87
votes
Accepted
How do I make Ubuntu sound like HAL, from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Getting Ready
Download the HAL sounds and store them in a folder, let's say ~/audio/hal/
EDIT : as pointed by @M. Becerra in comments, stoutman.com is now broken. More HAL sounds are available in The ...
- 3,818
74
votes
How to change desktop icon size?
I had the same problem because I had changed the icon size in a window. So I fixed it back from top-right of an open file browser window!
Changing icon size in any file browser window will affect all ...
- 841
40
votes
Accepted
Wasted screen space due to multiple horizontal bars at the top when an application is open in GNOME desktop
You may try one of following GNOME Shell extensions to get rid of the title-bar of a maximised window:
No Title Bar (an actively maintained fork of Pixel Saver with customisation options)
No Title ...
- 68.6k
36
votes
Creating a .desktop file for a new application
Instead of manually adding .desktop files, you can use the little GUI tool alacarte (Main Menu) to do this for you.
Installation:
sudo apt install alacarte
- 27k
31
votes
Accepted
How can I change the purple background color of the lock screen on Ubuntu 17.10?
From these steps here, you can change both the image and the background colour:
Move your favorite image to /usr/share/backgrounds:
It's better to move the image you want to set as login background ...
- 36.7k
28
votes
How to change desktop icon size?
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.icon-view default-zoom-level 'small'
- 381
28
votes
How do I set default view to 'list' in Nautilus file manager?
For everyone who likes to do things by terminal changing the settings for nautilus can be done by
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences default-folder-viewer 'list-view'
If you need to find ...
- 436
28
votes
Accepted
GNOME 3 merge top bar and Ubuntu dock (side/bottom bar)
The Dash to Panel Gnome Shell extension does exactly what you want and is highly configurable.
You can install it from Ubuntu software (search Dash to panel), or using the terminal with the command ...
- 88.2k
26
votes
Accepted
How to set a file size limit for a directory?
Usual filesystem quota on ext4 is per-user/group, not per-directory. ZFS can sort-of set a directory quota, by creating a filesystem of a fixed size off a ZFS volume. A simple trick, though, is to ...
- 198k
24
votes
Accepted
How to write en and em dashes?
You need to learn the Unicode numbers of these two characters. They are not actually hard to remember, because they look like years. ;)
En dash: U+2013
Em dash: U+2014
To write a Unicode symbol, ...
- 7,956
23
votes
Compress and Extract options in Thunar
No need to create custom options: you just need to install the thunar-archive-plugin to have both Compress and Extract Here options.
You may install it with the following command:
sudo apt-get ...
- 346
22
votes
Accepted
Rotate video by a keyboard shortcut in mpv
You can add a custom mpv key binding for rotating a video in steps of 90 degrees as follows:
Open the ~/.config/mpv/input.conf file with your favorite text editor (here I'm using nano):
nano ~/....
- 14.6k
21
votes
Modify the SSH welcome message to include system IP address
This may be more than you want/need, but the landscape-common package automatically adds system information, including IP addresses to the MOTD.
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-28-...
- 7,152
21
votes
Accepted
How to slim down Ubuntu GNOME title bar fatness?
You're seeing this fatter title bar because you're using Gnome-Shell. In Gnome-Shell, the title bars of Numix theme are much fatter than the versions for Unity.
Check these two images
Unity
Gnome ...
- 76.7k
20
votes
Use path bar and address bar in Nautilus
First install dconf-tools
sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
After installation open dconf-editor go to org –> gnome –> nautilus –> preferences and choose always-use-location-entry
- 441
16
votes
Display a message while prompting for sudo password
See if your sudo supports lecture_file option
man sudoers | grep lecture_file
This is what man sudoers says in my case :
lecture_file Path to a file containing an alternate sudo lecture that ...
- 4,973
15
votes
How to remove the time stamp on the right side of the fish shell?
Put this in your config.fish (or eg. .config/fish/functions/fish_right_prompt.fish):
function fish_right_prompt
#intentionally left blank
end
By putting stuff in this function you can also ...
- 253
13
votes
Where are cursor icons stored on Ubuntu 16.04?
The cursors are indeed installed in the /usr/share/icons folder. User specific cursor themes can be installed in ~/.local/share/icons folder. You might have got confused because of all those icon ...
- 76.7k
13
votes
Accepted
Cycling windows by click on dock program's icon
"Ubuntu Dock" is forked from the extension "Dash to Dock", and accordingly uses it settings. Thus, you can change the behavour of "Ubuntu Dock" by editing the dconf settings of "Dash to dock", using ...
- 88.2k
12
votes
Is there something like "VirtualBox Guest Additions" for QEMU/KVM?
Yes, the SPICE guest additions
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html#guest
- 473
11
votes
Accepted
Custom (editable) message for each user after login
You can do that in the following setup, which will produce a semi- transparent window, staying for an arbitrary time:
Create in a (any) directory, in which each of the users at least has read ...
- 83.8k
11
votes
Wasted screen space due to multiple horizontal bars at the top when an application is open in GNOME desktop
I prefer the Unite GNOME Shell Extension. It manages to integrate far more application windows into the top bar than No Title Bar or Pixel Saver does.
- 164
11
votes
How to make it clear when laptop is on battery in 18.04?
From the attached pics in your Question gives clue that those icons are named as
battery-good-charging-symbolic.svg and
battery-good-symbolic.svg
There are similar Images with naming which can be ...
- 22.5k
9
votes
How do I set default view to 'list' in Nautilus file manager?
Other possible way of solving this is through dconf Editor, see org.gnome.nautilus.preferences and default-folder-viewer there.
This means there would be a simple one-line expression to change this, ...
- 604
9
votes
Accepted
Is there a way to add an image as a sticky note to my Unity Desktop?
Showing an image on your desktop
Windows can be of different types. We do not only have "normal" windows, but also windows of (in our case) type "DESKTOP".
Windows of type "DESKTOP" stay below ...
- 83.8k
9
votes
Accepted
How do I change the speed of the app drawer appearing?
Things look and feel different as Ubuntu 17.10 comes with GNOME shell instead of Unity like before.
To change the app-drawer animation speed you may use a GNOME shell extension called "Impatience" ...
- 68.6k
9
votes
Accepted
How to change the login screen resolution in Ubuntu 18.04
For 18.04 there are a couple of things you can try.
The first thing to do is to make sure the resolution of 1920 x 1080 is supported in grub. To do that reboot your computer and hit Esc repeatedly ...
- 416
9
votes
How to make it clear when laptop is on battery in 18.04?
I solved this by going to Tweaks → Top Bar → Turn on Battery Percentage.
Now the battery percentage is shown as a number, so if unplugged, the number shows as declining which is more attention ...
- 602
9
votes
Accepted
How can I properly make a bash prompt with error colors and emoji?
New solution
It turns out it's actually possible to do this with just PS1 and not PROMPT_COMMAND. We don't need to set any additional global variables. Here's a one-liner:
PS1=$'\e[1;33m\\t \e[36m\u\e[...
- 4,650
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible