If you previously used version 2.x of Thunderbird and upgraded to 3.x (for example through an Ubuntu release upgrade) you might notice that Thunderbird will not show any of your old e-mails or settings.

This results from a different directory being used for storing profiles and configuration.

You can replace the blank profile with your old one like this:
cd ~
mv .thunderbird .thunderbird-invalid
cp -R .mozilla-thunderbird .thunderbird

Upon its next start, Thunderbird brings up the migration wizard introducing you to a few vers...

When you need to bulk rename files you can not call "mv *.foo *.bar" to change the extension of all .foo files to bar (because bash resolves wildcards and replaces them with the list of matched files).

This works on linuxes who use the Perl version of the rename command (like Ubuntu):

rename 's/\.foo$/\.bar/' *

You can also use this to rename other parts of the file, e.g. from flag_en.png, flag_de.png etc. to just en.png or de.png:

rename 's/^flag_//' *

Note that we used $ and ^ to explicitly look at the ...

Use this snippet by Achu from Ask Ubuntu:

ping hostname.tld | while read pong; do echo "$(date): $pong"; done

This gives you lines like:

Wed Nov  4 10:32:31 CET 2015: 64 bytes from 1.2.3.4: icmp_seq=298 ttl=61 time=0.673 ms
Wed Nov  4 10:32:32 CET 2015: 64 bytes from 1.2.3.4: icmp_seq=299 ttl=61 time=0.616 ms
Wed Nov  4 10:32:33 CET 2015: 64 bytes from 1.2.3.4: icmp_seq=300 ttl=61 time=1.04 ms

This will make MySQL log all received queries so you can see for yourself what happens on the database level.

Don't switch this on for production machines!

1. Edit your my.cnf:
   sudo vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf
2. In the [mysqld] section, add:
   log=/var/log/mysql.log
3. Restart your MySQL daemon. On Ubuntu:
   sudo service mysql restart

Note that your MySQL performance will suffer. But when you need to enable query logging for a debug fest, you probably don't care about that.

Enter any command into explainshell and it will explain it to you: split into separate commands (if present), with each option explained.

About

Hello,
This site contains 29761 parsed manpages from sections 1 and 8 found in Ubuntu's manpage repository. A lot of heuristics were used to extract the arguments of each program, and there are errors here and there, especially in manpages that have a non-standard layout.
It is written in Python and uses bashlex, a bit of NLTK (to find the interesting parts of the manpage), a little d3....

Ubuntu lets you mount an SSH shell into Nautilus from Places -> Connect to server (select "SSH" as server type).

In order to copy a file over SSH from a shell:

scp filename username@remotehost:

The trailing ":" directs the file to username's home directory on the remote host.

You can also copy a file from the remote host to your local machine:

scp remotehost:remotepath localpath

In Ubuntu your ALT key is locked when you're working in VirtualBox. There are two workarounds for this:

• Press the Windows key in addition to the ALT key
• Run the attached registry file and restart Windows. Your left Windows key is now the ALT key.
• If you'd like to map keys differently, here are further instructions

Pdfposter is a Python script that allows to convert large PDFs into a PDF with multiple pages that can be printed and turned into one big poster.

In Ubuntu, you can install it with
sudo apt-get install pdfposter

Scaling to the desired size is a bit cumbersome. If you want to split large.pdf, I suggest you run
pdfposter -vns 0.5 large.pdf larger.poster.pdf
which will tell you into how many pages the file would be split. Then simply tweak the -s value till you get the desired number of pages, and remove the -n to generate the r...

If you get an error message like that you are missing the Aspell files a specific language:

No word lists can be found for the language "de"

Solve it by installing the proper package, e.g. on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install aspell-de

I've encountered a Ubuntu 16.04 today, where localhost resolved to ::1 instead of 127.0.0.1.

This will not usually make a difference, but could be relevant for firewall policies.

ReText is a cross-platform WYSIWYG-ish Markdown editor.

Toggle editor and preview layout with Ctrl+E.\
Press Ctrl+L to split the window for a live preview.

I use it to copy Pivotal Tracker story descriptions over, switch to the preview and have it as a small always-on-top window in a corner of one of my screens.

On Ubuntu, you can use a PPA to install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mitya57/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install retext

On Ubuntu, you can scroll horizontally with your mouse wheel when holding the Shift key while scrolling.

It does not work in all applications, but many support it.

If you're on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev

On other platforms: Look for a package containing ruby header files. On Red Hat that's "ruby-devel" likely.

If your pidgin IM fails to connect to ICQ, you may need to update it. The ubuntu default sources are usually outdated.

Just follow the instructions 1-4 and 1-3 on the page linked below.

Making SSL connection work

If you can not connect using SSL, open up the account settings and enable "clientLogin". Also, your Server should be set to slogin.icq.com.

Skype has been updated to 4.3 on Linux. This fixes group chat issues with non-linux clients.

If you have previously installed skype via ubuntu packages, you need to remove those fist via

sudo apt-get remove skype skype-bin

Note

Try to install the 32 bit version. In serveral cases this was the way that worked out.

Grab the installer here:

Promises unified window for all chat conversations, better call quality.

Upgrade seems to work fine. If you installed your old skype from a Ubuntu repository, you need to remove it first using:
sudo apt-get remove skype
Then simply install the .deb from the official page. You won't lose any settings.