Enhance PuTTY user interface
PuTTY's user interface is limited if you compare it to Gnome's Terminal. No tabs, no color schemes, ...
So I searched for mods or add-ons that could make it a better tool.
I won't list them all, but just point out the useful ones.
PuTTY Connection Manager
PuTTY Connection Manager
I tried it and now can't do without it ! It is the killer add-on for PuTTY.
It gathers PuTTY instances in a common interface using tabs and dockable windows (see screenshot taken from author's site above).
It has extra features like automatic login, connection manager, import/export, see full list here.
You can download it from here.
PuTTY Tray
This one adds tray minimize to tray feature to PuTTY but I don't use it for that as I use it with PuTTY connection manager. The features I like are auto-reconnection (after network connection failure or computer wake-up from stand-by or hibernation) and hyper-links support.
It can be used as portable application too by storing sessions configuration in files (to use it from an USB key).
You can download it from here.
PuTTY color schemes
PuTTY comes with a bad color scheme. Default standard blue is quite difficult to read on default black background.
Some color schemes are available on the web to correct this, you can google for them or look here for some samples (the igvita-light.reg looks just perfect for me).
They are available as .reg files that need to be imported using regedit.
Restore Windows boot option in grub 2 menu after installing Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10
After installing Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, grub 2 doesn't detect whether windows is installed or not (at least it did not for me), so you can't boot windows any more.
To fix this, there is a tool called grub-mkconfig that generates automatically a grub configuration file in /boot/grub/grub.cfg by detecting which operating systems are installed on your box.
To re-generate grub.cfg and install it as boot loader configuration, follow below instructions :
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg # edit grub.cfg and look if there is non-ascii characters (accentuated ones) in labels, if so, replace them with ascii characters sudo nano /boot/grub/grub.cfg #replace /dev/sda with the device where grub boot loader should be installed sudo grub-install /dev/sda sudo grub-install --recheck /dev/sda
Reboot your computer.
Now a line that allows you to boot your Windows installation should appear in grub's menu.