Tech Spot

I've found some of the articles and tutorials out there to be either confusing or lacking in detail. So I'm making this post to show how to install a custom Window Manager in Linux Mint, specifically for the XFCE light-weight edition. The reason why you'd want to do this is if you find the out-of-the-box window controls (minimize, maximize, close) to be too small or not to your liking. In XFCE I personally find this to be the case, though the Kokodi window manager provides decent controls. First, you'll need to find and download a custom window manager . Once you decide on one you like, download it from the Files section: Then, in a terminal window, uncompress the downloaded file to the /usr/share/themes (or ~/.themes if you're not allowed or don't want to make changes to /usr/share/themes) directory. user@linux-mint18 ~/Downloads $ sudo tar xvzf 43023-LiNsta-Black-Plastic.tar.gz /usr/share/themes [sudo] password for user: LiNsta-Black-Plastic...

So for a few weeks now, I've been dismissing this new Windows 10 Creators Update nag dialog. Some days I wake up to find that my PC is already awake. It turns out that Microsoft's been doing something sneaky behind the scenes. I thought I'd done all the usual methods to prevent that scenario, such as disabling the mouse from being able to wake up Windows.  Looking in Event Viewer (eventvwr), I see the wake source is Unknown. We can run a command in Windows Powershell to list all Scheduled Tasks that could wake the PC: Windows PowerShell Copyright (C) 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-ScheduledTask | where {$_.settings.waketorun} TaskPath TaskName State -------- -------- ----- \Microsoft\Windows\.NET Framework\ .NET Framework NGEN v4.0.30319... Disabled \Microsoft\Windows\.NE...

This is for a Motorola Moto G XT1028. YMMV for other variations or generations of the phone, but these instructions are fairly generic. The important thing is that you are able to find the appropriate recovery image for your phone. For me, CWM and Philz Recovery didn't work, but TWRP did. A lot of posts on XDA forums and Android StackExchange have steps for enabling USB debugging mode using the ADB shell. But what if you can't even see your device in "adb devices" in the first place? If your screen is broken and illegible, like mine was, you can't navigate via touch to enable debugging. This was the problem I faced. It took me several hours to really understand the solution. I won't go into detail for most of these steps as there are many guides already: Restart the phone in fastboot mode and connect the USB cable from your PC From your PC's command line, run: fastboot devices List of devices attached TA965XXXXX fastboot If yo...

I have been using Github Atom quite a bit. The more I work in it, the more I feel the need to tweak it. Not out of boredom, but rather that some of its usability is actually annoying. One of the things I just was able to adjust to my satisfaction is the vertical scrollbars while using the One Dark theme. On a Linux Mint install, Atom's scrollbars were frustratingly difficult to use. It is not a problem when you're working with smaller text files, but if you work in large ones you will find yourself spending inordinate amounts of time trying to grab the scrollbar with the mouse. Here is a hacked together styles.less (On Linux: Edit menu > Open Your Stylesheet... On Windows: File > Stylesheet...) CSS that will widen the scrollbars in both the tree view and editor with a well contrasted green-on-black color combo. As for a decently readable dark contrast syntax, you could try the Dark Plus ( dark-plus-syntax ) theme, which is neither too dark nor bright for editing H...

I have Synology's Mail Server enabled and running, but I couldn't find it in /usr/syno/mailstation like some other blog posts mention.  It turns out that in upgraded versions of DiskStation (I'm currently on DSM 5.2), the directory paths have changed.  In fact there appear to be no recognizable package names in /usr/syno. It looks like they moved it into /usr/syno/etc after I ran some find commands.  Try this path:  /usr/syno/etc/packages/MailServer DiskStation> pwd /usr/syno/etc/packages/MailServer DiskStation> ll drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 May 25 08:08 . drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Apr 13 15:33 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 12 2014 OldConf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6144 Apr 8 2015 alias.db -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3072 May 9 14:56 attachment_filter.db -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11264 May 25 08:08 log_statistic.db -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1079 May ...

After installing some alternate window managers and playing around, Linux Mint 17 would freeze or get stuck during the bootup sequence. It looked scary: Anachron... Starting Samba... Stopping Samba... Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with the Linux kernel or anything like that, just that the window manager wasn't able to display. These are some hotkeys that might help you get to the console shell. F1 toggles between the Linux splash / loading icon and the console log Ctrl-Alt-F1 through Ctrl-Alt-F6 bring up the terminals (tty1-tty6) Ctrl-Alt-F7 is specifically for the GUI / X session I found some messages like: "Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds", and the following in .xsession-errors: /etc/mdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup... localuser:user being added to access control list Script for none started at run_im. Script for auto started at run_im. Script for default started at run_im. x-session-manager[2466]: CRITICAL: We failed, but th...

Linux Mint is a great variation of Ubuntu. I have mainly used the xfce flavor because I wanted something lightweight to run on my old laptops. I had tried other distributions like Puppy Linux and Lubuntu but they didn't seem polished enough. I admit I have not tried Lubuntu in awhile so it may have improved. With all that comes pre-configured with Linux Mint, I still find I am always looking for that special custom theme or other software to improve my experience. Here's a list: System: Hardinfo for System Information (kind of like Windows Device Manager) Menu/Theme/Appearance: Out-of-the-box Kokodi theme with the Xfce-dusk Appearance setting makes a very pleasing, well contrasting dark look (see screenshot below). There are also good custom xfce themes like DarkCold (highly readable dark theme) Update 9/19/16: My new favorite dark settings use the LiNsta-Black-Plastic xfwm4 theme with the Adwaita-Dark gtk-2.0 appearance.  It actually provides a contrasting b...