Category Archives: Maverick Meerkat 10.10

[HOWTO] Get Edit Path Pencil Icon in Nautilus by Switching to Nautilus Elementary

Nautilus has breadcrumbs navigation. When you have a location you want to navigate to in a clipboard (copied from terminal or say a file), and if you wish to navigate to that location, you need to open up the run dialog (Alt+F2) and paste the location there or press Ctrl+L in any nautilus window and paste the location there. Both of these require keyboard. When there was Edit (Pencil) icon in Nautilus in some earlier versions, you could just press it and paste the location right there. But since it is removed now, it is not possible.

Nautilus elementary is a fork of Nautilus File Manager which claims to patched for simplicity. It now has a toolbar editor and you can easily add pencil icon to your toolbar using this feature.

It is currently available for Karmic and Lucid. To install it, open up Synaptic Package Manager (Alt+F2>gksu synaptic) and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Other Software and Add ppa:am-monkeyd/nautilus-elementary-ppa. If you are using Maverick, it is not available now, but you can use the Lucid PPA just by editing the entry (after adding, select it and choose Edit) and it should work fine. Now, close the dialogs and Reload in Synaptic. Mark All Upgrades and install it. You will need to logout and log in (or simply kill nautilus.. Alt+F2>killall nautilus) for changes to take effect. Now, to get the pencil icons or add/remove/move other toolbar elements, navigate to Edit>Customize Toolbar.

Hope this helps.

[SOLVED] Media Playing issues in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat 64bit Alpha 1 and I have been facing problem playing AVI and FLV files. I used to get the the following error “No suitable decoder module: VLC does not support the audio or video format “XVID”. VLC Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.”
in VLC when I tried to play some AVI files. Also, in terminal, it said:
“main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `XVID’.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.”
Also, FLV files failed to play without any error. Totem said:
“No packages with requested plugins found. The requested plugins are: XVID MPEG-4 decoder/H.264 decoder”.

The problem was with libavcodec and libavutil. It can be fixed by removing all of libavutilxx (libavutil50, libavutil49, libavutil-extra-49, libavutil-extra-50) and reinstalling only what is required. This may also remove other packages (vlc for example, if you have it installed that is), so watch out but don’t install them immediately. Exit Synaptic. Now, if you want to fix totem, just open media with it. It should ask you for codecs, install them. Totem should start working. Install vlc later.

Hope this helps.

[HOWTO] Ease your eyes while using Linux with some RedShift

I usually sit in front of my PC for long hours. It is always better to have least effect on my eyes and I used to reduce the brightness and adjust colors for that. Now, I have discovered a software to do just that. It claims to adjust the screen color temperature according to the surroundings. It is called Redshift and can be installed from the PPA ppa:jonls/redshift-ppa. To install it on Karmic and Lucid, open up Synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Other Software>Add and paste in “ppa:jonls/redshift-ppa” (without quotes) and then close it, Reload the package lists by clicking Reload in the Toolbar and then search for redshift and install it. It is not available for Maverick Meerkat now, but you can install it by following my earlier post. After installation, you can run it by invoking the following command from the terminal:

redshift -l LATITUDE:LONGITUDE

For example, since I am at Lalitpur, Nepal, I ran:

redshift -l 27.4:85.2

You can find latitude and longitude information about your city here. If you don’t, use the one which is nearest to your place and it should work just fine. You will immediately see a change in color. You may also like it to show a tray icon so that you can disable/enable it easily if you have to. To do so, just run:

gtk-redshift -l LATITUDE:LONGITUDE

You can toggle enable/disable by clicking on the tray icon.

You will probably want to install run it on startup. To do so, just open Startup Applications and Add an application with command as

gtk-redshift -l LATITUDE:LONGITUDE

To see how much it is actually helping your eyes, keep it enabled for prolonged hours while you sit in front of your PC and disable it. You will see how difficult it is to see the normal color and how cool RedShift is.

Hope this helps.

[HOWTO] Take care of PPAs after Distro upgrade to Development version

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Alpha 64bit and as expected, the PPAs that I use have been disabled. When I enable them, I get 404 errors for most because they have not set up PPA for Maverick yet. But I need the packages, I need the updates to those packages.

To get them, all I need to do is edit them in Repositories > Other software. Here I just change maverick to lucid and then I can use and update those packages. If I later find that the maintainers have already set one up for Maverick, I can simply change lucid to maverick.

If you want to add a PPA that does not have a Maverick release, lets say deluge-team ppa which does not have packages for Maverick at the time of writing this, you can simply add ppa:deluge-team/ppa and then edit it to change maverick to lucid. That should do it.

This is not a recommended procedure but it works and has always worked for me.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat from 10.04 Lucid Lynx

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Alpha has been available for download a few days back and I have decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 64bit to 10.10. I’m sure there are no notable changes in the first alpha, but it is great to have it installed as changes are seen easy and I can help in development by reporting bugs and trying to fix some issues on my own.

To upgrade, I had to launch Synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Updates>Release Upgrade>Show new distribution releases>Normal Releases and then close the dialog and then update the package list. Run 

update-manager -d

from the run dialog (Alt+F2) and in that box it says “New Upgrade release ‘10.10’ is available”, click on Upgrade and there we go.

Ubuntu 10.10 named Maverick Meerkat

Ubuntu 10.10 Marvick Meerkat has been announced at Shuttleworth’s Blog today, April 2, 2010 which should be released in October 2010.

It will probably have loads of new features that have been held back in Lucid Lynx since it is LTS (Long Term Support) version. I will probably be trying it out from the 1st Alpha release and keep you updated about the feature additions (what’s new) and changes. I think Maverick will feature gnome-shell, rgba support and more.