Chris’ Blog

Quick tip:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_vcd_command "vlc %m"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/volume_manager/autoplay_dvd_command "vlc %m"

No more crappy totem spawning when you insert a DVD or VCD, but instead the pleasure of VLC.

I have found a solution to my media player woes, Amarok, it serves as a nice replacement to mpd which has served me well. I will miss the flexibility of mpd but the featureset of Amarok is just amazing, all I need now is to get my QT apps looking more like GTK ones.

My Ubuntu installation had been getting rather touchy and unstable so I eventually bit the bullet and went for a total system nuke and reinstall. After a royal screw up I got my system reinstalled. The CD image I downloaded got corrupted on the wire but still worked, one of the core Gnome packages got modified and the MD5SUM checking failed and it refused to install. So, I got left with a broken installer and a text mode system, eventually I managed to get Gnome up and redownload the ISO and reburn (verifying the MD5SUM of the ISO before this time) and reinstalled again and it worked first time, even though I did fall asleep.

Now my next problem is finding a media player I like, looks like I might be going back to mpd, which is the root of all my problems I think.

I have been meaning to contribute to the Folding@Home project once again, sadly there are no packages for Debian or Ubuntu. I set about rectifying this, you can build my package from the source available here: <http://svn.cs278.org/~chris/packages/fah/trunk/>.

On one of my frequent visits to Slashdot it has come to my attention that Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has been released. Along side Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0! The sad bit Thunderbird 2.0 is not in Ubuntu 7.04, oh well. Slashdot also brings news that Michael Dell Chairman and CEO of Dell uses Ubuntu on his laptop at home.

I have had the last week at home, only a month to go before I go back to university (woo) and I have been busy. I have been scaling up my backup solution after settling with rsnapshot I have been writing scripts to handle backing up various special formats I use. So far I have implemented: Subversion, dpkg, DNS, and MySQL. I have licensed my scripts under the GPL v2 and you are free to use them according to that license. You can access the sources in my Subversion repository, its also worth noting I have packages for Ubuntu Feisty and Debian Etch available from my APT repository.

Further to my previous post about Flash player, I have it using ESD but I need to configure ALSA to use the dmix plug-in. I found out how to do this here. Very happy now

I used to have Firefox to use Google’s Browse by Name feature, but since I reinstalled my box I never got around to reconfiguring it. To do so yourself follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to about:config in Firefox.
2. Use the filter feature to find keyword.url.
3. Modify the preference and replace the default value with http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

Thanks to the Ubuntu Blog for this!

Anyway after configuring it I found a bug #84242, how cool is that bug number?

For ages sound emanating from flash player under Ubuntu has been difficult to achieve and a PITA regarding getting other sounds to player afterwards, I found a solution here.

# Flash also looks for /usr/lib/libesd.so.1
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libesd.so.0 /usr/lib/libesd.so.1

# Flash expects /tmp/.esd/socket to exist.
sudo mkdir -p /tmp/.esd/
sudo touch /tmp/.esd/socket

Daniel Carrera

I am in the process of writing a guide detailing how it is possible to install Ubuntu 7.04 (yet to be released) on to a hard disc for a laptop or another computer without the use of any CDs or temporary partitions to hold to root partition while you encrypt what will be the root partition which most other guides demonstrate, this is fine if you want to keep the partition say for /home or something but my laptops hard drive is not big enough for that sort of segregation. I use debootstrap to install Ubuntu on the laptop hard disc mounted on another Ubuntu machine. My method has huge advantages, you don’t need to burn any CDs, its far quicker because it is more direct.

I will be tidying this up and possibly turning it into a automated script. I must admit this has not been easy no one guide has got it going it has taken multiple HOWTOs to inch every step of the way, but now I have it done I am happy, the gotchas were rather frustrating at time due to the difficulty of easily debugging the initial ram image when the machine is booting.