MadBuntu

Baobab is a handy little utility that I have really come to like.  Baobab provides an easy to visualize layout of the used space on your hard disk.  Although this doesn’t sound that useful, I find myself using it all the time to see where I have recoverable disk space.

If your using Gnome, Baobab is listed as Disk Usage Analyzer under Applications->Accessories.  My KDE 4.1 installation did not have it on the menu, but it can be added via Kmenuedit or run from the command line with the command:

sean@redstar:~$ /usr/bin/baobab &

Baobab is a Gnome application, so if you run it under a different window manager you will need to to have the gnome libraries installed.

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I setup KDE 4 this week and really enjoy it.  My biggest gripe was that the numlock key was off by default.  I searched and search, but could find no settings to turn it on.  Apparently, there have been some changes between KDE3 and KDE4 and the instructions for KDE3 will not work.  This is what I ended up doing and it seems to work.

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While I was setting up Timevault, I noticed something really weird. When I added a application to start on login (System->Preferences->Sessions), it showed up as added, but was gone after I logged out and logged back in.

So when I ran it (gnome-session-properties) through the terminal, everything added fine, but I got this error in stdout:

Suddenly it all made sense. Somehow, the permissions on the autostart directory got messed up and it wasn’t allowing my to write to it. So the quickest way to change it is through the command line using chown and chgrp. Initially you can see the permissions on where the start up files are kept (~username/.config/autostart) are owned and writeable only by root.

Here is how we change that :

You must have sudo permissions to change file ownerships.

Here are some pages for chown and chgrp for more detail on those commands.