08 Jul 09 Getting Your Ubuntu 8.10 Notification Back In 9.04
If you miss the notification that used to be in the 8.10 notification area telling you new updates are available you can get it back by quite easily by issuing the following command.
gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
Then you just kill and restart update-notifier and you will have your icon for update-notifier back (to check it straight away, run: sudo apt-get update).
Note: This will also stop the update manager window from automatically popping up every time you run apt-get update which is reason enough to do it on its own.
07 Jul 09 Changing Your Tag’s Case In WordPress
Yet another pet hate of mine is things capitalised incorrectly. For me things like tags need to be either first letter uppercased of lowercases, and definitely not a mix of both. The problem with WordPress is that you unfortunately cannot change the case of a tag once it’s been used. This is because all your tags are put into a table the first time you use them, and from then on no matter what case you type a tag in, it will default to the capitalisation that is used in this table. The offending table is the wp-terms table.
This table contains a list of names and slugs (url friendly names) for all your tags. If you want to change the case of one of your tags you will need to do it here, either via console or phpMyAdmin or something else. Myself I went and just set all the names equal to the slug, and then changed the one or two tags I had with spaces in them back to something more rational. Whether you want to do it the same way as myself or not is up to you. Though if you want to you will merely need to run and update something like: UPDATE wp-terms set `name` = `slug`.
07 Jul 09 Changing WordPress Default Theme Front Page To Show Post Excerpts Only
This is one of those things that tends to get under my skin. Web sites with long pages showing far too much information on the front page. Realistically I think the best approach is to give users access to plenty of information, but not necessarily having them bombarded with it. For the WordPress Default theme (the one based on Kubrick) this is done by showing only post excerpts as opposed to the entire thing.. You can follow the steps below to this affect:
- Open up the index.php page of the theme. You can do this one of two ways.
- Manually: locate the folder wp-content/themes/default and open the index.php file
- WordPress Admin: look under the Appearance menu and select Themes. Once here select the Main Index Template page from the list on the right hand side of the editor.
- On the 20th line (or thereabouts) you will find the text: < ?php the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry »’); ?>
- Replace this text with the text <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
That’s it. One note though, I would always comment out any changes I have made so that should something go wrong I can always switch back. If you want to comment it out instead of replacing it then you would use < ?php //the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry »’); ?>
03 Jul 09 Cleaning Up Ubuntu
This is just a quick look at cleaning up an Ubuntu system. This is all documented elsewhere by an abundance of people, some of whom I no doubt took this off in the past and have forgotten where now (If you’re that person, then thanks very much, this stff has been coming in handy for me for a few years now).
Removing Residual Configs
The first step is to remove all of the residual configs lying about your system. These are configs which, as the name suggests, have been left behind by removed programs. To do so the we need to open Synaptic. You can find that in the System menu:
System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
Once we are in Synaptic we can click on the status button down the bottom left. This will separate your packages into sections based on their status. The one we are looking for will have the words “residual config” in the name. Select all these packages and right click on them. In the menu that appears choose “Mark For Complete Removal“. You can then click “Apply” at the top of the screen.
That’s it. You have now removed all your residual configs.
Removing Partial Packages
You will need to open a terminal for this one. To do so hold down “Alt+F2“. A box should appear, into which you can type “gnome-terminal” to open a new terminal. In the terminal you simply need to type the following to remove these partial packages:
sudo apt-get autoclean
Once you’ve put in your password etc that’s it. All gone.
Removing Unnecessary Locale Data
Theres a nice little app called localepurge that will get rid of all the locale data that you don’t need. This can amount to quite a substantial amount of space. The first step is to install localepurge. In your terminal type:
sudo apt-get install localepurge
After installing localepurge will require that you configure it with the locale’s you want to keep. It will present you with a list of abbreviations from which you can choose. Scroll down to the one that suits you best (i.e. for myself I kept en_IE.
That’s it. It will run automatically after each install and remove unnecessary locale data.
Removing Orphaned Packages
The app deborphan can grab all your orphaned packages and be used to remove them (be a bit careful with this one as sometimes it can remove something you need – it hasn’t happened to myself but I have heard of it happening). So to install the package, in your terminal type:
sudo apt-get install deborphan
To run the app you just need to type this at your terminal:
deborphan | xargs sudo apt-get -y remove --purge
This will remove all the orphaned packages on your system.
That’s it then, you should have free’d up a good bit of space on your system now and it should be a little tidyer than before!
