Disable Touchpad Clicks on Xubuntu

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Ahmed Tawfik

If you’re getting really annoyed – like I do – whenever you’re typing something and you touch the touchpad by mistake, which transfer the cursor to some other window on the screen, then this article is what you’re looking for:

Open a terminal and type in:
synclient MaxTapTime=0
If this successfully disables the tap to click, then add a new startup entry (Settings->Settings Manager->Session and Startup->Application Autostart) where the command is:
bash -c “synclient MaxTapTime=0”

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1875057.html

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Right-to-left e-mail composing in Thunderbird with Bidi

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Ahmed Tawfik

If you want to write Arabic, it’s very annoying to use left-to-right text direction, and it’s not supported natively in Thunderbird.

One of the solutions is to use the “Bidi” add-on for Thunderbird, I was able to successfully install it on my Thunderbird 8.

After installation is done and restarting Thunderbird, you’ll find two new icons for determining left-to-right or vice versa.

Update: I found it to be a very buggy add-on and sometimes views English text from right-to-left.

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Working with KSH

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Ahmed Tawfik

Here are the shortcuts that were of utmost importance to get me productive with KSH:

“stty erase ^?” to remove the ‘^?’ symbol when the backspace key is pressed.

“Ctrl-p” shows the previous command that you typed, pressing several time will get you sequentially to older commands

“Ctrl-n” shows the next command in case you used “Ctrl-p”, i.e. navigates forward

“Ctrl-b” moves the cursor back one character

“Ctrl-f” moves the cursor forward one character

Here is a screenshot of a table that contains most of the shortcuts

Note: Not all of them work, like the reverse search, have no idea why yet.

Source: http://www.bigsmoke.us/readline/shortcuts

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How to stop mysql from starting up automatically in Ubuntu Desktop

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Ahmed Tawfik

MySQL uses a different mechanism other than apache2, so you can simply comment the three lines inside “/etc/init/mysql.conf”

Change this:

start on (net-device-up
and local-filesystems
and runlevel [2345])
stop on runlevel [016]

to this:

#start on (net-device-up
# and local-filesystems
# and runlevel [2345])
stop on runlevel [016]

Source: http://anonir.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/ubuntu-lucid-disable-services-from-starting-during-boot/

It worked perfectly with the latest version of Ubuntu as of this article (Oneiric, 11.10)

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How to stop apache2 from automatically starting in Ubuntu Desktop

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Ahmed Tawfik

sudo update-rc.d apache2 remove

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