Well one of my gripes with Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ has been cured at least, Firebug 1.5 now works after upgrades to Firefox 3.5.8.
Shame that I’ve found out my bash completion is broken. 
Archive for the ‘Operating Systems’ Category
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Thursday, February 18th, 2010Sharing photos from N900 to Gallery2
Monday, February 1st, 2010I recently treated myself to a new mobile phonecomputer, so I bought a Nokia N900 which eXpansys eventually shipped to me. Now to the point, you can easily share content to Facebook, Ovi, and Flickr but I maintain my own Gallery2 installation and I wanted to upload my photos there as well. Luckily the sharing infrastructure is pluggable, so all I needed was a plugin which I found. 
Configuring it was a bit of a headache so here is how I did it. (more…)
Why do I bother?
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Updated my desktop from Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ 9.04 to Ubuntu ‘Karmic’ 9.10, the upgrade process worked flawlessly. Sadly the number of regressions has kind of taken the shine of the various improvements to the distribution.
The big kicker for me is the breaking of VLC and/or Gnome Screensaver, now VLC fails to suppress the screensaver in full screen which is kind of useless when you want to watching anything over 5 minutes long. To workaround this I use gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit to prevent the screensaver from activating, and set a command to kill that after 2 hours. The next problem I’ve observed is that even when the suppression and the film have both ended, the screensaver still doesn’t want to activate for ages; leaving my desktop burning the image into the screen until I lock the screen myself. Not a problem but I often hit the hay with a film on and usually fall asleep midway through, got up yesterday morning to find my desktop sat there still being projected from my display. LP #428884.
My second gripe is Flash player under a x86-64 installation using nspluginwrapper and the x86 Flash player provided in the repositories works, what’s so bad about that? Well you can’t actually click on any controls on the Flash object, which kind of rules out embedded YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc. roll on <video> with Ogg Theora. I resolved this by purging the packaged Flash and nspluginwrapper, and then installing the native 64 bit alpha version from Adobe.
Finally Firebug 1.5 doesn’t support 64 bit builds of Firefox, which to be fair Mozilla don’t support so I don’t really have a problem with this. You need to get an older release from the 1.4 branch, I’ve heard that the 1.6 alphas work again.
Good grumbling done for the morning!
Vacuum Firefox on Ubuntu
Thursday, October 15th, 2009It was suggested to me to use vacuum places to improve my Firefox awesome bar performance, as I’m still using Firefox 3.0 which is packaged with Jaunty; I do have 3.5 installed I just use it for testing sites at the moment. However realising that I didn’t need an addon a single line of bash will probably do what I want I headed to Google and found an explaining it all and a suitable one-liner to optimise all my Firefox SQLite DBs.
You will need the sqlite3 package installed and you should close Firefox prior to running the command.
for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done
Can anybody explain?
Monday, January 19th, 2009chris@sandman:/mnt$ sudo df -h . Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 459G -1.9G 461G 0% /mnt chris@sandman:/mnt$ sudo du -hs . 4.0G .
I sure as hell cannot!
New Home
Sunday, November 30th, 2008My blog has a new home on a VPS hosted by Host Europe shared between me and a friend. It has a nice lean installation of Debian Lenny, running a variety of low profile or tuned applications to provide various services. We also have another 50MiB of free memory to play with.
X2X
Monday, November 17th, 2008X2X is this awesome little utility I found which allows you to control an X session on a remote computer with the keyboard and mouse on your local computer, by remote computer I for example mean the laptop sat beside you as it relies on you being able to see the output of the remote computers monitor. The Ubuntu Community Documentation has a quick how to on using this handy tool.
Punching holes in Firewalls
Sunday, November 16th, 2008It is a lot easier than you think.
OpenSSH, which can only be described as the best utility of all time, is quite a versatile tool one feature people use frequently is port forwarding. This allows you to open a port on your computer that forwards the data over the SSH connection to the destination you specify, very useful when needing access to the an intranet web server when you don’t have a proper VPN set up for example. However, SSH can also do this in reverse! It opens a listening port up on the remote machine which then relays data to the destination you specify. For example you can SSH into a remote host and get SSH to open a port on that host which relays data back to the SSH port on the machine you are connection from, thereby allowing SSH access to a machine where it would normally be impossible.
A practical example:
chris@ktulu:~$ ssh sandman.cs278.org -R 2222:localhost:22
This connects to the server sandman.cs278.org and opens port 2222 which forwards traffic to localhost:22 (localhost is the machine I am connecting from). Once logged into the server I can do this:
chris@sandman:~$ ssh localhost -p 2222
Which opens a connection back to the remote machine.
Ubuntu Game
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
I’m not sure what I can really say to that, other than n00b!
