I’m loving AWN dock. My only gripe is that the volume control applet is broken, at least it is for me. For some reason my master volume has no effect on the actual volume. The slider moves up and down quite freely, but the volume remains unchanged. PCM volume works fine, so I thought I’d use that instead, however the volume applet only lists master. Bugger.

Turns out this is a bug – https://bugs.launchpad.net/awn-extras/+bug/497002

sudo gedit /usr/share/avant-window-navigator/applets/volume-control/volume-control.py

Skip down to line 65 and remove pulseaudio. You should be left with

mixer_names = ("oss4mixer", "alsamixer")

Save. Close. Relaunch AWN (restart, kill it, whatever). You can now select other mixers on the volume control applet preferences.

I love my 5 button mouse like no man should love an inanimate object. It’s getting on a bit and starting to go a little yellow, but that’s not the point. When I used this mouse on a Mac I could map the side buttons to Exposé actions, like tile all windows and show the desktop. I want to do the same in Linux, damnit.

With compiz you can do lots of lovely (and some pointless) things. Things like making the windows wobbly, or make it rain flaming globs of semen. I think. What you can’t do is map a mouse button to the show desktop action. Poop.

I searched for a while and came across this page with a very handy little script. A quick correction/update to the syntax and it works a treat.

From the command line

sudo apt-get install wmctrl
gedit ~/showdesktop.sh

paste this in :

#!/bin/bash desktopStatus=`wmctrl -m | grep mode | cut -d\: -f2`
if [ "$desktopStatus" = " OFF" ]
then
wmctrl -k on
else
wmctrl -k off
fi

Save and go back to command line

chmod +x ~/showdesktop.sh

You can now specify this command to run from a mouse button. Button 9 in my case. Open up compizconfig, go into commands and enter ~/showdesktop.sh in one of the commands then bind your button in the button bindings tab.

OK I’ve done this already, but it’s even easier than I thought. I found this after reinstalling xubuntu and thinking about it for more than a few seconds.

It turns out that all the required libraries are installed by default, so :

1. Make sure your printer is installed in Linux. It probably is, but if not this isn’t going to be very useful

 

2. Download the python script from here (copy the text, paste into an editor and save as airprint.py in your home folder

 

3. Mark the file as executable:
   sudo chmod +x ~/airprint.py

 

4. Run the python script with a switch to put the result in the right place :
   sudo ./airprint.py  -d /etc/avahi/services/airprint.service

 

5.  Edit your cupsd.conf:
   sudo nano /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

 

6.  Add “Serveralias *”  above “<Location />”  (without quotes)
7.  Share your printer in the printing GUI

 

8.  Print from your iphone/ipad