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…

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…

UPDATE: According to one commenter below, this workaround also solves the problem on Fedora 14. Happy days

Getting with the excitement of 10/10/10, I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat over the weekend. My trusty Dell Studio 1735 seems to be very Ubuntu-friendly, as each upgrade goes without a hitch.

I like the new 10.x layout and, although this update seems to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, boot time has decreased again and the new font is nice. The only issues are to to with software that worked before the upgrade, but now doesn’t work afterwards. VMware Player is one of those. Read more…

After a lot of indecision, a friend of mine decided to bravely enter the Internet age with an Acer Aspire One ZG5 netbook. Since we’d had such success with Kim’s netbook, I recommended that he get the same one. Again, as before, I removed the default Linpus operating system and installed Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition.

UNE is very pretty. It has the default Lucid purple theme, and boots up quickly on the little Acer. Although you won’t get full compositing, there are a few nice touches in the GUI, which somehow make it feel very “solid”. All was going well until, after a brief “Awakenings” moment when I was able to authenticate to the wireless network, the WiFi card decided that enough was enough and appeared in the network manager as disabled! Read more…

After finally disinfecting my laptop of the Windows Vista virus, I had a large chunk (100Gb) of free space on a separate partition. My idea, then, was to move my /home folder to a separate partition. This would mean that future operating system upgrades would (should) be much easier, and it would give me more room to spread out my famously well organised filing structure (ahem). As it turns out, resizing partitions and then moving /home is not as difficult as I thought. Read more…

It’s been a busy time here in MattRudge.net Towers. Firstly my iPhone decided that a working ringer control button was one feature too far, so it was duly returned to Vodafone for re-education. Its replacement, a sleek 3GS sporting iOS4, arrived the same day so withdrawal symptoms were kept to a minimum. Synchronising my new toy with iTunes proved to be much more of a headache, since iOS4 requires that you use iTunes 9.2. This should not normally be a problem, apart from an annoying issue with newer versions of iTunes in VirtualBox! Read more…