Change boot order with Grub Customizer

If you have a dual OS boot setup on your PC, chances are (according to Murphy's law) that your machine will never boot in the OS that you need. And obviously you will want to change the boot order.

All until Ubuntu 11.10 you could change the boot order from grub with Startrupmanager, but that piece of software is no longer supported. Instead, you can now use Grub Customizer.

Install Skype

Skype is a popular proprietary voip application that is available also for linux. It is not installed by default in Ubuntu but it is available from the repositories.

Open in Terminal

If you navigate through your files in Nautilus (or Files, as it's called since 13.04) and you suddenly need to open a terminal in the current location here is how to do it:

Autoscroll in Firefox

If you like to scroll a web page by using the middle button of a mouse you may have noticed that it is not working in Ubuntu. It is not missing, it is just disabled. Here is how to re-enable the auto-scroll in Firefox:

Restricted DVD formats

Ubuntu as an operating system aims to be universal. Although it can be customized in many different languages, there is only one official release for the hole world. DVDs however are restricted to geographical areas. So here is what to do if your DVD won't play on your Ubuntu PC.

Desktop slideshow

For a while now, Ubuntu offers the option to set as desktop background a slideshow of wallpapers. It is nice to have such an option integrated into the OS but you can not customize it; or at least there is no obvious method.

Here is the easiest way how to set a custom Desktop slideshow from your own folder of photos:

Move mouse between monitors

Do you have a dual monitor setup with Ubuntu and you have difficulties moving the mouse or dragging the windows between the two monitors? You can resolve the problem by disabling certain plugins from Compiz, or by the next easy trick:

Copy and Paste in terminal

When working in terminal you may notice that you can not use the usual  Ctrl + C  and  Ctrl + V  commands. Instead, use  Ctrl + Shift + C  to copy and  Ctrl + Shift + V  to paste. It is very handy when copying all those command examples from internet.

There is, though, another "fancier" way to copy and paste text in the terminal and in linux in general, and this one uses a second clipboard to remember your selection:

to copy : select the text with the mouse cursor (it is automatically copied to the second clipboard);

to paste : press middle mouse click and the above selected text will be pasted;

alternate paste (in case you don't have middle button on your mouse) :  Shift + Ins .

You may find quite useful to have two separate clipboards for temporary storing copy-paste information.

Roll up window with mouse wheel

If you didn't knew, there is a nice compiz effect called "shade" that rolls up the window and hides it inside the title bar. It can be used as an alternative to minimizing a window so you have it around without occupying much space. More over, it is active by default lately in most of Ubuntu distributions (or at least 12.04 according to my experience) and it can be activated by pressing this special combination of keys:

Drag window to another workspace

When using multiple workspaces, dragging one window from one work space to another would seem the obvious thing to do.

Print screen

Two advanced print screen commands in Ubuntu:

Alt + Prt Scr = print current window

Shift + Prt Scr = print selection from mouse