Tag Archives: GNOME

Access gvfs mounts from the command line

December 8, 2008

In the past, having used the “Connect to server” feature in GNOME, you could easily access the remote server’s filesystem from within Nautilus, but it was impossible to access it from the command line (please correct me if I miss something here). Now GNOME uses gvfs. As soon as GNOME connects to the remote server,…

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Creative PC-CAM 750 on Fedora 10

December 8, 2008

George Notaras

Hardware 3 Comments

About two years ago, I had published some notes about how to use the good old Creative PC-CAM 750 digital camera/webcam combo under Linux using the spca5xx kernel module. Many things have changed since then. The ‘spca5xx‘ driver has been re-released under the name GSPCA, which has lately made its way into the kernel. This…

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Using a switch to prevent system shutdown/reboot/suspend

November 26, 2008

George Notaras

System 3 Comments

What I tried to accomplish today was to prevent a system shutdown or reboot or suspend, if a specific process was still running in the background. This might sound pretty useless, but having shut my PC down once again this afternoon while the backup process was still active in the background, I decided to resolve…

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Problems using libnotify for User to User Notifications

November 18, 2007

George Notaras

Desktop 6 Comments

There are several methods that can be used for text message exchanging between different non-privileged users. Usually, when the sender of such a message is a service and the recipient, who is supposed to see the message, is a human, that message is called a “notification“. The method used by many services that run within…

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Dictionary Lookups Anywhere

October 18, 2007

George Notaras

Desktop 5 Comments

I consider ditionaries, either in printed or electronic form, as one of the most useful sources of valuable information and an indispensable companion when reading. Lately, I’ve been reading lots of stuff, which involved scientific terminology in the English language, so it was very often required to lookup words on various online dictionaries. I did…

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Some thoughts about Epiphany extensions

May 16, 2007

George Notaras

Linux No Comments

Many GNOME users have not realized that the Epiphany browser, apart from the official extensions package, can be further extended by third party extensions, which haven’t made their way into the official package yet. A good place to start checking what else is available for your favourite browser is the Third Party Extensions for Epiphany…

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Blanking a rewritable CD/DVD in GNOME

May 15, 2007

George Notaras

Linux No Comments

Chances are that your removable media preferences in GNOME are set in a way so that CDs get mounted automatically. There is a usability bug that comes into play whenever you try to blank an already written rewritable CD or DVD with Gnomebaker or directly with the command-line tool (cdrecord). An error message that the…

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Smart Bookmarks in Epiphany

May 11, 2007

George Notaras

Linux No Comments

Smart Bookmarks is an extension for the Epiphany browser. Admitedly, its name or description in the browser extensions panel does not help the user understand what exactly it is about. What is a smart bookmark after all?

Screenshot of a menu under GNOME: ROUND 2

March 15, 2007

George Notaras

Linux 2 Comments

A few days ago, I had written a post about the difficulties I had encountered in an attempt to capture an image of a menu under GNOME. A reader, “mysurface“, who, by the way, has written an article about taking screenshots, was 100% positive that, after issuing ImageMagick’s import command, it is still possible to switch between running applications with Alt-Tab and trigger menus with Alt, before using the mouse cursor to select the area that will be captured.
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Print a Man Page

March 5, 2007

George Notaras

Linux 2 Comments

Reading a man page using a terminal application is easy, but I doubt if it would ever win a convenience award. Sometimes, it is necessary to print the man page. I can recommend two ways of doing this.