with reference to my previous post , I recently reinstalled my computer at work switching to Debian Wheezy (testing). They got rdesktop 1.7.0 in their repositories which also has the fix for rdesktop , hurray π
Desktop
Adobe Air – Ubuntu Maverick – amd64 and Wimp
I’m checking out Wimp as a substitute to Spotify. My Wimp stopped working yesterday and refused to start because of ‘wrong ELF’. It turned out my Adobe air installation somehow was in 32bit, I don’t know how/why it initially worked (though 32bit apps usually work fine on 64bit Ubuntu thanks to 32bit libs) .
Anyway I came over a 64bit compiled Adobe Air package at launchpad, it installed fine and I could reinstall Wimp again.
Sun java plugin in Lucid Lynx
I still need sun’s java plugin to access my internet bank. The recent Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) have removed sun packages from the official repository. But you can still quite easily install Sun java plugin by :
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin
source: beeznest.wordpress.com
Still not friends with Ekiga
Ekiga in Ubuntu Karmic hangs with pulse
With reference to this post I finally figured out that I could after all use a Linux softphone with our iptelephony solution at work.
At first I tried Ekiga, since it’s Ubuntu’s default softphone app, but it didn’t really work, kept on hanging.
I tried Twinkle, which worked right out of the box, but using QT 3.x libs ? I just couldn’t settle with that. I don’t like to mix QT libs in my glibs environment and I REALLY don’t like to use really old QT libs if I must have them.
I took an other shot at Ekiga, and dug up this post at launchpad which solved my problems.
Upgrade to Ekiga 3.2.6 and things should be okay with Karmic, pulseaudio and Ekiga again.
Launchpad Ekiga 3.2.6 repo here.
Disable GDM in Ubuntu 9.10
When I need to disable services in Linux I’m used to symlinks in /etc/rc2.d
(for debian based distros) .
Ubuntu 9.10 doesn’t have any symlink for gdm in /etc/rc2.d
so how do I disable the freakin’ service ?
It seems gdm is started by upstart now, but they’ve also switched to grub2 and according to ubuntuforums.org we can control this from grub.
edit /etc/default/grub
Change the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash text"
And issue:
# update-grub
terminator and real transparency
Terminator is a great terminal, but running compiz it might be a bit confusing getting real transparency (if you’re one of those). With reference to the terminator man page (man 5 terminator_config), edit ~/.config/terminator/config and add these lines:
enable_real_transparency = true background_darkness = 0.7 background_type = transparent
Note: use background_darkness to adjust the level of transparency π
Ubuntu 9.10 running a Windows XP guest in virtualbox.
At work they recently switched to ip telephony, our supplier haven’t got any Linux client for their softphone so I had to install windows just to have a working phone !
So I end up running Virtualbox-ose and setting up a windows guest.
After installing windows xp (which takes AGES) I installed the softphone application, but my michrophone didn’t work in the guest environment !
The mic did work OK in Ubuntu, so I ended up debugging ( a lot).
I came over several people having the same problem + launchpad had a bug reported on the problem.
I uninstalled pulseaudio and the mic started working OK in the guest.
I had to do a
apt-get purge pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio + the rest of my packages related to pulse (found via dpkg -l | grep pulse),
except i still got libpulse-browse0 libpulse-mainloop-glib0 and libpulse0
Apt tells you it’s removing ubuntu-desktop as well, which probably is because ubuntu-desktop got pulse as a dependency or something. I find that apt-get doesn’t remove as much as aptitude wants to, so I used apt-get for this one.
I also installed gnome-alsamixer alsa alsa-firmware-loaders alsa-tools alsa-tools-gui
and reboot
note: volume control (in tray) and ‘system -> preferences -> sound’ in gnome is now broken, but I kan control sound via gnome-alsamixer
UPDATE UPDATE: see this post regarding “I no longer need windows for my companys ip telephone solution”
Usefull tool !
So I had to convert some jpg’s to pdf, I know I’ve done it before but it’s so long between each time I keep forgetting which tools I used the last time I did it.
Bitprison.net reminded me how I did it last time.
Imagemagic is just priceless !
Are my tray icons in kde 4.2.x finally working ?
I came over this post: forum.kde.org
and I got really interested when someone there says they no longer have problems with garbled icons in kde 4.2.x .
I’m still a bit reluctant to upgrade to kde 4.3 simply because kde 4.2.x which I’m running right now is almost perfect, the only thing that really annoys me are those occasionally garbled icons in the tray.
So I ended up adding the QT 4.5 repo from http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/Repositories#KDE_4.2.4 and upgraded all my qt 4.4 packages to 4.5.
My first impression after restarting kdm is that this might just have been the final milestone for me to get happy with kde 4 π