Category Archives: Tips and tricks

Emelfm2 with usb storage devices

As Audax 0.2. came out it came along with a program Simple mount that made it easier to mount usb devices. You can access Simple mount by pressing Windows+p and open the Sysman2 Gui program, which also holds the launcher entry for Simple mount. Alternatively, you can open a terminal and type: sudo sh /usr/share/sysman2.sh in order to get the Sysman2 Gui started.

What Simple mount does is that it basically creates a folder to user’s home directory and then mounts an usb device into it. After the device gets mounted you can access the folder and your device’s content will show up. Note. Even when it is possible to mount the same device to multiple mount points (a.k.a. folders) simultaneously, I strongly advice against it. If you do multiple mounts at the same time and then forget to unmount everything before unplugging the device from the computer you might get a data corruption and damage your files.

As Emelfm2 is now the default file manager of Audax, it is of use to clarify few things so that Emelfm2 would not feel too odd for the regular or first time users. The most obvious question might be: How to copy files within Audax using Emelfm2? Continue reading →

Mounting usb sticks and external hard drives within lightweight desktops

When you are using lightweight desktops one obvious question will eventually rise: How do you mount usb sticks or external hard drives? In most cases the system will handle to mounting and the device will just pop-up as an entry within the file manager. On some distributions you will eventually realize that while you can copy things from the device easily, process might not be just drag and drop when you try to copy things to the device. Continue reading →

Alsa and HDMI sound via display

It turns out that getting a sound output from a HDMI connected display when using Alsa is actually really simple. Here is the outline of the process.

1. Install alsa-utils (we need a tool called aplay). For example: sudo apt-get install alsa-utils

2. Open a terminal client and type aplay -l to list all your sound devices.

You will get something like this: Continue reading →

Lenovo Ideapad G50-30 and others alike in Linux

Recently, I had a chance to setup Linux to Lenovo Ideapad laptop. While the machine itself is of great value there are few difficulties when it comes to actually enabling its every function. The Ideapad I got my hands on did not have any switches, which would enable or disable Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. When Linux was installed it also came to be that the left mouse button was disabled (not working at all). All these problems were easy to fix and in this post I will walk you through the whole process, which helped me to get the most of the great Ideapad laptop. The steps below are done as root user (su root) or as a sudo user (sudo su). Use sudo or root depending on your system’s setup (meaning: root might be disabled and sudo might be enabled or vice versa. To complete the steps below, you can use any terminal client of your choice (xterm. terminator, gnome-terminal…)

Continue reading →