Ubuntu Graphics Session Fix after botched Kernel Upgrade

Overview
This post is about restoring graphics to your Linux Desktop session if you install some kernel updates that don't go so well. Particularly, ones that fail with your graphics drivers.

Quick Steps
If you get error message (when trying to upgrade kernel packages or kernel drivers): "Skipping (driver build) at this time because kernel-source is missing." Try the following steps:

Note: `uname -r` is a commandline option which will auto-substitute your kernel version and architecture into the install command. If installing via a GUI, just use the info output from running the console command `uname -r`.

sudo apt-get install linux-source-`uname -r` linux-headers-`uname -r`

If this does not automatically cause your nvidia drivers to compile, cause a manual install with:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

If that still doesn't work, try uninstalling and reinstalling nvidia-current.


Background
Today I noticed there were some kernel updates in Ubuntu, but they had been kept back. So I decided to manually install them, since they did not appear to be causing any package conflicts. I do updates from command line with 'apt-get' (because I'm awesome that way *wink*). While installing the held-back packages, being kernel updates, it tried to accommodate my Nvidia graphics drivers.

Apparently, this failed. I noticed the error on the console, and immediately downgraded my kernel back to the previous versions. But alas, it did no good. I rebooted and was confronted with a text-only machine. Now, I'm fine with this, since I spend a lot of time on console. (Screen, vim, ssh, and elinks are usually all I need for most rescue operations. Sometimes rtorrent, wget, and curl are handy too.)

After trying to get the packages to jive well together, I gave up trying to juggle the kernel packages and instead focused on the Nvidia drivers. I tried installing the nvidia-current package provided by the Ubuntu repositories. (I was running a later version from a PPA.). This failed, but triggered the same error.

"Skipping (driver build) at this time because kernel-source is missing." Now, I've seen this error before. So I quickly installed the linux-source-`uname -r` package. This did not quite do the trick, and I have been around long enough to know that the source-packages often require the header packages as well. So I install linux-headers-`uname -r` package.

Once installed that, I didn't even have to do anything. The system automatically compiled the missing nvidia drivers and installed them for me. A quick reboot later, and now I am blogging about this simple solution.

How to replace Pidgin certificates (the GUI method)

This morning I tried Pidgin and got an error message saying:

"Unable to validate certificate. The certificate for omega.contacts.msn.com could not be validated."

For the record, the problem isn't on Pidgin's end – it's a misconfiguration of the MSN servers. Here is a short term fix until the problem on Microsoft's end is fixed.

How to replace your certificate (the GUI method)

Go to pidgin's Tools->Certificates. Remove the old certificate. Don't close this window yet. (You can, but it is easier to not).

With your browser, go to https://omega.contacts.msn.com. It will give you "Directory Listing Denied"error.

With Firefox, click on the lock symbol in the lower right corner. This will display dialog box about the page info. Click the button "View Certificate." On the window that pops up, go to the Details tab. Click on the "Export" button to export the certificate to a file.Call it whatever you like.

Now, go back to the pidgin Tools->Certificates dialog. Click the "Add" button to add the newly exported certificate. I had to specify the hostname as explicitly: omega.contacts.msn.com

This was the only way I could get it to work.

Harddrive Space Disappearance and Freespace

Overview
This is just a quick list of places to look to free up space on your harddrive when using KDE. (In this article, I am dealing with version 4, but some of it does work for version 3 too.) This can be helpful if you ever suffer an anomaly of used space you just can't seem to locate and free up under the great KDE desktop.

Background Information
Sometimes rarely in Linux (running KDE) I receive the message that I'm running low on diskspace on my root (/) partition. (I only give it about 15 GBs total.) After emptying my Trash, most of the space on root (/) was still in use. So I began to dig around to find out the cause of this.

Akonadi
Size: 140.9 MB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/akonadi
Though I own a Droid X smartphone, I do not use any of KDE's utilities to synchronize my devices. So I was quite surprised to see it taking up that much space. Please note, this is not the location of the installed program, just some data it had accrued about me personally and stored in my home directory.

Nepomuk
Size: 378.2 MB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk
Since no services in KDE actually use Nepomuk (and no programs I know of connect to it), currently is a 100% completely useless service. Don't let it run on your system, since it will only take up space and resources that you cannot use.

Thumbnails
Size: 4.6 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.thumbnails
Now this one makes sense. I collect literally tens-of-thousands of images and regularly browse them, so I'm not surprised this is so large. Still, it would be nice to specify a limit to the size of this folder.

Clearing out this folder took a bit of skill. I had over 100,000 files in this directory total, and even doing `rm .thumbnails/normal/*` threw a rarely seen error: "Argument list too long"

The simple solution is just to delete the sub folder 'normal' and 'large' inside of '.thumbnails'. I could tell you some nifty console commands to hack around this, but this works just fine.


Apt cache (a.k.a. the System Package Cache)
Size: 1.3 GB (on my system)
Location: /var/cache/apt/archives/
If you are not a seasoned and knowledgeable Linux user, chances are you don't know about this one. Whenever you install any new updates or packages through any number of GUI / Graphical front-ends (such as Synaptic or Software Management) or through command-line program like dpkg or apt, all downloaded files (called packages) have to be placed somewhere while downloading. This location varies a little between Linux distributions, like Ubuntu versus Red Hat. Under Ubuntu and Debian (and any Debian forks) are placed in /var/cache/apt/archives. This can become very full with lots of temporary download files. There are a couple of ways to clear this folder out. My favorite is simply from command line:

sudo apt-get clean

Yum/DNF cache (a.k.a. the System Package Cache)
Size: 1.3 GB (on my system)
Location: /var/cache/yum/
If you are not a seasoned and knowledgeable Linux user, chances are you don't know about this one. Whenever you install any new updates or packages through any number of GUI / Graphical front-ends (such as Synaptic or Software Management) or through command-line program like dpkg or apt, all downloaded files (called packages) have to be placed somewhere while downloading. This location varies a little between Linux distributions, like Ubuntu versus Red Hat. Under Ubuntu and Debian (and any Debian forks) are placed in /var/cache/yum. This can become very full with lots of temporary download files

You should manually clear any folders of files you don't need.

Wine
Size: 5.0 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.wine
The Wine folder. I was pretty surprised by this one also. All my Windows applications are installed in non-home-directory locations and I haven't done much with Wine lately, so this folder should have been relatively small. After doing some quick checking, I found the folder (.wine/drive_c/users/MY_USER_NAME/Local Settings/Temporary Internet Files) to be the culprit. I suspect this came from updating a videogame of mine recently, since it had a multiple Gigabytes to download and install.

Trash Files (Lost/Forgotten)
Size: 2.0 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.local/share/Trash/files/
Even after emptying the Trash through the regular interface, some large files persisted. I found them here and manually deleted them. (Side Note: I have to say, though I generally love KDE, their trash system is fairly broken with two major problems. The first is if you open the Trash to look inside, it copies all the files to the /tmp/kde-username/ folder, consuming harddrive space. In my case, I let my trash become huge, so this immediately fills up all freespace on the root / partition. This is a terrible bug they absolutely should have fixed years ago. The other problem is, like this situation, occasionally letting files slip through the cracks and not be correctly deleted.)

KTorrent Magnet Links
Size: 8.3 GB (on my system)
Location: ~/.kde/share/apps/kio_magnet
There is a bug with the KDE IO Slave for using Magnet Links in Ktorrent. Instead of downloading files using the temporary storage directory as specified within KTorrent, it dumps them to this location. That's a serious problem. The easy fix to remove this directory, and create a symbolic link (with the same name) to some temporary folder wherever you want.


Hope that helps you clear up some space on your home-directories and root partitions.

Update 1: Added the Wine section.
Update 2: Added the forgotten Trash files section.
Update 3: Added KIO_Magnet /KDE Magnet Links section.

MPlayer / SMPlayer problems in Ubuntu 10.10

I'm current having some small problems with SMPlayer in Ubuntu 10.10. I'm not sure what the cause is but I'm fairly certain it relates to the recent switch to Kernel Direct-Rendering-Management (DRM) and Nvidia drivers. I say this partly because I am noticing other small video glitches but for the most part they are not worth even mentioning.

However specifically there seems to be problems with trying to use VDPAU. (If you don't know what that is, in a nutshell it is letting your videocard's CPU, often called a GPU, do video playback/decoding for you, which is faster than using your main CPU as well as leaving the system CPU free for other tasks.)

While the problems with VDPAU are hard to pin down (I'm having trouble finding an exact bug report to list here), I have found a small fix to help with my other SMPlayer problems.

I have started using daily compiled MPlayer packages from this PPA.

https://launchpad.net/~motumedia/+archive/mplayer-daily

It seems to have helped with smoothing playback in other areas where I might get lockups when I would use some more exotic SMPlayer/MPlayer feature.

Rip Subtitles from YouTube (and Google Video)

Rip Subtitles from YouTube (and Google Video)

Today I needed to extract some subtitles from a cute video I found on YouTube, and I tracked down this piece of software that lets you do it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/google2srt/

It's a very simple program, but it does the job. Simply give it the URL of the target video, optionally give it a file-path to where you want the output SRT (subtitle) file to be saved, and hit Read. It will present you with a list of the subtitles it can find at that URL address. Check the subs you want, and hit GO. It will save them for you.

It saves the subs in SRT, which is a generic and well supported Subtitle format. In the case of most video players, if you name the SRT file exactly the same name as the video file, when opening the video in a media-player the program usually automatically detects the subs and enables them for you. (Or if your media-player doesn't, you should get a better one that does, like SMPlayer or VLC.)

How to Edit a Configuration File

HOW TO EDIT A CONFIGURATION FILE

New users to Linux may have trouble editing configuration text files at first. I'll try to be simple, and this guide is for people using Gnome or KDE.

The simplest way is using a user friendly program. In Gnome (which is normal Ubuntu), the default text editor is gedit. In KDE (in Kubuntu) it is Kate. Also, this is a protected system file, so you need to use special Administrator privileges before you can edit it. Don't worry. This is simply.

In this example I am showing how to open a BlueTooth configuration file, but it works for any other example configuration files.

KDE

In KDE, you need to find the "Run Command" option the Application menu. (The App menu is usually in the lower left-hand corner, with a colorful K-button.) In KDE4's new menu style, the "Run Command" is (currently) under the 'Computer' section, near the top of the small list. Find the option and click it.

In the input box that displays, copy/paste the this command into it and press enter:

kdesu kate /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

The 'kdesu' program tells the system you want to run the text editor (kate) with Admin access. You will be prompted for your individual user password, which you enter. Then kate should open with a file ready for you. (This is the /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules file which we told kate to open for us.) If this file does not open, you can open it manually by going to menu File -> Open... and then navigating to the '/' root directory, down to 'lib' and so on until you find the file ' 70-hid2hci.rules'.

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit Kate.

GNOME

In Gnome, first open the Terminal through the Application menu. (The App menu is usually in the upper left-hand corner, labeled as Applications.) On my system, it is under Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal.

In the input command window that displays, copy/paste the this command into it and press enter:

gksu gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

The 'gksu' tells the system you want to run the text editor (gedit) with Admin access. You will be prompted for your individual user password, which you enter. Then gedit should open with a file ready for you. (This is the /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules file which we told gedit to open for us.) If this file does not open, you can open it manually by going to menu File -> Open... and then navigating to the '/' root directory, down to 'lib' and so on until you find the file ' 70-hid2hci.rules'.

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit gedit. You can close the Terminal also.

Hope that helps.

Network Management Disabled

I am surprised I have not mentioned this before. This is a recurrent bug that's been cropping up in KDE 4 since version 4.3 as far as I can tell. (It may have started later, so don't quote me on the exact date, and it might have nothing to do with KDE itself, and might be an Ubuntu thing.)

The symptoms are the computer boots, the desktop environment loads (Gnome, KDE, etc.) and there is no Internet, when there should be. You click on the Network Manager and it tells you "Network Management Disabled." Bug report here. This bug has come and gone for me for a while now.

The problem is an incorrectly configured configuration file. (Basically, this is a bug that should never have happened but it did. Thankfully it's easy to fix.)

Open this file /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state with Admin privileges, and make the following changes. (If you need help on editing a system text file / configuration file, see this Article for a simple New Users guide.)

NetworkingEnabled=false

to

NetworkingEnabled=true

Save the file and close it. There may be a system service you can restart, but I cannot recall it at this time. Just reboot and your network should return to normally.

Source: I copied this article verbatim from http://www.unixmen.com/linux-distributions/4-ubuntu/1069-ppasearch-a-tool-that-search-and-add-ppa-repository-in-ubuntu-via-command-line

I am only keeping it as a personal backup here in case it moves. All credit goes to them for presenting this great tool.

PPASEARCH is a nice tool that search launchpad PPAs via command line and add them to Ubuntu repositories, it is available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

The use of PPAsearch is easy, just open terminal and type ppasearch .

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Open terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wrinkliez/ppasearch

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get  install ppasearch

Using PPASEARCH:

For example i want to search for deluge ppa, open terminal and type:

ppasearch deluge

You will got a list of PPAs that contain the package deluge, choose one by typing the number and confirm.

The EULA is sometimes only a one way deal

I just read this post over here: http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/08/it-is-windows-world.html

And I knew it was something I just had to pass along here. The story summary is this: The article is about the person who wants to get a refund for the bundled Windows 7 copy that arrived on his computer. He read the manufacturer EULA (End User License Agreement) and it clearly states they will handle refunds for things like the software. So he calls them up and navigates through the phone-center-maze for multiple hours. He even goes as far as contacting the specific store he bought the item from. All say they do not do refunds for the software. He eventually calls the higher supervisors at ASUS back, and they flat out tell him they do not handle this, despite it being clearly written in their EULA that they do.

I like the poster's comment at the end. If we, the user, should break the EULA we can get our asses sued, but if the company decides to mess around with you, we the user are ... sore out of luck?

This is yet another reason why I, for entirely personal experiences and reasons, never buy ASUS products. I keep hearing great experiences from friends involving ASUS, but all of my numerous experiences with them have been various degrees of disaster and frustration. To be clear, I am not saying ASUS is the only company to do this. I know for a fact hundreds, if not thousands, would do the same in an instant. I'm just saying... well, it's ASUS. I don't buy from them.

This is another reason why Linux users should never ever have to buy a copy of Windows. 99% of us already have been forced to pay for some bundled copy of the software we neither want, nor can use, and certainly cannot refuse. I personally have been forced to pay for at least three bundled copies of Windows, and I sure has hell will never use them. It is for this reason I feel pride and triumphant when I use Windows products without paying for them. (Yeah, I do. Just try and sue me). At this point, I have more than paid for every copy of Windows I use.

KDE 4.5 Review: Bugs return!

So I've been using KDE 4.5 since the evening it came out. I don't know what it is about every time the KDE claims "this is a stabilizing release" but it seems to be the opposite of my experience. This is easily the buggiest point release of KDE since their last "stabilizing release" of KDE 4.3.

Now admittedly, the list of bugs is small... but they are hitting my hard and frequently. Very frequently. Usually about 12 to 20 times a day. I am hoping (and I'm pretty certain) these bugs are just for my installation.

Konqueror: I use Konqueror as my file manager, and since the upgrade about twice an hour it has a total lockup/total freeze for a duration of anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds. It's pretty horrendous sometimes. It also won't let me close tabs on occasion. There have been some more minor but less frequent bugs but I lost track.

User management: I cannot add a new user to my system, at least not through the GUIs nicely provided by KDE. I wanted to add a new one so I could check his default Konqueror configuration settings against my own. BUT creating a user is proving problematic, since after I create one and set it's password, I switch sessions to log in with it. However, at the login screen it asks me to change the password (root required) it says. HOWEVER YOU CANNOT TYPE ANYTHING INTO THE BOX. At first I thought it was an error with my wireless USB keyboard, so grumbling I plugged in a wired keyboard, but it actually made it worse (the mouse cursor stopped working when I did that). So I cannot log in with the new user I created. That's.... pretty hilariously bad.

Plasma: Presenting all Windows is slow. I don't know why because everything else seems better. This is a pretty minor bug because it does not really impair functionality, mostly. Sometimes it is so slow the cursor doesn't reach the correct window in time when enter is pressed or the window is clicked

Klipper: It stays open after you select some previous entry. It stays this way unless you click it closed. Perhaps this is a feature?

Kubuntu KDE 4.5 Upgrade Problem and solution

So I just did an dist-upgrade of my Kubuntu 10.04 system running KDE 4.4 to KDE 4.5. Upon a reboot, there was a problem. I had no desktop. Just a blank black screen.

So I began to dig around to see what the problem was.

SOLUTION
The solution was to install the package 'kubuntu-desktop' which triggered a group other packages to be installed (such as kdebase-workspace-bin, for example). This group turned out to have everything I was missing. I have NO idea why these packages were not install during the upgrade, but this has been a weird one. (During the past few days, when checking if I had any updates, I was presented with what looked like have available dist-upgrades to KDE 4.5, which would have resulted in some strange installations AND removals had I applied it. I can only assume this was because the packages in the repositories were being updated over a few days and thus the lists had some old and new mixes that didn't jive quite perfectly until all were updated.)

Also, during the install I failed to update the /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc file to the newest version (my fingers slipped on the keyboard, if you can believe it). I don't think this was the cause of my problems, but I did manually upgrade that just to make sure.

Noteably ktorrent is not available in the Kubuntu PPAs because of a version dependency. Strange. Hope they fix that soon.

Synergy configuration example

For a year or more, I have been using the program called Synergy to control multiple computers from a single machine with a single keyboard and mouse. Synergy is available for most Linux distributions, but it is also interesting to note the original program has not been upgraded since 2006.

Synergy+ is a maintenance fork for implementing bug fixes to the original Synergy by Chris Schoeneman, which hasn't any source updates or new releases since 2006 (as of writing this). If you experience any odd problems with your Synergy that are not configuration bugs, try using Synergy+ instead.

My configuration of Synergy is slightly more complex than your average one. The main differences are that the top and bottom 5% of each screen are not shared, so you can safely use the buttons and window-controls in each corner without problems of jumping to adjoining screens. Also, I have a Logitech Revolution MX mouse, which has about 9 buttons. I have added mouse button configuration to make sure I can use Thumb buttons for Forward-History and Back-History. (Without this configuration, my machines were disconnecting from each other.)

In this example, I have two screens. Misty is on the Left, and Jenny is one the Right.

section: screens
Jenny:
Misty:
end
section: links
Jenny:
left(10,90) = Misty
Misty:
right(10,90) = Jenny
end
section: options
mousebutton(6) = keystroke(WWWBack)
mousebutton(7) = keystroke(WWWForward)
mousebutton(4) = ;
mousebutton(5) = ;
end

I hope this example configuration file is helpful to any viewers.

(And by the way viewers, connections with Synergy are not encrypted, meaning not secure. It is open to monitoring, so if you type something critical or secret, it can possibly be viewed. To secure Synergy, you should tunnel it through a secure connection, like SSH for example.)

Ubuntu Logitech diNovo Edge Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard

I use the Logitech diNovo Edge in Ubuntu/Kubuntu and I love it. When I installed Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid, this wireless keyboard failed to work. The bluetooth device manager kept prompting me to connect and pair the device with a PIN but nothing I did ever worked.

UPDATE/EDIT: This problem has been reported in version dating from 10.04 to 11.04. This solution works for those, but there is a slightly different solution for 11.10.

Here is the solution / fix for getting the keyword to work. The source for this information is here.

Edit the file: /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

(If you need help editing a file, see bottom section.)

Change this line:

# Logitech devices
KERNEL=="hiddev*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

to

KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d", ATTRS{idProduct}=="c70[345abce]|c71[34bc]", \
RUN+="hid2hci --method=logitech-hid --devpath=%p"

I have made the changed sections BOLD. I also turned bluetooth off from the icon in the system tray.

After making this change, I turned on my wireless keyboard, unplugged it's bluetooth dongle, plugged it back in, paired the keyword with the dongle, and a few seconds later it worked. I did not even have to reboot.

HOW TO EDIT THE FILE (for those who need help with this stage)

New users to Linux may have trouble editing text files at first. I'll try to be simple, and this guide is for people using Gnome or KDE.

The simplest way is using a user friendly program. In Gnome (which is normal Ubuntu), the default text editor is gedit. In KDE (in Kubuntu) it is Kate. Also, this is a protected system file, so you need to use special Administrator privileges before you can edit it. Don't worry. This is simply.

KDE

In KDE, you need to find the "Run Command" option the Application menu. (The App menu is usually in the lower left-hand corner, with a colorful K-button.) In KDE4's new menu style, the "Run Command" is (currently) under the 'Computer' section, near the top of the small list. Find the option and click it.

In the input box that displays, copy/paste the this command into it and press enter:

kdesu kate /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

The 'kdesu' program tells the system you want to run the text editor (kate) with Admin access. You will be prompted for your individual user password, which you enter. Then kate should open with a file ready for you. (This is the /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules file which we told kate to open for us.) If this file does not open, you can open it manually by going to menu File -> Open... and then navigating to the '/' root directory, down to 'lib' and so on until you find the file ' 70-hid2hci.rules'.

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit Kate.

GNOME

In Gnome, first open the Terminal through the Application menu. (The App menu is usually in the upper left-hand corner, labeled as Applications.) On my system, it is under Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal.

In the input command window that displays, copy/paste the this command into it and press enter:

gksu gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules

The 'gksu' tells the system you want to run the text editor (gedit) with Admin access. You will be prompted for your individual user password, which you enter. Then gedit should open with a file ready for you. (This is the /lib/udev/rules.d/70-hid2hci.rules file which we told gedit to open for us.) If this file does not open, you can open it manually by going to menu File -> Open... and then navigating to the '/' root directory, down to 'lib' and so on until you find the file ' 70-hid2hci.rules'.

Edit the file as directed earlier in this article. Save the file, close the file (menu File -> Close), and then finally exit gedit. You can close the Terminal also.

Hope that helps.

Google Still Not Evil

I probably shouldn't be posting this, since I feel commenting on anything related to politics is foolish on the Internet, but I'm doing it anyway. (Perhaps I'll delete this post later.)

Google is Still Not Evil.

I hear people talk about this and to be honest, I try not to be disdainful of their thoughts but it's hard.

GMail: If you worry about Google reading your email when using Gmail, there's a solution: Don't use it. Good Lord people, it's a great free service, but you aren't required to use it.

Do be honest, it's basically impossible for your email to not be ready by any modest sized email provider now days. For spam purposes alone your email is scanned. Not to mention there are other things being watched for. About the only way you can be "safe in your privacy" is to run your own email service, and even then that won't be a guarantee. Email isn't very secure to begin with and people need to realize that.

But I'm not done here. Gmail is awesome, and it's free. Do you remember the days of 10MB inboxes? I sure do. Do you remember the days of abysmal email interfaces? Thank God Google came along and improved things. (Though some old companies still haven't got with the program of using anything beyond HTML 2.0 or HTML 3.2. I'm looking at you Yahoo.)

Google Search: If Google started censoring their stuff, people can always choose to use something else. Though they are censoring things now, but that's not because they want to but because Government's and independent Agencies ask them to (like the RIAA and MPAA).

Google Earth: Paranoid much? Get over yourselves. You can tell Google not to map your private residence. (I know at least two people that have done such.) But you have to be a private estate or some-such and if you whine about not having a private place... that's not their problem. As far as seeing them as Big Brother for mapping the whole earth, you are just being an anti-big organization paranoid person, because Lord knows many Governments and probably numerous companies have already done this. At least Google's been upfront and honest about it.

Google Phone GSP: You think that just because your phone has GSP, that suddenly now you can be found? Um... unless you had powers of invisibility, you could be found before, albeit it not as quickly. Your cellphone can be tracked by cellphone tower transmitters along, alone. Let's also not forget that Google Phone's are not the only ones with GSP. Numerous phones have them, from many companies and providers. Honestly, this point alone is just banal and so are those people who worry about it.

Google Phone: I have not heard this argument spoken much but some people, namely Steve Jobs, seems to think Google is in fact being evil because they entered the cellphone business. Umm.... Steve, aren't you just being juvenile because you now have to share the cellphone-industry sandbox? Seriously, Google has just as much right to venture into that industry as you did to make your portable music player. Nay, strike that. They had more rights, because they made (good) software, not hardware, whereas you often make both. Grow up Steve. Sometimes I respect you, and other times I wonder if you've gone off your medication.

Google Chrome: People worry about it being closed source. ... Wait, what? People worry about Chrome, but you don't worry about Internet Explorer, the Blackhole for Viruses and Security vulnerabilities? Or what about Safari? Opera? They are all closed source. Most people seem to single out Chrome for some reason as dangerous because it's closed source. Well, again, all I can say is you can always use another browser. There are plenty now, and if openness matters, you know where to go: www.getfirefox.com

I'm aware people worry that it watches your activity and possibly stores the information, in the supposed interests of providing better features and usability for you. If you don't like being watched and recorded however, get a different browser. Simple as that.


YouTube: This isn't mentioned by people when talking about how evil Google is becoming. That's probably because it's a point in their favor mostly. Google spends multiple millions of dollars a year to keep YouTube running, because that website has never made a single penny of profit. But they've done more than just keep it running. They've added numerous great features, most prominent among them being higher quality video. That's just awesome.



Conclusion
The list of great things Google provides we the people for free goes on and on. (Something that neither Apple nor Microsoft can boast. Certainly not for free, and in my opinion, not even with price disregarded.) Google contributes every single year to the free open source community, something you don't see Microsoft do very often and certainly not for the many early years of their history.

Honestly people, Google isn't forcing you to use their products and they are still free. If you are worried about misuse of power, you ought to be flipping outraged at Microsoft. You'd have trouble getting away from them and they sure has hell are not free. (For more information, check out http://techrights.org/)

In conclusion, because I don't want to talk about this anymore, I've yet to see one decent piece of convincing evidence to show that Google is Evil or becoming Evil.

Command to Logout / Shutdown / Restart KDE4

There may be another easier way to do this, but this command will bring up a dialog box with the options to Logout / Restart or Shutdown KDE4.

qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer org.kde.KSMServerInterface.logout 1 -1 -1

This is useful for when Plasma crashes and will not restart. (I actually have no idea how to manually restart plasma.)

KDE Compositing Won't Enable

Today, I started KDE and for some reason Compositing was disabled, and my System Settings icon was missing from its normal place in the KDE Menu. I could not re-enable Compositing. I suspect the problem is because of some recent software upgrades I loaded for KDE 4.4.2. Here is how I fixed my problem. Hopefully it will help others.

General Troubleshooting
To make sure there was no problem with my computer, I did a simple but easy test. I created a new user through KDE's system, and logged into that account. Everything worked fine. So, I knew it was a configuration file problem.

I could now compare the new account's config files (which reside in the an individual's home directory and typically start with a '.' or are stored in a directory starting with a '.'). Comparing the new account's config files against my own. I was able to eliminate quickly all of the non-KDE config files fairly quickly.

I made a backup of the .kde/ directory in my home directory, using a tar file. Then that directory, I used a simple divide-and-conquer technique for finding the troubled files. Instead of checking the over 100 config files from my directory, I simply copied the first half of the new account's config files over my own, and logged-out-logged-in to KDE to check if that fixed the problem. If not, I tried the other half, and repeating the eliminating half until I found the files the troublesome files.

Solution
The files in question was all prefixed with kwin. Had I guessed intelligently I would have tried these first. But simply overwriting all the kwin related files in ~/.kde/share/config/ with the newly created account files (which were probably created from defaults) fixed my problem. Compositing was restored and all I had to do was reset a few minor customizations I had before.

KDE 4.4 Feature: Drag to edge to Maximize

I do not like the new feature in KDE 4.4 for dragging a window to top of the screen to maximize it. Here is how to disable this feature.

Open System settings -> Workspace Behavior -> Screen Edges

Now deactivate:
* Maximize windows by dragging them to the top of the screen

Thanks to commentors for the updated info.

Fix Pidgin's Google IM "Lost Connection with server" error

(Please note this fix was some time ago with an older version of Pidgin, and older versions of Gtalk. Particularly the address 'talk.gmail.com' doesn't always work.)

Recently I encountered an old error in Pidgin, and here is my solution to it. While visiting a network at a local college, my Google IM account throws this error in Pidgin:

Lost connection with server: Connection reset by peer

Here is how to fix this.

1. From within the main Pidgin window, select the menu "Accounts"-> "Manage Acconts"
2. Select the Google IM account in question. Click the "Modify..." button.
3. Check the option: Force old (port 5223) SSL
4. Uncheck the option: Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams
5. Set Connect Port: 443
6. Set Connect Server: talk.google.com
7. Click the "Save" button and re-connect with your account.

Trouble Shooting
If you get a message asking you to accept a certificate, you have probably forgot to add the Connect Server address.

Ubuntu Linux software easy download support

This is mostly a thought piece or commentary. One reason to run a very popular distribution of Linux is that it tends to be widely supported. Ubuntu is certainly one of the most popular Linux Distributions in the world.

Just today, I checked out the www.pidgin.im website and to my delight I found, under the Downloads section, an explicit area for Ubuntu. It had easy to do instructions for adding automatic Pidgin updates into your Ubuntu system. These updates are made possible by members of the community running their own complimentary APT repositories (PPAs under the Launchpad website), which Ubuntu helps provide with bandwidth, tools, tutorials, etc.

The APT system is one of the greatest inventions in computer software management history, and one of the absolutely greatest features of Linux. Ubuntu has helped foster spreading of the marvel and ease of the APT system.

So, the one line conclusion: The APT system is great (if you didn't already know) and Ubuntu is continuing too expand and make great use of it.

Firefox plugin support under Ubuntu

So for some of you, this will be old news, but it was new to me.

In times (not so long) past, a major complaint concerning Linux was its plugin support for browsers. Namely, if you went to a website that needed, for example, QuickTime... Firefox would inform you that a certain plugin was missing and that's about as far as it would help. Installing the plugin (and anything else needed) would fall to the user, and sometimes that task was not easy.

Ubuntu continues to make the user experience better in their distribution, since they apparently have a solution to this problem. Ubuntu provides a package program called Ubufox which will assist users in automatically install plugins as necessary. It's a simple "Enter your password" and click Next solution, and doesn't get much smoother than that. I used this for the first time today and I didn't even have to restart Firefox. It just worked.

I haven't found something this nice since they automated Nvidia driver installation with the (KDE/Gnome)-Jockey program. Nicely done once again Ubuntu.

Firefox add-on/extension woes -- Corrupt profile

UPDATE: I apologize for any strong language in the original post (listed below for history's sake). I was very frustrated at the time this was happening. The short version of this story is that I had serious Firefox profile and add-on corruption issues when I updated to a particular version of Firefox 3.6, and it drove me crazy.

I found a solution. Use the bleeding edge versions of Firefox in Linux. It is shockingly stable and works great 97% of the time, seriously. Plus it's sound-barrier-shatteringly fast compared to the current stable Firefox.


OLDER POST:

So I have literally done 3 and 1/2 hours of debugging Firefox 3.6 lately and all I have to show for it is certain knowledge which plugins are causing my profile to CONTINUALLY become corrupted.

Ever since Firefox reached 3.6, I have had corrupt profile problems. This is pretty annoying, I must say, since this only very rarely happened under 3.5. Now, it should be noted I use quite a few extensions/add-ons/plugins. About 20 currently. I used to utilize more in the past.

Now, I only know the profile is somehow corrupt because Firefox 3.6 simply REFUSES to start occasionally. I have rebuilt my profile probably literally 30 times by now.

So far, any single one of these following extensions (as of today) are corrupting my Firefox 3.6 profile:

• Autopager
• Download Helper
• DownThemAll!
• FireFTP
• FireGestures
• Xmarks

I'm currently looking into what I can do, since these are probably some of my favorite add-ons, especially Xmarks, FireGestures and Autopager. At this point, I'm going to start using the Firefox debugger more in depth and also doing code comparisons between these add-ons to determine if they have any similarities between them.

UPDATE/EDIT v1:

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news: I could not figure out how to use the firefox-dbg package (the firefox debugger). Also, the source code to comb through with the above listed add-ons is huge, and seeing as how I am not a Firefox add-on programmer, it would be quite a lot of work.

The good news: I pulled down the Mozilla Daily Builds of Firefox and the corruption bugs seem to be gone for now. (WAIT, no it is not. See update v2.) It is possible this profile corruption bug has been aggravated in the currently point release which just came down the Ubuntu apt-pipe this morning, because the latest build is version 3.6.2 and the problems seem to be gone. Let's hope this is pushed out to official quickly.

UPDATE/EDIT v2:

I spoke to soon. The bug remains even in the latest daily Mozilla. Fuck this shit. I'm moving to Chrome for the time being. I am still a mozilla Firefox fan, but I can't use this right now.

As it is, even though Chrome only supports about 70% of all the add-ons I use, that is more than I can current use in Firefox. This is embarrassing and infuriating.

UPDATE/EDIT v3:

Chrome is not the answer to my problems, though it has been an interesting experiment. I have switching back to Firefox 3.5 for the time being until I can confirm where the problem lies.

UPDATE/EDIT v4:
Use the bleeding edge versions of Firefox in Linux. It is shockingly stable and works great 97% of the time, seriously. Plus it's sound-barrier-shatteringly fast compared to the current stable Firefox. The bugs are gone.

Windows plagued by 17-year old escalation bug

Back in June of last year, a vulnerability was discovered in the Windows Kernel which that allows untrusted users to take complete control of systems running most versions of Microsoft Windows.

The vulnerability resides in a feature known as the Virtual DOS Machine, which Microsoft introduced in 1993 with Windows NT, according to this writeup penned by Tavis Ormandy of Google. Using code written for the VDM, an unprivileged user can inject code of his choosing directly into the system's kernel, making it possible to make changes to highly sensitive parts of the operating system.

"You can in theory write to memory segments that are otherwise considered highly trusted and sensitive," said Tom Parker, a director in the security consulting services group at Securicon, a Washington, DC-based security practice. "So for example, malware could possibly use it to install a key logger."

The vulnerability exists in all 32-bit versions of Microsoft OSes released since 1993, and proof-of-concept code works on the XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, and 7 versions of Windows, Ormandy reported.

Ormandy said the security hole can easily be closed by turning off the MSDOS and WOWEXEC subsystems. The changes generally don't interfere with most tasks since they disable rarely-used 16-bit applications. He said he informed Microsoft security employees of the vulnerability in June.

"Regrettably, no official patch is currently available (then late January 2010)," he wrote. "As an effective and easy to deploy workaround is available, I have concluded that it is in the best interest of users to go ahead with the publication of this document without an official patch."

Microsoft security officials - who are already working double-duty responding to a potent Internet Explorer bug used to attack Google - said they are looking in to Ormandy's advisory and are not aware of attacks that target the reported vulnerability.

Early this month, Microsoft did finally put out a security update patch to this bug, more than 6 month after it was reported. Laughably in standard Microsoft quality and style, this update promptly crippled some systems with the notorious Blue Screen of Death. The systems thus falls into a reboot loop. The only way to solve the reboot looping or BSOD is by removing the patch... or such was the conclusion of thread pertaining to the issue on the MS support forums.

And people wonder why I still claim Windows isn't a very secure OS.

Microsoft Windows bugs that could be fixed, but won't be

This is just a list of the bugs I observe in Microsoft Windows that are still popping up, more than 10 years after viable solutions having been discovered. (In the case of some bugs, the time is even longer). The list is short right now but I will update it as I find more, which shall doubtless occur in time.

The follow Microsoft Windows bugs that still exist because they don't care enough about you as customers to fix them. Instead they'd rather kowtow to the RIAA and MPAA with useful system performance leeching software you never wanted and will ONLY inconvenience you. Yeah, way to go guys. Give the people stuff they'd riot about if most people knew or understood it, but never fix real problems for them.

• Virtual Memory running low / running out. [Confirmed since Windows XP, until currently today (2010-02-06) with Windows 7]. It should be noted this still occurs on machines equipped with tons of memory.
• File System Fragmentation (with NTFS and/or FAT32). [Confirmed since Windows 2000 until Windows 7]. Let's not even start on the abysmal performance of Microsoft File Systems.
• Rebooting (still too frequently). Need I say more? Every single update that is security related requires an update, and not just those. Too much I tell you, especially for a system that is so horribly insecure.

This List is not necessarily Bugs, though they are still problems that COULD and SHOULD have been fixed decade(s) ago.

• Slow Windows Update Downloads. There is no excuse for this. Honestly, none. Not anymore anyway.
• Slow Windows Update Execution. I really forget how long these can take sometimes and just accept this as normal. It's pretty ridiculous when I take a moment to notice it.
  

Modify / Disable Logitech Mouse Search Button

Overview
On some computer mice with extra buttons, some buttons will trigger a search commend. In Ubuntu, clicking this button will just open your browser to your default search engine. Here are details on how to make sure you have control of your mouse button, so it does not bug the hell out of you.

Background Details
Until recently, I was never plagued by this truly abysmal feature. I had remapped this little button my Logitech MX to be "go up a directory" which I frequently used in my file manager and image viewer. It was very handy.

But on a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, suddenly my wonderful mouse was cursed with this abysmal feature. The source is your Desktop environment.

Disabling The Feature
In KDE 4.4.2, go to System Settings -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Global Keyboard Settings -> khotkeys.

Find the option for Search and disable whatever key is set.

I hope that helps all of you.

Finding the Button Key Code (Optional)
Sometimes it useful to determine what your mouse-button's keycode is. For this, we use the program 'xev.' ('xev' is part of the X-Windows system under Linux, so chances are you probably already have it on your Linux machine and do not need to install it).

Open a console, and enter the xev command. It will dump a lot of information to your terminal. Simply click the button you are curious about, and then carefully close the small graphical window that popped up. (Do this by only moving your mouse over the window-manager boards of the window, not the content area of the window, if you can. If you do move your mouse over the content area, you will see a lot more info output to your terminal, which will be slightly more work to comb through.)

Here is some sample output (from my system):

.....
FocusIn event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
mode NotifyUngrab, detail NotifyAncestor

KeymapNotify event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
keys: 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0

KeyPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 25847246, (258,7), root:(264,28),
state 0x0, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 25847246, (258,7), root:(264,28),
state 0x8, keycode 111 (keysym 0xff52, Up), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

MappingNotify event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
request MappingKeyboard, first_keycode 8, count 248

MappingNotify event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x0,
request MappingKeyboard, first_keycode 8, count 247

KeyRelease event, serial 36, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
root 0x13c, subw 0x0, time 25847332, (258,7), root:(264,28),
state 0x0, keycode 225 (keysym 0x1008ff1b, XF86Search), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False

PropertyNotify event, serial 38, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
atom 0x187 (_NET_WM_ICON_GEOMETRY), time 25847344, state PropertyNewValue

PropertyNotify event, serial 38, synthetic NO, window 0x1800001,
atom 0x187 (_NET_WM_ICON_GEOMETRY), time 25847693, state PropertyNewValue

ClientMessage event, serial 38, synthetic YES, window 0x1800001,
message_type 0xfe (WM_PROTOCOLS), format 32, message 0xff (WM_DELETE_WINDOW)
... # This was the end of the output.

In this case, my system was seeing that pressing this small button triggered approximately three key sequences. The two I had program (Alt+Up in this case), and also something called XF86Search. This is the dreaded name for this abysmal feature.

Firefox 3.6 for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic

This news is a bit old, but Firefox 3.6 is out now. For Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, this new version is not in the official repositories yet. Here is a way to install it for yourself.

For those who don't like to download and run the files straight from the getfirefox.com website, here is an apt repository for Ubuntu which works well.

The group's website is here: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-stable

They have instructions there for adding this software repo to your system, but basically you do the follow.

1) Close down Firefox completely. This includes all download and add-on windows.

2) Add these lines to your apt-sources list. You can do this by editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list or adding them through whatever graphical package manager you use (such as KPackageKit or Synaptic).

# Firefox Stable Channel Packages
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-stable/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-stable/ubuntu karmic main

3) Add the repositories apt-authentication keys to your system, and thus help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Running this command on a console will do it for you.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com CE49EC21

4) Refresh/Update your apt lists. (This downloads the newly listed software). You can install it by using whatever graphical package manager you use (such as KPackageKit or Synaptic) or from a console with this command:

sudo apt-get update

5) Install the program Firefox. Not firefox-3.6 (which won't really give you anything). You can install it by using whatever graphical package manager you use (such as KPackageKit or Synaptic) or from a console with this command:

sudo apt-get install firefox

There. You are done. Under KDE, you should be able to just click the firefox icon in the apps menu and in all Linux system you should be able to just run the command 'firefox' to load the browser. Happy browsing.

KDE 4.3 Fails to Load after System Update (Solution)

After installing my system updates yesterday, KDE 4.3 failed to load upon reboot this morning. It boots until it reaches the KDE login screen (with KDM) but it will let me log in from there at all.

The last updates installed were:

• Package: xserver-common, version 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4.1
• Package: xserver-xorg-core, version 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4.1

Though I suspect that the recent updates to gcc/g++ and libc/libstdc++ may have also affected this. I can't be sure.

Either way, I don't know exactly what the problem was, but here is the solution I found. My '.Xauthority' file in my home directory was the problem. I don't know what was wrong with it, but after I cleared that file of all contents, KDM let me log in normally. I hope this fix works for anyone else.

NetBeans with native OS Look and Feel

I have my own system color preferences, mostly low contrast and dark, in order to be gentle on my eyes. I know Java's programs tend to have good integration into the native "Look and Feel" of the working Operating System.

I have been trying out NetBeans recently on Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic and I had not been able to get the native colors to be enabled, until just tonigh.

NetBeans needs to be invoked with the following command argument --laf .

To get GTK/QT Look and Feel working, run NetBeans with this command argument:

netbeans --laf com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel

VirtualBox wins an award for Best Technology of 2009 from InfoWorld

InfoWorld has published it's opinions on this year's best technologies, and Sun's VirtualBox 3.1 is one. They find it to be a compelling high performance, cross-platform virtualization software alternative to VMware Workstation, noting that VirtualBox definitely supersedes this competitor in scalability.

VirtualBox 3.x supports up to 32 virtual CPUs per VM, while VMware Workstation supports just 4. "Add to this improved snapshot capabilities and 2-D acceleration for virtualized applications, and you have a solution nipping at VMware's heels in the general desktop virtualization space," writes InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy.

Another feature highlighted is VirtualBox's teleportation capability. The command-line function allows users to use a simple syntax to move a VM running under VirtualBox on one system and "teleport" it to another VirtualBox system, all the while preserving the VM's runtime state.

The most remarkable feature of VirtualBox is the speed with which it has developed into a real competitor in the desktop virtualization market. "In a little over a year, Sun has turned this relatively unknown fledgling from an obscure German software developer (Innotek) into a potent threat," observes Kennedy. "Our advice to VMware (and Microsoft): Be afraid. Be very afraid."

InfoWorld article: http://www.infoworld.com/print/105458

Convenient Audio Converter for Linux

I recently discovered a handy audio conversion program that does not have much publicity (mostly because the program is written by a French person, and not covered in any English websites I could readily find).

The program is called XCFA (X Convert File Audio). It supports a wide range of conversion for input and output formats, and when using it under Ubuntu, it offers the option to (attempt to) automatically install any missing dependencies (such as support for FLAC, AAC, etc). It has additional features besides conversion, but I won't cover those here.

The general use is to start the program, go to the Files tab, and import the music you want to convert. It analyzes the input files and presents you with your options for conversion. (If you open a lot of files, it can be a little slow, but it's fast when opening just a few.) It's pretty straightforward and this is one of the nicer audio conversion tools I have used since dBpoweramp back in Windows. (I would not quite call this dBpoweramp for Linux, but it's the closest I have used in years, and certainly a viable alternative.)

Included is a picture of me using it to convert a bunch of my flac files to MP3s.

It appears to be available in Ubuntu in version 9.10 Karmic or later, which does not surprise me too much as the program is fairly new.

Virtualbox + Games = Solution to last major hurdle?

Just a quick post. This is probably old news to many of you, but I continue to have high hopes for VirtualBox solving the Gaming issue with Non-Windows system (i.e. Linux). My hope is that using VirtualBox, people will eventually be able to simply play their Windows videogames in Linux.

There are people already dabbling with this idea and things continue to improve.

Here are a couple of articles talking about success stories with gaming through VBox:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualbox-3-directx.html
http://vmetc.com/2009/07/18/video-of-working-windows-directx-games-in-virtualbox-302-on-ubuntu-904/

These articles are somewhat old and VirtualBox has already released newer versions with even more 3D acceleration support. According to some of the information I have seen about porting videogames to Linux, one of the biggest hurdles is the 3rd party applications used. This is frequently things like login software, sound systems, or anti-cheating. These are often proprietary, totally closed source, random applications that can be really a problem for porting.

Using VirtualBox, it lets Windows handle everything but the direct video rendering, which is passed up to the host OS, where it is offloaded to the resident GPU. Assuming this pass-through can be done with minimal performance loss, this option for gaming is basically awesome, since it lets Windows handle all the nasty software pitfalls.

I remember when I learned about Virtualization software years ago, and naively thought I would be able to play my videogames through it. Now several years later, this is slowly becoming a reality. Using VirtualBox, the Linux community might be able to overcome much of the last major hurdle for Linux adoptation into the Desktop Market. Namely, gaming.