Ubuntu on Piotr Wittchen

Geary - neat e-mail client for Linux

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 13:41:00 +0000

Overview

I was using web interfaces for e-mail for a long time, but I wanted to give a try a desktop clients for Linux. I was searching for a quite simple solution with almost zero configuration, which I can use for my private and work e-mail accounts. Geary seems to be quite good choice. It is clean, easy to use and pretty neat e-mail client for Linux. It integrates with Unity on Ubuntu and display system notifications informing about new message. Unfortunately, we need it running in order to see notifications, which is small drawback. Nevertheless it works quite good, so I’m going to give it a try. Install it with the following command:

Mutate - yet another Spotlight for Ubuntu

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 12:26:00 +0000

Overview

Some time ago, I published post about Synapse indicator, which is an alternative to MAC’s Spotlight for Ubuntu. Recently, I’ve found another software, which is in my opinion even better than Synapse. It’s called Mutate. I like it, because it works quite smooth, looks simple and clean. In addition, it’s open-source.

Installation

We can install it with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mutate/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mutate

Configuration

After installation, we can run Mutate from Ubuntu dashboard or via default hot-key CTRL+D and type preference.

Making Ubuntu faster

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 16:43:00 +0000

Unity desktop environment consumes lot of computer’s memory. I’ve recently found good article about 4 simple tweaks to improve Unity performance on Ubuntu. Here is the short summary of that tweaks:

Remove Unwanted Lenses

It will speed up loading data under “Super” button.

sudo apt-get autoremove unity-lens-music unity-lens-photos unity-lens-gwibber unity-lens-shopping unity-lens-video

Install Compiz Config Settings Manager

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

In Compiz Config Settings Manager perform the following operations:

Disable Animations and Fading windows
Set the Texture Filter to “Fast”

After that OS won’t use additional resources for performing animations.

Synapse Indicator - Spotlight for Ubuntu

Thu, 25 Dec 2014 17:06:00 +0000

Introduction

If you were using Ubuntu for some time, you might have noticed that Ubuntu Dash from Unity is working quite slow. We can disable on-line search or a few other elements, but it’s still very slow. If we want to have fast search, we can use external software like synapse.

Synapse

Synapse is searching really fast and we don’t have to wait a few seconds like in Ubuntu Dash or disable some search options. Synapse can be installed with the following commands:

Indicators for Ubuntu

Sun, 07 Sep 2014 20:47:00 +0000

I recently found an article about Best Useful Indicators Collection for Ubuntu. Indicators are very useful feature of the Ubuntu and Unity. Ubuntu has some default indicators, but we can add new indicators if we want to. Mentioned article contains list of many indicators, but personally I prefer and use only a few of them. Here are my favorites:

Multi Load indicator

Nice thing. This indicator monitors system resources. E.g. usage of the processor, RAM, disk and network. We can customize it and set refresh interval. I found default low interval like 500 ms very disturbing, so I changed it to 5000 ms and it’s ok for me. In the screenshot above, you can see blue chart for CPU usage, green chart for RAM usage and yellow chart for network usage. You can change, configure and customize it as you want.

Software for common users on Ubuntu

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 16:17:00 +0000

In this article, I’ll describe Ubuntu software for common users, which I personally use and which could be helpful on daily basis. Ubuntu software dedicated to programmers AKA developers will be described in separate article.

Chrome

In my opinion, it’s currently the best web browser. We can download, unpack and install it, with the following commands:

sudo apt-get install libxss1 libappindicator1 libindicator7
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable\_current\_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome*.deb

Skype

Maybe it’s not the best, but one of the most known messengers and lot of people use it. In addition, at my work people currently use it as a common messenger. We can download and install it with the following commands (first command adds new software repository, from which Skype can be downloaded):

Ubuntu system boot problem

Sun, 17 Aug 2014 20:05:00 +0000

Description of the problem

Recently, after installing Linux Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my computer, I encountered strange problem during the system boot. Before system launched, I received the following message: After that, I typed: exit and system started normally, but this error occurred every time after reboot, so I decided to fix it.

Fixing the problem

Attempt #1

First, I tried to change rootdelay as error message said. I opened file /etc/default/grub I found there the following line: