If you get an error like this:

An error occurred while installing pg (0.17.1), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that gem install pg -v '0.17.1' succeeds before bundling.

Then do this:

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

... and run Bundler again.

When your file manager sorts file case-sensitively after a distribution upgrade, you probably need to reconfigure your locale settings as described here.

In older Ubuntu releases you could ALT+drag any panel bar to another position and/or monitor. In Ubuntu 11.04 Natty you need to perform the steps from the attached article instead:

1. Right-click on the panel to access the panel properties
2. Uncheck "Expand"
3. Move the panel by dragging the grip areas that now appear on the panel edges
4. Check "Expand" again in the panel properties

Run

sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback

or (alias)

sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

from a terminal.
Then logout to reach the logon screen and click on the options button next to you name.
Select Gnome Classic, log in et voilà.

On my Ubuntu MATE machine, switching applications with ALT + TAB was impossible, because it took nearly 2 seconds. The culprit appears to be an "UX improvement" gone bad: MATE renders a live screenshot of each running application inside the application switcher.

Fixing this is simple:

• Open "Window Preferences"
• Either uncheck "Enable software compositing window manager" or check "Disable thumbnails in Alt-Tab"

You can use fold:

fold -sw 60

You can now paste your texts. fold will echo them back, word-wrapped after 60 columns. Exit with Ctrl+C or Ctrl+D.

You can also use files for input and output:

fold -sw 60 input.txt > output.txt

Just install the texlive-xetex package:

sudo apt-get install texlive-xetex

Running integration tests without texlive-xetex will produce an error during xelatex execution:

RTeX::Document::ExecutableNotFoundError

DeaDBeeF is one of the better music players for Linux.

You can find installation instructions here.

When doing a presentation you may want to hide your desktop icons.

You can switch them off (or back on) like this:

• Open up gconf-editor
• Navigate to apps -> nautilus -> preferences
• (Un)check "show_desktop"

PhantomJS has no binary builds for Linux, and building it yourself is painful.

However, you can install it through npm:

sudo npm install -g phantomjs

1. Put the font files (e.g. ttf) into ~/.fonts
2. Run fc-cache -v

Or, if you prefer to use the GUI, open each font file and click the "Install" button in the top right of the preview window.

Add the following to /etc/rc.local:

(sleep 3 && echo disable > /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth)&

Bluetooth icon will be active for a few seconds, then turn gray.

When you drag a file from a Nautilus window into a terminal window, the file's path will be pasted into the terminal. This also works with multiple files.

Edit /etc/default/bind9 and change

OPTIONS="-u bind"

to

OPTIONS="-u bind -d 50 -g"

Restart BIND and you'll see debug log on your console.

$RANDOM on bash returns a random integer between 0 and 32767.

echo $RANDOM
9816
echo $RANDOM
30922

If you want to limit that to a certain maximum, you can just compare against the modulus of that maximum + 1. \
For example, the following will yield results between 0 and 9:

echo $(($RANDOM % 10))
5
echo $(($RANDOM % 10))
9

Note that this skews random numbers to the lower regions of your boundaries in most cases.

This will install a printer called "PDF":

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Files will be put into ~/PDF/ without any questions asked.

You need to install the following packages before you can build the Paperclip gem:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick librmagick-ruby

You need to install the following packages before you can build the Nokogiri gem:

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev

First install Node.js / npm.

Then you can install Bower through npm:

sudo npm install -g bower

Luckily, this is simple. Just install three packages:

sudo apt install ipheth-utils libimobiledevice-dev libimobiledevice-utils

Then turn on the "Personal Hotspot" in iPhone settings, connect it to your Ubuntu machine via USB and you should be up and running.

New way to install an actual puppet version on ubuntu

The linked article describes how to use a Firefox addon "Flash-Aid" to install a better build of Flash and apply some optimizations.

With this I can now properly watch fullscreen HD videos under Ubuntu.

Ubuntu natty introduced new "invisible" scrollbars for GTK programs such as gEdit or Nautilus.

If you do not like them:
sudo apt-get purge liboverlay-scrollbar-*

In order to have a tool recognize the changes you have to quit all its instances. Or just log out and back in.

blueprint is DevStructure’s workhorse tool that looks inside popular package managers, finds changes you made to configuration files, and archives software you built from source to generate Puppet, Chef, or shell code.  Everything blueprint sees is stored in Git to be diffed and pushed.  It runs on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and newer.