Some essential ubuntu tricks

I blog, for I forget.

And I cann't afford to forget, because I need to format again and again and again and install os again and again and then struggle with some simple tasks.

How to disable guest account

To disable the guest account edit the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

and add the line

allow-guest=false

Now this is how the file will look like

[SeatDefaults]
user-session=ubuntu
greeter-session=unity-greeter
allow-guest=false

After you reboot, guest account will be disabled. 

How to show all startup applications

All the startup applications will be stored in the folder /etc/xdg/autostart folder and will be of the form aaaa.desktop. These will contain a line

NoDisplay=true

You should set this line to 

NoDisplay=false

And then these will be shown in the settings button, startup applications list. 

I got a sed command to do this in one line

sudo sed -i 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g' /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

How to set path for the executable (like java for eclipse)

You can either add these two lines to .bash_profile in your home directory

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_07/bin/java

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_07/bin

Or add these lines to /etc/profile file

To activate these changes, logout and login again.