Skydrive in Ubuntu 12.04

I now am happy with my 12.04 mostly xubuntu system, I just wanted a way to mount Skydrive.. Turns out it is easy with the SME packeage. Very easy to install, let you link to 3 storage providers (including Skydrive!!) plus they give you 5gigs from their own service... not too bad.. 

Just go to smestorage.com and get the package for you.. If you have problems installing sudo apt-get -f install should fix you right up.

Went to wordpress for awhile.... I like blogspot better, so I am going to transfer by posts from there over here.
 

I just got an old Dell Latitude C600 (P-III 750 512mb, 60GB, DVD-RW) -with a good battery for the total sum of $30! Yeah! - The only downside is that it had a european keyboard or something so a few keys are in different spots.

Here is what I did w/it.

• Put in cardbus wifi and usb 2.0 cards I had sitting around.
• Install XP to a 28 GB partition. (for starcraft, office and the occasional windows program) i user Virtual Sheep to auto mount my starcraft/broodwar iso's.
• Install Crunchbang Linux (a really nice, fast Ubuntu derivative) on the rest of the drive - had to fix sound as detailed here .. http://wiki.debian.org/snd-maestro3 , set the video up for 1024x768 as per here..http://www.ubuntugeek.com/fix-for-video-problem-on-the-dell-latitude-c600c500.html added the Debian menu as detailed here.. http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/19/auto-update-menu/

Not really sure what I am going to do w/it, but I will probably use is as a document display in conjunction w/synergy most of the time.

Using apt-fast to speed up Ubuntu installs

When setting up your Ubuntu system and installing lots of programs, you might want to consider using this really neat utility called apt-fast. It gets your download from multiple sources to increase your download speed and therefore speed up the install process, best of all it supports the upgrade and dist-upgrade options!

Here is the homepage : http://www.mattparnell.com/projects/apt-fast-and-axel-roughly-26x-faster-apt-get-installations-and-upgrades.html

Using Ubuntu, just drop to a command line and do the following...

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tldm217/tahutek.net

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install apt-fast

Now when you install just use apt-fast instead of apt-get and you should see a big improvement.

Scott

I just set up my netbook with 10.10 server edition, LXDE and cairo-dock, all I had to do to make it just right for me was remove lxpanel and pcmanfm. Now I have a nice clean desktop without all the extra crap installed I will never need. The only thing missing was a wallpaper changer, so I threw together a little script to display a random one. Be sure you have FEH installed and are not using pcmanfm to manage your desktop. Just save it somewhere, chmod +x it, and add it to ~/.bashrc (I start a terminal at login) with a & at the end of the line and you are good to go.

#change wallpaper randomly

#by scott goodgame 2010

#! /bin/bash

WALLPAPER_DIRECTORY=~/DesktopStuff/wallpaper

INTERVAL=300 # number of seconds to keep each wallpaper

FILES=($WALLPAPER_DIRECTORY/*)

while true; do

feh --bg-fill ${FILES[RANDOM%${#FILES[@]} ]}

sleep $INTERVAL

done

Irvverter in Ubuntu 10.10 Meerkat

My favorite conversion software for my ematic mp3/video player, iriverter, dosent work when installed from the repository. Here is how to install it..

Go to http://iriverter.thestaticvoid.com/ and download the latest version.

Drop to a command prompt and change to the directory you downloaded it to, then type sudo /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/bin/javaws iriverter.jnlp

Enjoy

Scott

Adding a Bearpaw 1200 CU Plus scanner to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Netbook Remix

I sometimes take my old scanner with me on the road and needed to add it to my Ubuntu installation so here is a quick rundown of what I did, as much for me as for you.

First head over to http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/ and get a file called PS1Dfw.usb.

Drop to a shell, cd to the directory you downloaded it to and issue the following commands...

sudo cp PS1Dfw.usb /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/

sudo chown root /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/PS1Dfw.usb

sudo chmod 755 /usr/share/sane/gt68xx/PS1Dfw.usb

Now the scanner should be just fine.