One of the changes Ubuntu 9.10 made from 9.04 was the placement of “asynchronous” farther down the right side of the screen.The problem a lot of users have with this is that it leaves a big space between the top of the screen and notifications.

Everybody posts about applications to install after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. I'm not saying they are not interesting, I'll even post some links to such posts from other blogs (look at the bottom of the post) I really liked, but to get there, you must firstly fix everything that's not working for you, tweak some things and so on.

If you use the Ubuntu Personal Package Archives (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas) then forget about opening /etc/apt/sources.list to add a repository; in Karmic, use the new add-apt-repository command. For example, to add the repository for the chromium browser...

In a recent article I wrote about using regular expressions in editors, I mentioned the fact that by default, Emacs will match newlines when using a complemented character set, and vim won't. A helpful reader, Tim Chase, contacted me to share a way around this.

For a long time it has bothered me that Compiz does not seem to run as smoothly as Metacity on my desktop system. With desktop effects switched off, moving windows around the screen would seem smoother. With desktop effects switched on, I'd also notice tearing in areas of the screen with fast motion including in videos.

Bash functions, unlike functions in most programming languages do not allow you to return a value to the caller. When a bash function ends its return value is its status: zero for success, non-zero for failure. To return values, you can set a global variable with the result, or use command substitution, or you can pass in the name of a variable to use as the result variable.

Ten tips for handling windows in linux .

I wrote this article for TechTarget about the fabulous Web Wizard and its uses for mass PDF conversion and quick web publishing of existing documents. It's a great feature that bears re-posting about. It's also really, really not obvious.