To get python to save history across sessions you put the file .pystartup in your home directory and you add the line

Open a terminal and go to your home directory.

(In Ubuntu 10.04 and other versions, navigate to Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal to bring up a terminal window. You should already be in your home directory.)

Add the line

export PYTHONSTARTUP=/home/name_of_home_directory/.pystartup

to the .bashrc file, replacing name_of_home_directory with the name of your home directory.

(In Ubuntu 10.04 and other versions, you can open this file by typing

gedit .bashrc

at the command line. This will bring up a simple editor. Just add the line given above to the bottom of the file, save the file and close the gedit window.

The name of your home directory is the string that appears before the @ sign in your command line prompt, assuming you haven’t done anything to change this. For example, your prompt might look like this:

name_of_home_directory@mycomputer:~$

You can also find it by going to Places->Home Folder. The window that pops up will have the text

name_of_home_directory – File Browser

at the top.)

That should do it!

Thanks to archduke.

Recently, I wanted to include a string like this:

Latin (C)

in an OpenOffice spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, every time I entered ‘Latin (C)’, the ‘(C)’ would get changed to a copyright symbol. Ctrl-z would erase the entire entry, rather than revert the copyright symbol to the string I typed in the first place.

To turn off this behaviour, I went to ‘Tools -> Autocorrect…’ and selected the ‘Replace’ tab. This gives a big list of all the auto-corrections OpenOffice will make.

I clicked on each item that I didn’t want OpenOffice to ‘fix’ for me and clicked ‘Delete’ to remove the entry.

Alternatively, one can go to ‘Tools -> Autocorrect…’, select the ‘Options’ tab and uncheck the box next to ‘Use replacement table’. Doing this should prevent OpenOffice from making any of the changes listed in the ‘Replace’ list. (It is worth having a look through the other tickboxes here as there were several other things I wanted to untick, like fractionifying fractions and making URLs into links.

This worked on OpenOffice Calc 2.4.1 running on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

I prefer a simple desktop environment free from whizzy graphical effects. In particular, I didn’t like the whooshing between desktops. I think of my desktops as discrete spaces and didn’t want them to appear connected in any way. In particular, I didn’t want to be able to move a window halfway off the left-hand side of the screen and then find it on the desktop to the next desktop over. How disorienting!

To disable the default

Navigate to System -> Preferences -> Appearance
Click on the ‘Visual Effects’ tab
Choose the ‘None’ option
Click ‘Close’

This freed me from all the unwanted effects.

(To disable only the desktop whooshing and not other graphical effects, perhaps it would be worth exploring ubuntu-tweak. After Ubuntu Tweak is installed, it can be accessed via Applications -> System Tools. I suspect playing around with “Compiz Settings” under the ‘Desktop’ heading could help. I may try this if I find a nice feature missing now that I’ve turned off visual effects, but for now, I’m happy.)

When I uo Ubuntu 10.04, I also ended up with Firefox 3.6.3. This was all fine and dandy apart from one thing: when I right-clicked a link and selected ‘New Tab’, the new tab would come into being right next to the current tab, not at the end of my (usually long) list of tabs. Because I often open multiple tabs at once and prefer to read them left-to-right, I wanted to change this behaviour back to what it was in earlier versions of Firefox.

Here’s how it can be done….

In the window where URLs normally go, type the following:

about:config

Unless you’ve already done this and have unticked the button that says ‘Show this warning next time’, A page will lode with the title ‘Here there be dragons!’ and a warning message.

Click the button that says ‘I’ll be careful, I promise!’ to get to a page with a zillion options.

You can search via keyword by typing a word into the ‘Filter’ box. For example, if you type ‘tab’ in the Filter box, one of the items that appears in the ‘Preference Name’ column is

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

Right click on this option and click ‘toggle’ to change the value from ‘true’ to ‘false’ if you want a newly opened tab to appear at the end of your list of tabs.

Mozilla has a handy page with information about some of the preferences that appear in about:config and links to pages that cover other about:config options.

Woo! New version of Firefox came with Ubuntu 10.4!

I couldn’t immediately figure out how to opt out of receiving third-party cookies, but got there in the end. Here’s where the tickbox is hidden….

Navigate to Edit -> Preferences and select the Privacy tab.

Under the ‘History’ heading, there is a line that starts “Firefox will:” and a drop-down menu. Select “Use custom settings for history” from the drop-down menu.

This will cause some new options to appear, including “Accept third party cookies”. Untick this box and click “Close”.

Navigate to:

System -> Preferences -> Screensaver