GNU/Linux

"System program problem detected" dialog not disappearing

On a number of occassions, I’ve had some sort of crash happen on my Ubuntu 18.04 systems. Bugs are unfortunately something that will always exist, which is fine as long they aren’t resulting in unrepairable damage. On Ubuntu (Gnome?), this will usually result in a dialog appearing in which one can choose to report the issue that happened, titled “System program problem detected” (shown below). Knowing how valuable this kind of information can be for developers, I usually choose to report the problem.

My Gnome Shell setup on Ubuntu 18.04

Since Ubuntu 18.04, which is my current distro at the moment, I’ve started to be quite fond of Gnome Shell. A lot of the early design decisions that I disagreed with have either been fixed or are available as extensions. Below are the extensions that I use. Alternatetab - I use this in order to get Thumbnail and application icon on the tab switching interface. I also choose to only show the windows on the active desktop.

Cron job in cron.d not starting

Imagine the following scenario. I needed to have a cronjob that run a script every fifteen minutes, which I logically would place in the /etc/cron.d/ folder. But as I waited and waited, the script never ran. After some intense googling, I finally found a forum post which contained the solution to my problem. By simply not having an empty newline at the end of my cron job file, it would not run!

Dollar sign in terminal examples

If you’ve been looking at examples of terminal commands, you will most likely have seen that there is a dollar ($) sign in front of the actual text. The dollar sign means that you are doing the command as a normal user. The pound (#) sign means that you are doing it as the root user. If you start a terminal as a normal user, you will actually see the dollar sign and the vice versa with the pound sign.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Once you go foobar2000, you never go back. As I am currently trying to use Linux as my main OS, it became a big annoyance that none of the music players in Linux Mint’s repository were anything like foobar2000 in terms of speed, low memory usage and the awesome playlist centric GUI. After scouring the web I finally stumbled upon DeaDBeeF which is pretty much identical to the look and feel of foobar2000.

How to change the format of the gnome-panel clock

Due to my love for the Windows 7 taskbar like applet DockbarX, I’ve found myself installing Linux Mint 11, as it makes use of Gnome 2.32. The goal I had was to have a desktop environment that is similar across the OS’s, as I don’t want to spend time relearning things every time I reboot. One of the first things I noticed when I changed the background color of the gnome-panel to a dark one was that the text of the clock applet became unreadable, as it is set to a black color.