Tech Scribblings

For the last several months on my Ubuntu machine at work the numpad has not been working. It has been so frustrating. I would turn the numlock on and off and nothing would seem to get it to work.

I thought it was something wrong with the keyboard or possibly after a kernel update one of the drivers changed and killed it for some reason. I was on Hardy and haven’t taken the time to update to Intrepid yet. I just figured after I update to Intrepid it would fix the problem. Turns out it probably would have but I fixed it without having to upgrade yet.

This problem actually has to do with Gnome’s Accessibility settings! I found out that if I type 2,4,6, or 8 on the key pad it moved the mouse around by tiny amounts, almost unnoticeable.

To fix the problem I just went to System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technologies, clicked on Mouse Accessibility, selected the mouse keys tab and unchecked the “Allow to control the pointer with keyboard” option. That fixed it!

I had installed Adobe Reader to replace the default eVince document viewer. The problem was that PDFs I opened in Nautilus still opened with eVince. I wanted to know how to fix it so it would always open with Adobe Reader.

In order to do that you need to navigate to the file you want to open with a certain program in Nautilus. Right click on the file and click on Properties. Open the “Open With” tab. Select the program you want to open the file.

Thats it! So easy, and much better than the Windows way of doing it, you just have to know where to go.