ubuntu Network Manager showing 'Enable Wireless' in grey and makes it unclickable

i've run into this issue multiple times in ubuntu while waking up from a suspend / hibernate like operation. right clicking on the Network Manager on the notification area shows 'Enable Wireless' but unclickable and in grey. you can fix this by making following changes to file:

/var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state

and making sure it looks like:

 

[main]

NetworkingEnabled=true

WirelessEnabled=true

WWANEnabled=true

 

sometimes a "sudo service network-manager" is enough after the previous step to reflect the change, but on other occasions i've had to reboot my machine.

give this a try when you're stuck and let me know if it works.

the best way to upload photos to facebook from (k)ubuntu

Its been a well known issue that the facebook uploader fails miserably in ubuntu, and hence these packages rock! first i installed phatch

$ sudo apt-get install phatch

next, f-spot

$ sudo apt-get install f-spot

though i know that f-spot allows one to batch update photos, i preferred the intuitive and simple interface of phatch for doing so. i used f-spot's Facebook upload plugin (which is deactivated by default) to upload to Facebook. the f-spot plugin can be activated from Edit > Manage Extensions and used from File > Export > Facebook. happy photo uploading!

kde extended desktop not working?

here's what lspci tells me about my on-board graphics card and the xrandr (primitive command line interface to RandR extension) i executed to get my extended desktop on:

$ lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

$ xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --rotate normal --output VGA1 --auto --rotate left --left-of LVDS1

after endless attempts to get this working from the Display Settings (and then realizing that these options don't exist in there) Rajat helped me get this working.

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