I’ve been using Firefox’s fullscreen mode on my Eee PC to get the maximum amount of vertical screen space possible. I noticed that the screen flickers black briefly whenever a tooltip or right click menu is displayed. All fullscreen applications seem to be affected.

I thought this would be valuable to some of you that are new to Ubuntu. Being rather new to this Ubuntu Linux thing myself, I have struggled to get the terminal commands for fixing the .dmrc permissions issue just right.

Everytime I install Ubuntu, my usplash (the boot GUI) is 640x480. So here is howto make the usplash resolution fit your display resolution:

I’m sure many of you have heard by this point that there is a reported vulnerability in openSSL and openSSH.  The basis of this is that they keys that are generated when you use these tools (ie; installing openssh-server, etc) are generated in a weak manner and can be prone to simple brute force attacking.

I’ve found that loading a Flash applet in Firefox will cause Firefox to lock my whole system’s audio playback. Audio and video in Totem don’t even start to play when this happens. Until Firefox is closed, the only application that can play audio is Flash.

While running Compiz-Fusion, You wouldn’t be able to see any video play while either moving the window, viewing desktops in expo, 3d cube, or any other cool effect for that matter; instead you would see a blue screen, including when viewing in full screen.

Last year Nanci posted that there were grammar checking tools for OpenOffice.org, the wonderful open source office suite, that takes care of one of the most glaring omissions and deal breakers in people looking for a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office. Unfortunately there seems to be a bit of a glitch with it in Ubuntu Hardy. Luckily there is an easy way to fix it.

In Ubuntu, there is an infamous issue with the Gnome clipboard manager. (Actually, it’s not even decent enough to be called a “clipboard manager.”) Many people face extremely annoying problems of losing data when copying and pasting, especially when the copied source is closed. Ironically, this problem has not been fixed in the recently released 8.04 Hardy Heron.

You might have noticed that the suspend and hibernation function in ubuntu/kubuntu won’t work. While there’s no official fix, you might find this work around helpful.

Here’s the scenario. You have a dual boot machine, Ubuntu on one side, Windows on the other. You’re tooling around, doing your thing and then one day you boot into Windows and get this:

Kiven of That Damn PC wrote about improving your desktop layout in Windows by reducing the number of mouse clicks you have. I also do the same thing on Linux. I put the icons of the apps I commonly use on Gnome panel.

For a while I had been noticing that video playback in both Totem and VLC was too dark. Using VLC I could manually adjust the brightness to watch videos normally. Today, I found how to fix the problem.

Every SSH server uses a random key to identify itself. When SSH is installed a new key is generated. SSH clients keep track of the host key, if it changes the user can be warned that they might not be connecting to the computer they think they are. Most of the time this happens when the SSH server or the OS are reinstalled.

Something happen to a windows Master Boot Record (MBR) that you’re responsible for? Want a very quick, very easy way to restore it with nothing but your craft, native intelligence and a liveCD?

I realized the other day that the flashplugin-nonfree package appears to be broken.  It’ll act like its installing but at the end, if you pay close attention, it’ll give an error about the md5sum not matching and give up.  This applies to installing the package manually or via the browser notification itself.  I wanted to post a temporary fix while we wait for the package to be updated.

Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. Pidgin stores you passwords in plain text in ~/.purple/accounts.xml. Someone can easily boot into recovery mode while you are away and find your passwords in plain text.