I have a Ubuntu 12.04 install on an external HDD. On my Dell Laptop, I tried to boot into 12.04 by connecting the USB 3.0 compatible external HDD to USB 3.0 port but it wouldn’t show the grub (v2.00-7ubuntu11) boot screen. A rather silly workaround helped, however. I connected it first to a USB 2.0 port so that the grub screen loaded. Then, I disconnected the HDD and reconnected it to USB 3.0 port and voila. I don’t know if it’s the BIOS or grub (or both?) but this is what I’m going to do from now on.

Fedora 16 Alpha is coming out soon and they have selected Fedora 16 wallpaper. Here is how I installed it in Fedora 15: Continue Reading

I am a programmer and I can’t do without a clipboard manager. If you have never used a clipboard manager before, you don’t know what a great tool you are missing. GPaste is an excellent clipboard tool for Gnome-Shell, however it is neither available in Ubuntu repository, nor in any PPA (as of now). Here is how you can compile it. Open up the terminal and get going.

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I have just installed Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 11.10 Onieric Ocelot. In Gnome-Shell interface, there are no title bar controls for minimize, maximize/restore. To enable them, open up the terminal and type in (or copy/paste) the following command: Continue Reading

I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot on my laptop. I had been using Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on it and since I use this PC for work, I was reluctant in installing Gnome-Shell from PPA. But since Gnome-Shell is available in official repositories, I decided to give it a go. To install, just open Ubuntu Software Center, search for Gnome-Shell and click “Install”. After installation is complete, log out and when logging back in, select Gnome (see screenshot below).

When trying to purge Gnome3 PPA, I had to cancel the ppa-purge process and when I tried to run the same, I got the following message: Continue Reading

I have installed sun-java-jre/jdk on my Ubuntu and Fedora. I am using svn for my project and have been running it well with my old Fedora 15 installation on my old PC. However, recently I installed Fedora on my other machine and installed Netbeans 7.0.1 on top of sun-java. Fedora did not handle graphics very well, so I installed Ubuntu alongside as well. But every time I tried to access subversion functionality from Netbeans, I got the following error: Continue Reading

Having video and sound issues with Fedora 15, I decided to try out Natty on my HP Pavilion G4 1009tx. Surprisingly, sound and 3D effects ran great with Intel onboard graphics so I installed it onto the Hard drive. In all excitement, I decided to try out proprietary ATI drivers for the switchable dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics. However, when I rebooted, it would not boot. It seems that plymouth crashes and system ends up with a black screen. So, I decided to remove fglrx and keep on using Intel card but it seems that I can’t even boot into recovery mode. So, I had to remove fglrx and make the system usable again using the Live CD and chroot. Here is how I did it.

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I installed Fedora 15 on HP Pavilion G4 1009tx Notebook recently. It has Intel Onboard Graphics and ATI Radeon HD 6470M Graphics 1024MB GDDR3, with switching option in Windows. However, it was disappointing to see that Gnome-Shell does not load on it while used to run fine on my old Desktop with onboard Intel Graphics. I tried to install ATI Properiatary drivers from RPM Fusion repos. However, after reboot, the booting process halted after showing the following:

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To install Wireless driver for HP Pavilion G4, I followed the instructions here. Basically, I just connected it to the internet using a cable and here is what I did in the terminal (System Tools>Terminal): Continue Reading