Disable "Your battery might be broken error" on EEEPC 704G

It's irritating, every time I boot up an Ubuntu variant, it complains that my battery has a very low capacity (2,3%)

You need a program called gconf-editor to fix it, so let's get it:

Open a terminal window

type in sudo apt-get install gconf-editor

type in your password and press ENTER

now, type in gconf-editor in a terminal window.

Navigate to the Apps folder

then the gnome-power-manager sub folder

then the notify sub folder

find the setting called "low_capacity"

remove the tick next to it.

You should now no longer receive these error messages.

A calculator for Peppermint ICE

Thanks to Rich_Roast from the Peppermint OS forum for helping me to become aware of the built in calculator. I worked out the tutorial.

Peppermint One has Galculator installed by default, while ICE seems to have none. However, xcalc is installed. To run it,

click Menu > Run

and type in xcalc

press ENTER

If you want a shortcut to Xcalc in your accessories menu:

Open PCManFm

go to folder /usr/share/applications

click on Tools > Open current folder as root and enter your password.

run Leafpad, to do this click Menu > Accessories > Leafpad

type the following into the window:

[Desktop Entry]

Name=XCalc

Comment=Basic Calculator

Exec=xcalc

Icon=kcalc

Terminal=false

Type=Application

StartupNotify=false

Categories=Utility

save the file as xcalc.desktop to the desktop folder

right click the file, click on move

go back to PCManFm and click on Edit and then on Paste

You have now pasted the file to the /usr/share/applications folder and you have a shortcut to xcalc in Accessories. Note that we are "borrowing" the kcalc icon as xcalc does not have an icon in the file.

Alternatively (if you want to easier solution, and you have an Internet connection) you can install Galculator

Click on Menu

click Accessories

click Lxterminal

type in: sudo apt-get galculator

type in your root password and press ENTER

you now have Galculator added to your Accessories menu.

For a different approach try Speedcrunch, it is very suitable as a financial calculator. It's great to have options.

How to add a "show desktop" icon

How to add a "Show desktop button" to the bottom panel and stuff up Conky in the process

If you do not use conky, having a "show desktop" button is great.

Right click on the panel

Click on panel settings

Click on panel applets

Click on Add

Scroll down, click on minimize all windows

Click Add

Click the up arrow to position it

Click close

WARNING: using this button will probably minimize your conky window as well! Once minimized the only way to undo that is to end the process and then to restart it.

Thanks to Google Search and the LXDE forum I was able to temporarily fix this, however - upon reboot conky had dissapeared.

Open the .conkyrc (hidden file, so click on view and then on show hidden files in PCManFM)

Make the following changes:

own_window yes

own_window_type dock

own_window_class conky

Save the file

Now click on menu, Preferences, Openbox configuration Manager

Click on the doc tab

choose the position for the conky window (most conky windows I have seen are on the top right hand corner)

Click the check box "allow windows to be placed in the dock space"

Click the dot next to Keep doc below other windows

click Close

The only thing that bugs me is the the conky window now has a background colour, which compliments the theme chosen in Openbox, oh well at least I am making progress.

As I said, this fixed the problem until I rebooted, if anyone has any advice please post it in the comments.

Eliminating desktop icons

Peppermint Linux does not have a "arrange icons" setting for the desktop. A possible work around is to add a panel with your icons on.

Right click on the bottom panel, then click on create new panel.

Right click on the new panel, click Panel settings and go to the panel applets tab.

Add an application launcher bar, click edit and set it to the program you want

add a spacer between application launcher bars to give it a "justified" look.

Right click on the top panel, then click on panel settings, go to the geometry tab. Here you can set the icon and panel size. My panel is 22 pixels high and the icons are 20 pixels high as my eeepc has a 7" monitor and I do not want to loose too much space to a panel.

If you like to hide the panel (which I do not) go to the Advanced tab and click on the check box "Minimize when not in use"

Saving disk space - Part 2

Install Bleachbit to help remove temporary files, browser cache files, etc. This program is available for various flavours of Linux and if (like me) you have a EEEPC with a 4GB HDD then it is a big help.

sudo apt install bleachbit

There are certain files that Bleachbit could not remove, around 4000 localisation files could not be removed although it said that they were removable.

I would reccomend using this program, to be able to clean the .deb files I mentioned last time you need to run Bleachbit as root. If you do not have such a menu entry open a terminal window and type in

sudo bleachbit

Wine Program Files location

Maybe you are looking for where your Windows programs have been installed to, here is the location. Remember the .wine folder is a hidden folder.

/home/tienie/.wine/dosdevices/c:/

Broken Packages

Packages, broken or otherwise makes me think of the post office or a courier service.

Linux uses packages every day, whether you like it or not. When you install or remove a program packages are either downloaded or removed. Debian uses .deb files (Peppermint Linux is a decendant of Debian, Ubuntu and Mint).

Recently, there was a widespread problem with Peppermint Linux. Peppermint uses the Mint update manager, and this keeps the system up to date with new updates. However, Mint update did not want to update and gave an error saying "Broken Packages", and asking you to fix the problem before you can update further.

Now, as far as I can tell, Mint Update will download new updates EXCEPT if the update is a RISKY update. Then it tries to update the other packages, and if one of the packages that needs to be updates DEPENDS on the other RISKY package (too risky to be updated by Mint Update), so then you get a broken packages error.

There is a work around, or fix for this. The packages in question are VLC files, so you need to open Synaptic Package Manager, then type in VLC and update the installed VLC packages.

After that, open a Terminal window and type in:

apt update

apt upgrade

This should fix the problem and you can once again have an up-to-date Peppermint Linux system.

PCManFM - Problems

There are various problems with the new version of PCManFM. A file manager is a vital part of your operating system.

The new version can only click & drag to copy files that have spaces in the file name, amongst other problems as well. So I decided to try out Thunar.

So I open a Terminal and type in:

sudo apt-get install thunar

enter my root password

and Thunar is installed, ahh much better.

Auto login

Loggin in with a username and password seems great for someone with a linux background. It is safe. But I come from a dos / windows background and I want my system to login automatically as I am the only person (that I know of) that uses it.

So here is how to do it:

open a Terminal

gksudo leafpad/etc/xdg/peppermint-ice/lxdm/lxdm.conf

delete the # and space infront of "autologin" and "session"

change "dgod" to your username

save the file and reboot.

Changing the time settings on the taskbar

Time settings in the taskbar

I don't like the counting seconds in the taskbar, it makes me feel like time is going by too quickly. So I changed it :)

Here is how to do it:

right click on the clock on the taskbar

Clock format: %H:%M

(%R does the same thing)

Tooltip format: %A %F

This one is also a pet pieve. It does not change the way the system works (much), but it helps me to be less irritated while using Peppermint.

Viewing fonts in Peppermint ICE

Peppermint is a lightweight distro, that was meant for you to edit your documents with Google Docs or using Microsoft Office Docs. I am using it "incorrectly" or not "as it was meant to be done" by installing OpenOffice. So now I need to add some fonts as in Windows / Corel Draw I have around 3000 fonts.

Adding the fonts is easy:

Open PCManFm

go to your home folder

click on View > "show hidden"

make a new folder, rename it to .fonts

any font you copy into that folder will be installed (I think you need to reboot before it works)

But, let's say like me you have a + - 200 MB zip file on your flash drive with all your fonts on. You do not want want to install all the fonts, just some of them. The problem is that you can't view any of the fonts as Peppermint does not have a font viewer installed either.

I tried Google and found nothing, I searched for "font viewer peppermint linux" and a few other terms - but none were successful. So I went to Synaptic, typed in fonts and started looking through the thousands of packages that have to do with fonts (I was getting desparate here!).

I found fontypython and installed it. Voila! I was now able to view the fonts in a folder, just as I had wanted to for days. There is a very satisfying feeling when you are able to solve a problem on your own and this one was great.

This might not help a lot of other people, but to me it is great!

Startup programs

If you are like me, you don't want to have to click on Menu > Run and type in conky and press every time that you reboot. In Windows there is a folder called startup to add shortcuts to, in Linux I was lost.

Here is how to do it:

Open a terminal window

type in

gksudo leafpad /etc/xdg/lxsession/Peppermint_Ice/autostart

type in the root password

add the following line:

@conky

save the file and reboot

Now conky will autostart when you boot, you can add other things here as well.