Using PDF-XChange as default pdf viewer

PDF-XChange can be installed and run quite smoothly with wine. However, it is a bit tricky to set it as default application as it is not registered automatically and so won’t be on the list of choices when using mimeopen to set default app. My solution is to change default.list in ~/.local/share/applications (or /usr/share/applications if you want to…

vnc server for 16.04

I have couple laptops. Try to setup vncserver on one those so that I can access it convenient from another one. Followed the guide from digitalocean and here are something I like to jot down Initially I got port 22 connection refused error. That should be due to the default firewall setting (port 22 not…

Lenovo X1 gen 6 deep sleep

I got an X1 Yoga and it works great with Linux. Unfortunately, deep sleep doesn’t work out of the box. However, this article describes a nice fix for that. But for me, step 18 needs to replaced by step 23. If you encountered the same problem as I got, your grub would have been broken…

X1 Yoga trackpoints under 18.04

Got a new X1 Yoga recently. I installed a fresh ubuntu 18.04 and everything is working almost perfect (except suspend does not work every time). But trackpoint is a big headache to me. I am used to trackpoint (a long-time thinkpad fan going through X61 and X230) and the erratic behavior of trackpoint is a…

Change resolution with terminal (Ubuntu 16.04 and Thinkpad x230)

Getting nostalgia and suddenly would like to play a round of old StarCraft. I have upgraded to 16.04 since last year and couldn’t set resolution to 640×480 from Displays setting. But simply using xrandr -s actually works: xrandr -s 640×480 I can then recalibrate the stylus with the usual Wacom Tablet setting.  🙂

SageMath

Trained as an electrical engineer, I am most comfortable with Matlab in terms of serving my math need. However, for symbolic math problems, Matlab is not as intuitive as Mathematica (of course, we can still do it though. Check out “syms”). But I never get used to the syntax of Mathematica. And I found the…

Install Ubuntu to Nvidia laptop

I tried to install Ubuntu 18.04 to MSI  GS43VR 7RE laptop. It is a laptop with GTX 1060 gpu. I kind of expected hiccups with installation. Actually, I couldn’t even get Ubuntu to start with plain installation. The culprit is NVidia driver as expected. Adding “nomodeset” to boot option fixed the problem.  One may also…

Install Gogs on 16.04

My goal is trying to setup a git server along side with one of my existing sites. Say my site has a domain name example.com. I want to setup a git server at https://git.example.com.  I chose Gogs as it is quite light-weight and it appears to be sufficient for me. For security purpose, I tried…

Reinstalling ubuntu packages

I lost my mariadb root password and the recovery process does not work after many tries. Since I was not actually using any databases on that machine. I decided to simply reinstall MySQL server. But just running sudo apt purge mysql* didn’t clean up everything. I still got configuration errors when I try to reinstall…

apt update fail after installing Jetson library on host computer

As title, the issue is “fixed” by adding  [arch=amd64,i386] just after deb on every deb line in /etc/apt/source.list as suggested here. However, note that some deb lines may be included under the folder /etc/apt/source.list.d. So don’t forget adding [arch=amd64,i386] to them also. Another fix mentioned here is to remove the arm64 architecture completely. sudo dpkg –force-architecture –remove-architecture arm64 It did…