I now think that I have the perfect usermenu! Its got absolutely loads of styles, and also backgrounds, and they're all available from the menu. And here it is -

[begin] (FluxBox)
         [exec] (Claws-Mail)    {claws-mail} 
         [exec] (google-chrome) {google-chrome} 
        [exec] (TEA Text Editor) {tea}
        [exec] (Pogo music player …

Introduction

Anybody who has written software for public use will probably have received at least one bad bug report. Reports that say nothing ("It doesn't work!"); reports that make no sense; reports that don't give enough information; reports that give wrong information. Reports of problems that turn out to be …

I'm currently listening to Sky FM Classical on 'Pyradio'! This is where you can download it from https://github.com/coderholic/pyradio but you can download a zip of the repo and install from that. Its home page is at http://www.coderholic.com/pyradio

To install it you will …

This is how to install cryptkeeper and set it up for usage.

Cryptkeeper is a GNOME applet for managing EncFS encrypted folders. To install it, use this command -

sudo apt-get install cryptkeeper

You can start Cryptkeeper from the menu with Applications->System Tools->Cryptkeeper

You should see an icon in …

I have long time been a fan of Truecrypt and used it very successfully, but I've been looking about for a replacement that kept within FOSS guidelines of being 'free', free as in speech not as in free beer! FOSS being http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html at free …

Like I said, I'm sorry Fluxbox for doubting you, you do still work well. I've enabled xcompmgr - which is an 'X composition manager' or 'xcompmgr is the standard composition manager for the X Composite extension, which allows clients to modify what is drawn to the screen before it happens. This …

I'm still using this backup script to back up ~/cron/ as its got my reinstall.sh script in which I need for installing, so it seems sensible to keep access to it.

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I've encountered several problems with fluxbox today

• When using urxvt the title-bar would always be underneath the top panel, with no way of changing it. I was able to get round it using xterm but that meant that I couldn't use the tabs that was programmed into 'urxvt'.
• When I …

I've recently been looking at my backup strategy, as I now believe that its very wasteful of resources to have 14 copies of something as I have at present. That's 14 copies of an email, document, or anything really. So I've been looking about for something

• that will allow me …

This is one of those things that's always difficult to explain. The bits of Linux that I miss on other platforms are not things that you immediately see as being of particular importance. The best example of this is the freedom - why would I care that I'm free to do …

I've recently started using fluxbox as my main desktop, and 'fluxbox' "is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which started as a fork of Blackbox 0.61.1 in 2001, with the same aim to be lightweight. Its user interface has only a taskbar, a pop-up menu …

As this is such a large subject I've split it into three, and this part just deals with the menus, the ones you get if you 'Right+Click' with your mouse on the desktop.

## menu generated by 'menumaker 0.99.7' on 15/06/13
[begin] (FluxBox)
    [submenu] (Development)
        [exec …

In my usermenu in Part 2 you'll see that I have these two lines in the Quit submenu.

      [exec] (Reboot) {gksudo /sbin/reboot}
      [exec] (Shutdown) {gksudo /sbin/shutdown -h now}

which are quite special ones. This requires the following two lines to be put into /etc/sudoers very near the …

Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative/addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel, etc. Its installable from the repos and has its home page at ’GLX-dock’ http://glx-dock.org/ where it has a good set of documentation, a wiki and …

I've just started using skippy-xd which is a full-screen task-switcher for X11. You can get it from https://code.google.com/p/skippy-xd/downloads/list but it is 'vintage software' being released in 2011!

To install it is just sudo dpkg -i skippy-xd_0.5-1_i386.deb, and then to configure it …

Its possible to give LibreOffice some colour in its background, which makes it much nicer to work with. And this is how you do it -

1. Go to ’Firefox Themes’ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lucky/ and have a look at the themes and find one you like.

2. Then …

Having recently had to create a new user for my computer due to several things going wrong, I took the opportunity of putting in several things that I'd been considering for some time, so here it is, finally! As far as I can see, the only times that you go …

I recently came across this script for streaming radio written in Spanish and using Spanish stations, but it looks to be quite easy to adapt it to English stations. If I knew Spanish it would be very good, but its an interesting item showing another way of getting streaming radio …

One programme that I use everyday is ctodo which is to be found at https://github.com/Acolarh/ctodo ,and its a simple ncurses-based task list manager.

They say that pictures are worth a thousand words, so here we are, 'ctodo' in all its ncurses-glory! I do hope that you …

I'm afraid that I'm addicted to trying out various programmes and desktops, and one that I've tried before is Razor-qt which I've just revisited and its moved on and is now very workable, and I've moved over to it from LXDE. It is currently showing version 0.4.1-2 in …

My scripts continue to grow and improve, and these are just the most recent additions -

# for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1)
HISTSIZE=1000
HISTFILESIZE=2000
export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%a %h %d – %r # "

bind "set completion-ignore-case on"
This is part of my .bashrc, and the export command …

I recently had two errors crop up on my LibreOffice set-up where I'm running version 4.0.1.2. The first is -

Error loading BASIC of document 
file:///home/boztu/.config/libreoffice/4/user/basic/Standard/script.xlb/:
General Error.
General input/output error.

and this is the second one …

I've recently become a convert to the use of aliases which make life so much simpler and more enjoyable. Its so nice to just enter into a terminal upgrade and it executes the command sudo apt-get upgrade!

It saves time using these short-cuts, but you do have to remember them …

I tend to use scripts for many things where I believe they can be useful, so here I list them for posterity’s sake.

This is my favourite script and is so useful when you come to do a reinstall of your distro -

Reinstall.sh

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There are a lot of radio stations on the internet and I have made my list from various sources, starting with those from the programme Radio Tray. I've also included those from SomaFM, and the BBC for those in the UK.

Here is my list of sources -

• http://www.listenlive …

Although I have a very modern and up-to-date computer with 4 gigs of RAM, I do like the desktop environment of LXDE, which has a very light footprint. I have customised it to my needs and preference, with a top panel for everything and cairo-dock in the bottom panel place …

I have a new computer which means that I've had to upgrade my conkyrc and conky setup.

conkyrc

# Based on conky-jc and the default .conkyrc.
#

# Create own window instead of using desktop (required in nautilus)
own_window yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
background no
# Use double buffering …

I have a new computer which means that I've had to upgrade my conkyrc and conky setup.

# Based on conky-jc and the default .conkyrc. #

Create own window instead of using desktop (required in nautilus)

# Based on conky-jc and the default .conkyrc.
#

# Create own window instead of using desktop (required in …

Finding information about your mobile phone

Open the dial pad and type the following -

*# *#4636# *# *

And you'll see various hidden things about your mobile.

Convert a .mkv file to a .avi

Command line to convert a MKV file to a smaller xVid AVI file, by reducing the video bit rate …

Yesterday I heard of someone running MATE on Debian wheezy, which is something that I've been wanting to do myself. MATE is a fork of Gnome 3, essentially going back to Gnome 2 but updating it slightly, and today I logged into it. And it works beautifully! I've long had …

I am now the proud owner of a Sony Xperia Miro, with my service provider being Vodafone. And with it being an android phone there is a plethora of programmes for it, or as they should be known as 'apps'. I didn't like the software keyboard that came with it …

I finally took the plunge and upgraded my debian box to testing, also known as 'wheezy' which is the next version of Debian. I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list so that everything that said squeeze was changed to wheezy, and then did a 'sudo aptitude update' and checked that …

Recently I've been using various pdf tools to watermark pdf's and generally play about with them. They are pdfForts from https://github.com/sjau/pdfForts and have various tools, like -

addPasswdPDF

This script adds a password to the PDFs.

bookmarkPDF

Lets you edit the current bookmarks and apply them to …

I installed Darkstat today, a packet sniffer which runs as a background process and displays its output as a web page in your browser. It installed with sudo apt-get install darkstat and gives a warning that it needs to be configured as part of its installation process. This is done …

My backup script has been amended so that if the external USB hard drive ceases to be mounted for any reason then the script will send an email telling me so, and its been commented as well to explain what each section does. It now reads as -

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One new script and one amended script, first cab off the rank is an amended backup script.

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#!/bin/bash 
#(c) Keith Edwards, GLLUG, December 2011.
#    Additions from moggers87 …

I've used sudo updatedb and then locate foo to find things on my system, and that worked for some things but not others. I needed something more powerful, enter ........... Grep!

Grep works as

grep pattern file-name1 file-name2

as in

grep 'Bin 01' /home/boztu/Music/*

Which shows all instances of …

For about a week now I've been struggling with datapacker which is a tool to pack files into the minimum number of bins as you specify to burn as a CD or a DVD, and who's homepage is at https://github.com/jgoerzen/datapacker/wiki . The programs author, John Goerzen …

I have been a fan of Tony Buzan's mind-mapping for many years, and have used several programmes for it, primarily kdissert and now freemind.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea …

After a gap of very nearly five years, actually 4 years and 11 months, I am at last able to upload xml files so that the RSS feeds are now working again! I'm sorry it took so long, and its a bit of a convoluted way of uploading them, but …

A part of my plan is to backup all my mp3's to dvd, and then maybe even delete some of them such that I can play them from the dvd I've been busy converting from flac to mp3 and wav to mp3.

flac to mp3

First, flac to mp3, is …

C here equals the CONTROL key

C-x C-f calls ’find-file’ which means that it finds a file and reads it to the screen

C-x C-v calls ’find-alternate-file’ which means that it reads a different file.

C-x i calls ’insert-file’ which means to insert a file at the cursors position.

I've decided to back up my music collection to DVD, and one folder contained 2976 mp3s, which came to 18.9gbs, much too big for one DVD. so I used genisoimage with the command -

genisoimage -o ~/irishceltic.iso /home/boztu/Music/Irish_Celtic_Music_Collection_Version_2 .

This gave me a single file called "irishceltic …

I also started the groundwork to upgrade to wheezy from squeeze. I knew that I got a distorted screen under wheezy and it turns out to be my graphics card, which is a bit old, being a VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev a1) , as …

WINDOWS

The following short cuts will focus primarily on open windows.

Alt-tab

This combination cycles through the currently open windows. This is handy when you have a lot of windows open and you constantly are moving from one to another.

Ctrl-alt-d

This combination minimizes all open windows to the far …

Vnstat has long been a favourite of mine, and I've used it for many years, but I've just learnt that when you set it up with vnstat -u -i eth0 run as root, that you must then reboot for it to have any effect and start recording.

Although I use GNOME there are certain programmes that I use from KDE, like Kontact and konqueror and krusader. I have long had a gripe that I can’t read the tasks in Kontact because the red colouring of them obscures the text. So today I did something about it …

I recently had to do a fresh install of debian 6.0.4 due to trying to upgrade to wheezy [debian 7] and failing when my /usr got down to 7.5mbs and it still wasn't completed. So I reinstalled everything into one giant partition so I'm no longer worried …

To back up my collection of dvd's to my hard drive I use handbrake which creates a m4v file, and then winff to create the .avi file, which is on average about a quarter to a third smaller than the starting file. The quality is quite good working with the …