Having a guest account might be useful on a home computer, but it’s generally not what I want enabled on a notebook. To disable the default Guest account you need to edit lightdm.conf and add a line (allow-guest=false). sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf [SeatDefaults] greeter-session=unity-greeter user-session=ubuntu allow-guest=false Tested in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin & Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

As a follow-up on a very old post I thought it’s worth providing an update. Despite it’s age (& only costing $350 at the time) my little Asus EEE PC 900 it is still a useful device. It has turned out as one of the better IT investments in my lifetime. However it’s not (and was never) the fastest kid on the block and recent OS upgrades have become increasingly resource hungry.

UPDATE: [01-May-2012] It appears that this PPA repo is currently broken (does not allow to get GPG key and has unmet dependencies on x84_64). It appears that the install on i386 systems does work anyway if you ignore the GPG key error, but I wouldn’t install in that case as PPA installs are security risk enough without GPG errors. UPDATE: [11-May-2012] The reason the PPA does not work is that it has been disabled by Ubuntu due to a licensing issue with (not hard to guess) Oracle.

I have recently been looking at different CAD options on Ubuntu and LibreCAD (http://librecad.org/) is looking like the best option for my needs at current (apart from the wish there would be some DWG support). Since the main Ubuntu repositories are usually a fair bit behind the lastest stable realeases of LibreCAD you need to add the LibreCAD Dev PPA Repository sudo add-apt-repository ppa:librecad-dev/librecad-stable<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install librecad<br></br>

Whilst I am by no means a photographer I do end up taking quite a few photos (these days pretty much exclusively on my phone) and the management of these photos can be a pain. So far I have never found an program worth the pain over plain old file management. But having stumbled across Darktable (http://darktable.org/) I think I might have found a worthwile package. Install on Ubuntu: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmjdebruijn/darktable-release<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install darktable

When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver. On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories.

The latest instalment in my never-ending quest to find a decent SIP client (see Ubuntu SIP I & Ubuntu SIP II) I came across JITSI (http://jitsi.org/). Since the website looked very interesting and the project seems very well maintained (http://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/Screenshots) I decided to give it a go. The installation is a breeze with a Ubuntu/Debian package available and the installation also adds the repository to keep the package up to date.

Getting Multifunction Printers to scan under Linux can be a bit of a pain. The Samsung SCX-3400 I had to install recently was no exception. Here are the necessary steps I had to perform: Ignore all Samsung Provided CD’s and downloads. They do not work under Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) Add Samsung Unified Driver repository http://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/smfpv3.html Install Samsung drivers and libsane-extras Edit sane configuration files vim /etc/apt/sources.list #add the Samsung Unified Driver Repo deb http://www.

Connecting to IPSec VPN gateways has always been one of the more painful things to do. Unfortunately Cisco is not helping by being extremely sluggish on making their utilities available on most recent OS revisions (you can’t even get their QuickVPN client to work properly on 64bit Win7 yet). Operating System support outside of Windows seems to be pretty much non-existent (see https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2040595). Shame on you Cisco ! Option 1 – running QuickVPN under using wine Download the QuickVPN client

One of the features I missed since the good old Android 1.5 days was the ability to take screen-shots on the device. Prior to Android 4 (ICS) the only workable way to create screen-shots was to connect via USB cable and use the Android SDK to make remote screen-shots. On Android 4.0 all you have to do is press Volume Down Key + Power Key down at the same time and hold.

With the release of the final VLC 2.0 player you need to add a back-port (the next version 12.04 will have it included in the main repositories) PPA to Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:n-muench/vlc sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install vlc Thanks to Nate Muench for providing this !

One of the most important utilities on any computer is a decent text editing tool. Since there are as literally hundreds of text-editors out there you would think it is an easy task to find a similar one for each platform. The requirements list in order of priority: Fast & Native (reading NOT Java or similar runtime requirements) Excellent Search & Replace (which is where most fail ….) Lightweight Simple GUI (reading NOT an IDE) Potential Candidates Scite Scite was my first try since it is based on the same engine as Notepad++.