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How to Find out the Gateway/Router IP Address

If your linux system uses Network Manager, just right-click its icon and then click on “Connection Information”. The gateway IP is listed as “Default Route” – your primary DNS server IP is mostly like the same as this gateway IP.

If you want to do it on the terminal, the command is “sudo route -n”

How to Share a Printer over Ubuntu Network

Beside using Samba to share a printer over the Ubuntu network, which tends to give problems, there is a better way sharing a printer: using CUPS.

CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) is the de facto standard for Linux and Unix machines as well as the built-in printing system in the Macintosh as of Mac OS X Version 10.2. This means that any printer that is connected to your Ubuntu Linux desktop is a CUPS computer.

The following 20-second trick was posted by Arjen Karel on his blog – I just re-phrase it here to make it easier to follow:

1. On the computer to which your printer is connected, type “http://localhost:631″ in your browser address bar – without the quotes of course. Now you enter the main page of the CUPS software.
2. Click on the “Administration” tab on the top menu and then check both of these two settings: “Share printers connected to this system” and “Allow remote administration” – make sure you DO NOT check “Allow printing from the Internet” as you only want computers on your local network to access the admin area, not any one else – certainly not anyone out there over the internet.
3. Click on the “Change Settings” button to confirm the changes – you may need to enter your own login username and password.
4. Open the Ubuntu text command Terminal and type “ifconfig” to find out the IP of this host computer that has the printer connected to – write down this IP address as you need it to install this network printer on other computers on the network.
5. Suppose the host computer’s IP is 192.168.1.101, now go to any other computers on the network that need to share this network printer, open your browser and type “http://192.168.1.101:631″ – now you are accessing the CUPS on the host computer from a guest computer.
6. Browse to the printer you want to share by clicking on the “Printers” tab on the top menu and that printer’s IP-based address will show up in your browser’s address bar. In my case, the address is “http://192.168.0.101:631/printers/Samsung-SCX4521F-Compaq”
7. Copy this IP-based printer address, then go to “System > Administration > Printing” to add this printer. In the “Enter device URI” field under “Device > Other” enter the IP-based address of the network printer.
8. Go through the rest of the process to finish the configuration of this network printer – you may want to give a proper name to better identify this printer as you can have as many printers configured this way on the network.

That’s it! Enjoy and many thanks again to Arjen Karel to posted this trick! Note that this trick works on your local network even when the printer-host computer is on gateway 192.168.1.x while another on 192.168.0.x – in this case the two computer cannot normally share anything.

How to Run Windows inside Ubuntu or Linux Mint

The instructions given here are tested in Ubuntu but should apply to Linux Mint or any other Linux desktop systems without problems. To save space, we do not copy it here – please click on the link to see how to run Windows or any operating system inside Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

The iBus Language Input Bar Is Missing – How to Enable It Manually?

We have to use the command line for this case – just copy and paste the following one-line command to the terminal:

ibus-daemon

How to Link a Particular File Type to Certain Software

You do that by clicking the “Open With” tab when viewing the properties of a particular file type.

For example, files ended with .txt are text files and you may want to open all these files with your favorite text editor such as Bluefish (if not gedit or others), then this is what you should do…

1. Open your Linux file browser and find any file with the .txt ending, say, readme.txt
2. Right click the file name and then click on “Properties” for the file – usually that is the last item on the list.
3. You should see a tab called “Open With” – click on it.
4. You now see a list of applications that one might use to view and edit this readme.txt file or other files that have the same extension.
5. Pick the one you like on the list
6. If you do not see your favorite application on the list, then click on the “Add” button to browse and add your favorite to the list.

The rest of the steps should be self-explaining and you can use the same approach to change the settings later on.