Yesterday I updated my system to Gnome 3.8. Unfortunately I was not able to boot it anymore. I would only see the boot manager but then It would just hang with a black screen. Switching to a console (Ctrl + Alt + F2) didn't work.

First of all you need to be able to work with your system. The easiest way to achieve that is starting it with runlevel 1.

Using SSH to copy files

Copy something from this system to some other system:

scp /path/to/local/file username@hostname:/path/to/remote/file

Copy something from some system to some other system:

scp username1@hostname1:/path/to/file username2@hostname2:/path/to/other/file

Copy something from another system to this system:

Sometimes after you come home from holidays you realize that you forgot to adjust the time of your digital camera. So all pictures might have a wrong date and/or time in the exif header. Fortunately it is pretty easy to fix that with linux:

jhead -ta10:11 *

=> Adds 10 hours and 11 minutes to the exif datetime of all files (that have exif headers) in the current folder

jhead -ta-10:11 *

=> Subtracts 10 hours and 11 minutes from the exif datetime of all files (that have exif headers) in the current folder

If Linux (after an update) doesn't boot up anymore it might be necessary to boot into the installation using some distribution which can be booted from a cd/usb-drive (p. x. Ubuntu). The first step would then be to load the encrypted installation and maybe to rewrite the grub bootloader. The following commands can be used to do so:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda1 dm-0 mount /dev/mapper/dm-0 /mnt/temp
grub-install -- root-directory /dev/sda

If you try to build the driver you might get the following error message:

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/patrick/Desktop/Canon P-150 Linux/sane-backends-1.0.19/doc'
Generating sane.ps...

kpathsea: Running mktexfmt latex.fmt
make[1]: *** [sane.ps] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/patrick/Desktop/Canon P-150 Linux/sane-backends-1.0.19/doc'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

The problem is the documentation (does anyone read it?) so you can just disable building it. Open the make file and change line 40 from

Sometimes after an update you might get the error "PDF Document not supported" in Evince. To see what exactly the problem is you should start it up using the command line (p. x. evince '/test.pdf'). In my case I got the following message:

exiv2 -r'%Y-%m-%d %H%M :basename:' rename $(ls)

Mounts the folder photo on from the server 192.168.0.16 into the directory mount on our local machine. It uses youruser and youpassword to authenticate

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=youruser,password=yourpassword //192.168.0.16/photo /mount/

First you need to check the list of supported modes. When running the command

xrandr -q

it shows me (for my netbook with external monitor) two displays: LVDS1 and VGA1. VGA1 is the external monitor but xrandr doesn't recognize it's native resolution.

We can generate the mode we want to add with the following command:

cvt 1680 1050

The output should be Modeline and then some text. We create the new mode with the following command:

remove elements from panels in fallback mode

Just hold the alt key while doing a right click on the element. This will show you the Remove from Panel option.

Nautilus Exit Fullscreen Mode

Just press Alt + F7 and move you mouse. This will reset the window to the normalized state