This article shows how to disable a Wacom tablet without unplugging it physically. This could also be applied to other input devices, but in my experience I only use it on Wacom tablets.
Why am I interested in disabling the device? Well, some programs have problems dealing with multiple devices, and the "tablet inside" a Tablet PC cannot be easily unplugged, making it harder to use a external tablet.
Disable the device
Open a terminal window and run:
xinput set-prop DEVICE_NAME 'Device Enabled' 0
The DEVICE_NAME can be determined using the command xsetwacom list devices. If DEVICE_NAME has spaces you should surround it with quotation marks (either single or double), like so:
There are two settings related to Xfce font rendering that make fonts look better: Anti-aliasing and LCD Hinting.
From my experience with Xubuntu these two settings are set to its optimal value, so I never had any complains about the font appearance. But if you think your fonts could look better, proceed as described below.
Thunar's "send to" menu option can be easily extended using desktop entry files. All we need is to create a new desktop file in ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto/ for each destination. The desktop file has a MimeType field which allows you to control on which file types the "send to" option will appear. If you omit the MimeType the option will appear for all types.
Example
The example bellow is a option to send my sketches to Picasa. It appears only for PNG images and uses a shell script that I wrote and is in $PATH. You can use it as a boilerplate for your own.
# sketchupload.desktop - Send to Picasa
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
TryExec=sketchupload.sh
Exec=sketchupload.sh %F
Icon=picasa-16
Name=Send to Picasa
MimeType=image/png;
apt-file is a command that allows you to find which package includes a specific file. It can also be used to list all files included in a package without installing or downloading it.
Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.
Here's how to install it in Xubuntu using two methods: from Ubuntu repositories and from source. The version in the repositories is always a little behind so to get the latest version choose the source method. The highlights of the newer versions are described on Exaile's website.
Exaile Running on Xubuntu
Install from Ubuntu Repositories
Open a terminal window and run:
sudo apt-get install exaile python-mmkeys -y
Note: The command above also installs python-mmkeys.
This package is needed to activate the "XKeys" plugin (support for keyboard multimedia keys). You'll get this error otherwise:
mmkeys.so is not available
Install from Source
Navigate to Exaile's download page and grab the source tarball. It should look something like this: exaile*.tar.gz.
Extract the tarball somewhere and open a terminal on that directory, then run this command:
sudo apt-get install python-mutagen python-mmkeys -y && make && sudo make install
Usage
Exaile can be accessed via Applications Menu > Multimedia > Exaile or typing the following command: exaile.
Switching Plank's theme it's easy: replace dock.theme and hover.theme in ~/.config/plank/theme. Plank should reflect instantly the changes. However there's a problem: Plank ignores some themes and uses the default one. Well, this happens because the newer version of Plank uses a different notation.
Plank using the Gingerbread theme
Fix
Open dock.theme and hover.theme on a text editor and paste the contents of the files from the new theme into the existing ones. Now find the words PlankDrawingThemeRenderer and PlankDrawingDockThemeRenderer and remove the sub-string Renderer. Don't forget to save.
And that's it! Plank should now apply the new theme. By the way, new themes can be found here.
