like:

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sed -e 's/^M//g' widosTextFile > newTextFile

This should replace the character “^M” by nothing (The ‘g’ is for global: i.e. replace every instance of ^M in each line, not only the first instance in each line), which is exactly what we want.

But, just typing ^M won’t work, since it will be interpretted as two characters, ^ and M, which is not the behavior we want. To type the control character ^M one should use this:  [ctrl]+[v] and then [ctrl]+[m]. This will be displayed as ^M in the terminal, but it will have a completely different meaning.

Hope it helps somebody.

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Removing Control Characters From a Text File in Linux

I already wrote a post about reading them from firefox, so they’re displayed in a nice way as html pages.

In this post we’ll add colors to the manpages viewed from inside the shell.

First, open your ~/.bashrc file. To open it with gedit you can type:

gedit ~/.bashrc

Now, to the end of this file, append this:

export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$’\E[01;31m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$’\E[01;34m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$’\E[0m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$’\E[0m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$’\E[01;44;33m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$’\E[0m’
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$’\E[01;32m’

The strange ‘\E[01;32m’ are special strings which tell the shell to change its foreground’s/background’s color (see my previos post about writing with color in a linux shell). You can change them to suite your terminal’s background color.

Now, save your .bashrc file.

As expected from their names, the above variables do not affect the man program directly, but affect ‘less’ program instead. So, in order to complete our task, we should add an alias to our aliases file (If you don’t have an aliases file you can add this to your .bashrc file):

Add this line to your aliases file:

alias man=’man -P less’

This tells the man program to use less as its pager.

That’s it. Now you just to try it. For example, type: man ls

And see the magic

Note: This was originally posted in Tips4Linux.com

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Add Colors to Your Manpages

First, you need to install a program called man2html. Doing this in Ubuntu is as easy as opening a terminal and typing:

sudo apt-get install man2html

Now, that you have this program installed, open your firefox.

From the menu, choose bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks and add a new bookmark with these values:

Location: http://localhost/cgi-bin/man/man2html?query=%s

Keyword: man

Click add and you’re done.

Now, to view a manpage, go to firefox’s URI’s bar (that’s where you usually type a websites URL), and type:

man something.  For example: man ls

And see the magic

Note: This post was originally posted in Tips4Linux.com

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View the Manpages in Firefox

This tool allows you to capture any region of your screen, by selecting it with your mouse, clicking on the title-bar of a window and other methods. It’s very flexible and contains many options.

To download the program in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install scrot

Now, open a new text file and type this

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#!/bin/bash

scrot "/home/YourUsername/Desktop/screenshot`date +%d_%m_%y_%H_%M_%S_%N`.png" -s -q '85'

Don’t forget to replace YourUsername with your actual username. We’ll assume that you called the file “scrshot”

This script will call scrot, will tell it to save the screenshots on your desktop with names similar to screenshot14_11_08_00_36_41_278273217.png (I know the name looks ugly, but I love this nomenclature because it prevents file name conflicts). The -s flag is for “Select”: This will allow you to select any area/window with your mouse. The -q flag is for “Quality”: In the above script I set it to 85%, which is good enough. Note that increasing the quality will also increase the file size.

Now, make the file executable:

chmod +x scrshot

Add a new launcher to you gnome panel, give it a suitable name and let it execute the above script. (i.e., in the “Command” field, enter the path to the script, eg. /home/YouName/scripts/scrshot  or wherever you saved it).

No taking a screenshot is easy: Click the launcher, select a region, and go to your desktop to collect the resulting file.

Actually, scrot is more powerful than described in this post, one of its strong features is adding a delay so the script will wait for a given number of seconds before taking the screenshot.

For more options refer to the manual pages:

man scrot

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Take Screenshots in Linux with “scrot”

The greatness of this tool is in its simplicity: the whole todo list is saved as plain text, and operations like adding/removing/prioritarizing/modifying/listing items are done through a very simple command line interface supplied in a bash script.

Other interfaces are also available, like Jabber/AIM bots, so you can achieve the same functionality through Google Talk (TM) or other IM clients. However, the command line interface is the easiest/coolest/most powerful.

Using the script is easy:

1. First you need to download a single bash script and a configuration file, you can find them in a zip archive here.

2. After you unzip the archive, you need to create a todo folder in you home directory:

mkdir ~/todo

3. Then, take the .todo configuration file from the extracted archive and move it to your home directory:

mv .todo ~/.

4. Edit the .todo configuration file and change the TODO_DIR variable into ~/todo

5. You may want also to change the colors for each priority in .todo configuration file (default colors assume a dark background for your terminal).

6. Take todo.sh and move it to /usr/local/bin so you can call it from any directory:

sudo mv todo.sh /usr/local/bin/.

7. Make todo.sh excutable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/todo.sh

8. Edit the first line in todo.sh so it looks like this:

#! /bin/bash

9. You may want to add an alias in your alias file:

alias todo=’todo.sh’

That’s it, now you can start using todo.txt:

1. To add an item to the list:

todo.sh add “Learn python”

2. It’s convenient to add tags to your items:

todo.sh add +programming “Learn python”

3. To list the items:

todo.sh list

4. To list items of a specific tag (eg. programming):

todo.sh list +programming

5. To assign a priority to an item:

todo.sh pri ITEM_NUMBER PRIORITY

where ITEM_NUMBER is the number appears to the left of the item when you use the list option, and PRIORITY is a letter between A to C (You can extend this in the configuration file).

6. To list all items with priority B:

todo.sh listpri B

7. To mark an item as done:

todo.sh do ITEM_NUMBER

8. To archive all done items into done.txt (done.txt and todo.txt live in ~/todo/ directory)

todo.sh archive

9. To replace an item:

todo.sh replace ITEM_NUMBER +programming “learn how to write python scripts”

There are few more options available, you can see them in todo.sh help:

todo.sh -h

There is also a nice video tutorial here.

Enjoy

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Todo.txt – A simple yet powerful todo manager for Linux