Using the Mic with Skype 2 on Ubuntu 8

1. Open volume control (dbl click on the icon or type gnome-volume-control in a terminal)

2. Go to 'Preferences' and enable the 'Capture' device.



3. Adjust the volume for the 'capture' device and make sure its not in mute.



4. That worked for me :)

How to change resolution in Gnome without the panel icons jumping around

The gnome panel has this annoying habit of letting loose of your panel icons when you change the screen resolution. (This happens when I step down the screen resolution to suite the projector, for example).

To prevent this, a nifty little application called 'pessulus' can be used to lock down the panels.

It can be installed in ubuntu as follows.

$ sudo apt-get install 'pessulus'

$ pessulus 

Lock down the panel as shown in the screenshot below.



No more messing up the panel icons when changing the screen resolution :)

Encrypted chats with Pidgin / Gaim

Doing encrypted (RSA) chats using pidgin is as simple as:

$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-encryption

This installs the encryption plugin.

Encrypted chats are possible once you enable this plugin from preferences in pidgin.

Note the 'padlock sign' in the chat window below.


Check the packet data for yourself using a packet analyser like 'wireshark'.



Its encrypted !

:)

Installing Epson Perfection 660 USB Scanner in Ubuntu 7.10/8.04

Unfortunately Ubuntu did not autodetect my scanner but the installation was trivial.

1. Obtained the driver file from http://www.epson.com.sg/epson/drivers/driver_download.htm?dc=1&mode=3&m=false&catid=5&pid=46
2. Unzip the file. The file we need is TAIL_061.BIN (which is inside /DATA/BIN inside the zip file). Put this file in /usr/share/sane (or anywhere you please) and give read permission to all (chmod a+r /usr/share/sane/TAIL_061.BIN as root)
3. Edit /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf and change following line. (do as root)
   

    firmware /usr/share/sane/snapscan/your-firmwarefilefirmware
   
     to
   
   firmware /usr/share/sane/TAIL_061.BIN.bin
   

   
   
4. Plug the USB cable
5. Start xsane (type xsane in a terminal or find the program from the menu)
6. Thats it!
   

Local DNS cache to speed up Ubuntu/Debian

This article explains how to setup dnsmasq to speed up dns requests.

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/08/02/local-dns-cache-for-faster-browsing/