Xubuntu Geek

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. (click on the images to see the differences) Anti-aliasing disabled and LCD Hinting set to lcdnone Anti-aliasing enabled and LCD Hinting set to lcdnone Anti-aliasing enabled and LCD Hinting set to lcddefault Check current settings Open a terminal window and run: xrdb -query Fix If your Xft.antialias is set to "0" or Xft.lcdfilter is not "ldcdefault", run: # Enable anti-aliasing xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/Antialias -n -t int -s 1 # Set LCDHinting to lcddefault xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/Lcdfilter -n -t string -s lcddefault You should logout and in for setti

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; References The "Send To" Menu

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. Install Open a terminal window and run: sudo apt-get install apt-file -y && sudo apt-file update The last part of the above command will update apt-file 's cache, so it might take a few minutes to complete. Usage The updated cache can be queried for a list of packages containing a file. The query may be constructed using only the file's name or the file's path: apt-file search filename apt-file search path/to/filename The contents of a package can be listed with: apt-file list packagename References apt-file | manpage

If you try to play an encrypted DVD on Xubuntu (most likely using the default player, Parole) you'll get an error message: To play encrypted DVDs, we need the libdvdcss2 package. Here's how to install it in Xubuntu. Install Open a terminal window. First we need to enable Medibuntu repository: sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update Then we install libdvdcss2: sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 -y That's it! You can now play encrypted DVDs on Xubuntu. References Medibuntu

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

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 .