Friday, May 22, 2015

Flash plugin in Chromium

The only real reason that made me install Google Chrome on Linux was that it came with flash plugin. And Chromium has no flash by default.

To have Flash plugin on Chromium it's sufficient to install pepperflashplugin-nonfree from the distro's repos (in my case it's sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree). That's it. No need for Chrome anymore.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

XFCE / Xubuntu - how take a screenshot of a screen area

By default the XFCE that is shipped in Xubuntu (as of Xubuntu 15.04) allows you to press the PrintScreen button and capture the whole screen and press alt + PrintScreen to capture the window in focus. Well, this is obviously not enough. People do need to be able to capture just a portion of the screen, it's an as frequent use case as capturing the whole screen (in my particular case it's even the most frequent use case).

But thanks to the developers of the default screenshot program in XFCE (whatever it is), there is a possibility to make screenshots of a selected screen region - we'll just have to quickly set-up a shortcut for it:

Menu => Settings => Keyboard => Application shortcut => Add => type the command:

xfce4-screenshooter -r

=> press the keys you want to be the shortcut for this action (for me it Shift + PrintScreen) => done.

(Or one could simply run the command xfce4-screenshooter -r by pressing alt + F2 to take a screenshot of an area, but it's obviously faster to create a shortcut).

Friday, May 15, 2015

How to launch 2 Skype instances on Linux

Here is how to launch several Skype instances on Linux (I currently run Skype 4.3 for Linux):

Alt+F2
skype --secondary

Pretty easy and really convenient =)