How to enable 3D Acceleration for guests in VMWare Workstation Pro 12.5

Posted on January 17, 2017 by Ahmed Tawfik

Just edit the file ~/.vmware/preferences and add the following line

mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = “TRUE”

That’s it, enjoy!

Source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/537787/enable-3d-hw-acceleration-on-vmware-workstation-10-on-ubuntu-14-04

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How to encrypt a USB Flash Drive in Ubuntu using LUKS

Posted on January 3, 2017 by Ahmed Tawfik

We lose USB Flash drives all the time, so if you hold any sensitive or personal stuff, you’d better have it encrypted, just in case.

Important Notes:

  1. This works only on Linux, won’t work on Windows or MAC
  2. Before you start the encryption, make sure to backup all your existing data on the flash drive, because the process will wipe it.
  3. You won’t be able to read your data on Windows or MAC
  4. If you lose your password, forget about your data

Let’s get going then. The steps are pretty simple:

  1. Open the “Disks” application:
    disks_app
  2. Select your flash drive (mine is the SanDisk Ultra USB 3.0 above)
  3. Press Ctrl + Shift + F to start the formatting process
  4. In the Type field, choose “Encrypted”
  5. Fill in the remaining fields, e.g.
    2
  6. Click “Format”
    3
  7. Confirm by clicking “Format” again
  8. That’s it. You’re Done!4

Now, whenever you insert and try to mount your flash drive in any Linux computer, the following dialogue will automatically appear:

5

Enter your password and then you will be able to use the flash drive.

Tested on Linux Mint 18.1 (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).

Enjoy!

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Compress PDF Files Effectively in Ubuntu

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Ahmed Tawfik

Found a great script that does an amazing job with compressing PDF files whilst maintaining a good quality:

Get the script from here: http://www.alfredklomp.com/programming/shrinkpdf/

Just copy the script to a text file and make it executable, then run:

./shrinkpdf infile.pdf outfile.pdf

It compressed 3 PDF files from 80 MB to 13 MB!

Enjoy!

Posted in Linux, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

How to solve Google Chrome Flickering on Ubuntu 16.04

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Ahmed Tawfik

Just do the following two steps:

  1. sudo nano /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

  2. Scroll down to the “Exec” line
  3. Add two additional parameters, so that it looks like this:

    Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable –disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds –enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers %U

That’s it, now restart Chrome and it shall work perfectly!

I am using Google Chrome 54 64-bit on Linux Mint 18 64-bit with the Cinnamon Desktop

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzawulh5vKo

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Fixing DNS Issues with Linux Mint 18

Posted on September 27, 2016 by Ahmed Tawfik

A problem that has been bugging me for a while on my Linux Mint 18, that the DNS is not working properly and on a random basis.

What I could fix it with is that I just did the following:

sudo vi /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

Then commented out this line:

dns=dnsmasq

That’s it! I don’t remember the source I took it from, but will add it once I remember 😛

Enjoy!

Posted in Linux, linuxmint, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments