Sometimes it may happen that you have a sound device that you do not use or then you are one of those people how dislike Pulseaudio and use Alsa instead. Especially with Alsa it gets very useful if you have only the sound device enabled which you actually use. Here are some notes about using Alsa instead of Pulseaudio in Linux.
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Mounting and unmounting devices from the command line
As it may happen sometimes you either work inside a terminal client or you find yourself using a Linux system or a filemanager which does not automatically mount volumes (meaning, for example, usb sticks or external hard drives). The next solution will help you on your mounting efforts.
Mounting devices
First you need to find out what is the address of the device you are trying to mount. Attach your device to your computer and run, for example, gparted to see the device’s address (should be something like /dev/sdb1).
Writing a simple bash install script
While installing programs the next simple trick might come in handy: create a bash script and let the terminal interface do all the hard work automatically.
First you need to open an empty text file (with gedit, leafpad, kate or any other). After you have the text file in front of you then you can start typing the install commands. For example I used the following very basic install script to set up my Ubuntu box.
Introducing the redshift: a help against weary eyes
When you work long hours with a computer at some point you will also start to feel the effects of it in your eyes. We of course have Gnome with its dynamically changing backgrounds and KDE4 with its similar kind of solutions. The bad part of it is that you will of course see the desktop backgrounds changing when the day goes by but the colors of overall workstation will stay the same which might in turn make long work hours challenging. So if you want to save your eyes and take the advantages that the redshift might offer then this post is definitely for you.
With the redshift you can achieve a state where your system can literally set the color temperatures of your screen according to the the time of the day/night of your locale timezone. The redshift is a nice little program also because you can run it as a background process without consuming too much system resources. If you want a specific and more detailed description of all the things that the redshift can do you should check out the manual pages of it. In terminal type the following once the program is installed: man redshift