Recent Entries

Entry tags:

firefox,
tumblr

my Firefox doesn't display Tumblr controls

I'd been trying to use Tumblr, and found it hard to use, but it turns out that I'm just not seeing all controls in in my Firefox (still on version 3.6.18 on Ubuntu 10.10, so far I've been too lazy to update). Anyway, in Firefox when I'm logged in I don't see the icons to (un)subscribe and get to the dashboard that should appear in the top right corner. If I use another browser they are there. I use NoScript, but have allowed all Javascript on the page, and I have also turned off my AdBlockPlus on the chance that that might interfere in some accidental way, but neither helps. Does anyone have an idea why the Tumblr controls are invisible?

PHP development server troubleshooting!

Okay, this is like my fifth time trying to get LAMP set up on Ubuntu, and yes, that includes using XAMPP. (All I want to do is practice my PHP so I can write WordPress plugins! *sob* Why does the world's easiest language have to be so hard to set up?)

*cough* Anyway. I used these instructions this time, after uninstalling XAMPP and what were hopefully all traces of my last attempt at doing this. I'm not using Netbeans -- gedit is okay with me -- and I didn't get any error messages or anything, so I thought I'd actually gotten it set up and set to use /home/feathertail/PHP as the document root.

I put a test file in there, browsed to /localhost and got this:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /testphp.php on this server.

Apache/2.2.17 (Ubuntu) Server at localhost Port 80

And for some reason it has the XAMPP logo as its favicon.

Can anyone point me in the direction of finally solving this once and for all?

Current Music: Little Lie - Lindi Ortega

Entry tags:

hardware

Linux and off the shelf laptops

My seven yr old PC is behaving badly. It freezes in the middle of a loong yum operation, or even in the middle of switching between text apps.

I could try to get it repaired, but as I have dialup (through Airport), getting updates makes me cranky.

So I'm looking at off the shelf laptops, because I can't afford anything on a credit card.

What kind of laptops do you use, and with what distro? I've heard HP is awful, yet on a Fedora Planet entry, a developer said he'd just installed F15 on a new HP, with no problems. I've also noted others using Acer. Lenovo is out of my league, money-wise.

So, out of a mixture of curiosity and part of my on-going mission to get an idea of what is possible, what do you use in laptops? What distros are you using, and were there any gotchas at first?

Edited to add
I'm mostly curious about what kind of hardware people are using; Laptops DEFINITELY, but if you want to talk about your desktop rig and what you've put into it, go for it!

My computer is a Lenovo 3000 J Series. I have an old Nvidia card GEForce 6200, Old Sound Blaster Live! MP3 that still gives great sound - provided I get rid of Pulseaudio. No wireless, it connects via Ethernet to the Airport, which is controlled by an iMac. (not mine).

Entry tags:

filesystems

File systems

Hi! I just plugged in a second hard drive on which I intend to rip Blu-Rays (I've legally bought). I'm booting from the first HD, and mostly this second HD will be a subset of ~/home.

I now need to format the HD, but I'm not sure which file system to use. I've had a look at Wikipedia, but it's more confusing than anything.

I need a filesystem that supports very large files (at least 200Gb), that plays nice with the last version of Ubuntu and that's reasonably quick since I'll be playing those very large files at some point.

Would ext4 be right for my needs, or should I go with another?

Thanks!

wacom tablet help with GIMP in linux?

Hi everyone - I'm a newbie to Linux, and have installed linux mint 9 on my netbook so I now have a dual-boot OS (with Windows 7 Basic).

I also just obtained a wacom intuos 4, and have been reading this website to try and figure out how to get my wacom to have pressure levels and stuff in GIMP. So far I haven't been successful - I haven't even managed to find the x-server file or anything. I'm really really new to this (I've only managed to find the wacom package to install) so if anyone has any ideas on slightly clearer methods or simpler instructions to make the wacom tablet work like a wacom instead of merely a mouse?

I'll be so grateful - I really don't like firing up windows now, it takes too long.

Helpful DD-WRT note regarding loopback

So, I just got a router that has DD-WRT installed on it (which is Linux based!). One of the things I have is a DynDNS account that I point to a development server for Dreamwidth. I was having the darndest time getting port 80 to go to this server, but only while ON the network! Apparently this is something called "loopback" and it didn't work out of the box for this version of DD-WRT. There is a fix, though, documented here:

iptables -t nat -I POSTROUTING -o br0 -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 192.168.1.0/24 -j MASQUERADE

/\ Run within management > run command > save firewall script

Which I'm documenting here for my future use and possible help to others who could run into the same issue.

Ubuntu PSA

https://twitter.com/#!/ubuntustatus/status/75541657638014976

PAM security update for Hardy, Lucid, Maverick, and Natty breaks cron (http://pad.lv/790538). Mirroring/downloads blocked; fix in progress

UPDATE:
https://twitter.com/#!/ubuntustatus/status/75619130614624256

Fixed PAM binaries for http://pad.lv/790538 are now available from the security archive, and will be on other mirrors soon.

Ubuntu Unity

I just upgraded today, because I was hoping to avoid problems like the one I am having.

I have seen several suggestions that, in order to put a launcher item on the launcher, one should create a shortcut on the desktop by right-clicking.

When I right-click my desktop, I don't get a right click menu. From what I've been able to tell via elgoog, while this was deliberate in 10.10, I should be able to right click the desktop in 11.04. Is there some secret setting I need to change in order to do that?

Thanks for any help.

What madness is this

Apparently some mad computer scientist decided to make it so you could boot Linux in your browser!

Has anybody tried out Natty/Gnome3 yet?

I've seen the odd mention of it, but I've been trying to give it some time to get more bugfixed before I make the attempt. On the other hand, I'm really itching to play with it.

Relatedly, I was trying to explain the Ubuntu-Gnome split to a friend who knows nothing about Linux and her response was, "Makeup sex!" Then I realized that their story is basically an epic breakup fic, and now I have a new Yuletide fandom.

Share your Linux desktop post

I was thinking, after I ran across a number of these threads recently in my attempts to get Cairo Dock running properly, that it would be nice to have one in a more familiar and fannish space. (Not that my desktop is fannish, at the moment, but I can't quite imagine finding pre-raphaelites in one of the threads I perused either.)

Is there any interest? Pictures can easily be hosted at TinyPic or ImageShack, which both allow uploading without a user account, if anyone doesn't already have photo hosting. I will go first in the comments anyway!

Entry tags:

ubuntu,
unity

Displaying all open windows in Unity

One thing that annoyed me when I upgraded to Natty and gave a try to Unity was the slowness and difficulty to switch between windows. I'm a multitasker, and I like to hop between Firefox, OpenOffice and a game or two.

I got this really neat trick from a French blog:

( Cut for length )

I hope you found this trick useful! Let me know if something was unclear :)

Current Mood: accomplished

problem solved

Ok, posting this in case anyone else has the same problem.
Solution to wifi woes in 11.04.
First add the maverick main repository to software sources. [ how to ] you want the main one.
Second, go into the synaptics package manger and search for maverick backports.
Install wireless-generic backport.
reboot
job done.

Current Mood: aggravated

Drat it...

Updated to 11.04 natty narwhal [seriously, who decides on these names!] and now the wifi driver is about as stable as a Russian nuclear reactor in Japan! Literally, it'll fail every 10 seconds or so, and doesn't always come back up..saying it's connected but not working and then the only options are to either disable/enable the adaptor or reboot completely.

Is anyone else reporting problems with older wifi drivers, [ralink RT61pci in my case] or is it just me..? the docs on the official site aren't too helpful, saying basically, 'sucks to be you' &,' have you tried rebooting?' [serious windows flashbacks here]

For that matter, has anyone found a way to get a Edimax 802.11b/g/n wifi card to work? [which is the other card I have, works fine if I duel boot into windows xp, but Ubuntu I get nada.]

Current Mood: amused

Entry tags:

Forget Chuck Norris, here comes Doug McIlroy

Researching material for a lecture on Unix administration, I came across Doug McIlroy, famous for co-inventing diff, Unix pipelining, and other important things.

I found a web page which lists what Doug can do. Some examples:

Doug McIlroy spawns Init
Doug McIlroy invented diff to win a bet
Doug McIlroy supervises the hypervisor
Doug McIlroy doesn't have an Erdős number; Erdős has a McIlroy number

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

ubuntu

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

Ubuntu 11.04 is released!

Just a few words from my experience so far. If you are not fairly tech-savy and/or bold enough to go exploring, I wouldn't recommend an upgrade just yet. I've had repeated Unity freezes/lockups on my brand spanking-new netbook with 11.04 loaded from a clean install. I am suspecting with all the changes that there were things that slipped. I do expect that those things will be cleaned up as they are discovered and sorted out. There are a lot of people who did a ton of work on this without getting paid a cent, please do not think that I am not absolutely grateful for their hard work, I respect the fact that things are going in a new direction and with a fixed release schedule there is only so much time to do work, so something has to give.

Initial impression: I expected to be disappointed by Unity, having run the 10.10 version on my old netbook for the past six months, I am not disappointed, but I am not blown away either. This feels like a good interface for my netbook, I am just not convinced yet that this is what I want on my desktop.

Anyone else? Experiences? Thoughts?

Two Ubuntu Things

the Power User's Guide to Unity aggregates a LOT of tutorials. It makes me feel more hopeful, although I think I may not install 11.04 until, like, July

Ubuntu UK Podcast by the UK Loco is a lively and amusing discussion by people who dance on the line between power users and developers. They are in mid-season 3, and I highly recommend them.

Entry tags:

netbook,
ubuntu

(no subject)

So I have this netbook; her name's Io and she runs Ubuntu. Io has a hard drive of a few hundred meg. She also has a permanently inserted memory card of sixteen gig. Every time I start her up, she complains about hard drive space and her lack thereof. How do I convince her that the memory card is her hard drive? Or at least convince Update Manager to download updates onto the memory card? Because I haven't saved a single thing to disk on Io that isn't an update from Update Manager.

Hard disk utility

Can anyone tell me if there's a hard disk diagnostic utility I can run from an Ubuntu live CD? I've got an intermittent boot problem where my computer hangs on the BIOS screen.

Thanks!

Entry tags:

question

RAM thrashing program?

Does anyone know of a good program to stress-test the computer's RAM? My Windows drive currently bluescreens every time it tries to do something RAM-intensive (0x7F UNEXPECTED KERNEL MODE TRAP), but MemTest86+ has been through 13 passes and not found any errors yet*. I suspect it's a stress-related memory fault, and I'd like to try stressing it on my Linux drive to see if it's Windows-specific.

I'm running Mint 10 GNOME 64-bit.

*It's still going: I left it overnight and I'm at work now. After 8 hours, though, I doubt it'll find anything in the next 11.