Stop the Cursor from Blinking

I have nothing against a blinking cursor myself, but some find it distracting. To stop Ubuntu’s cursor from blinking, open gconf-editor, navigate to /desktop/gnome/interface, and remove the check from cursor_blink. Then log out and back in again. Note that Evolution appears to ignore this setting, but most other applications will now have a still cursor.

Alternatively, by changing the value in cursor_blink_time, you can simply make it blink more slowly. A value of 5000 equates to five seconds—each unit is 1 ms. Be aware that a setting such as 5000 means the cursor will be visible for five seconds at a time and then invisible for the same length of time.

Closely Monitor the Power Consumption of a Laptop

Run gnome-power-statistics, and you’ll see a graph of the exact power usage of your computer over the time since it booted up (provided your computer’s hardware supports it). Try boosting the brightness of your screen or loading programs, and see how much of a drain they can be!

Switch Monitor Resolutions with a Single Mouse Click

If you have an external monitor or projector you occasionally attach to a notebook computer, you might be used to switching resolutions on a regular basis. Unlike with Windows, this isn’t just a right-click procedure—you must navigate the System→Preferences menu.

A good solution is to use Synaptic to search for and install resapplet. For some reason, although it’s officially a GNOME applet, resapplet doesn’t appear on the standard applet list. Instead, it must be configured to start at login. To do this, click System→Preferences→Sessions, ensure the Startup Programs tab is selected, and click the Add button. In the Name and Command fields of the dialog box that appears, type resapplet. Leave the Comment field blank. Then close the dialog box, and log out and back in again.

The new icon will then appear beside Network Monitor in the notification area. Clicking it will reveal a list of possible resolutions from which you can choose. Incidentally, it should be possible to instantly step up and down resolutions by pressing Ctrl+Alt and tapping the +/- keys on the numeric keypad. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on Ubuntu systems because of the way the graphical subsystem is configured. It may work on other Linux systems, however.

Add Cool New Visualizations to Totem / Rhythm Box

Both Totem and Rhythm Box include a funky animation that appears during music playback. Animations such as this are known as visualizations, but out of the box Ubuntu includes only one, rather than the hundreds found on the likes of Mac OS or Windows media players. However, you can add more to Ubuntu, for use in both Totem and Rhythm Box, by using Synaptic to search for and install the libvisual-0.4- plugins package.

Once the package has been installed, to change the visualization in Totem that appears when a music track is playing, click Edit→Preferences, select the Display tab in the dialog box that appears, and make your choice from the Type of visualization drop-down list. Your choice will take effect immediately,so drag the Preferences dialog box out of the way to preview it.

In Rhythm Box, click View→Visualization to start the animation, and then select from the drop-down list beneath the visualization.

See (and Reuse) the Most Recently Typed Commands

The command line includes a powerful history feature that can make life much easier. To see the recently typed commands, type history. This simply dumps to the screen a hidden file in your /home directory called .bash_history where up to 1,000 commands are recorded. Because this list will scroll off the screen when listed, it’s a good idea to pipe the output into a text reader, such as less:

$ history|less

To reuse one of your commands, at the command prompt type an exclamation mark (!; known as a bang in bash-speak) and then the number alongside the entry in the history list.For example,on my system, I noted when viewing the history list that the command cp /etc/ fstab ~/Desktop was command 591. To use it again, I typed !591 at the command prompt. If you ever need to simply repeat a command you’ve just used, type two exclamation marks—!!.

To actively rifle through your command history, hit Ctrl+r and then start typing the command in which you’re interested.The prompt will “auto complete” as you type. To use the command, hit Enter. To edit it before using it,hit Esc, and then make your changes.

Hitting the up and down cursor keys will also let you move through the most recently typed commands. Just hit Enter when you find the one youwanttoreuse.

Set Any Picture as Wallpaper with a Single Click

The easiest way of setting your own picture as a desktop wallpaper is to click and drag the image to the desktop using the middle mouse button (if the image is already on the desktop, then click and drag it a few inches to the left/right). On most modern mice, the middle mouse button is the scroll wheel, which also doubles as a third mouse button. On the menu that appears when you release the button, click Set as Background.

If that sounds a little too unorthodox for you (it can be hard to use the middle mouse button), you can also use Synaptic to install the nautilus-wallpaper package, which adds a simple Set as Wallpaper option to the menu that appears when you right-click an image file. After installation, you’ll need to log out and then in again before the option becomes visible.

Network app for Linux

Networking is a huge part of Linux and in order to be adept at it, one needs to know network apps. Here are a few that will tickle the brain cells and keep you sharp when the terminals are running.

Netscape

If you have the netscape installation, which you should, then, try running netscape on the X terminal. The problem though is that the versions of Netscape available right now are quite large and faulty. When you are not connected to the Internet, Netscape often stops working completely and looks as if it has hanged.

netscape -display host:0.0

If the machine that you’re working on has the permission to access and display on the ‘host’ machine, then run netscape on the one you are working on and transfer the output onto the machine called ‘host’.

lynx file.html

This is used when you are on the text mode and want to browse the internet from it, or if you want to view an html file.

pine

Local mail is mail that is sent by someone on your network to your computer. Pine reads this mail for you. You can also use Elm for this. You have Netscape for reading your email otherwise.

elm

As mentioned above, this does the same job as pine.

mutt

Quite aptly named, this is a fast and very useful mail reader. It is a basic app though.

mail

This is also a basic tool for emails and the commands mentioned above are much better.

licq

Icq clients are instant messaging clients. While this one is a good option, you can also go for kxicq. Older Linux distributions do not have icq clients installed in them.

talk username1

This is a network command that is used to talk to other users who are logged into the machine that you’re working on. You can use the command talk username1@machinename if you want to talk to someone on a different computer. Accepting a command is done through the ‘talk username2’. Rejecting a conversation is done through ‘mesg n’.

mc

Mc stands for Midnight Commander. It is used to launch the file manager.

telnet server

You us this command when you want to connect to a different machine using the TELNET protocol. One must have a login on the remote machine they are trying to connect to.

rlogin server

It stands for remote login and allows you to log into a remote machine. It uses the login id and password from your current session automatically and asks for a password in case the login fails.

rsh server

This does the same thing as the above command. It stands for remote shell.

ftp server

This command is useful for copying files to a remote machine or from it. In order to add extra features for graphical user interface, you can use ncftp.