Notes on upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04

I know that the standard policy in Ubuntu is to offer the upgrade from an old LTS to a new one when the new LTS reaches .1, i.e., 16.04.1, but well…

I upgraded my 14.04 in several machines, and I can signal these almost show-stopper problems (workaround exists for all of them, though):

on […]

A new nice trick for the Linux keyboard: greek letters

New layout for my Spanish keyboard

I do not know you, but me (as an engineer) use Greek letters like α, β, γ and so on quite often. I did a small change to my linux keyboard layout: the new part in the keyboard symbols files now is

partial alphanumeric_keys xkb_symbols “standard_tlde” { include “es(basic)” key <TLDE> { [ grave, asciitilde, […]

Managing PPAs in Ubuntu: a couple of useful scripts.

PPAs are really a great thing in Ubuntu: they allow you to have quite recent programs without upgrading all your system; most Ubuntu users use them extensively.

They have just one problematic side — the havoc that can happen on an upgrade. You see, when you upgrade your system, PPAs are disabled, but the program […]

Quick fix xfig bug

Ok, so I am a computer dinosaur. I still use xfig for much of my drawings, although I recon it is a program from the old century…

Unfortunately, after the recent upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04, a nasty bug surfaced in xfig: a crash whenever you try to draw point-dashed lines.

Fortunately, the launchpad user madHamish […]

How to modify a keyboard layout in Linux

New layout for my Spanish keyboard

Or: how to define a programmer-friendl(er) Spanish keyboard. …and you can add Greek, too!

A bit of history

There was a time when the computers all had the same keyboard — basically, the US one. You really do not need any more; the set of characters that could be represented where, after all, just the […]

How to modify a gnome shell theme

comparison of the top bar, before and after

This is (I think) the correct way of doing what I tried to do with an extension. My objective was to reduce a bit the size of the gnome shell top bar, and especially the font size.

The correct way is to use a “user” theme. What I did is to create […]

Randomly change the background of your Gnome desktop

Nice background

One of the thing I never got to understand is why the Gnome desktop do not have the option (present in KDE) to use the content of a directory to randomly pick an image for the “wallpaper” of the desktop.

There are a lot of solution outside, but I would like to share with you […]

Fast copy of photos — a solution!

configuring gthumb to run a script after a key press

So, you have a (big) collection of photo, and you want to rapidly browse trough them and select a subset for further consideration for, for example, printing or editing them. What I would like was that, while in the image viewer, with a simple key press I could copy the file to another, pre-chosen directory. […]

Adding a gnome/nautilus thumbnailer

thumbnails for xfig files

NOTE: this only works for Gnome 2. For Gnome 3, see an update here… What it is:

a thumbnail is the little image that Nautilus (the file manager of Gnome) shows to represent the file. Most of file types has a standard thumbnailer, and you see a representation of the file such as a […]

Integrating a new application in Gnome

part of the screenshot defining the new application as default

Just found out that the task of adding a new application for a new file-type on gnome (so that I can run it by double click, or from the mail client on an attachment, is easier than I suspected.

The problem: my bank send me my account information in files that are managed by an […]