Tips and tricks

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Contents

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Browsers

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Firefox

General

Mailto

Depending on your version, Firefox may not assign an application to handle "mailto" links. To change that behavior:

1) Click Edit --> Preferences --> Applications, then type "mailto" in the search box, and click the entry in the right-hand column to select the action you want.
2) Alternately: type "about:config" into the address bar, then right-click the page containing a long list of preference names. Select New --> String, then enter for preference name: 

network.protocol-handler.app.mailto

and for preference value the path to the email client you want to use, for instance, 

/usr/bin/thunderbird

or for kmail, enter 

kmailservice

Transferring profiles

When transferring a Firefox profile, whether in migrating from Windows, another Linux version, or from one MEPIS installation to another, you will need to change the file profiles.ini following these directions in order to access your bookmarks, cookies and preferences.

IPv6

If you have web access in Konqueror but not in Firefox, you may have to change the way addresses are being handled by disabling IPv6. See this page on how to disable it, and here for an overview of how different applications handle this protocol.

Laptop scroll button navigation

If your laptop has a 4 way scroll button (older models often had these) you will find that the up/down button scrolls the page up and down, but to get the page back/forward mappings working for the left/right click on the button, you need to make the following adjustment in the Firefox/Iceweasel config:
  • Enter about:config in the url bar, hit return and dismiss the warning message,
  • Paste mousewheel.horizscroll.withaltkey into the filter bar and hit return,
  • Edit values (double click on config, for pop up window or toggle True,False values), so that the values are set to: 
 mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action       user set  integer   2
 mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines     user set  integer  -1
 mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines  user set  boolean  false
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Opera

  • Notes feature:
Select text in a web page -> rightclick and choose "copy to note" or use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-C. To access your notes press Ctrl-6 or press F4 to see the sidebar and select Notes from there. When you double click on the note it will open the site from where you copied the note. It is very useful when you do research and need to copy things from many separate pages and then still be able to go back to those pages.
  • Search feature:
To add a search engine from any webpage, right-click the search box, select "Create search," fill in a name and a keyword (optional), and click OK. The site will be added to the pull-down search menu.
  • Tray icon
By default, Opera puts an icon into the system tray when it opens. To stop that behavior -- useful if kicker space is limited, for instance--add -notrayicon (include the single dash) to the command space in the KMenu entry and on the Application tab of any kicker or desktop icon.
  • Java and Java Script
You can test your current capability on the Java Tester website. If you encounter problems, be sure to consult the troubleshooting section of the Opera page on how to make a soft link to the Firefox plugins directory.
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Email clients

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Thunderbird

  • External links
To get Thunderbird to open hyperlinks in Firefox (alter as needed for another browser):
  1. Open preferences --> advanced --> config editor
  2. Right-click and create a new entry ("string") with name: 
network.protocol-handler.app.http

and value: 

/usr/bin/firefox

Do the same for https and ftp.

  • Transferring profiles
When transferring a Thunderbird profile, whether in migrating from Windows, another Linux version, or from one MEPIS installation to another, you will need to change the file profiles.ini following these directions in order to access your mail and preferences.
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Kmail

  • External links
To get Kmail to open hyperlinks in Firefox, you can set firefox as your default browser in KDE Component Chooser. In particular, see steps 1 & 2.
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Console

  • drag&drop -- you can drag a file or folder to Konsole. You'll get a short menu with choices to move the file, copy the file or cd to that folder.
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Desktop

  • Wallpaper: Right-click on the Desktop -> Configure Desktop -> Background -> Press "Get New Wallpapers" to get wallpapers from KDE-look.org
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Useful bash commands

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Finding largest files

find . -type f -printf "%k %p\n" | sort -rn | head
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List installed packages

dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall | cut -f 1 | tr '\n' ' ' > listpackages.txt

Explanations: "grep" is used to remove lines that contain "deinstall" (packages that were removed) "cut" is used to remove second column and "tr" to transform newline character into blank so the output could be used with "apt-get".

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List install history

ls -lt /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list|awk '$6!=x{print "";x=$6;print x}{printf " %s", substr($8,20,length($8)-24)}'|less

Or to find packages installed after a specific date, let's say "2009-01-01" you can use this command 

find /var/lib/dpkg/info/ -name "*.list" -newermt "2009-01-01" | cut -d/ -f6 | cut -d. -f1 | tr '\n' ' '|less
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