If you use Ubuntu 10.04 or any other Linux distribution which doesn’t automatically upgrade your Firefox to the latest version you can force it.
First of all you have to launch Terminal and add the right PPA to the repository:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa
Then you need to update and upgrade the OS using:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
If you are installing Firefox for the first time the right commands are:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install firefox firefox-gnome-support firefox-locale-en
As usual on Linux, it is not necessary to reboot the computer and you can start immediately to use your updated Firefox.
After I installed some new software I wasn’t able to update Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The Update Manager was not able to check for updates and when I tried to use the Synaptic Package Manager I hadn’t better results. A reboot was not the right solution and I tested different ways to solve my problem saving the Ubuntu installation in my computer.
Searching on internet I discovered that there are few possible solution to avoid this problem and, in case you have the same bug on your computer, I decided to sum-up the most powerful after I successfully tried them.
First of all you can try to force the update process through the Terminal typing:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
If this doesn’t work you will try with this next step:
sudo rm var/lib/dpkg/lock sudo dpkg --configure -a
Then launch again the Update Manager to verify if you succeed and if nothing happened solve the matter typing:
sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf sudo apt-get update
and try again to launch the Update Manager.
In my case this was enough to restore all the Update Manager features and solve the problem. If you have extra problems about this bug or if you want to suggest alternative solutions, please, don’t hesitate to comment this post.
Christmas time is ending and today we really don’t know how many relatives used out computer for “just few minutes” or “to quickly (sic) check the emails”. In few words, our Linux PC could have been overstuffed with unwanted temporary files and we haven’t had time to update it. So, it’s time to clean-up!!
First of all I suggest to use BleachBit because, for my experience, it’s the most powerful software to clean temporary files, log files and unwanted traces on your computer. BleachBit is easy to use and, as we described in previous post, very effective.
Then we have to check if our system is really updated so we can use the usual ways as Synaptics Package Manager or quickly run a some simple commands through Terminal to update, upgrade and remove old packages or Kernel.
For this purpose I collected three simple commands and chained them in a single line:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get autoremove
In this way you will be sure that you can start again to work on your Ubuntu as before the Christmas time!
This is the situation: I have a Netgear wi-fi router which has not the option to extend the wi-fi lan and two rooms in my house where it was not possible to use computers or external hard disks due to the weak wi-fi signal in there. The other available stuff I have is an Apple Airport Extreme with the right features to extend the existing wi-fi lan.
After many different configuration tests I was not able to configure correctly the wi-fi lan to improve the signal and cover all my house. Then I decided to buy a couple of used powerline ethernet adapter for about 30.00 USD and I put one of them near the area I wanted to cover with my wi-fi lan.
Then I connected the Airport Extreme to the adapter located near the low signal area and I was able to solve my problem configuring the lan in this way:
1- I reserved a fixed IP on the Netgear router for the Airport Extreme and I added that specific IP in the DMZ list:
2- I put the Airport Extreme in the Bridge mode and chose Ethernet as data connection:
3 – I cloned the configuration of the Netgear wi-fi on the Airport Extreme. In particular I assigned to the new wi-fi lan the same broadcasting name to the main one:
4 – I restarted the Netgear router and I had a strong wi-fi signal into all my house.
I know that the solution I found it is not orthodox but it is cheap especially when you do not want to spend money for a new professional router when the “old” one is still brand new.
If you installed Ubuntu and Windows at the same time, you probably noticed that when you start your computer you can choose what operating system to launch. The responsible software for this is usually the GRUB loader and its menu. Obviously, after you install Ubuntu, it is placed as the first option and if you do not explicitly choose Windows in a few seconds, Ubuntu will be started. But what if you want Windows as your default option? Here is how you change the order:
1. Launch a new Ubuntu Terminal (Applications, Accessories). Type in the following command:
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup
This will create a backup of the GRUB configuration file.
2. Now open the file. We’ll do it with a new command:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
You will be prompted for a password, after which a text editor will be launched. In most of the situations, the menu.lst file contains many comments. You have to search for a line that says
default 0
This should not be very far from the end of file. Here you will have to intervene. After a few lines you will the variable called ‘timeout’ and its value (10 by default). If you want to have more or less time available for choosing your operating system, change the 10 with what number you want.
So back to the boot sequence. Scroll through the file again until you find:
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic
There will be more titles. Count the order number of Windows, but start from 0. The value you choose should overwrite the default one. For example, if Windows is the 4th title in the list, you will need to type
default 4
instead of ‘default 0’, which was described above. All you need to do at this point is to save the file and restart your computer.
I usually update my Firefox as soon as possible but often, especially after installing the new version 5 on a Ubuntu 11.04 platform, I had to lose many add-ons that I previously selected and used daily. To avoid this problem I found some tips on the web and I tested all of them with different results.
Solution 1
– download the .xpi file from its official Firefox add-on webpage using the right mouse button (Save Link As) on 
– unzip the .xpi file with Archive Manager and open install.rdf using a Text Editor;
– find this line: em:maxVersion and change the value from e.g. 4.0.* to 5.0.*;
– click on 
icon in the Firefox Add-ons Manager, select “Install Add-on From File…” and follow the visual instructions.
Unfortunately this solution didn’t work always during my tests
Solution 2
– open a new Tab on Firefox and type: about:config;
– agree to the warning message;
– search all the lines with the string extensions.checkCompatibility and set the values to false
– restart Firefox and enable or install your “old” add-ons.
Solution 3 – The easy one!
– open a new Tab on Firefox and click on Tools –> Add-ons;
– search for the Add-on Compatibility Reporter and install it;
– restart Firefox and you will be able to install all the old add-ons.
Sometimes you will discover that installing “old” add-ons doesn’t mean that they really run on Firefox 5 but, in my experience, more than the 70% of them will be good for the new version. Have fun!!
Technorati Tags: Firefox, install, Firefox 5, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 11.04, tutorial
Many Linux users use the ‘find’ utility when searching for files using the command line on their system. They’ll do a simple:
find / -name ‘pattern’
Really though, the power of find isn’t just in finding names of files but rather specific details about those files. For example, if you wanted to find files which are writable by both their owner and their group:
find / -perm -444 -perm /222 ! -perm /111
or perhaps find any file that’s been altered in your Download directory in the past 24 hours:
find /home/user/Downloads/ -mtime 0
As you can see, the find command is very versatile and can be used to find an array of different attributes of files. There are times though where I’m just looking for something and I don’t want to have to wait for the command to scan the entire directory tree in order to track it down. That’s where locate comes in with quick and simple results.
Using the locate command can only be accomplished if you install the mlocate package. Most major distributions have this available. If not, head over to the mlocate homepage and install manually. Once that is accomplished, you’ll need to manually run a command to index your filesystem with it…otherwise, you’ll have to wait for the command to run automatically as it registers with cron to do so on a system level. Open a terminal and change to your root user, then execute the following:
updatedb &
This updates the mlocate database that indexes your files and forks it to the background (the ‘&’ forks it to the background). You can now logout of the terminal as root and the process will quietly work in the background.
After the command completes, using mlocate is as easy as using the locate command:
locate firefox | less
The command above will look for all files with Firefox in the name and pipe the command through less so you can use the space bar or enter key to scroll the file buffer. Of course, the reason we pipe it through less is because any file that resides in the ‘firefox’ directory will be reported in the output. While this tool isn’t as granular as the find command, it is a quick way to track down paths, directories, and files you know should exist. Since the data is indexed using the updatedb command (by cron) the results are very quick and the command does not have to scan through the filesystem to return the results.
There are plenty more advanced options via flags (such as following symbolic links, making search term case-sensitive, and even using regexp). See the man page for details on how each of these options work. Play around with locate and see what you can do! It’s a powerful and quick search command! 
This post is basically directed towards new users of Linux which are not much familiar with command prompt. This is a small but comprehensive article about ‘GNU find’ .
Find Your Lost Files!
Let’s start from a simple example:
Suppose you want to search for a file named ‘master.txt’ in your home directory.
Open the Terminal and issue the following command:
find . -name “master.txt”
‘find’ will immediately show the results. If ‘find’ does not show any result, this means that the file, in our case, ‘master.txt’, does not exist. It is not always the case that you want to find something in you home directory. The lost/desired file may be anywhere in your computer. Suppose you want to find a file named ‘space-01.jpg’ and you only know that is located somewhere in /usr directory. You can find it by issuing following command in Terminal:
find /usr -name “space-01.jpg”
and ‘find’ will tell you that this is located under /usr/share/backgrounds.
Using Wildcards
Maybe you want to search for a file but you don’t know its exact name? Don’t worry! You can still locate the file using ‘GNU find’ and wildcard will help you in this regard. Wildcards are a way of searching files when you don’t know much about your desired file.
One of the commonly used wildcard is asterisk (*). Lets consider an example to better understand the things.
Suppose you want to search a file named ‘Jumping_Flowers’ but you only remember the ‘Jumping‘ part of the file name. So issue the following command in Terminal:
find . -name “Jumping*”
And it will display all the files starting with the word ‘Jumping’. You can use asterisk (*) anywhere with a file name. For example:
find . -name “*Jumping*”
And it will display all the files which contain the word ‘Jumping’.
Here are some more examples of use of a wildcard:
find . -name “Jumping*Flowers*”
find . -name “*Jumping*Flowers.mp3”
Searching For Different File Types
Sometimes you are not looking for some specific file but you are looking for a group of files. For example, you may be looking for all the .txt files in your home directory. To find all the .txt files, you will give the following command in Terminal:
find . -name *.txt
In case of mp3 files, the above command will be:
find . -name *.mp3
When You Want to Search with Respect to Time
If you want to search for files by the last time they were accessed, you can use -amin flag with ‘find’. In this case you have to put a minus (-) sign before the time. The time here is in minutes. In order to search for .doc files which were accessed in last 10 minutes, you will give the following command:
find . -amin -10 -name “*.doc”
Similarly, to search for .doc files which were modified in last 20 minutes, you will use -mmin option as follows:
find . -mmin -20 -name “*.doc”
Search For Files which are Eating Your Hard Disk
There may be files on your system which are not only huge in size but also located obscure places. You may also may not know when they were last accessed. You have to use -size option with ‘find’ to locate them.
Let’s see how we can do this:
find . -size +100M
It will list all those files which are greater than 100 Megabytes. You can replace ‘M’ with ‘G’ (for Gigabyte) or with ‘k’ (for Kilobyte)
Copy, Move, or Delete Unwanted Files on the Fly
Copy – ‘find’ can also be used to copy or backup your files. You can use ‘find’ to copy certain files from one location to other with one simple command.
Suppose you want copy all of your mp3 songs from your home directory to your Windows Partition. Enter the following command in Terminal:
find . -name “*.mp3” -exec cp {} /path/to/Windows_Drive \;
And all of your mp3 files will be copied to the desired Drive/Folder.
Move – There may be situations that you quickly want to move all of your document files from your Hard Disk to your USB to keep them safe. To move all of your documents from your home directory to your USB, you will issue the following command:
find . -name “*.doc” -exec cp {} /path/to/USB \;
Delete – Suppose there are a lot of .tmp files and you want to get rid of them at once. Again ‘GNU find’ is at your service and does the work for you. Issue the following in Terminal and all of the .tmp files are gone…
find . -name ‘*.tmp’ -exec rm {} \;
Which Files are Owned by You and Which Are Not?
There may be a situation when you want to know that which files in some other directories (or even in your home directory) are owned by some other user of your computer.
Suppose there is another user named ‘blackstar’ with whom you are sharing your PC. Now you want to know that which .doc files in Windows Directory is owned by this user ‘blackstar’. You can do this by issuing the following command:
find /path/to/Windows_Drive -user blackstar -name “*.doc”
Just replace ‘blackstar’ with your username to search on your system.
Direct the Output of ‘find’ to a File
You can save the results of your ‘find’ command to a text file which will allow you to examine the results in detail at some later time (or to create playlist of your songs). For this purpose a greater than (>) sign is used (referred to as “piping the command”).
Suppose you want to save the list of all the mp3 songs in your home directory to a text file (which you can later share with your friend), you can do this by:
find . -name “*.mp3” > mp3.txt
It will save the complete path to all of your mp3 songs in the file named mp3.txt.
Computer Borders 