Flash Player Update

The flash player is the thing that isn’t updated automatically through mint updates, so after some time from system installation it might be quite obsolete.

Go to Adobe site and download recent tar.gz pack of FLASH player for linux.

Extract folder, open it and copy paste the libflashplayer.so file to etc/alternatives overwrite the old one.

That’s it, log in/out or restart browser. Check version with right click on any flash object in the browser. Be happy with new updated flash on your system

Orphaned packages

When you install some programs, applets, games etc. additional packages can be downloaded.

Later on when you uninstall those programs games etc. some of the packages can be left over in your system. Usually this occurs because they have been pulled into the system to satisfy the dependency requirements of other software that has since been removed.

If there re many of them they can slow down your system and simply take some space on your drive.

To remove orphaned packages: Open Synaptic Package Manager

Click on Settings/Filters

Make new filter, call it “Orphaned” and on the right side of the window select only Orphaned, click OK

Now from menu on the left select “Custom Filters” and click Orphaned. This will display all orphaned packages in your system that you can safely delete. Choose any/all of them and ‘Mark For Removal’ with right-click.

“And don’t forget to apply your changes before closing Synaptic Package Manager”

Cinnamon & Mint 13

Future seems to be in Cinnamon taste

To let you prepare for the incoming Mint 13, I advise you to take a look here http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/

You will find there all info that you have to know about new shell that have “Traditional layout, advanced features, is easy to use, powerful & flexible”. You can download there new themes, applets, extensions and how to install them, which is BTW very easy.

So start forgetting Gnome 2… 3 , Unity, MATE, MGSE and invite Cinnamon to your computer, because this seems to be the default and only? shell in coming Mint 13

The newest version for now is 1.3.1 which is very stable and ready for daily use. Maybe in next releases some best of the themes will be included by default as well as applets and extensions so you will not need to upgrade anything.

As of now take a look on the link above and join the Cinnamon. IMHO the best that happen to Mint lately.

Advanced power settings

The Gnome 3 power settings are bare minimum and in order to do some more advanced fine tuning, you can install “dconf Editor” and edit the relevant strings manually:

Type in Terminal:
sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

Then launch “dconf Editor” and navigate to org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power

Login screen background

To change login screen background
Open “unity-greeter.conf” as root:

Terminal Code:
gksu gedit /etc/lightdm/unity-greeter.conf

Find the line “background=/usr/share/backgrounds/linuxmint/default_background.jpg”

and replace the path with the path to an image of your choice – be sure to type it correctly or you’ll at best end up with no background.

Best is to put new image in same folder to make sure Linux have access to it, just change name