Workaround for Ubuntu Karmic Bug: Window List buttons do not always respond to mouse clicks

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

Here is the bug URL

I got the solution from there as well, as this was an extremely annoying bug for me and I consider it a FATAL One!

Open a terminal and run the following command:

“nohup env GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 gnome-panel –replace &“

Where:

“nohup“: To run the command independent from the terminal, so as not to cancel the action if the terminal is closed.

‘&‘: Must be put at the end of a command run using “nohup” to run it in the background and avoid canceling the command.

That’s it!

The above command will restart the “gnome-panel” and you’ll find that the bug disappeared.

I haven’t restarted my machine yet to know whether this command is persistent or not (I think not), but anyway it can be easily put in the session startup if it’s not.

Thanks go to “schuetza” who suggested this nice workaround on the original bug report.

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Extract audio from a video file in Ubuntu

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

“mplayer -dumpaudio GummyBearSong.avi -dumpfile gummybear.mp3”

Where:

“GummyBearSong.avi” is the source video, in the example above it was 30 MB
“gummybear.mp3” is the output audio file (in mp3 format), was about 3 MB in size

Another method that worked flawlessly with an MP4 file is using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i SOURCE.mp4 -vn -acodec libmp3lame OUTPUT.mp3
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Enforce any application to appear full screen in gnome

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

In Gnome, you can force any application to go full screen;
Open System=>Preferences=>Keyboard shortcuts
Under “Window Management” assigne any key combinations such as “CTL+SHIFT+F” for “Toggle Fullscreen mode”.
Open any application (firefox, eclipse, ….) and press “CTRL + SHIFT + F”, the program will goes in full screen mode.

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pass entire parameters in shell scripts

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

example bash file:

save the following in a file called print.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo “$@”
and then :
chmod +x print.sh
./print.sh hello world
Note that, all the parameters you pass to print.sh will be passed to echo, this because of “$@”

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List sessions for a user using Siebel CLI

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Ahmed Tawfik

“list sessions for login user_name“

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