Blender won't start windowed when Legacy Fullscreen is enabled in Compiz

Ran into this the other day, with a solution presenting itself on launchpad as usual. This is more of a workaround than a bugfix, but it works perfectly satisfactorily.

Essentially you want to change your Blender launch parameters to something along the lines of:

 blender -w -p 0 0 800 600 

What this does is tell Blender to launch in windowed mode, as well as starting at the bottom left of your screen and at a resolution of 800 by 600. You can then move the window around and resize/fullscreen it as per the norm. For some reason Blender throws a hissy fit and refuses to start windowed when only the "-w" parameter is specified, the additional options seem to force it to work properly.

Assuming you're using Gnome, you can customise your menu entries by going to System > Preferences > Main Menu.

GDM2Setup / Ubuntu Tweak - Unable to change Xsplash Wallpaper

On a couple of fresh Lucid installs so far I've run into this same problem, whereby GDM2setup and/or Ubuntu Tweak are unable to change the wallpaper for Xsplash. This apparently stems from the fact that a directory both programs need to modify does not exist by default in 10.04.

A fix presented itself in the form of the reply from WobblyBob on launchpad here.

Essentially all you need to do is run this command in the terminal:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/images/xsplash

Then attempt to change the wallpaper once again. Hopefully that has fixed it!

Ensure Compiz starts with --loose-binding upon login with a handy script

Previously talked about was the massive perfomance enhancement systems using Nvidia cards and Compiz enjoy when Compiz is started with the '--loose-binding' option. To ensure that this happens properly upon every login i've found that deploying a quick little bash script is easiest.

To create the script:

gedit compiz-start.sh

Copy and pase the following into it

#!/bin/bash

compiz --replace --loose-binding
gtk-window-decorator --replace

Save and close gedit.

Make the script executable: 

 chmod 700 compiz-start.sh

At this point you can test the script using './compiz-start.sh' from your home directory.

To add this script to your list of startup applications: 

In Ubuntu, go to 'System > Preferences > Startup Applications' and add the line:

/home/yourusername/compiz-start.sh

So that it is one of the entries. At this stage, you're done, however, i've found the script works best when combined with the delay script mentioned previously.

So with that, the line to run the compiz script after five seconds would be:

 /home/yourusername/delay.sh 5 "/home/yourusername/compiz-start.sh"

Done!

Make Lucid less irritating - Change buttons from left to right and remove mail icon

Raar! Certain changes in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx have brought on the rage, specifically the buttons being on the left, and that damned mail icon I never use (due to using a webmail client) in the new notification area that cannot be conventionally removed without also removing the volume icon.

So, some quick fixes to copy/paste into the terminal!

Remove the mail icon:

sudo apt-get remove indicator-messages 

Move the window controls to the right-hand side: 

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout" --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

 That should hopefully soothe the irritation somewhat.

Conky problematic in Lucid? Battery bar appears empty.

After upgrading to 10.04 on my laptop I found that the battery monitor bar was returning an empty bar with no data. Inspection of errors returned by running it in the terminal showed that conky was trying to identify the battery by the wrong portion of the script, specifically:

${battery_bar 7,65 BAT0}

Where it should have been attempting to lookup 'BAT0', it was actually looking up '7,65'. After double checking that the script had been written correctly, I attempted a reinstall from the repositories, to no avail! The solution ended up being just to download the source, compile and install.

Conky source can be found here, download the tarball of the latest version.

To install:

Ensure dependencies have been met:

sudo apt-get install lua5.1 liblua5.1-0-dev libxml2-dev build-essential libcurl4-gnutls-dev libx11-dev libxt-dev libxext6-dbg libxext-dev libxdamage-dev libxft-dev libimlib2-dev libglib2.0-dev

Find the Conky tarball you have downloaded and extract the contents to a convenient location, then navigate to this folder in the terminal.

Then, while in this directory, in the terminal:

 ./configure
make
sudo make install

And you're done! For convenience you could use a program called checkinstall to autobuild a deb, so that it is easier to remove or upgrade conky at a later date.

To do this simply replace 'sudo make install' with 'sudo checkinstall'. Follow the steps and enjoy Conky!

A Guide to Clonezilla - Create a backup image of your computer using a LiveCD or USB Drive

Previously mentioned as being used to completely restore a broken system using partition images was Clonezilla, so it seems like a good idea to post up a short guide for using it!

The First Step: Download the iso from here, you're looking to download the one marked as 'stable iso/zip'. You can then use a program like Infrarecorder (Windows) or K3B (Linux) to burn the iso image to a blank CD. Alternatively, use USB Startup Disk Creator (Ubuntu - System > Administration) or UnetBootin (Windows) to create a bootable USB drive.

The Second Step: Check your bios settings to ensure that your USB or Disk Drive is listed above your HDD in the boot order, else Clonezilla will not initialise upon bootup.

The Third Step: Have your backup medium ready, be it USB Stick or External Drive, but do not plug them in yet. Boot the computer, you should be presented with a menu looking just like the one below:

Rest of the guide after the break:

Link List - Applications

I've added a bunch of links to various applications that I always add to every fresh installation of Ubuntu, mainly so that I actually remember some of the less regularly used ones, but also for anyone that might be interested in having a look at some apps they've perhaps not seen before.

Load nvida-settings Configuration upon Login

Lets say you've tweaked your nvidia-settings configuration slightly to make things look better, possibly changed the contrast and saturation values in order to get more even looking colours and better definition. Maybe you've also noticed that these settings are not persistent between each boot, and require you to load nvidia-settings in order for them to have effect. This is quite irritating. A solution, however, is at hand.

It turns out that this is deliberate behavior on the part of the nvidia-settings program. In an instance where a computer has multiple users, you may want to have different configurations for each person. This is where your .nvidia-settings-rc comes in handy.

So open nvidia-settings and set it up the way you want it, once you've done that you want to navigate down to nvidia-settings configuration and click "save current configuration". This will then prompt you to save to your home folder, which is exactly what you want to do.

Nvidia settings can then be made to load the configuration upon login by adding

nvida-settings -l

to Startup Applications under System > Preferences.

If this doesn't work, try running that command in a terminal. When I did this I was given output along the lines of the following:

ERROR: Unable to assign attribute RedContrast specified on line 40 of configuration file
'/home/sam/.nvidia-settings-rc' (no Display connection). 

Luckily the solution is also fairly simple. You need to go back into nvidia-settings and untick "Include X Display Names in the Config File" on the nvidia-settings configuration tab, then resave the settings to your .nvidia-settings-rc.

Let me know if you have any issues!

Increase Compiz Performance with Nvidia Cards

A nice quick note here.

Always remember to add "--loose-binding" to Compiz-Fusion launch options when running a computer containing an Nvidia card. The performance boost is more than a little tangible.

For those of you who have Compiz constantly running, it is possible to enable this through Compiz Icon (Found in synaptic) under the options menu visible when right clicking on the taskbar icon.

Why Clonezilla is amazing, and how Linux rocks

Recently a laptop running Ubuntu 9.10 broke down, with the screen and a few other components utterly refusing to work, it was still usable with an external screen and so some measure of recovery was possible. Now this laptop is used for work and had important documents along with specifically configured programs on it, making it a pain to set up a spare laptop with not just a backup of the documents, but also all the running programs on the computer.

Enter Clonezilla.

Clonezilla is a fantastic tool for creating images of hard-drives, partitions and backing them up for future restorations. It only copies used blocks on the drive, meaning that the image itself is never bigger than it needs to be.

So roughly 4 hours later, and a 220 gig image of the entire laptop was cloned to an external drive, ready to be moved into the spare laptop.

This is the bit where using Linux comes in handy. Once the image was restored on the spare laptop, the system booted perfectly on the new computer, and everything instantly worked exactly as before. This is the beauty of using a system that detects and loads drivers every single time it boots, keeping the information for these drivers entirely within its kernel. It didn't matter that completely different hardware was present, the install didn't complain once and it couldn't have been easier.