"What if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder."
--Matt Groening (The Simpsons)
After setting my ThinkPad to standby mode it never woke up as I expected. In most cases I had to poweroff the whole machine, which is very ugly. I am using Ubuntu 8.04 (because it runs stable) and discovered the issue has not been fixed in the new 8.10 release.
In these days I read somethin interesting in the Ubuntu Forum
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I had some trouble to get the maximum resolution for my monitor, using the VGA output of my Thinkpad. I’m running Ubuntu Hardy which uses the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver by default. This can be combined with xrandr to manage all your monitor/resolution settings without restarting all the time.
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While using the terminal based IRC client “irssi” I faced the problem that I always had to copy and paste URLs to my webbrowser.
After a little research I found a way to open URLs just by clicking the mouse wheel. It’s quite easy: you need a special terminal: rxvt-unicode (urxvt).
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Have you ever asked yourself why your DVD Player is much more quiet than the CD-ROM drive in your PC. It’s because playing audio/video just needs a reduced reading performance which calms down your drive a lot.
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Some of you are familiar with the situation when you have got a bunch of pdf files you want to print. Especially at university there are a lot of different lecture notes waiting to be put on paper. Printing every single file can be annoying and cost too much time (and money if you pay an extra charge for the print job). Facing this problem I found out that there is a way to put multiple pdf files together using ghostview (which should be included in every linux distribution)
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Sometimes you’ve got the problem that some websites are just reachable in a particular network or you want to connect a service from another computer. No problem if you have SSH access to an external computer:
ssh <username>@external-computer.net -L 1234:badwebsite.com:80
This simple command on your terminal (executed as root!) will take you directly to badwebsite.com port 80, when you enter localhost:1234 in your browser. This means that port 1234 of your local machine is bound to external-computer.net and leads directly to badwebsite.com. This website thinks you connect from external-computer.net.
You can even try to establish secured SSL connections, but this is not allowed by all remote servers. Therefor you just have to replace 80 with 443
As you can see, every port can be tunneled, not only the HTTP port. For example try port 6667 for IRC connections.
In order to use the special keys on your keyboard or laptop like audio control or the “ThinkVantage” Button it is sometimes neccessary to do some tweaks on your system. Not all window managers directly know how to deal with these keys.
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