Shortly after my last post, my aging Dell Studio laptop learned the hard way that gravity can sometimes be a cruel and heartless mistress. I learned a couple of lessons too. Notably that 1) Dell Studio laptops do not bounce and 2) hardwood floors are called that for a reason. After recovering the pieces (well most of them), sadly the computer would no longer boot, and the screen was beyond repair.

I got myself set up again with a nice, Ubuntu-happy laptop, which I’ll tell you about in another post. I removed the hard drive from the old Dell and put it in a 2.5″ external USB enclosure to try to try and mount my /home partition for data recovery, which is when I got the dreaded “Bad superblock on /dev/sdb3″ error. Read more…

It’s been a while since we last saw the Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat around here! For all new visitors – that’s a deerstalker hat. It’s the one that Sherlock Holmes famously wore. It is not an armoured tortoise, or a 1950′s UFO movie prop. It’s my special icon reserved for when I’m feeling a little bit smug and happy that an annoying problem is now solved (or – in this case – worked around!).

My Dell Studio 17 is getting a little long in the tooth now. It happily accepts any and all updates that I throw at it, but each one adds a new brand of strangeness to the brew – not to mention the fact that the screen hinge is now held together with chicken wire and insulating tape! Anyway, a weird little problem started happening where, shortly after login, the touchpad would stop working. Read more…

Oh the fun of general and non-specific error messages. The package management system is usually quite well behaved, but when it fails, you can get a series of errors each bewilderingly unhelpful. For instance, Ubuntu Software Center may give you an error telling you that you have no Internet connection and refuse to download any software – even when you’re happily browsing the Internet and downloading gigabytes of files in a different application.

So, what causes this seemingly nonsensical error, and how can you recover? Fortunately, the fix is quite easy. 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…

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…

Even though Maverick’s new installer is a joy to look upon – reportedly Steve Jobs wept tears of joy when he saw it – there are a couple of things that it doesn’t tell you. One of these can cause the installation to appear to hang completely with the “Forward” button greyed out. This has been brought up as a problem on the Ubuntu forums a couple of times, so I thought I’d mention it here – especially since the solution is very simple indeed. Read more…

Continuing down my, admittedly short, list of software that needs updating now that I’ve upgraded to Maverick, we come to Sopcast. I do like Sopcast (as has been discussed before), but even describing it as “a bit flaky” would be generous. The fact is that Sopcast usually requires attention after any upgrade or update to my system. I’m not complaining, mind you. It is free and when it works – it works well. 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…

It’s time for a new icon! This is my official “Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat” icon, which is reserved for when I have to do some strange detective work in order to solve a baffling problem. Looking at it again, it looks a bit like a snail, but trust me – it’s a deerstalker!

Since moving from a free blog hosted on WordPress.com to my self-hosted WordPress blog, everything has been going very smoothly. I have had more control, and been able to insert some Google Ads into popular posts, which should just about cover my hosting costs. Things were going swimmingly until I decided to update one of my posts and immediately got a 404 Not Found error message. Adding new posts seemed to be fine and, to add to the conundrum, some posts would let me update. Read more…

Sometimes the most scary looking errors can be quite easy to solve. When a package installation is interrupted, or fails, Ubuntu Software Center may refuse to allow you to install any other package from that point on. It responds with a rather friendly and helpful-looking message: “The installation could have failed because of an error in the corresponding software package or it was cancelled in an unfriendly way. You have to repair this before you can install or remove any further software.” But then doesn’t give any instructions as to how to fix the error! Read more…