Tech Juice

Introduction

If you are a Windows poweruser, the switch to a Linux desktop environment can be quite a shock. Many of your favorite shortcuts and tricks become useless, and it can be quite challenging to get back up to speed. There are many tweaks that you do to make Ubuntu’s Gnome 2 desktop environment easier to use and more powerful. This article presents a list of things to do after a fresh install that may help both Ubuntu newbies and adept users.

Note that the 11.04 release of Ubuntu introduced a new desktop environment called Unity. It is a trainwreck of an UI at this point (2011), and power-users will most likely be much more productive in the ‘classic’ Gnome 2 UI. The tips in this article apply to Gnome 2 for Ubuntu, but some things might work for other distros and UIs.

Programs to Install

There are several invaluable programs that everyone should get after a fresh install.

Ubuntu Tweak

Ubuntu Tweak is a tool for Ubuntu that makes it easy to configure your system and desktop settings. If you are a Windows user you might know Windows Powertoys, which is very similar. You can configure login settings, package related jobs, default folder locations, which items to display…

The “Folder in Use” error occurs when a network share on a remote computer is mounted as a disk in Windows Explorer on Windows 7. This post explains how to resolve it.

Problem:

You have mounted a remote network share on your computer, with write access. When moving folders around in the share you get the “Folder In Use” error.

Looking at the opened file handles on the server that hosted the share, you will probably see the ‘Thumbs.db’ files are being written to. This means Windows Explorer is generating Thumbs.db files in the share–which are thumbnail cache files used by Windows Explorer.

Solution:

Completely disabling the use of ‘Thumbs.db’ files will prevent the problem from occurring:

1. Open the Group Policy Editor (Start -Run -‘gpedit.msc’)
2. Set to Enabled:
   User Configuration Administrative Templates Windows Components Windows Explorer Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files
3. Reboot

A good thread about the same subject can be found here.…