Wednesday, December 26, 2007

A Practical Joke For Office

Got this from another place so won't be taking the credit for the first one, the second prank is quiet popular too but i did it on my own :p

  1. On your mark's computer, go to the Desktop and make a new folder.
  2. Rename the new folder to e.g. “Porn” or "XXX" or What ever title that will grab attention
  3. Make a screenshot
  4. Delete the folder that you’d just created
  5. Install the screenshot image as a Desktop wallpaper
  6. Enjoy!

Another trick i loved to play is

1. Take a screen shot of the desktop
2. Hide all the icons
3. Move the taskbar from down to another position and hide it
4. Make the screen shot as the wall paper
5. Enjoy especially if the victim is your average windows user :p

Ubuntu Solving The Problem Of Disappearing Disc Space

For past few days i was puzzled by this problem that i kept deleting files but there was no difference in the hard drive space, so by searching and reading i figured out a way to solve this problem,I thought about writing this small tip/guide for newbies like me

Problem / Symptom

I delete files from my hard drive (it can be linux partition or it can be NTFS partiont) yet the space on hard drive remains the same as it was before deleting the files.

Solution

What happens when you delete a file in GUI is that Linux moves the files to a Trash folder instead of actually deleting the file,

For Linux Partition i would suggest you open the terminal go to

Code:
cd /home//.Trash
Replace the with your user name e..g

Code:
cd /home/baqai/.Trash
now to see if you have any hidden files in the directory

Code:
ls -a
this will show you all the hidden / non hidden files in the directory

now for deleting the files

Code:
rm 
If you want to remove a directory than use

Code:
rm -R 
For Windows Partition

Say you have a windows partition mounted and the volume of that drive is "Downloads" you can follow the same principals as above with slight twist

First lets go to your partition

Code:
cd /media/Downloads
Now lets find those files which you deleted

Code:
cd .Trash-
e.g. in my case i typed

Code:
cd .Trash-baqai
Now you will enter a new directory

Code:
ls -a
You will be again shown a list of files, now you can follow the steps above to get rid of the files once and for all and can recover your hard drive space.

On windows partitions you will also have another directory by name of .Trash-root which you should also check just in case you deleted some files by your root account and they are there, For most of the new users like me it should not be a case normally

Monday, December 24, 2007

Fixing the Desktop Resolution in Ubuntu Linux

This is one of the lessons i learned on my own by screwing up the display configuration of my GUI of Ubuntu (Linux). So what happened is that i changed the refresh rate and resolution to match my TV (It's a HDTV which supports VGA) and everything was messed up, here is what i did

I suggest you backup your display settings before making any changes otherwise you will be sitting like an idiot like me :P

1. Either boot in recovery mode OR you can simply press CTRL+F1 to go in the CLI (Command Line Interface)

2. go to /etc/X11

[code]cd /etc/X11[/code]

3. Baclup your config file

[code]sudo cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.backup[/code]

4. Fortunately for me ubuntu had already kept my last configuration file so all i had to do was to over write the current one

[code]sudo cp xorg.conf.1 xorg.conf[/code]

5. Than had to reboot the machine [code]sudo reboot[/code]

there were couple of backup configurations in the folder so it was trial and error procedure till i found the configuration which was working for me

this was a hap hazard way of describing things but what the heck, hopefully it will help someone out or perhaps me in the future to recall my footsteps to solve the problem :P