KnowUbuntu

I get annoyed sometimes with the mounted volume icons on my Ubuntu desktop. I don’t like them popping up when I insert my USB drive or attach other volumes. So…I got rid of them.

I have come across two ways to do this. The first is very simple, but requires you to install a third party tool called Ubuntu Tweak (sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak). Once installed, open the application (Applications –> System Tools –> Ubuntu Tweak) and click on Desktop on the sidebar.  From the Icons section you can select which icons show up and even what to call them.

This next solution isn’t as simple, but doesn’t require the installation of any additional software.

1. Open gconf-editor
   1. Open a terminal window
   2. Type: gconf-editor
2. Navigate to /apps/nautilus/desktop
3. Uncheck the volumes_visible box.

Either of these solutions will remove the volume icons from the desktop. The Ubuntu Tweak solution will also allow to customize the icons a little more and also provides other useful and fun customizations for Ubuntu.

You know when get those annoying NO_PUBKEY errors as you try to do an apt-get update? I’ve found how to solve that. It isn’t the nicest solution, but it works good and it is only two lines of code.

NOTE: the value KEY in both lines indicates where the key value is supposed to go (the value that apt-get cries about).

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv KEY gpg --export --armor KEY | sudo apt-key add -

I ran into a problem yesterday where I wanted to mount a directory from a remote server to my work laptop. I wanted to be able to use applications like eclipse with files that were on other servers.

The solution I found was awesome. With Ubuntu 8.10 I was able to do the following to mount these remote servers and use the filesystem as if it was local.

1. $ sudo apt-get install sshfs
2. $ sudo adduser username fuse
3. $ sudo mkdir /media/remote-server-mount-point
4. $ sudo chown username /media/remote-server-mount-point
5. $ sshfs remote-server.com:/desired-mount-directory /media/remote-server-mount-point

That it! Then when you have another server that you want to mount, just repeat steps 3-5 for that server. Pretty cool. You would than access the file on that server from /media/remote-server-mount-point.

I have installed the new Ubuntu 8.10 on both my home desktop computer as well as my work laptop. After doing so I turned on the transparency feature of the gnome-terminal (the default terminal app for Ubuntu). On my home computer this feature would work as expected, I could see windows behind the terminal window. However, on my work computer I was seeing the desktop image. Even when there were windows behind the terminal window I saw nothing but the desktop image, not even the desktop icons were displayed.

This was very frustrating to me. I really like some of that visual candy and having it at home, but not at work was a bummer. However it turns out that the solution is simple. All I had to do was enable compiz. I had it installed on both machines, I just didn’t have it enabled on my work computer. NICE!

This is still a little frustrating. I can’t have “truley” transparent terminal windows unless I enable another application that seems to bring with it a little overhead.