monline

This is a fix for the whitespace issue with the original Generate Checksums action.

Using the attached Nautilus action, you can easily add a custom action in the context menu of Nautilus and calculate the MD5, SHA1 or CRC32 (as defined by POSIX.2 -aka. IEEE Std. 1003.2- standard) checksum of the selected files and/or for all files in the selected directories recursively. It works with filenames containing whitespace and supports selection of multiple items. By default the results are displayed in a 1000x600 window, but you can easily change that. The action requires zenity to display a dialog box for checksum method selection and display the results.

"Nautilus-actions is an extensions for nautilus which allow to add arbitrary program to launch through the nautilus popup menu of selected files. Each time you right-click on one or several selected files in nautilus, nautilus-actions will look at its configured actions to see if a program has been setup for this selection. If it is the case, it will add an item in the menu that allow you to execute the program on the selected files."

Apparently Ubuntu changed the startup process significantly in Karmic, since GDM is now not started by a startup script in one of the the /etc/rc[0-9].d directories, but something else. Even the /etc/init.d/gdm filesystem entry was changed: it's now a symlink pointing to /lib/init/upstart-job. The latter is part of the upstart package which has the following description ...

There's a nice Python script for the job at linuxquestions.org written by Seamus Phelan. I've tested it, found a few problems and fixed them.

There're quite a few howtos on the topic already, but most involve a lot more steps than what I've found. If you need a quick&dirty way to connect to the already running GDM, here's how to do it (ssh into the server and run as root):

Now you can use your VNC client to connect to the VNC server which is most probably running on the standard 5900 port.

If you're into reading manuals, then start with "Using GCong" in the "GNOME Desktop System Administration Guide". It has almost all the info that I'm going to describe here. However if you're just interested in how to set up global Gnome defaults (ie. defaults for all users), then read on.

Gnome Panel has a built-in clock that can display weather information as well. If you enable the display of temperature and/or the weather in the clock applet's preferences (and set a location too), then hovering the mouse over the weather or temp. icon will show a detailed description (including wind speed) of the current weather in your area. There's also an "apparent" temperature at the end of the line that starts with the text "feels like". Eg. yesterday my reading said: "34.0 °C, feels like 36.6 °C". I've always wondered how this "feels like" value is calculated.

Just found out about this: "Zenity is a tool that allows you to display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts. It is similar to gdialog, but is intended to be saner. It comes from the same family as dialog, Xdialog, and cdialog, but it surpasses those projects by having a cooler name." Seems to be pretty useful. The original project homepage is at GNOME Live.

The phenomenon is nothing new: there're at least a dozen bug reports on gnome-panel eating up CPU and/or RAM.
Eg.:

• #461106 - gnome-panel starts consuming 75% or more of the CPU and becomes unresponsive
• #187540 - gnome-panel freeze when 8 windows are open when the panel is vertical (and here's a related forum thread)