Mac OS X "Open"

I just love the OS X command 'open'.  No matter where you are you can just type open filename and it'll figure out the associated app and open the file with it.  I wished there was a Linux equivalent 'till go figure... there is one.

I found this stackoverflow post mentioning the command xdg-open.

that's a bit convoluted to write, so i made an alias

alias lopen='xdg-open'

lopen foobar.pdf
lopen .
lopen somefile.py

All of it works flawlessly.  :D I love it

PS. open command is taken by an openvt binary.  Hence lopen.

Hint:  To change the default association, in gnome at least:

Right-click->Properties->Open With->Set as default (lower right).

If you need to add a custom application. (I'll assume you created a .desktop icon and it shows up properly in your gnome menu using alacarte or by hand)

You need to update your:

 ~/.config/mimeapps.list

For example in my case, I added the following line:

text/plain=alacarte-made.desktop;

where alacarte-made.desktop is my sublime editor.

You can fine a list of most of the supported mimetypes in:

/usr/share/applications/defaults.list

Fixing Font Rendering In Chrome Fedora

Fonts in general aren't as pretty in Fedora out of the box as they are in Ubuntu.  But the Chrome rendering is horrible.  I had to add this little gem to my ~/.fonts.conf file.

<match target="font">
 <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
    <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 <edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
    <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
    <const>hintslight</const>
 </edit>
</match>

Ubuntu 15.04 Broken Upstart / Working Systemd

Ubuntu 15.04 I believe has switched over to upstart which in turn has broken more then a few 3rd party apps I had installed.

For example whenever I tried to install plex media server I would get the following error:

"initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart: Connection refused"


Here's the fix that worked for me:

sudo dpkg-divert --local --rename --add /sbin/initctl
ln -s /bin/true /sbin/initctl

Credit for this little tweak: https://www.nesono.com/?q=node/368