How I removed an annoying nautilus context menu item

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

AT LAST I DID IT!!

After installing the new version of Lotus Notes, it added a stupid item to my nautilus context menu labeled “Send to Lotus Notes”, this item crashes nautilus whenever it’s clicked!! and it was bothering me a LOT! I googled and googled and googled and found nothing at all! Here is the bug description “http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd85forum.nsf/c6054cf2ea498b338525733900559bd1/7ab83251d1d068db852575fb0036104b?OpenDocument” and here is what I did to remove that item:

  1. Killed nautilus “killall nautilus”
  2. In a terminal, I started nautilus again, just type “nautilus”
  3. I reproduced the issue by clicking that item to crash nautilus
  4. An error message appeared stating that “nautilus: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-2.0/libnautilus-notes-sendto.so: undefined symbol: gnome_vfs_uri_new“
  5. I just went to the folder “/usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-2.0” and renamed the “libnautilus-notes-sendto.so” file to another name
  6. Restarted nautilus and it’s gone!
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Mirage: A very simple, powerful and quick image editor in Ubuntu

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

Since gimp is considered somehow a heavy-weight program, at least for basic image editing, I searched in Ubuntu repositories for a quicker alternative and I found “Mirage”, it’s very simple and contains nice features such as:

* Slideshow and fullscreen mode
* Rotating, zooming, flipping, resizing, and cropping
* Screenshot

I used it primarily for image cropping as I had to open gimp for every image I wanted to crop and that was bothering me a lot as it takes some time to startup.

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How to avoid Internet Disconnection while connected to VPN on Ubuntu or any other OS

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

I wished to have that feature since a very long time ago and at last I found a solution which was very simple! The solution idea is simple: Don’t use your base OS to connect to the VPN, use a virtual machine instead, for example I use Virtualbox as my virtualization software and I have Ubuntu 9.04 as my base OS and Ubuntu 9.10 as my guest OS, I installed the Cisco-compatible vpnc and network-manager-vpnc packages, and then connected to the VPN on the guest OS and everything worked like a charm! On my base OS I can do everything I want as if I’m not connected to any VPN and my guest OS connects to the VPN and has access to all network resources there, simple, isn’t it 🙂 ?

Update: I did the same with a Windows XP guest and Cisco VPN client and it worked fine as expected.

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Capslock Indicator in Ubuntu

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

Very useful if you don’t have a led on your laptop indicating whether the caps lock key is turned on or off:

  1. “sudo apt-get install lock-keys-applet”
  2. “killall gnome-panel”
  3. Right click the panel, click “Add to panel” and then choose the “Lock Keys” applet
  4. Enjoy 🙂
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Access shared-folder in Ubuntu host from Ubuntu guest in Virtualbox

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Ahmed Tawfik

This is the scenario that you run Ubuntu as your host operating system and Ubuntu guest in VirtualBox, and that you want to access a specific folder from Ubuntu host.

First you have to make sure that have install Guest Additions. From the VirtualBox’s menu go to Devices → Install Guest Additions… This will mount a virtual CD on your /media/cdrom. Normally this folder’s window will show up. As root run the program VBoxLinuxAdditions.run. When the program completes reboot your VirtualBox.

With Guest Additions installed you may now go ahead and define the shared folder(s). From the VirtualBox’s menu go to Devices → Shared Folders. A dialog will show up. In this dialog you can specify which folder from your Ubuntu host system you want to share with your Ubuntu guest. Press the button with the + symbol to add a new shared folder in the list. You will have to specify a Folder Name for each folder you add. Make sure you memorize that name because you will need it very soon.

When done with you shared folder(s) specification, you may now go ahead and actually mount these folders from Ubuntu. First you have to create a mounpoint, that is, a directory in your Ubuntu guest which will reflect the shared folder from Ubuntu host:

# sudo mkdir /media/host-share

Of course you may choose an alternative path for your mountpoint. With your mountpoint created you can now mount the shared folder, like this:

# sudo mount -t vboxsf folder-name /media/host-share

Where folder-name will be the name you assigned for this folder when you were adding it in the shared folders list.

Source

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