Building a binary for GTK3 theme

We discussed some aspects of making a GTK3 theme in my previous post, and may be we shall do more. In this post, I'll try to explain how to create a binary for your GTK3 theme.

When you make a GTK3 theme...

GTK themes in Gnome 3 follow a new syntax that is different from GTK2. The new CSS syntax in GTK3 makes it easier to make themes. Though it is easy to understand the CSS syntax than the old gtkrc syntax, it is not enough to know just CSS. GTK themes are more than that. A good start can be this tutorial and specifically this.

Make your 3G modem work in Linux

Making your new 3G modem work on Linux can be sometimes quite troublesome. All vendors provide software to make the modem work on Windows, but few support Linux. But you can make your modem work in Linux with few steps, though not as easy as in Windows, it is not that much difficult. I've tested this on Ubuntu 12.04 with a Micromax 3G modem.

What is Rooting an Android Phone?

Rooting? Are you gonna plant trees? :) Let's face it, most of us don't know what is rooting, and what do we get from it. It can be easier to understand for someone who is a Linux user, but for others, it could be a big mystery. So here is my attempt to explain what I know.

Install Jockey Driver Installer in Fedora 16

Jockey driver installer is an application which can install various hardware drivers, originally intended for Ubuntu. The guys at Parsidora have ported it to Fedora. The problem is, it is only for Fedora 15. So we will install it in Fedora 16 here.

Xperia X10 Mini, X10 Mini Pro and X8 bootloader cracked, finally!

May be new devices have popped up with the latest versions of Android and old ones are forgotten. But there are still users out there. The devs work day and night to get the best of these devices even if its manufacturer has dropped support for them. Sony will not update its older devices such as X10 Mini, X10 Mini Pro, X8 etc. But they dtill can have Android 2.3 due to the amazing work done by devs. But the work was not complete. The bootloader was still locked. Means the inability to install custom kernels.

Test Hub to Test HTML on the Go

After struggling with eclipse for overnight, I have made an android app named Test Hub. The app is pretty simple. You can practice or test HTML tags with it. It uses your phone's Webkit engine and result is displayed as you type.

How to Add Auto-Update to Your Bash Script

It was the time when I was developing my Fedora Utils script and wished to add autoupdate to it. It was not difficult. But certainly I had no clue about what to do. I didn't want to make another text file with update details on every new release and upload. I just wanted the process should be automatic. I asked in different forums, but no one could give an answer. But at last I did it! And I became the happiest man on the earth thereafter:)

How to Customize a Ubuntu Live CD

Ubuntu has a very good documentation for customizing Live CDs. But for a novice, the information given can be a little overwhelming. Especially if you just want to create an Live CD just with all system updates and your custom software. Here i will describe how to create a updated Live CD image with all the updates and custom software. You can follow the procedure to customize the Ubuntu Live CD or other distros based on Ubuntu.

Make Your Ubuntu Faster!

As you would probably know that I'm a Linux Mint user if you visit my blog regularly. Recently, I was starting to feel that my Mint was a little bit slower on my old hardware. So I dug the web to find out what can I do. In the past I had tried elementaryOS and is was quite snappy. So I researched about the packages removed from elementaryOS. I got the ebuild script used to convert a Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) ISO images to elementaryOS Luna ISO images. I dug the script and finally I came up with my own script which I want to share with you. I will post the various almost never used packages you can safely remove. These may vary depending on the packages you use. But they should be ok for most home users. By removing the unused packages, you prevent running of the services you don't use, thus making the system faster.

Fun TV - Live TV on your Smartphone

When I bought my first smartphone, many of my friends asked me, "Can you play Live TV?". But I was unaware of the links for different channels and could not find a right app. But finally, I've made an app myself.

Fun TV is an app which lets you stream TV Channels directly through the built in video player or any other player that supports live streaming. Adobe Flash is absolutely not required.

How to Create a Simple Chrome Web App

Shiney web apps for chrome add bit of extra functionality than just a bookmark in your browser. If you want to create a simple web app for your blog or site, then fear not, it is extremely easy. The things you need are,

• A text editor like Notepad++
• A high quality icon with 128x128 resolution for your app
• Google Chrome already installed

Free Sites to make an Android App

If you have a blog or site, making an Android app can give you many advantages. But you don't want to learn all the programming stuff, though it could be useful. It is not a difficult task now a days as you can use many free online services to create your own app. I've used three sites till now and i want to share my experience with you.

How to Automatically Mount NTFS Partitions in Ubuntu

Ubuntu does a good job detecting NTFS partitions through the ntfs-3g driver. But it does not mount those partitions automatically when you login. Most of us will prefer to mount them automatically instead of manually clicking the partition icon to mount it.

How to fix the "rpmdb" error in fedora

If you use  Fedora, you might have come across a problem when updating. I've actually faced this problem while I'm using rawhide repo for Fedora 15. When trying to "yum update", I get,

error: db4 error(-30974) from dbenv->failchk: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db4 - (-30974)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:
Error: rpmdb open failed

How to get rid of “Enter password to unlock your login keyring” prompt

Ubuntu and some gnome based distros use a centralized password management tool called Seahorse, which is a GUI front end to GNOME’s keyring management system. It stores all your saved passwords, PGP keys, SSH Keys etc. used in different applications with a master password. This master password is same as your initial login password.

Backup your phone data

Mobile phones have become a part of our life. We always have a lot of important informations stored in our phone. There are also messages of our loved ones and important contacts numbers. While it is not hard to backup the data in the phone memory, I recommend not to store anything in the phone memory. This will slow down your phone and you always have fear of losing the data. You can easily backup the data on memory card on another memory card, PC or USB stick. So the main concern is about the Contacts, Notes, and Calendar entries etc. Today we will take a look at backing up our important data so that we can easily restore them in case of data loss. The data loss can be accidental, or due to firmware upgrade or flashing.

Dual Booting: Part 4 (Last Bits)

In this article, we will see those last bits you need to know when you dual boot. we will describe how to remove an operating system without affecting the other, switching between bootloaders and troubleshoot common problems. There is also a nice PDF containing all chapters.

Dual Booting: Part 3 (Installing Ubuntu)

In the previous article, we saw how to install Windows. Now the next step is to install a Linux distro. Unless you are a advanced Linux user, I recommend you to choose Ubuntu. Even better if you choose Linux Mint. They are completely free and available for free download through various media on their websites. We'll see how to install Ubuntu. Installing Linux Mint is basically the same.

Dual Booting: Part 2 (Installing Windows)

So, we discussed some basic things about dual booting in the previous post. Here, we'll see the installation process of Windows. Windows doesn't detect any other operating systems such as Linux. So, to achieve a dual boot configuration, you should install Windows first, so that Linux can easily setup a dual boot environment when it detects previous Windows installation. If you already have Windows installed, you can skip it. But if you have Linux installed, fear not, you can proceed installing Windows as we would later describe the procedure to add Linux to Windows boot menu.