Kubuntu

So if you've just installed or upgraded to the new version of Kubuntu (Wily Werewolf), you will notice that Skype runs fine but does not appear in the system tray as an icon. The workaround to fix this is to install the sni-qt package, but specifically the 32-bit version of the package (as Skype is a 32-bit app). To do this, open a terminal and type:

This will also install a dependency. Once this is installed, quit Skype and restart it to find the familiar green check in your system tray.

So here I was happy with my installation of program foo.exe under Wine in Linux (Kubuntu if you must know). All of a sudden, the program starts whining a little, wobbling a touch, and generally exhibiting wonky tendencies. While I could have uninstalled it and tried to reinstall it to see if that fixes the problem, there's a neater solution that is only available for Wine users.

I was looking for a way to add a custom context (right-click) menu to KDE's Dolphin (in Kubuntu 14.10, Utopic) that (much like in Windows) would allow me to enqueue an entire folder/directory in Videolan. Many of the examples that I looked at were rather sketchy or incomplete. Here's a simple working example that might be of help to someone else out there. You can modify it appropriately to get it working for other applications as well.

A quick and easy way to join or merge multiple PDFs together on Linux (Kubuntu 14.10):

This doesn't resample pages or any other nonsense like that either :) pdfunite is provided by the poppler-utils package which should already be installed.

If you want to do the opposite, i.e. split a unified PDF file into multiple ones, poppler-utils also provides the aptly named pdfseparate.

Hope this helps :)

So, I am often SSH'd into a remote server from my Kubuntu desktop. I also rarely switch off my desktop and prefer to just hit sleep instead. One of the things that can be annoying when I resume the desktop is that the previous SSH session is now unresponsive/frozen as SSH believes that it is still connected to the remote server while the server has given up on the old session long ago. No amount of CTRL + C or CTRL + Z banging is going to terminate the session which can take an inordinately long wait to time out.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions where I've found that my system audio only plays when I switch to a different tty. I don't know exactly how to duplicate the issue . But essentially, if I switch from my Kubuntu 14.10 KDE desktop to a different tty (using something like CtrlAltF5) and then switch back to the KDE tty, I find that I can hear no audio. However, if I switch again to the command-line tty, I can hear that audio that ought to have been playing in KDE. Rather weird, huh?

I can sometimes be rather picky (some would say 'anal') when I write, for example, an e-mail. I get annoyed if I have to resort to typing three periods for an ellipsis rather than achieving it with just the one character. Doing something with one character instead of three is also a skill that has carved itself a niche in this age of Twitter. So how would one go about it?

So I've had a graphics issue with my Kubuntu box which relies on an Intel motherboard. While I was hoping to put off the fix until the next version of Kubuntu (out in April), the display bug was getting to be really annoying. I therefore decided to upgrade to the latest kernel immediately.

So I upgraded my Kubuntu box's kernel to 3.19 and while that fixed my graphics issues, I ran into a new and peculiar issue where hovering over links in Google Chrome failed to display the linked addresses in the bottom of the screen (the status bar). This is apparently a known (Chromium) bug which has still not been resolved. The current recommended workaround is to disable and re-enable hardware acceleration as follows:

While using Google Chrome on Kubuntu 14.10, the display hung for about 5 seconds before unfreezing with the following notification:

Once this began occurring with an increasing frequency, I began to do a little digging. Looking through /var/log/kern.log brought the following up: