Mega-ZBlog » Linux

Creating Linux .desktop shortcuts to Windows apps with the app icon intact.

Dan Bugglin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:16:13 +0000

Spent a good chunk of time figuring out Wine no longer has this baked in, but I figured if I could just find a Windows app that accesses the shortcut API I could get it to work.

This command line app fits the bill perfectly. You might have to direct the shortcut to your desktop (“C:\\Users\\\\Desktop\\shortcutname.lnk”), not sure if Wine will create the .desktop file otherwise. When it’s done you’ll have to delete the .lnk but your .desktop file, icon-ready, will be there!

Hardy Blue Heron… Blues…

Dan Bugglin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:48:17 +0000

So I’ve been messing with Ubuntu on and off for some time now and the new version 8.04 came up yesterday. I upgraded but I experienced some problems along the way I think others should know about:

Free Space: Depending on how many extra packages you’ve installed since installing Ubuntu originally, you may need 1.5gb free as I did for downloading. But the unpacking phase ended up taking 1gb more… and left me with as little as 70mb free at one point! I’ll need to expand my partition I guess and shrink my Windows’ partitions. But just be sure you have enough free space.
Drive mounting: You will probably have to edit your /etc/fstab to fix drive /dev addresses. All /dev/hd* have been changed to /dev/sd*, bumping existing /dev/sd* up and out of the way. Also disc drives are now /dev/scd0, scd1, etc.
If you use Truecrypt and you can’t mount drives after upgrading, do an apt-get remove truecrypt and then go to the official site and follow the download instructions. Extract the .deb file and do a dpkg -i on it to install it, and truecrypt should work again.
Upgrading may destroy custom mouse and monitor configurations in xorg.conf. You did make a backup of all your important changes there, didn’t you? This is only a concern if you use multiple monitors (it doesn’t set them up right when upgrading) or if you have a mouse with more than three buttons, since both cases usually require a little surgery on this file to get working right.
Compiz settings will revert. Use ccsm and set them back manually. ccsm is a bit easier to work with after the upgrade.
Emerald themes won’t apply to compiz anymore unless you specifically use emerald as your window manager instead of compiz. Weird. Also emerald might hang when you run it… delete ~/.beryl and ~/.emerald/settings.ini, go back into Emerald Theme Manager and reapply your settings, then it should run fine. You probably want to put “emerald –replace” in your startup items under the “Sessions” Administrative thingy so your theme will work on startup.
There doesn’t seem to be a Wine 0.9.60 build for Ubuntu yet. Maybe in a couple days.

bash history

Dan Bugglin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:02:57 +0000

Well everyone seems to be doing this so I guess it’s my turn.

This is from an SSH shell into this webserver. I’m not booted into Linux on my desktop machine at the moment so this will have to do.

[mzzt@server1 ~]$ uname -a
Linux server1.sorrowind.net 2.6.9-42.EL #1 Sat Aug 12 09:17:58 CDT 2006 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
[mzzt@server1 ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
149 cd
127 ls
56 rm
44 ln
42 exit
35 chmod
16 pico
11 mv
8 cp
3 put
[mzzt@server1 ~]$