Install Poker Clients On Linux

Getting various poker client to work on Linux can be troublesome and I was myself struggling with it for a while, even had windows running in Vmware player for a while so I could play on some of the more popular sites which was crashing when running in Linux and wine, like Paddy Power Poker and Mansion Poker, but not anymore.

This post will describe how you install these poker clients on Linux.

Recently I created a couple of PlayOnLinux script to install the 3 poker client I use myself, so I can play natively in Linux without the need for windows, the 3 poker rooms are

Paddy Power Poker

Mansion Poker

PKR - Let's play

PlayOnLinux uses wine to run Windows Applications on Linux but has the capability to easily create individual prefix sets in which you can install each application.

Here is the instructions you need to install these client on Linux.

First you need to download and install PlayOnLinux, follow this link and select your Linux distribution for further instructions.

Secondly,

Start PlayOnLinux, click Install.

to go to Games and search for Poker.

Select desired poker software and click Apply and follow the guide on the screen to install.

You'll have the choice to install some other Poker Client as well like Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars, those scripts is not something I've contributed to but should be working as well.

Enjoy and good luck at the tables.

Best firefox experience

I want to highlight some of the best Firefox plugins out there, that have made my experience with the web and facebook.com more pleasant :)


First up is URL Link, this add-on make it possible to mark any url within firefox, right click on it and open it in a new window or tab, really worth having.

Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/403

Try it here: http://lhansen.blogspot.com :)

Second up is, GMail Checker, which is a light add on to keep an eye on your inbox and other "folder" you may have and wish to monitor.

Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3179

Next up is Download Statusbar, which is a plugin that removed that anoying download window, that pop-up every time you download a file. Instead it will show your files download status in the button of the screen in a small tab like bar. I really love this one.

Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/26

The next one I'm going to write about is Greasemonkey, which enabled allot of other "plugins" in form of Java scripts, that can be used to improve your web experience by adding or removing features from websites.

Get Greasemonkey here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Hate ads in Gmail? I do!
This Greasemonkey script removed those ads : http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/43019

Like Youtube, and like the videos so much you wish you could download them?
Check out this script here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/39788
it will allow you to download all youtube videos in MP4 , MP4 HD, HD, Flv or 3gp format streight down to your mobile :D Sweet, aint it!

Last but not least, here is a script to remove those damn app and tests your friends take on facebook, this script is called "Facebook - External Apps Blocker" and can be download right here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44490


Thanks for reading, that was my little contribution to your enhances web experience.

Enjoy.

3D Desktop (Compiz Fusion) on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

This is tested on the latest daily snapshot of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.


This is a follow-up on my guide for Ubuntu Edgy guide.

I still receive responses on my older guide from people with problems getting this cool desktop feature to work, I hope that with this guide I can show people just how simple and user friendly Ubuntu Linux have become throughout time, and also to encourage other people to follow the same line when writing documentation for the novice user.

Enjoy.


First things first, my system specs.



My system specs.

Laptop is Dell D610
1GB of RAM
CPU is Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz
Graphic card is ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Radeon Mobility M300]

The Installation.

The graphic card driver:

In this first part of the installation we will be installing the proprietary driver for graphic card in order to gain maximum performance from the system.

You might not have the same graphic card as me, but the steps should be similar to yours even if the graphic card is different, but note that not all graphic cards have a proprietary driver available or might not be necessary at all.


First start the program that controls the hardware drivers as shown in the picture below.


If you are asked to enter your password then you have to do so.




The main windows should look similar to this.


Check the "Enabled" box to install.








If you see the following confirmation box appear chose "Enable" to continue.











And now watch the driver install onto your system.









When finished click "close" to continue.








And reboot your system when asked, to complete the installation of your graphic card driver.




Setting up 3D Desktop:

Now the time has come to prepare the system, by this we will need to enable Compiz, it comes installed with Ubuntu by default.

First start the "Appearance" Application as shown below.


If you are asked to enter your password you need to do so






When it's started, select the "Virtual Effects" tab and then select "Extra", and "Close" then application.




If it ask you to confirm and you can see what is on the screen, press "Keep settings".








Now you need to install one applications to help you configure your 3D desktop, to do so start the "Add / Remove Applications" program an show here.




Here you need to do several things.

1. Under "Show" select "All available applications"
2. Under "Search" write in "compiz"
3. Tick "Advanced Desktop Effects Settings"

"If it asks you to enable comunity maintained software, choose to do so"
4. Click "Apply" to apply the changes and watch the software install on your computer.




When the application is installed click "Close" to continue.







Now that we have installed the application, we can start configuring our desktop, start the "Advanced Desktop Effects Settings" application to configue the 3D desktop.





When the application have started, the first 2 plugins we will enable is "Desktop Cube" and "Rotate Cube" to test it works, tick the checkbox on both, as shown in the picture.





It might come up with a warning of conflicting plugins, click "Disable" to continue.


To test your rotating "cube" press and hold down
"Alt + Ctrl + Left-Mouse-Button + Move Mouse"

Most likely you will only have 2 sides by now.





This can be changed in "Advanced Desktop Effects Settings" under "General Options" and tab "Desktop size", change "Horizontal Virtual Size" as shown here.






Now you should have a full rotating cube, test it with the commands shown above.





I wont be going into more details of the configuration of your desktop, but will let you play with it yourself, basically don't be afraid to look at all the plugin's and test them out, if you click on then you can find help see how they are activated and change them to your own preferences.


After at little bit of playing around you can easily get a cool looking desktop.



Thats it for this guide, tutorial etc.

Hope you enjoyed it and it worked out great for you.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

-Lennart

Evolution - "Timed out trying to get lock file"

Here is how I solved this problem.

So this morning I got this error on my Evolution mail, the first thing I tried was to restart evolution as this normally would solve a lock problem, but in this case it didn't work, evolution kept complaining about the lock and I was unable to access one of my mail folders while the other ones worked.

Then as I normally would do I searched google in hope someone else have had a similar problem and found a solution on this, but was not able to find any answers that solved this problem only suggestions, but none of them worked.

I gave up on google and looked in the .evolution directory starting with

$ find ~/.evolution/ -name *.lock

and found a .lock file on the folder i was unable to access.

So I shutdown evolution.

$ evolution --force-shutdown

and removed the .lock file.

$ mv ~/.evolution/.lock ~/Desktop

and started up evolution again, then did no longer get the error message and my folder was yet again accessible.

This solved it for me.

Convert AVI to 3gp with ffmpeg

Been playing around with this for a while and found several examples online none of which worked for me in first try, got it working with the following command.

ffmpeg -i [input.avi] -acodec libamr_nb -s 176x144 -ar 8000 -b 120000 -vcodec h263 -ab 10.2k -ac 1 [output.3gp]

Enjoy,

Disabling Gnome screensaver thru the terminal

Today, I had a interesting problem where I needed to disable the Gnome Screensaver remotely via the terminal.

Normally it's a trivial task to disable a screensaver via the graphical interface but I never had to do this remotely.

However, I figured I needed to use the gconftool-2 Gnome configuration editor tool, and found this thread that lead me in the right direction.

With this command you can see the current status of Gnome Screensaver.

gconftool-2 --get /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled

- false means screensaver is disabled
- true means screensaver is enabled.

Change the configuration with this command

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/gnome-screensaver/idle_activation_enabled "option"

Insert your options as shown, and again

- false means screensaver is disabled
- true means screensaver is enabled.

The firefox extensions I use

Here is a list of Firefox extensions I use and find essential for a decent browser experience.


Google Browser Sync

With this extension you save your bookmarks and more if you have a Google account, quite handy if you need to use the same bookmarks at work and at home, without using the same computer.

NoScript

Use this to block Java scripts.

Adblock Plus

Is IMHO the best Add blocker out there.

Fasterfox

For faster internet surfing.