Good old Skype, it seems to have been in Linux Beta forever! I suppose now that Skype is part of the happy Microsoft “family”, it probably always will.
Anyway, I recently had a problem where Skype would not open on my Ubuntu 11.04 laptop. Well, to be precise, Skype opened and closed immediately. The solution was simple enough. Read more…
As I said in my previous post, my upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (love the name) was almost perfect. I’m getting to grips with – and actually quite liking – the new Unity interface. I know that everyone’s opinion varies, and that whether you like a new UI or not is entirely personal and subjective. Here, though, are a few tweaks which have made Unity a bit more usable for me. Like adding your favourite folders (from the old “Places” menu) to the Home folder launcher. Read more…
I don’t really use Evolution much – it’s not just that I don’t agree with evolution as a theory (which is a completely different subject), but that I don’t use POP mail too much, and so Evolution (the mail client) tends to be of little use. A common problem, though, after not using it for a while can be the “Error Generating Message List” followed by other vague errors about corrupted disk images or folders. Fortunately the solution is quite simple. Read more…
I love alliterative post titles! But I didn’t like the fact that even with my little 64-bit Flash for Ubuntu installer script (updated now, by the way), Flash videos would “freeze” in full-screen. The sound would continue, but the video would freeze. If I pressed Escape to exit full-screen mode, then everything would be fine – it’s just that Flash would never run in full-screen. John Lewis commented about a PPA fix on his blog, but I couldn’t get the PPA to work. I now have a different fix for this, which – so far – seems to be working. Read more…
Maybe you tried my tutorial on installing GNOME 3 a couple of days ago and perhaps you were infected by the contagion of my excited spaniel mode, and so made GNOME 3 your primary window manager. If you’re now disillusioned with that decision and wish that you had left GNOME 3 in the sandbox (or – even worse – that you’d never read my blog post!!), then read on. Here is how to revert back to GNOME 2 – assuming you followed the steps in my previous tutorial. Read more…
Ok, so I haven’t been totally wasting my time while waiting for Natty to be released (well…after reading this post, you might think that I have been wasting my time!!), so I decided to replace the default GNOME desktop manager with GNOME 3, which was released earlier this month. There are plenty of posts about how to do this, but here is what worked on my installation. Read more…
Yay! Now it is the official banner. Narwhals…they are the Jedi of the sea!
Let me start off by saying that, in general, I like SonicWALL products. They were the first firewalls I ever sold and, as such, they are still the ones I feel most familiar with, and know best. It’s also no secret that their GlobalVPN Client makes it ludicrously easy to create and connect to a VPN. Unfortunately, though, SonicWALL’s focus is very Windows-centric. This means that, now I have a need to connect my Ubuntu laptop to a SonicWALL VPN, I have to leave the warm and fuzzy comfort of the GlobalVPN client and get to know Openswan a bit better.
According to what I have read and researched, many people have difficulties connecting Openswan to a SonicWALL appliance. I was no different. At one stage I had decided that it would be easier for me to gnaw a tunnel to my client’s office through solid granite, rather than persevere trying to get the VPN tunnel running. In the end, though, I got it working – here’s how. Read more…
Every new release of Watchtower Library seems to require a new set of instructions to install, and Watchtower Library 2010 is no exception. After happily using the 2009 edition on Ubuntu for some time, I installed the new version expecting the same flawless behaviour; however it nastily crashed and burned with “The program WTLibrary.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close…” Running it from the terminal didn’t help either. I just got a lot of errors, including “Unhandled page fault on read access to 0×00000000″ After a lot of messing around, this solution got Watchtower Library working on my Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit installation. Read more…
The Linux media centre project is now complete, and I’m very happy with the results. In this post, I’m going to talk a bit more about the final hardware configuration. Part 6 will discuss the actual Mythbuntu configuration, with a summary of the project and photos!! Read more…
