hints & tricks in no particular order
22/11/2010
I recently had to setup a simple, straightforward file server. I chose to install the Turnkey File Server Appliance as it had everything I wanted, ready to use. Following a SAMBA tutorial I could set the server so Samba users can have access to shared resources. However, for a public share I wanted to have a completely […]
07/09/2010
I recently installed Pan, a newsreader for Linux that's quite good and stable, but a bit old. As a consequence, it doesn't handle SSL. Fortunately, it is possible to use a third party tool, stunnel, to do the hard work instead. First: sudo apt-get install pan stunnel4 To install both applications. Next: edit […]
17/07/2010
I use PS3 Media Server on an almost daily basis and just love it; however it sometimes gives me headaches. I wanted to play a quicktime trailer to impress a friend, but it ended up in the thing refusing to display anything else than "Corrupted Data". After a while, I found out that unchecking "Switch to tsMuxer […]
24/06/2010
I just installed a fresh Ubuntu on my old but trusted Toshiba Satellite, offering it a second youth. Everything worked perfectly but Bluetooth was not detected. The Toshiba bluetooth radio is disabled at boot, and it can only be enabled with a particular ACPI call. Sounds like a very proprietary approach... Anyway. To […]
13/09/2009
I wanted to print some random document on old but reliable HP PSC-1300 when I discovered my printer was gone -- Ubuntu wouldn't recognize it anymore! I first tried to reinstall two packages: hplip and cups, without any success. I then tried to register the printer manually, using the hp-setup utility. It would go for a […]
16/08/2009
Unfortunately, I didn't find any satisfying editing tool for my HD videos under Ubuntu -- Kino is a good tool, but it's not HD ready. There are some others, but none reaching the stability and features of say, Pinnacle Studio under Windows. I'd love to be proven wrong. However, for the time being I'll keep a XP […]
02/08/2009
I messed up my nvidia drivers quite a bit while trying to enable vdpau, to the point openGL was not working anymore and the display was suffering from many bugs. I decided to remove and reinstall the nvidia drivers. sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg select "nv" for the first screen and hit enter until it's done. Then […]
02/08/2009
I tried to enable VDPAU, which is a NVDIA API providing hardware video decoding. The key is to use up to date drivers and VDPAU enabled software. MPlayer provides VDPAU compatibility in the latest versions. However, the Ubuntu repository only has an outdated version of mplayer. I used a 3rd party repository, […]
20/07/2009
I have already tried a few UPNP servers, the best being mediatomb so far. However, I recently bought a new television which is UPNP/DLNA compatible and I had to look for something more video friendly. I found PS3MediaServer which is able to stream and transcode music, photos and video by using the well known […]
11/07/2009
Getting Windows 7 RC side by side with Ubuntu is not too difficult, but still requires some practice. I started by freeing 30 GB on my 1 TB disk. It seems too small afterwards; only 6 GB left! If I come to install the Windows 7 retail version someday, I will definitely increase the partition to say 60 or 100 GB. To do […]
06/06/2009
I've got Ubuntu installed for years on my desktop PC. I changed the hardware twice while still having a very stable distribution -- I could always boot after a major hardware upgrade. I can't say the same about Windows XP. Anyway, that's not the topic here. To migrate from my 32 bits distribution to a 64 bits version […]
03/05/2009
It is possible to list all installed packages by using the following command: dpkg --get-selections It is then theoretically possible to export a packages list dpkg --get-selections > myPackets And install these packages by importing this list dpkg --set-selections < myPackets apt-get dselect-upgrade Source […]
22/03/2009
I got into trouble when I changed my old 160 GB ata drive to a brand new 1 TB sata drive. I simply used GParted to copy the partitions over from the old disk to the new. When booting on the new disk, I got a screen filled with GRUB GRUB GRUB and so on - and no, it's not a virus. ;-) Several things I forgot about: When […]