Thursday 23 July 2009

Battles won against my laptop

My 7 year old laptop is now too geriatric to run anything too meaty. Windows is definitely out of the question, so I have Xubuntu.
Today, I bring you:

How to add a terminal launcher to the xfce panel:
right-click>add new item>launcher
Then find the terminal program in /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal and drag it into the launcher. Or, just set command to "/usr/bin/xfce4-terminal" and uncheck the "run in terminal" box. Give it a nice name and picture of a terminal window.


How to connect to a windows shared area when smb4k is acting up:
If you can see the various windows computers in smb4k (eg ACOMPUTER) but it won't let you mount ACOMPUTER/afile, then try this on the command line...
sudo mount -t smbfs //ACOMPUTER/afile/ -o username=myname /home/myfile/MyMount/
...where you have provided your username to access the shared area. When prompted, give the corresponding password.
To unmount:
sudo umount /home/myfile/MyMount/

2 comments:

Gergely Imreh said...

My Arch XFCE setup puts the terminal there, and the lauch command is:
exo-open --launch TerminalEmulator

The shared area mounting: use -t cifs, smbfs is depreciated (or soon will be). The computer's address can be in the
\\\\ACOMPUTER\\ashare or //ACOMPUTER/ashare format. Sometimes it complains that it cannot resolve ACOMPUTER, then use nmblookup to match the windows name to the IP, and use the IP for the ACOMPUTER.

So, how's Xubuntu? I'm spreading the Linux love here, our group server running Ubuntu Server with software RAID and moinmoin for the group wiki and windows shares and gitweb and (hopefully soon) OpenVPN.... And converted some of the lab computers to dual boot too... ;)

Ali said...

Thanks for the advice Greg! Crikey, I didn't know anyone was reading this blog. Sounds like you certainly are spreading the linux love! My Xubuntu is okay at the moment, better since I increased my RAM to a whopping 512MB.
I'm pyxplotting my thesis! YAY.