Tag: windows

Posted on in Desktop, Linux

No Title: Working around the missing –title parameter in Gnome Terminal

About a year ago the Gnome developers took away the option to run Gnome terminal with the –title parameter. This allowed you to give the terminal window a custom name like ‘SSH@MYBOX’ or ‘myProject’ instead of just ‘Terminal’. Why did they do that? I don’t know. It seems to just be what Gnome developers do these days.

If you prefer separate terminal windows for separate tasks, naming those windows is a nice way to tell them apart. This applies to general orientation (i.e. looking at the windows in the Activities overview and deciding which one to click on) and for scripting purposes (i.e. writing a script targets windows by title).

For me personally this latter option is the more important. I have a local terminal and a remote terminal and I would like be able to access either quickly and easily with a simple keyboard shortcut rather than mucking about with tabs. Here I will detail a way to accomplish that without the missing –title parameter.

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Aside
Posted on in Linux

So Long Farewell Auf… Oh just be off with you!

I’m about to install a linux distro in a way I haven’t done before on my laptop. That’s because I’m going to delete all the laptop’s partitions first, including the one containing the preinstalled Windows 8.1 it came with. It’s weirdly exciting in a way that installing linux hasn’t been in a long time.  Fedora 23 is out and at a glance it seems to support all the strange little quirks of my model: The high resolution touchscreen, the gyroscope that turns the screen, the custom extra buttons. Add to that that Wine is now impressively capable of running the few Windows games that I am addicted to – Spelunky, Hearthstone – and I no longer have any reason to dedicate half my SSD to an OS that is aching to upgrade to full-on spyware. Here we go. I feel all giddy. See you on the other side.

Posted on in Desktop, Linux

Bluetooth dual-booting: Sharing a bluetooth device between linux and windows

If you’ve used Linux for several years across various devices you are going to run into some hazy déja-vus – the feeling that you’ve been here before, facing this problem, getting that error. But it’s been so long that your bookmarks and notes about it are long gone, not to mention any recollection of how or whether you even found a solution.

Sharing a bluetooth device between Windows and Linux is one such experience for me. I had a blutooth keyboard that I never got properly working with both OSes. I eventually spilled sticky, smelly liquid into the keyboard and tossed it. That was years ago. Today, I unpacked a pair of Edifier E25 Bluetooth pc speakers and ran head first into the problem I had faced oh back in 2011, probably:

You can pair the device to your pc in Linux and then pair it in Windows but either OS will render the other’s pairing invalid. Which means that you have to remove the old pairing and ‘repair’ the speakers every time you booted into another OS. Which is so cumbersome you might as well just get a cable out and be done with it.

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