I’m roughly 10.009009 times evil *_*

Completely useless, and yet essential. Now you know :evil:

ubuntuforums members Tutorials

K.Mandla (here and there) has been reviewing and collecting tutorials from the ubuntuforums every week. This work is really impressive (both K.Mandla’s and the UF member’s) and is one of the many useful elements a Ubuntu newcomer may find useful.
Please visit the Tutorial of the Week thread, and feel free to suggest UF Tutorials in this thread. Thanks!

Known hardy bugs and workarounds

frodon has started a thread on UF to collect hardy bugs and workarounds. If you stumbled upon a bug and found a workaround, feel free to post in the thread so that the sticky can be improved.

• sudo unable to resolve host: Workaround, Bug Report 1, Bug Report 2.
• Excessive disk I/O in Firefox 3b5: Workaround, Bug report.
• Samba Shares: Workaround, Bug report.
  -Note : Basically right click on a directory and share it -> Install the needed samba server -> log out and back in -> Repeat right click on directory to share.
  Do Not Share $HOME : See Deeta’s post #7 in the “Workaround” above.
• ATI & Compiz: Rocket2DMn’s Workaround, Bug report.
• GVFS and disk usage: Workaround, Bug report.
• SATA drives not detected in IDE mode (DELL users mainly): Workaround, related thread, Bug report.
• Install VMWare Server: Workaround, not really a bug, more of a FAQ.
• VirtualBox OSE: Problem : VBox status code: -1908 (VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED). Workaround : Remove VirtualBox OSE and install the PUEL version, Bug report.
• System -> Quit takes a long time to appear: Workaround: Re-enable the gnome-power-manager in Administration-Sessions, Bug report.
• Shut down screen problem?: Workaround.
• Downgrade to Firefox 2, add-ons will not install: Workaround.
• Edit /etc/sudoers with gedit: Workaround, Bug report.
• High CPU usage in system monitor: Workaround - use top or htop in the meantime, thanks vor, Bug report - fixed upstream and currently in -proposed (may 08th 2008).
• Bluetooth headsets not working: Workaround, Bug report.
• USB devices and permissions: Workaround, Bug Report.
  - The syntax used in the 40-permissions.rules has changed with 8.04. In addition, any user changes now need to be in a user-numbered-and-named.rules file higher than 40.
  Thanks anewguy.
• Crash after installing system-config-samba: Workaround : sudo touch /etc/libuser.conf, Bug Report. Thanks kikke.

Reference

UF thread.

Update

May 08th 2008: High CPU usage in system monitor.
May 10th 2008: Bluetooth headsets not working, USB devices and permissions, Crash after installing system-config-samba.

Edit /etc/sudoers with gedit in Ubuntu Hardy Heron

I came across a UF thread that p_quarles pointed at us in the Staff area. Thanks p_quarles :).
The classic:

export EDITOR=gedit && sudo visudo

will open /etc/sudoers with visudo, which does not behave like nano any more. I’m not a vi fan, please accept my apologies, Ive said it. I’m a nano fan :)
But I understand some users feel more comfortable with gedit or other GUI text editors.

The way to go now is:

export EDITOR=gedit && sudo -E visudo

where the -E option preserves the user environment variables.

Reference

Launchpad Bug Report

.7z archives on Ubuntu hardy

I just stumbled upon this one yesterday. .7z archives were given to me but impossible to extract them on a basic hardy install. A little googling led to p7zip. The package is in the universe repositories. Just install it, and there you go, compress and extract in 7-zip format :)

Medibuntu: non-free-codecs for hardy

Due to the interest to my previous post on gutsy, here is the procedure to install non-free-codecs on hardy:

• Add the Medibuntu repositories to your sources.list:

  ## Medibuntu.
  deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free
  

• Add the key to your keyring, reload the sources.list file and install the package:

  wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs

You need to add the key if you got to this article searching for the following error:

W: GPG error: http://packages.medibuntu.org hardy Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2EBC26B60C5A2783

Here is the package description for the *codecs from Medibuntu:

bapoumba@scorpio:~$ sudo aptitude show non-free-codecs
Package: non-free-codecs
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 1.1
Priority: extra
Section: non-free/metapackages
Maintainer: Medibuntu Packaging Team <admin@lists.medibuntu.org>
Uncompressed Size: 32.8k
Depends: w32codecs
Description: Non-free codecs
 This package depends on the binaries codecs package matching your architecture
 (w32codecs for i386, w64codecs for amd64 and ppc-codecs for powerpc systems). 

 It can be safely removed.

Enjoy!

My kids Top 6 Linux games

We are leaving for a short vacation week, I’ve been begged not to leave my laptops at home. Here are the reasons why:

atanks

Once atanks (package atanks) is installed, you launch it from a terminal. The goal is to destroy other tanks before they destroy yours. You can earn “money” when you hit them and win, buy weapons, and get more powerful shields. My kids are not fluent in English, my systems are in English, they found their way around on their own.

Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid

Install the blobwars package (home page) and there will be an entry in the games menu, such as for the other games below. There was a war in the little Blobs world. You need to save all the Blobs while facing the ugly enemies and Galdov, their leader, using different weapons and ways to kill. You can turn on/off the blood effects, which are not scary. I like the “scroutch” sound the aliens make when they die ^^

Armagetron

Do you remember Tron, the movie? Armagetron is inspired from Tron. Drive a “Light Cycle”, a bike, that creates plasma walls where it goes. The closer you get to a wall, the faster you drive. Do not crash against it and force the enemies to crash by putting walls around them. Bottom line, be fast. They like the game, for short periods of time, it is quite intense, on the keyboard too..

wormux

Beware, the music can be obnoxious after a while. It’s a nice music, but it gets to my nerves. In wormux, you choose a number of teams (usually, my kids choose 4 teams), their look (dragons, foxes, bulls, pigs, etc.) and their weapons. Then you command one team and you have to exterminate the other ones. The nice thing is that you cycle through the teams. The winner is the team that has members left when all the other ones are dead.

Powermanga

Powermanga is a “shoot’em up” with manga-style drawing and lots of colors. You drive a space ship and have to destroy asteroids and enemy vessels. At times, the two youngest ones team up to use the keyboard with their little fingers and win. Side note: no music ;)

Frozen Bubble

Frozen Bubble is a classic, you launch balls to a series of other balls, they fall when you hit at least two adjacent balls with the same color. You win when all the balls are gone, before the top wall pushes them down and they hit the launcher. Some levels are easier than others. If you are too slow, the ball gets launched anyway, so hurry!

The descriptions are theirs, with their words and my own comments. All of the games are in the universe Ubuntu repositories. 3 boys, how did you guess?

When UF Staff is having fun!

We just had a forums layout upgrade:

And redistributed the roles among Staff:

Enjoy while it lasts!

Edit: looks like it’s changing, ROLF!
Edit 2: Matthew has them all :)

Hashes (#) in /boot/grub/menu.lst

/boot/grub/menu.lst is used to customize the grub bootloader. Similar to every configuration file, a hash # at the beginning of a line means it is a comment, for humans to read only. The application will ignore it. Well not quite. A special section in /boot/grub/menu.lst defaults the rule: the automagic kernel list.

### BEGIN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST
## lines between the AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST markers will be modified
## by the debian update-grub script except for the default options below

##DO NOT UNCOMMENT THEM, Just edit them to your needs

## ## Start Default Options ##
<snip>
## controls how many kernels should be put into the menu.lst
## only counts the first occurence of a kernel, not the
## alternative kernel options
## e.g. howmany=all
##      howmany=7
# howmany=all
<snip>
## ## End Default Options ##

2 hashes mean the line is a comment, 1 hash is a default option, no hash is a kernel entry. grub is special, it names drives and uses hashes its own way :)

References

UF Thread
hermanzone pages

Zotero : a browser based reference manager

I’ve always struggled to manage all my bibliography and citations, either for work (I’m a Biologist) or for Linux resources. Proprietary softwares are expensive, open source applications have limitations. As a result, I was not using anything particular, from real papers in boxes to browser bookmarks and text files full of references. Quite a pain, totally useless. This morning, a colleague pointed Zotero at me. And now I’m happy :)

Zotero is a firefox extension (also available for Netscape and Flock) working on Linux, Mac and Windows. The citations can be used offline. When browsing a page where Zotero can get the citation data, a little icon appears in the url field:

Most important, Zotero can export a bibliography to OpenOffice.org. On gutsy, no problem installing and testing the OpenOffice extension.
You can choose a standard formating style for the citations, and a custom style is in development. Sooooo nice for a scientist (for other people as well, but I cannot tell from experience)!

You have to have firefox open so that Zotero runs to create the bibliography in OpenOffice. So far, this is the only small limitation I see. As I said, I’m happy :)