I’m just discovering the usefulness of smbclient and this link has a great summary of the commands you can fire through this tool from the terminal.

Probably the most common one I need to do is to use the tarmode to copy whole folders down, like so:


tarmode
lcd /tmp #this switches the local directory
recurse
prompt
mget pdf995/ #this recurses and tars the pdf995 remote directory and puts it in /tmp on the client


This one bugged me for ages, and it’s still not something you can completely remove, but if you are using Ubuntu or a Gnome desktop as, say, a media centre, you may not want to have the Gome panel/bar appearing at all.

The current best solution is to use gconf-editor to set the auto_hide_size of the panel you want to change (under /apps/panel/toplevels/[panel name]) to 1.  Then make sure the “auto hide” option is checked and voila – pretty much gone.

So, there’s this very well documented bug with all versions of Ubuntu where the network connection is dropped before any set Samba shares are unmounted.  This results in annoying “CIFS error 50″ type timeout issues. 

ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh
ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh

I’m still working through the kinks on this one, but this post on Ubuntu forums seems to give good instructions for setting up one of the servers in my house as the only one to download update packages for apt, while the others point to it (saving me bandwidth costs).

I’ll post more as I figure it out, but this line is key for the other machines:

echo 'Acquire::http::Proxy "http://hostname:3142";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy

Seems like a silly little thing, but I do a lot of copying and pasting from Visio and other graphical apps into Word and other Office apps.  So, I’ve started to write some macros to speed this up.  Here’s the one for PowerPoint:


Sub PasteEMF()
    ActivePresentation.Slides(ActiveWindow.Selection.SlideRange.SlideIndex).Shapes.PasteSpecial (ppPasteEnhancedMetafile)
End Sub


Funambol is an open-source synchronisation platform that supports, among others, Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mobile and RAZRs (via Java).  It’s quite an impressive system, but not the easiest thing in the world to get up and running on  your own Ubuntu server. 

Some of the important links and tips and tricks I found:

• GSMblog has a good overview on how to get it up and running.
• If you want to get the database in MySQL rather than Hypersonic, here are the instructions.
• I haven’t tried this, but here are the instructions to get it up and running with Apache natively (rather than Tomcat).

When I followed these (today) I was installing version 7.0.6.

I like Thunderbird.  But I also like Outlook.  And I have to say that the latter has some things that I just wish the former had – e.g. like a bit more polish.  Granted, Outlook 2007 is quite a few versions older than Thunderbird 2.0.0.19, so there’s plenty of time for improvement.

Regardless, there are some tweaks that really should be made when migrating across from Outlook.  A great post by Justin Carmony outlines some of them here.  The best of the bunch is this:

Composition & Addressing – This is an absolute must change. If there is anything you’ll get out of this article, it is this: Check “Automatically quote the original message when replying” and below select “start my reply above the quote.” This is the most annoying default setting of all. My friend couldn’t help but laugh at how non-standard that was. If you use signatures, I would set the second line to “Below my reply.” This is the default for Outlook.

Also, to continue improving on the Reply function, I followed these instructions and installed this extension.  Specifically (in case the site is down in future):

1. go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/760 and install the TB extension “Thunderbird Reset Quote Header”.
2. create a text file called HTML_Header.txt, and copy the following into it;

Code: Select all

<hr tabindex=-1><font face=Tahoma size=2><!--@A@--><b>From:</b> @A@<!--@A@-->
<!--@D@--><b>Sent:</b> @D@<!--@D@-->
<!--@R@--><b>To:</b> @R@<!--@R@-->
<!--@C@--><b>CC:</b> @C@<!--@C@-->
<!--@S@--><b>Subject:</b> @S@<!--@S@--><br></font>

3. Create another text file called TEXT_Header.txt and copy the following code into it.

Code: Select all

----- Original Message -----
<!--@A@-->From: @A@<!--@A@-->
<!--@D@-->Sent: @D@<!--@D@-->
<!--@R@-->To: @R@<!--@R@-->
<!--@C@-->CC: @C@<!--@C@-->
<!--@S@-->Subject: @S@<!--@S@-->
<!--@S@--><!--@S@-->

4. Go to your extensions window in TB and select the extension you just installed, and click options.
5. Point your HTML header to the file you just created. Point the text header to the other file you just created.

Here’s a couple of tricks that I should always remember.

How to create a “shortcut” in Ubuntu

There is no such thing as a “shortcut” in Ubuntu, but to quickly create a symbolic link to a folder, hold down CTRL+SHIFT and drag and drop the folder onto the desktop (or wherever you want). Done. The permissions of the symbolic link are determined by the file or folder to which the symbolic link points.

How to search for a file containing some text from the command line.

Courtesy of nixcraft:

$ grep -r "text to search for" /file/location

To add a user to another group

sudo adduser username group

Still not quite sure on why this is, but it seems when I set up new installations of Ubuntu, Ctrl+Alt+F1 doesn’t bring me to a console – it just brings me to either a blank screen, or a screen with a flashing cursor and nothing else. So, I found the following steps on the Ubuntu Forums:

1. sudo pico /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and add

fbcon
vesafb

2. sudo update-initramfs -u

3. sudo pico /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer and change the line "blacklist vesafb" to "# blacklist vesafb"

4. Reboot and everything should be fine

Oh, and make sure you add vga=791 to the /boot/grub/menu.lst beside the distro option that you choose to run.

It turns out, this couldn’t be simpler. Simply copy the .gconf folder from your old home folder to your new one and you’re done.

Easy as that!