Saturday, March 17, 2012

Ubuntu User? Did you Try gnome-shell?

If you are interested in trying different flavor of Ubuntu! Desktop! yes, you can install
sudo apt-get install gonme-shell gonme-tweak-tool
You will need gnome-shell first as it is unity replacement.
Then you will need gnome-tweak-tool to be able to configure it.
Do your homework and search for some desktop captures, but, my opinion, it rocks, much better then unity.
Well, I like it better, and feels more warm than unity for me.  Enjoy, and let me know your opinion too...

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Good Resources for my PandaBoard

The following are some good resources for reference to use with my PandaBoard:

Of course this is the main home page for the Board:
http://pandaboard.org/

Examples on how to program IOs, IRQ, DMA, Timing and more:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/IO-Port-Programming.html

TI OMAP Mobile Processors:
http://e2e.ti.com/support/omap/default.aspx

How to Install the Screen Saver in Ubuntu 11.10 and Later

For some reason, Ubuntu does not include the screen saver option by default.  So, I like to add this option and the option to turn of my monitor after certain time.  Here is how to install it and run it.


  1. By holding Ctrl+Alt+T you start a Terminal Window
  2. type the following to remove gnome-screensaver:
    • sudo apt-get remove gnome-screensaver
  3. Now, Type the following to install the screen saver with extra screens
    • sudo apt-get install xscreensaver xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra
  4. You need to go to Control then find Startup Applications
  5. Add the following to allow the Screen Saver to start on boot
    • xscreensaver -nosplash
  6. Now, you need to edit the configurations and you do this by going to Dash and typing xscreensaver
  7. Enjoy, make sure you configure the Blank after, Cycle after, and the Advanced configurations.
Hope this blog will find you and help ease your day a little, 

How to Unzip a file in Ubuntu

The three type of zipped files I used for now are .tgz, .tar.gz, and .bz2
below are the command and options to how to unzip them

$ tar -zxvf filename.tgz
$ tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz
$ tar -jxvf filename.tar.bz2




You can type tar --help in the command line and you will get all the options and their usage, here are the options description I used above:
-z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip   filter the archive through gzip
-j, --bzip2                filter the archive through bzip2
-x, --extract, --get       extract files from an archive
-v, --verbose              verbosely list files processed

-f, --file=ARCHIVE         use archive file or device ARCHIVE

Hope this blog will find you and help ease your day a little,