Remove hibernate from the log-off menu in Ubuntu

I have had little success getting the hibernate feature to work on any Laptop running Ubuntu. I currently use a Dell XPS with 6 Gigs of RAM and don’t even find it practical to hibernate due to the waste on hard drive space and the time it takes to go down and come back up. With a good battery it is much easier to suspend. I don’t even like having the hibernate option on the menu for fear of an accidental click. So I finally got around to figuring out how to get it off the menu and I thought I would pass it on for anyone wanting to do the same.

All you need to do to remove hibernate from the menu is to change allow_active to no under the org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate section of the file /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.upower.policy. To do this open a terminal and type:
sudo gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.upower.policy
Find the line below the org.freedesktop.upower.hibernate section that says:

<allow_active>yes</allow_active>

and change it to:

<allow_active>no</allow_active>

Save the file and restart the indicator-session service with the following command:
killall indicator-session-service

Your done!

How I created my own level for Luola

My kids and I like to play this game on Ubuntu called Luola, but it only comes with 5 or 6 levels. After we had gotten board with those first few levels included I started looking around for some more level and found out that it really is that hard to create your own level from scratch. So, after a little searching and reading trough the limited documentation I created a few experimental levels. Ayrica and Quin even created some levels of their own. This is still a work in progress but here are the level I have created so far:

This level maps out the 16 colors you can use to create a Luola map
My first real level using all the colors in a Hawaii Like theme

Download my Luola levelpack here.

You just have to put these extracted files in your luola/levels directory. On my Ubuntu system the path to the levels folder is `/usr/share/games/luola/levels/`.

I modified my “hand” cursor in Ubuntu

I would like to share a little something I worked on the other day, just for fun.

I wanted to “doctor” the default “hand” Cursor in Ubuntu so I Googled it and found a great plugin for GIMP (a FREE Linux equivalent of Photoshop). So I downloaded this X11 Mouse Cursor (XMC) plug-in and installed it. This made it easy because I could just open up any X11 Cursor file right inĀ GIMP and edit it like any other multi-layer image file.

So I chose to start by opening the “hand2” cursor file from the whiteglass theme (on my system this file was found in `/usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/`).

Then I quickly made a few small changes to each of the 5 layers and saved it in my Downloads folder as “handeli.xmc“.

Next I had to replace the the default X11 Cursor file with my newly modified version. To do this I ran the following commands (if you run Linux on your computer you can download my modified Cursor file and run these commands to install it):

sudo mv /usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/hand2 /usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/hand0
sudo mv Downloads/handeli.xmc /usr/share/icons/whiteglass/cursors/hand2
gnome-appearance-properties

Click the “Customize…” Button on the “Appearance Preferences” window, switch to the “Pointer” Tab on the “Customize Theme” window, and choose “whiteglass” from the list of pointers.

If you don’t run Linux on your computer then “Doom on you!”, download Ubuntu now!

Just in case you are too lazy to change your operating system and install this Cursor, here is a small GIF of what it looks like.handeli.xmc X11 Cursor

I finally fixed my card reader.

My SD Card Reader has never worked in Ubuntu on this Dell XPS machine since I got it over a year ago. I never fixed it because I hardly ever use it but I did have a need to use it today so I Googled my issue and found a very simple fix. I just had to add “pciehp.pciehp_force=1” to the end of the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= line in the file /etc/default/grub. Then I ran sudo update-grub and rebooted and it works every time now.