Category: Linux

Tux 500

Chad

Our goal is simple: we want to collect community donations to enter a Linux sponsored car in the 2007 Indianapolis 500. We need your help!

Website: Tux 500

My thoughts: This is a grand idea, but it looks like they are just getting this underway, and I find it almost impossible to believe they will raise $350,000 in 40 days.

Enabling The Cube In Feisty’s “Desktop Effects” : Ubuntu Tutorials : Breezy – Dapper – Edgy – Feisty

Chad

I found something this evening in passing that I wanted to pass on to the rest of you. It’s a small fix that will allow the Cube to function properly with the current setup of Feisty and the desktop effects. Currently you can get the wobbly windows but no Cube.

In any event, try the tip below to get the Cube to function if you’d like to stick with Compiz (vs Beryl).

gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/hsize 4
gconftool-2 –type int –set /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/number_of_desktops 1

Via: Ubuntu Tutorials

Filed my first bug report

Chad

I’ve submitted a bug report(my first ever) to the Ubuntu developers, because of a reproducible error with Filezilla in Feisty Fawn. Here’s a little lead-up to why I felt I needed to submit this(Normally if something doesn’t work right, I just wait until it gets fixed or find another program to use).

Last weekend I dumped my Arch Linux install and opted to go with a the latest testing release of Feisty Fawn. For the most part everything worked quite well, I’m really impressed with the pre-release of Ubuntu. During this week, Filezilla(my FTP client of choice) worked just fine. Now, this past Friday evening, I wanted to completely redo the configuration of my laptop. I dual-boot with a XP partition for work and I wanted to make my XP partition even smaller so I chose to do the whole laptop again. Since I was happy with my Feisty experience from the prior week, I decided to install it again. I used the exact same media I used about a week ago. Now for some reason I had more issues. I had a difficult time getting the ATI proprietary drivers working properly. And for some reason Filezilla did not work. This really stunk as I spend quite a bit of time FTP’ing between servers. Why would Filezilla work with one install and not in a second, identical install? Just to make sure I didn’t make a mistake, I went ahead and reinstalled Feisty again. Sure enough, Filezilla still does not work.

Here are the details of the bug. When Filezilla is launched for the first time, it creates a hidden folder in the Home directory called .filezilla. If that directory does not exist, the app segfaults. But does create the folders. With the folder there, the program launches, but can never successfully list remote directories. The segfault could be recreated by deleting the .filezilla directory.

Now because I don’t like any other available FTP client, and I didn’t believe the issue was anything specific to me, I created a launchpad account and filed a report for Filezilla. Within minutes of my entry, I received an email asking for more info. I went ahead and got them the debugging info they were looking for. Now as of this morning, there have been a few more reports from the community and my bug has been listed as a duplicate, but the cool thing is that it has been confirmed and patch already submitted. Now I just need to sit back wait for an updated release via apt-get. Fun stuff!

Finally have a working Arch Linux install

Chad

For some reason, I’m really drawn to Arch Linux. I’ve used it in the past(probably a couple of years ago), with decent success. However, recently I’ve been wanting to try it again, but am having many issues. I won’t go in to the issues I’m having, yet, as I haven’t researched deeply in to them, and want to before I start bad-mouthing the distro.

That being said, I got a full working Arch Linux install up and running last night in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The only trick I had to do was choose the IDE-Legacy boot option during the install. After that, everything just worked. And what was amazing to me, is that networking was working from the get go on it, and I was using my laptop via wireless. So VirtualBox must pass whatever networking the host computer is using to it’s virtual adapter. Thats was cool and somewhat unexpected.

Once the base was installed, I was easily able to install gdm, gnome, xfce , and fluxbox and everything worked perfectly. I’m really liking Xfce, and Arch already has the latest(4.4) available in its repositories. So that was cool to check out. I did get an error installing xfce4-goodies though, but it wasn’t a show stopper.

Arch is fast. Even in a virtual machine, everything is very snappy. I really want to get it working on my workstation or even my laptop as the main install.

Permissions error using VirtualBox

Chad

I downloaded and installed VirtualBox on my Debian Etch laptop and I experienced a permissions error the first time I tried to start a virtual machine, however it worked fine running as root. The fix is easy and was found in the FAQ of the VirtualBox website.

If you get a message saying “VirtualBox kernel driver not accessible, permission problem” when starting VirtualBox right after installation, make sure that your user account is listed in the vboxusers group. The installation takes care creating that group, but you will need to manually add all users to it that should be allowed to run VirtualBox. As root, for each such user, run usermod -G vboxusers -a . If any of the affected users are currently logged in, they need to log out for the changes to take effect. In case any user already attempted to start VirtualBox before logging out (which launches the VBoxSVC service process with incorrect permissions), that user additionally needs to run VirtualBox shutdown from the command line to terminate the service. This solves the permission problems. (Alternatively, a reboot will help as well.)