When dual-booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 16.04 on a computer, there is conflict in time settings because of the way the two operating systems set the hardware clock. By default Ubuntu uses UTC while Windows uses local time.
So when you shut down the computer, the hardware clock is set to, say, “13:00”. When you reboot, Windows sees “13:00” as local time but Ubuntu sees that as UTC and so converts the time back from UTC to local time. You can fix this by either asking windows to set the hardware clock with UTC, or Ubuntu to use local time.
To make the change in Ubuntu
You can set the hardware clock time standard through the command line. You can check what you have set to use by:
$ timedatectl | grep local |
The hardware clock can be queried and set with the timedatectl command. To change the hardware clock time standard to local time, use:
# timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 |
If you want to revert to the hardware clock being in UTC, do:
# timedatectl set-local-rtc 0 |
Problem
Windows Update got stuck at “Check Windows Update …” on a freshly-installed Windows 7 SP1.
Solution
- Download Windows Update KB3020369 from Microsoft website.
- Download Windows Update KB3161608 from Microsoft website.
- Install KB3020369. This is required to install the next KB.
- Install KB3161608.
- Reboot. Run Windows Update again. This should solve the problem.
See this post for details.
I don’t like opening pdf files in Firefox so I’d like to disable this feature. To do this, you need to configure both Acrobat and Firefox:
- In Firefox, go to Tools -> Options -> Applications. Define the default action for the Portable Document Format (PDF) as “Always Ask”.
- In Acrobat, go to Edit -> Preferences. In the “Internet” tab, uncheck “Display PDF in browser”.
This should disable opening PDF files in Firefox. Next time when you click a link to a PDF file, a window will pop up and ask what you want to do with the PDF file.
This is a post copied from here. All the credits go to the author, Steve.
Sometimes when you go to upgrade your machine with apt-get you will see that a package is being “kept back”.
Normally to upgrade a machine you would run:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade |
This should upgrade all the installed packages upon your machine (well at least all those packages which you have installed that have a newer version available), but it doesn’t always do that.
If the dependencies have changed on one of the packages you have installed so that a new package must be installed to perform the upgrade then that will be listed as “kept-back”.
For example my apt-get upgrade today showed this:
root@sun:~# apt-get upgrade
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
bind9-host dnsutils imagemagick libmagick6
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded. |
There we can see four packages haven’t been upgraded, even though newer packages are available. This is because two new packages were introduced, and these upgrades depend upon it.
To fix this you must run :
This will upgrade the packages that have newer versions available, and install any new dependencies which are required to do that.
root@sun:~# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Calculating Upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libdns16 libdps1
The following packages will be upgraded:
bind9-host dnsutils imagemagick libmagick6
4 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3697kB of archives.
After unpacking 1860kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] |
Here we can see the two new packages which are required to satisfy the dependencies of the upgrades, libdns16 and libdps1.
If you Logitech Performance MX Mouse doesn’t work out of box under Xubuntu, there is an easy fix.
Edit the file: /lib/udev/rules.d/97-bluetooth-hid2hci.rules. Change this line:
# Logitech devices
KERNEL=="hiddev*", ATTRS{idVendor} =="046d" , ATTRS{idProduct }=="c70[ 345abce] |c71[34bc] ", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method= logitech- hid --devpath=%p" |
to
# Logitech devices
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor} =="046d" , ATTRS{idProduct }=="c70[ 345abce] |c71[34bc] ", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method= logitech- hid --devpath=%p" |
Note that you only need to change “hiddev*” to “hidraw*“.
Restart the machine and your Performance MX Mouse should work now.
A very useful tip that I found in this post. Here is the quote:
Seems like relative paths are supported, they are just not straightforward to implement. For example if your Powerpoint presentation is in the MyFiles folder, and the MyMovie.avi is in the Media folder inside MyFiles. The trick is to edit the xml files inside the Powerpoint file:
- Make a copy of your presentation as Presentation.pptx (just to keep the original safe).
- Rename your Presentation.pptx file into Presentation.pptx.zip.
- Open the resulting zip file by clicking on it. It will open as a folder. Inside it, go to ppt, then slides, then _rels. You will see files called slide1.xml.rels etc.
- Copy (drag and drop) all those to another place, outside the archive. Now open the file corresponding to the number of your slide with video with some editor (for example, Notepad). Look for the line that says something like: Target=”file:///C:\MyFiles\Media\MyMovie.avi”. If your Powerpoint presentation is in the MyFiles folder, and the MyMovie.avi is in the Media folder inside MyFiles, then change the above line to: Target=”Media\MyMovie.avi”.
- Save the slide1.xml.rels file (or whatever number it was), then drag it back to that archive (that is actually a Powerpoint file), and then rename the archive back to Presentation.pptx.
This is it. Now you should be able to carry around the folder MyFiles with the presentation and with the Media folder inside it that contains your video.
Works for me on Windows 7.
I have a Trendnet TK-207K 2 port USB KVM attached to two computers, one of which has VMWare Workstation on Windows 7. When I am running the VMWare Workstation, the Trendnet kvm suddenly switches to the next machine. It is as if I hit scroll-lock twice to go to the next machine, but I didn’t. Then I have to manually press the button on the top of the kvm and wait for about 20 seconds for it to be re-recognized by the computer running VMWare. Very annoying!
I think the reason why this is happening is: when I’m using VM workstation and I set a num or caps lock status inside a VM and then leave the VM, my Num or Caps goes off and then goes on again when I enter the VM. So something is happening when the VM enters the virtual machine to set the Num and Caps lock, and I’d assume, the Scroll lock status too. If this is done by VM workstation manipulating the keyboard buffer it might literally be “as if you hit scroll lock twice”
The solution I found: first thing, make sure you have installed the VMware tools in your image. If you use the Num Lock, Caps Lock or Scroll Lock make sure they are both set the same on your host computer and your VMware image. For the VMWare image, when the virtual machine boots up, hit F2 to enter BIOS to set the key status.
This post from Windows 7 Forum has good instructions on how to enable or disable the quick launch tool bar in Windows 7: Enable or Disable Windows 7 Quick Launch Toolbar.
Here is a screenshot:
This post from Windows 7 Forum has good instructions on how to manually create a Windows 7 installation USB flash drive: Create a Windows 7 Installation USB Flash Drive. I tried Option Two from the post and it worked well.
Here is a screenshot:
