Clean Up Ubuntu Grub Boot Menu After Upgrades

One of the things in Ubuntu that has always driven me crazy is the addition of new items into the grub menu without removing the old entries that likely don’t even work anymore. I’m sure most experienced Ubuntu users already know how to do this, but here’s the method anyway.

To remove these entries, we’ll need to edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst. You can do this by using Alt+F2 and then typing in the following command:

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now that we’ve got the file open, scroll down to the bottom of the file where it says “End Default Options”, and you’ll find all the menu entries for the various kernels in here. You can just select and delete the ones you don’t want.

Save the file, and then the next time you boot up you’ll see a much nicer set of options.

Hope this helped in reducing your grub size..................This is applicable only upto distro's like jaunty9.04 which are using grub..

How to configure Pidgin to work with Google Talk........

1. Download & Install the latest version of Pidgin.
2. Open Pidgin and go to Add / Edit Account window of Pidgin.
3. From the drop-down box choose XMPP as the Protocol.
4. For the Screen name enter your Google Id (Gmail Id).
5. For Server enter gmail.com
6. You can leave the Resource with the default Home.
7. In the Password field enter your Google ID password.
8. Enter Local alias as whatever you want to.

 
Then in the Advanced tab change the following settings.........

Force old (port 5223) SSL: Checked
Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams: Un-Checked
Connect Port: 443
Connect Server: talk.google.com
Proxy type: Use Global Proxy Settings

The same could be done in empathy too usually configuring gtalk account in pidgin and empathy is some what a messy work if u didnt configure the advanced tab that is the port etc if we dont configure these all we will get a "connect error".

Need to install Linux software on an offline computer?

Keryx is a portable, cross-platform package manager for APT-based (Ubuntu, Debian) systems. It provides a graphical interface for gathering updates, packages, and dependencies for offline computers. Keryx is free and open source.

http://keryxproject.org/

How to restore Grub from a live Ubuntu cd.

This will restore grub if you already had grub installed but lost it to a windows install or some other occurence that erased/changed your MBR so that grub no longer appears at start up or it returns an error.


Put a ubuntu live cd on your cd rom and restart and boot from cd so that you could become a live session user.........When u get into the desktop open terminal and type.....The code to be typed is highlighted so that you could easily find the codes........


sudo grub


This will get you a "grub>" prompt.It is the grub shell...At grub>. enter these commands


find /boot/grub/stage1


This will give you a location..whatever was returned for the find command use it in the next line


root(hd?,?)


Again use the value from the find command i.e. if find returned (hd0,1) then you would enter root (hd0,1)

Next enter the command to install grub to the mbr


setup (hd0)


Finally exit the grub shell


quit


That is it. Grub will be installed to the mbr.
When you reboot, you will have the grub menu at startup.

How to reset your password in Ubuntu......

This tutorial will help you to rest your password..........
when the GRUB is loaded from your Boot Menu select recovery mode........

It is usually the second option......you can see in the above pic........
After you select recovery mode and wait for all the boot-up processes to finish, you'll be presented with a few options.We want the Drop to root shell prompt option so press the Down arrow to get to that option, and then press Enter to select it.

Now you will in the root........
If u forgot the user name as well then type-  ls /home
this will lsit all the users in the system now selest your username from that....
To reset password type- passwd username
in my case my username is ganesh so i will type passwd ganesh 
now it will prompt for new password type that then retype the same password once more....
Then type -  exit
The above menu will appear once again from that select resume normal boot thats all...
you resetted the password...........