hints & tricks in no particular order
07/09
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 […]
05/09
24/07
I'm running Windows 7 and Ubuntu on the same machine. When I boot into Windows, the clock is 2 hours behind the actual time. If I fix the time and then boot into Ubuntu, the clock is 2 hours ahead. This upsets the Windows time, and it goes on like a vicious cycle. Ubuntu gives you the choice to set UTC or not during […]
17/07
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 […]
25/06
Why would an external USB disk drive be ignored by Windows 7, while it is perfectly working on other systems and USB itself is working properly on the target PC? It took me a while to find out. In the disk management console (under administration tools, computer management), I finally found a nice error message that […]
24/06
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 […]
15/06
20/01
Classical repair boot operations Fix the MBR: fixmbr Fix the partition boot record: fixboot Fix the boot menu cd c:\ attrib -hrs boot.ini copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak del boot.ini bootcfg /rebuild Determine Windows XP version From dos prompt or recovery console, assuming c: is the windows installation type […]
22/12
I kept getting the following error when trying to update Easy Peasy 1.5 after an installation from scratch: W: A error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used.GPG error: http://fr.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty Release: Les signatures suivantes ne […]
15/10
13/09
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 […]
11/09
Please note this is a newbie post, for people like me who don't know anything about IIS 7 yet. First, make sure IIS and ASP.NET are installed. Go to Control Panel Programs Add / remove Windows programs Check IIS Services Make sure WWW services and Web admin tools are checked Also make sure that ASP.NET is enabled in […]
16/08
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
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
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
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 […]
20/07
I recently had the need to update the display driver of my old Toshiba Satellite M50 laptop. The onboard videocard is an ATI Mobility Radeon X600 SE. When trying to install the legacy Catalyst drivers, I got a "chip not supported" error, and a hint telling me I should check on the Toshiba website. Unfortunately, the […]
11/07
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 […]
09/07
I'm using EasyPeasy on a EEE 701 (the very first official netbook) on a daily basis at work. When I upgraded UbuntuEEE 8.04 to Easy Peasy 1.1 (based on Ubuntu 8.10), I started to experience a very slow and intermittent wifi. I tried a lot of tweaks, in vain. I finally found out that replacing the installed wifi driver […]
06/06
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 […]