Beautifying Xterm via .Xresources

Xterm is the default terminal emulator of the X Window System. And its default state is very, well, default. It is usable but, IMO, it's not very pleasing to the eyes. For a lack of a better word, it looks bland.

Behold Xterm in all its default glory!

Some might say why fuss around with the terminal when clearly there are GUI tools available. I believe that doing some things via the command line are faster.

I will be using .Xresources file to do the configuration of Xterm. It's just a text file located at your home directory so doing a nano ~/.Xresources will create it there. You only then need to edit it with your configuration (of course, you can replace nano with your editor of choice).

Here's my .Xresources file:

! xterm ----------------------------------------------------------------------

xterm*geometry:           80x25
xterm*faceName:           droid sans mono:regular:pixelsize=14
!xterm*font:             -*-dina-medium-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
xterm*foreground:         white
xterm*background:         RosyBrown1
xterm*dynamicColors:      true
xterm*utf8:               2
xterm*eightBitInput:      true
xterm*saveLines:          512
xterm*scrollTtyKeypress:  true
xterm*scrollTtyOutput:    false
xterm*scrollBar:          true
xterm*rightScrollBar:     true
xterm*jumpScroll:         true
xterm*multiScroll:        true
xterm*toolBar:            false

If you may notice, I used the Droid Sans Mono font and the RosyBrown1 background. Of course you can change these settings to your liking. Note that the .Xresources does not only cater to Xterm but many more X-applications as well. If you are using Arch Linux, like me, then you can start reading this wiki.

Oh, if you are not using a desktop environment (I'm only using a window manager, Openbox), you may need to add the command xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources to your .xinitrc file.

Here's my "beautified" Xterm:

PIIIIIIIINK!!! Xterm

Happy configuring!

Getting the DWA 125 Wireless Dongle to Work in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I have a laptop with networking interfaces eth0 (Atheros AR8152) and wlan0 (Broadcom 4727) which are not supported by the kernel version of 10.04 LTS (2.6.32-21-generic). I needed a kernel version 2.6.37 or higher to get these 2 interfaces working. But since I had no Internet connection, the best way, based on the answer(s) to my query, was to download the kernel manually from http://packages.ubuntu.com and install it in it's binary (.deb) format. When I tried searching for them in the package site, I saw that these linux-generic or linux-*-generic files had multiple dependencies so I thought twice of installing them this way. Dependencies is actually one of the top reason why I get freaked out about installing Linux distros without an Internet connection.

Resize Images in Ubuntu

So I like using my Ubuntu install. One thing that bothered me was that with the default F-Spot photo manager, I could not for the life of me find a way to resize my pictures. So I removed F-Spot and went with Shotwell. The same, there is a button to Crop but no Resize.

What I like about 10.04 LTS is that GIMP wasn't installed by default. I use a netbook and I feel that it may not be able to cope with the resources needed for GIMP. But I felt that installing GIMP was the next move. I searched Google and came across the article below (mentioned as a Reference).

So what's the fastest, most convenient and most user-friendly way to resize photos? Right-click the picture and on the drop-down menu select "Resize Images..." (read: it can process multiple pictures). It's called the Nautilus Image Converter and it resides in the context menu. Obviously, you will need Nautilus to be your file manager.