The Catling Mindswipe

In normal operation, the Ctrl+Alt+Delete key combination brings up a menu to shut down, restart, suspend or hibernate your machine. Then there are the times when the X-Server, that software stack that handles the windowing graphics display breaks down and things appear to freeze, the mouse cursor won't move and Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn't respond either. There are alternatives; the shortcut keys Alt+PrintScreen+K also quits X-windows to go out to the log-in screen without a reboot.

Xkill is an installed component of the X11 Utilities package present in many Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Linux Mint. It's a tool for terminating badly behaved X clients or unresponsive programs which just stop. Sometimes the only thing to do is kill them! You can run it in several ways.

Barefoot into Cyberspace - Adventures in Search of Techno Utopia by Becky Hogge Can we keep the Internet an open, democratic and free tool for the betterment of mankind? Barefoot into Cyberspace tackles this question. Written by a recent guest of ours on the Full Circle Podcast , Becky Hogge is a journalist and former director of the Open Rights Group . In it, Hogge seeks out the radical hackers opposing the old institutions gathering to control the Internet.

Puppy Linux was designed as one of those small, light-weight Linux distributions, intended primarily for lower specification hardware whilst still providing a full suite of applications and utilities for a usable desktop environment. Frugal with resources, it was blindingly quick. Lucid Puppy 5.2.5 is not the latest release, dating from April 2, 2011. The download is a 128MB .iso image file which I decided was worth a road-test on an otherwise obsolete AMD chip and main-board combination from 1999... Puppy Linux 5.2.5 is based primarily on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx,” but there's a mixture of utilities provided using the 'Woof' build system, such as a later version of the e2fsprogs file-system utilities from Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal.” Puppy 5.2.5 uses version 2.6.33.2 of the Linux kernel and thanks to that build system, Woof, it can take binaries of other popular distributions and incorporate them into new Puppy releases, among them many components from Ubuntu su

In the Ubuntu file system, you can use Nautilus file manager to browse most files but can only write files in your own home folder and sub-folders such as Desktop and Documents. If you have to perform file operations outside of your home folder using the Nautilus file manager, you'll get errors owing to insufficient write permissions. If you've got sudo nautilus in the command buffer of every terminal session it might be time to create a launcher for Nautilus with elevated permissions. Go to the Gnome Menu > Applications > Preferences > Main Menu I've chosen to create mine in the "System Tools" menu group in the left panel, highlighting that then selecting "New Item" on the right panel. Give the launcher a name such as Elevated Nautilus in the "Name" box. Enter gksu nautilus in the "Command" box. This will run the file manager as Root. Select "OK" button and "Close" button. You can now go t

Usually when Linux updates to a new Linux kernel version, the old one is left behind and your boot menu gets longer. Once you're sure your new Linux kernel is working and stable, you can safely remove the old kernel versions and clean up the boot menu.  Do this with care and attention removal of the current running kernel will render your system un-bootable. I know, I've done it! Run the System Monitor (sysmon) where the system tab will tell you the version number of the current running kernel. In a Terminal session, the command uname -r returns the same information; on my Ubuntu machine it's 2.6.38-8-generic. Next, go to System > Administration > Synaptic   In the lower left panel, choose Status then select 'Installed' from the filter list. This narrows down your candidate list to those installed.   Enter the current kernel version number (e.g. 2.6.38) in the Search box. You wil get a filtered list based on your latest kernel version - mine is 2.6.

Full Circle Side-Pod Episode Ten: Dancing in Bare feet is available from the main site. In this episode, interviewing Paul Levy and Becky Hogg. Just me, Robin Catling hosting things today, but I'm not alone, as we have not one but two guests. First up is Paul Levy, from Cats3000, Rational Madness and the Critical Incident un-conference, who will be talking about Learning to Dance with Spiders. We'll follow that with an interview I recorded about a month ago (before I got caught up with OGG Camp). Our second guest is Becky Hogg, journalist, activist and author of the book Barefoot into Cyberspace. The Full Circle Podcast is also a proud member of the Tech Podcasts Network .   File Sizes: OGG 27.8Mb mp3 23.6Mb Running Time: 1hr 12minutes 18 seconds   Feeds for both MP3 and OGG: RSS feed, MP3: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed RSS feed, OGG: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed/atom   Your Host: Robin Cat

You can now hang out with the cool cats by adding Google Plus One sharing to your Wordpress.com blog. At the bottom of each post and page you can now include Google Plus One sharing buttons for your readers to share your content across the full range of social networks/services. Wordpress.com took a little while to catch up with Google Plus. There was a code generator for putting the Google Plus One button into a widget, but now Google Plus is included in the standard sharing options. It is all encapsulated in the Sharing options to make it as easy as all the other services. From the Wordpress Dashboard, go to Settings, then Share Button. Here you can customise which sharing services you want hooked into your blog. The common services - Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumblupon, LinkdIn and the rest have now been joined by a Google Plus One button. Email and Print are also standard buttons. You can easily enable services by simple drag and drop of the buttons from the Available Servi

Are you seeing the error in Gmail: "This message may not have been sent by...." another Gmail user? You'll see this warning if a sender is claiming to be from Gmail, but the service can't confirm that the email actually originated from a Gmail sender. Like most third party messaging services, all mails sent through Gmail contain authentication data in the message header that can verify that the message was sent through Gmail.  So if you see this warning, how should you act on it?

HTML5 Guidelines for Web Developers by Klaus Förster, Bernd Öggl, Addison-Wesley / Safari Books Whether you are a web developer, hardcore coder or, like me, just somebody who dabbles and tries to keep up with the latest technology, you will find this volume on HTML5 of interest. "You should definitely have a basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS; a willingness to work with a different browser for a change, not just the one you are used to; and above all, a desire to discover something new." Written by a couple of enthusiasts from Innsbruck, Austria, it's a good round-up of what's in and out of the emergent HTML5 standard. There is a companion website in English and German demonstrating the code snippets at http://html5.komplett.cc/welcome . It's good that Förster and Öggl sat down to produce this, as I have struggled this year to find a decent source that encapsulates the proposed HTML5 standard. As Open Source developers and sys admins, they h

Old Computer New Life: Restoring Old Hardware With Ubuntu [PDF] by Stefan Neagu This new guide by MakeUseOf author Stefan Neagu does just what it says on the cover. Outlining everything you need to know to get Ubuntu up and running on older computers, all those old (and not so old) machines that don't quite race along with Redmond's finest software, this is a guide to free software in general and an excellent beginners' installation guide to Ubuntu Linux in particular.

The Ubuntu Unity desktop doesn't have a lot in the way of user preferences - unless you know where to find them. You can adjust some of the settings in Unity if you can get to grips with the plugins for the Compiz rendering engine. You will need the CompizConfig Settings Manager installed as a pre-requisite. You can install it through Software Center by searching for 'CompizConfig Settings' Run the CompizConfig Settings manager then under Preferences you will need to find and add the Unity plugin to the CompizConfig Settings panel. You will need to turn off Automatic sorting to unlock the plugins list to add it to the active panel. In CompizConfig Settings, select the Unity plugin, then choose the 'Experimental' tab. There's a stack of settings to adjust for transparency, timings for show/hide, Dash icon animation types, showing of devices in the Dash and blur. It's not the complete control over settings you get in Gnome Desktop, but then as we kn