Two quick things today. First, a tip on how to disable the splash screen and annoying popup “nag” screen on Avira Free AntiVir version 9. To get rid of the splash and nag screens, just follow the instructions here. You can also disable the little update notifier following these instructions. As an aside, this section of the title was loosely derived from a Grand Stream Dreams blog post on Taming AVG Free version 8.

Linux

Next, switching to console mode, a useful tool for Linux users. While it is usually preferable to use some form of GUI for general computing tasks, there are times, even if you’re not running a specialized server or recovering a corrupted machine, when a simple comand-line interface would come in exceedingly handy. You can, of course, open a terminal window to get a text interface, which is great for quickly and efficiently running powerful commands, while looking and feeling hardcore. The advantage here is that you can open other windows and continue using the GUI. However, there are times when a program crashes or the GUI freezes, and dropping to console mode acts as the equivalent of the Windows Task Manager. This can be easily accomplished with the shortcut key Ctrl+Alt+F1, with F1-F6 opening separate terminal instances. You can then terminate the offending program or restart the X server, and return to the GUI with Ctrl+Alt+F7.

Further reading here.

Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal). Type this and press enter:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Wait for it to do it’s magic and you should be good to go. If you run into problems, I suggest starting at Google. Installing the MS core fonts seems to be an issue in this release, but then again maybe I don’t know because I’ve never had problems with it before.