Graphics driver problems with Ubuntu

Graphics driver problem is not new to Linux users. The graphics card manufacturers does not provide information about their hardware, so open source community can not develop drivers for graphics hardware. Some open source driver may be available but most of the cases they are full of bugs. Here comes proprietary drivers. These drivers are closed source and provided by the manufacturers.

In my Dell Inspiron I have a ATI graphics card. After I installed ubuntu on my laptop, I could not enable graphics effects. So, I had to install proprietary fglrx driver. It is very easy in ubuntu. Go to System > Administration > Hardware Drivers/Additional Drivers. In 10.10 and above the option is called Additional Drivers. Here you will find available proprietary drives for your computer. In my laptop it looks like this:

After installing you may have to reboot your computer. Now, you can enable different graphics property like animations, effects etc.

There is also a ppa for latest graphics updates which may not be available on standard ubuntu repository. To enable the ppa go here.

Take a screenshot in your s60v5 mobile phone

Screenshots can be useful sometimes and you may want to take a screenshot of your mobile phone screen. If you have a symbian s60 version 5 mobile phone, it is a matter of a few button presses.
First of all you have to download an application from OVI and install it. Now, open the application and you will see a screen like the image below.

Now, you are ready to take a screen shot of your phone screen. If your phone is a touchscreen phone without any button, don't assign any shortcut key. Just change the delay so that you can go to your desired page within chosen time delay. If you have buttons on your phone you can assign a shortcut key and take screenshot pressing the keys.

Download mobile applications from OVI using your computer

Many of us are using Nokia smartphones. Nokia users can download applications from OVI. These applications are very useful and most importantly they are safe to use. But, you must have noticed it is not possible to download applications without your handset and sometimes you may want to download them from your computer. With firefox web browser it is very easy to download those applications. All you have to do is install an add-on and configure it.

To do so, just go to Tools > Add-ons and search for an add-on named "User Agent Switcher"  and install it. Restart your browser.

Now, it is time to configure it. You will find an option in Tools of your browser named "Default user agent". Place your mouse there and you will see some pre-configured user agents (like iPhone, Internet Explorer etc). I will show how to configure your mobile phone by an example of Nokia e63.

Suppose you have a Nokia E63. Now, go to this link and press expand all on the right side of the page. You will see an entry

Example User Agent header

Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE63-1/200.21.012; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413

Now, go to Tools > Default User Agents > Edit User Agents. Press New > New user Agents. In description write E63 and in user agent paste found in the example user agent header

Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaE63-1/200.21.012; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413

Erase all other data and save it. Now, you can easily switch to Nokia e63 by clicking in the e63 found in the Tools > Default User Agent.

To download applications go to http://store.ovi.mobi/. Don't forget to switch your agent before visiting.

Swap basics for ubuntu users....

What is swap?
Swap space is the area on a hard disk which is part of the Virtual
Memory of your machine, which is a combination of accessible physical
memory (RAM) and the swap space. Swap space temporarily holds memory
pages that are inactive.

How much swap do you need?
it's highly recommended that the swap space should be equal to the
amount of physical memory (RAM). Also, it's recommended that the swap
space is twice the amount of physical memory (RAM) depending upon the
amount of hard disk space available for the system.

Creating swap
At the time of installing ubuntu we can specify how much swap we will use. But it is also possible to add more swap without partitioning any of the HD space. We can create a swap file and allow the os to use that as virtual memory. This is possible because Linux treats everything as a file (like - directory). Now, lets create a swap file and tell our UBUNTU to use that-

First of all we will create a 512MB .swap file

Code:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/512Mb.swap bs=1M count=512

Formatting that file to create a swapping device

Code:

sudo mkswap /mnt/512Mb.swap

Adding the swap to the running system:

Code:

sudo swapon /mnt/512Mb.swap

The additional swap is now available and can be seen by

Code:

cat /proc/meminfo

To make the change permanent -

Code:

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

and add this line at the end of the file

Code:

/mnt/512Mb.swap  none  swap  sw  0 0   

Find out best server for you to download repo applications

Ubuntu provides a very rich repository to download and install softwares. We can find and install these applications from Software Center under Applications tab. If we install a software, first it is downloaded from a server and then it is installed. Sometimes the download speed is not good. To increase your download speed from the repository follow the steps below -

1. Go to System > Administration > Software Sources
2. Under the Ununtu Software tab you will find an option Download from.
3. Click on that and select Other...
4. A new window will open click on Select Best Server.
5. This will perform several tests and select best server for you.
6. Now, close the window clicking close and click yes to update the repository.....

And you have successfully selected Best Server For you...

Play video in terminal

Terminal is used frequently in ubuntu. it is a powerful and useful tool for ubuntu. too many things can be done with it. even you can play a video in terminal....:|:|:|

yes! you can do that. all you have to do is install mplayer using the command below-

 sudo apt-get install mplayer

now, to play video execute this command-

mplayer -vo caca name_of_the_video

and see the magic. to view the video in black and white format-

mplayer -vo aa name_of_the_video

 the video quality is not so good. but, still you can show your friends the power of ubuntu terminal....