Tag Archives: Ubuntu

HackerTray: Bring Hacker News To Your Ubuntu Linux Menu Bar

HackerTray, a free Linux app programmed with Python2 (inspired from Hacker Bar) simply brings Hacker News to your Linux menu bar. It is yet not compatible with all Linux systems but works really nice with Ubuntu. Following screenshot explains everything pretty well about how it works on your Ubuntu desktop. So now we are starting with its installation and upgrade process etc.

HackerTray

How to install HackerTray?

Open your Linux Terminal and use the following commands to install:

sudo pip install hackertray
OR
sudo easy_install hackertray
OR
#Download Source and cd to it
sudo python setup.py install

Now you can run hackertray from anywhere. Other than this you can now add it to your OS dependent session autostart method.

If you are a Ubuntu user then you can access it from:

  1. System > Preferences > Sessions
    (OR)
  2. System > Preferences > Startup Applications

Depending upon your Ubuntu Linux Version. Or simply put it in ~/.config/openbox/autostart if you are running OpenBox. Here you can see how the configuration should look like in Ubuntu and its derivatives.

How to upgrade HackerTray?

The latest stable version is always available on pip. You can check which version you have installed with pip freeze | grep hackertray.

To upgrade, run pip install -U hackertray.

In some cases (Ubuntu), you might need to clear the pip cache before upgrading:

sudo rm -rf /tmp/pip-build-root/hackertray

Easily Download, Install & Use Skype For Ubuntu

Skype uses decentralized peer-to-peer technologies and lets you make calls without letting anything go through a central server, but through distributed servers and other users. It is proprietary software you may use for making calls over the Internet using your computer. The Skype software is free to use, but it is not free software. It is free as a beer, its source code is not available for modification.

By default Skype is not installed on Ubuntu but you may install it by clicking: Install the skype package. You need to Activate the Canonical Partner Repository to install Skype.

OR alternatively you may install it by visiting Ubuntu Software Centre. OR you may install it directly from your terminal. Follow the steps:

skype

Step-1 Open your terminal, type the following command and hit ENTER:

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dbus libqt4-network libqt4-xml libasound2

Step-2 If it asks for password, type password and hit Enter again.

Step-3 Now use the following command for downloading Skype:

  • Skype 32-bit:

wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-ubuntu-32 and hit Enter.

  • Skype 64-bit:

wget http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-ubuntu-64 and hit Enter.

Step-4 After you finished downloading, use the following command to install Skype:
sudo dpkg -i getskype-*

Step-5 Now finally to finish installing:
sudo apt-get -f install

That’s all with download and installation. Now open Dash Home, type Skype, open and start using it.

Working With Ubuntu Universal Access

Don’t know what Ubuntu Universal Access is? You can do much more with your mouse, keyboard and touch pad. Open your Ubuntu system. From the top right corner of top panel click the small settings icon and then click System Settings option. From System Settings page scroll down to System sub section and click blue color Universal Access icon. It provides you many different useful options, by default it opens up Seeing tab, now lets see what you can do here:

Seeing TAB

  1. You can change contrast to high, low, normal or high/inverse
  2. You can change text size to small, normal, large, larger
  3. You can enable beeps for caps lock & num lock
  4. You can enable or disable screen reader

Hearing TAB

You can enable visual alerts. You can enable a visual alert indication when an alert sound occurs like you can flash window title or even you can flash entire screen. Great feature if you don’t like hearing alert sounds again and again. Sometimes they are very disturbing.

Typing TAB

This is very useful tab. Here you can enable virtual screeen keyboard, Most Ubuntu users don’t know that Ubuntu already provides you a cool virtual keyboard, they keep searching for it on cloud.

In normal conditions there is no use of virtual key pressing but sometimes when any key of your keyboard stops working, or you are watching a movie on your laptop, having snacks and suddenly you receive an email sound and you don’t want to touch your keyboard and make it dirty. Well you can respond to your email by using Ubuntu’s virtual keyboard.

You can also turn on accessibility features from the keyboard. You can turn on Sticky Keys, it treats a sequence of modifier keys as a key combination. You can enable certain conditions like you can disable if two keys are pressed together. Also you can enable a beep if a modifier key is pressed.

Slow keys: You can turn them on or off. They put a delay between when a key is pressed and when it is accepted..

Also you can change acceptance delay by dragging its bar from short to long. Other than this yo can enable a beep, beep when a key is pressed, accepted or rejected..

Bounce keys: You can enable or diable bounce keys. They ignore fast duplicate key presses. Here also you can enable a beep when a key is rejected and change the acceptance delay by dragging the bar between shot and long.

At the bottom of this page you will find a small text area where you can type to test settings.

Pointing and Clicking TAB

Pointing and clicking tab provides you options for Mouse keys, Simulated Secondary Click, Hover Click.

Mouse Keys: Cool option. You can enable Mouse Keys by pressing the on/off button given there. These mouse keys allows you to control your mouse pointer using your keypad.

Simulated Secondary Click: Enable option to trigger a secondary click by holding down the primary button. Provides you controlf for acceptance delay.

Hover Click: Allows you to trigger a click when pointer hovers. This also provides you delay control and mothion threshold.

Mouse TAB

Mouse Settings: At the very bottom of the page (right corner) you will see a Mouse Settings link. This directs you to Mouse and Touch pad controls page where you can:

  1. Set mouse for RIGHT HANDED or LEFT HANDED person.
  2. You can enable option to show position of mouse whenever Control key is pressed from the keyboard.
  3. You can set MOUSE POINTER SPEED, increases or decrease mouse acceleration and sensitivity.

Other than this you can increase or decrease threshhold for Drag & Drop and Double Click Timeout.

Touchpad TAB

Now finally click the Touchpad tab. Here you can enable or disable touchpad while typing, you can enable/disable mouse clicks with touch pad.

Scrolling options allows you to turn on Edge Scrolling, Two Finger Scrolling and Horizontal Scrolling or you can completely disable the touchpad scrolling.

Last, Pointer Speed section allows you to increase or decrease Mouse Pointer Speed (this time touchpad’s mouse pointer), its acceleration & senstivity.

Clean Up Ubuntu System To Make It Like A Freshly Installed One

Ubuntu Tweak is awesome Ubuntu app and we havealready discussed about it earlier. Now this tutorial explains you how you can use Ubuntu Tweak for cleaning up your system so its more likely a freshly installed one. [ALSO READ: Downloading and Installing Ubuntu Tweak]

Ubuntu Tweak provides you a cool handy feature called Computer Janitor. So first of all click Ubuntu’s Dash Home present at the top of your Ubuntu Launcher.

Type Ubuntu Tweak in search box and click top open the app. By default Ubuntu Tweak opens up its Overview tab. Click Janitor tab present on the top left corner, last tab of Ubuntu Teak.

Ubuntu Janitor

From the left sidebar you can individually select caches you like cleaning up from your system. So tick the boxes like Firefox Cache, Software Center Cache, Personal Cache like Thumbnail Cache, System Cache like Apt Cache, Old Kernel, Packed Configs and Unneeded Packages etc.

As soon you tick any cache box, on the right site Janitor will provide you further selections you can choose. Now finally click the CLEAN button present on the bottom left corner.

Easily Start Tweaking Powerful Ubuntu Unity Environ In Seconds

Ubuntu Tweak [ALSO READ: Ubuntu Tweak, Download & Installation Tutorial], a well know application among Ubuntu Users. The application provides you various useful features and customization you can make in Ubuntu Unity without any programming skills. Here we are discussing about the tweaks this useful application provides you.

Type Ubuntu Tweak in search box and click top open the app. By default Ubuntu Tweak opens up its Overview tab. Click Tweak tab, third tab from both left and right side.

Unity Tweaker

Now here you will be seeing various on/off buttons handy buttons. From this page you can turn on/off HUD, you can enable fullscreen mode in Ubuntu Dash. you can enable Super key, you can set launcher hide mode to never hide, auto hide or intellihide, you can enable or diable Composing Manager but to take it affect you may need to log out then log in back. Other than these all settings you can also increase working spaces, by default Ubuntu Launcher shows you four working spaces but you can increases that number to 36 or decrease it to just 1.

Ubuntu Tweak: Download, Installation & Usage

Ubuntu Tweak is a free Ubuntu app for configuring Ubuntu easily without working with any terminal command and code etc. It provides you many cool desktop and system controls that default Ubuntu desktop environment doesn’t provide you. Using Ubuntu Tweak you will be able to enjoy the experience of Ubuntu.

Continue reading Ubuntu Tweak: Download, Installation & Usage

Easy Ubuntu Tweaking App To Configure & Tune Up Unity Environ

MyUnity is a great tweaking app for Ubuntu users. It is simple, easy to use and downloads in seconds. The application gives you a compact and clean interface for tweaking many features of Ubuntu 3D Unity and some of Ubuntu 2D. You can install it directly from Ubuntu Software Centre.
Continue reading Easy Ubuntu Tweaking App To Configure & Tune Up Unity Environ

Installing Google Play Music Manager In Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail

Sometime back Google released Google Play Music Manager for desktop computers that enables its users to upload their music collections to cloud and download their library to their hard drive easily. After the music files are uploaded to cloud, they can be listened from any Android Phone, desktop computers, tablets etc.

Continue reading Installing Google Play Music Manager In Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail

How To Resize Unity 2D Launcher in Ubuntu 12.04?

Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity 2D, for a general user it appears very difficult and for some users even impossible to resize the Ubuntu launcher. On other hand with Unity 3D, this can be done very easily from appearance settings simply by dragging the slider but this method is only available for Unity 3D not 2D. This tutorial explains you how you can easily reduce (or change) the launcher size in Ubuntu 2D.

Continue reading How To Resize Unity 2D Launcher in Ubuntu 12.04?

Easy Terminal Commands For Installing Adobe Flash Player In Ubuntu Linux 12.04

Adobe flash player allows you to browse multimedia content online like videos, animations , some flash games and other rich media content etc etc. It supports almost all operating systems like Linux, Mac, Android, Mobile OS, Solaris etc. You can easily install in your Ubuntu Linux, right from terminal by following few simple steps given here.

Continue reading Easy Terminal Commands For Installing Adobe Flash Player In Ubuntu Linux 12.04