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…

I had always thought I was the gadget freak in our family, but Kim is starting to put me to shame with her new PDA powered by Windows Mobile 6. Of course, this raised the natural question: “how do I sync this with my Linux netbook?” It is possible, and not that difficult, but the instructions found on the Internet are incomplete and, at times, confusing. So here is my complete guide to setting up a Windows Mobile PDA to Linux synchronisation! Read more…

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have successfully installed Windows 7 Ultimate as a guest operating system under VirtualBox – complete with USB drivers.

The installation was painless and easy, but when I started Windows, it kept reporting that “No Audio Device is Installed”. Audio was enabled for this guest machine in VirtualBox, but nothing was working. Read more…

UPDATE 4th MAY, 2010: If you’re having problems with USB devices in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 64-bit, then check this post instead.

The only thing that stopped me from completely deleting Windows from a hard drive partition, was the fact that I needed it for some proprietary telephone system programming software. Due to the weird USB drivers that the software uses, I couldn’t get it working under Wine, so decided to try and get it working on a virtual PC through VirtualBox.

I had already successfully installed Windows 7 (more of that in a future post), and all was working ok. So I installed the software, plugged in the USB cable hopefully and waited. Nothing happened – and Windows couldn’t even see the USB device. I had the Guest Additions installed, so clicked on the Devices -> USB menu in the little VirtualBox menu at the bottom of the screen and, although I could see my devices listed, they were all greyed out (or “grayed out” if you’re of the American English persuasion). Read more…

It’s strange sometimes how things that should be simple can start to seem very complicated. A case in point is Skype on Kim’s Acer Aspire One. I have Skype working very well on my laptop, but after installing it on Kim’s, the microphone didn’t seem to be working at all!

Obviously, I’d followed my own advice in a previous post. I also confirmed that the microphone was working in Sound Recorder, but when I made a Skype test call, the conversation was very one-sided indeed.

A lot of digging around showed that PulseAudio treats everything as stereo – even if the microphone is mono! The two inputs cancel each other out, resulting in a stony silence for whoever you’re trying to talk to on Skype.

The solution is as follows: Read more…

This is the first of two short blog posts today. After installing Skype on Kim’s netbook, for some reason I couldn’t add it to the Startup Applications list. I’d go through the usual procedure: System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications, add it and verify it was in the list, but after a restart, the list reverted to its previous settings; no changes I made were saved.

I went investigating and it appears that others are having the same problem. Some queries on this issue were posted as little as two days ago.

The only reason I could think of was to do with permissions. The startup applications data are held in the /home/<username>/.config/autostart directory, so I checked the permissions of this folder on my laptop, running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic and saw permissions of drwxr-xr-x. On Kim’s netbook, running Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 Karmic the permissions were set so that only root had the rights to modify this directory.

Changing the permissions, then, is a trivial matter. Simply open a terminal window and type:

sudo chmod -R o+wrx /home/<username>/.config/autostart

Obviously, replace <username> with your own username, shown before the @ sign in the command prompt. After you’ve run this command, try changing the startup applications again, and everything should work.

No major niggles or problems after upgrading to 9.10 – in fact I’m running out of superlatives to describe Karmic. My wife has long since given up listening to me extol some new-found virtue of this distribution. As I launched into an enthusiastic lecture on the new-look UI with smaller icons and beautifully anti-aliased fonts, the pitying look of incomprehension that crept unbidden across her face spoke volumes.

Anyway, one thing that did stop working for me after the upgrade was Skype. This isn’t generally a problem, I don’t use Skype all that much, but this week I needed to use it for an important video call at work. Whilst Skype loaded fine, none of the sound devices seemed to work, and the test call was quieter than my wife’s reaction to Karmic’s faster shutdown speed. I had “pulse” listed as my default audio device, which seemed to be correct, but nothing was happening. I also tried “Intel hw:0,1″ and “Intel hw:0,3″, but still no joy.

Although I was using the latest version, I decided to uninstall Skype using the Synaptic Package Manager. I marked each Skype package for Complete Removal, which would remove any configuration files and user data.

I then reinstalled Skype from this link (or if you have Ubuntu 64bit, then this link). Just download the package, and then open it for installation. Things were better from the outset, because at least this time Skype made a noise on loading. When I checked the options, I could see that the sound devices were now referred to differently “PulseAudio server (local)” rather than the multitude of options I had previously.

I found it best to uncheck the box that says Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels, and then to set the microphone volume through the System -> Preferences -> Sound applet. If I allowed Skype to adjust the sound automatically, then I could hear people perfectly, but they couldn’t hear me – it practically turned off my microphone.

Then, all that was left to do was to add Skype to start automatically, which is easy:

• Go to Options in Skype and choose General
• Check the Start Skype minimised in the system tray box
• Go to the System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications applet
• Click Add and enter the following details:
  • Name: Skype
  • Command: skype
• Click Add and then Close. Now Skype will start automatically when you reboot.

It seems that Ubuntu 9.10 is more dependent on PulseAudio than previous releases, and I’ve read a lot of blogs indicating that this may not be a good thing. I’m going to do more research before I give an opinion, but suffice to say that the above procedure fixed my Skype audio problem.

Audio options in Skype

I’m now happily updated and running Ubunto 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. First impressions are that it is excellent – much tighter than 9.04, with a more slick user interface, and faster response time. Little niggles I had with 9.04 are gone and, so far, it has been very nice to use. More on that in a future post.

One thing I particularly like is the new boot loader, GRUB2 (or 1.97~beta4 to be exact). This is more flexible than the previous GRUB loader, and allows you to add splash screens if you wish.

To enable this, you can do the following:

Download sample splash screens by opening a terminal window and typing:

sudo apt-get install grub2-splashimages

This installs sample images to /usr/share/images/grub, although I preferred to create my own.

To use your own image, open or create an image in the GIMP, and scale it to 640 x 480. Save it to /usr/share/images/grub as a TarGA (tga) file.

Now open a terminal window and type:

sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme

Look for the line that says:

for i in {/boot/grub,/usr/share/images/desktop-base}
/moreblue-orbit-grub.{png,tga} ; do

and change “moreblue-orbit-grub” to the name of the image you have selected, make sure you retain the “.” between the name and {png,tga} parts.

Save the file and quit back to the terminal.

Now type:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

If all goes well, you should see the following status lines:

Updating /boot/grub/grub.cfg …
Found Debian background: (your file name).tga

When you reboot your computer, you should now have the lovely new splash screen displayed. Here’s the one I’m currently using:

GRUB2 splash screen

It’s based on this image from my Flickr stream. Why? Because it’s a “splash” of course!

In my continual quest to find a browser that I’m reasonably happy with, I decided to try Opera 10 for Ubuntu. I had been told that it was faster than Firefox and more sleek, and my first impression with the user interface was very positive. It does look incredibly pretty. I like the slim navigation bar, and the “Speed Dial” tab is very cool.

Unfortunately, when I actually tried to open a web page, it moved slower than an arthritic sloth on crutches whose feet were encased in concrete. Convinced that this couldn’t really be correct, I started to investigate. Due to my experience with slow browsing in Firefox (see this earlier post), I was leaning towards an IPv6 issue again. Sadly, it seems that it is not possible to disable IPv6 from within Opera, like it is in Firefox. The only option, then, was for me to disable IPv6 in Ubuntu globally. My router doesn’t support IPv6, and my network is IPv4, so I couldn’t really see any benefit to me in keeping it.

There were a few methods mentioned as to how to disable IPv6 in Jaunty, but this one was the successful one for me:

• Open a terminal window
• Type:

  sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

• Scroll down to after the line which reads: ## ## End Default Options ##
• At the end of the line that begins “kernel”, add the following text:

  ipv6.disable=1

• Save and quit from gedit and restart Ubuntu.

The procedure is different for GRUB2:

• Open a terminal window
• Type:

  sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

• Locate the line which begins: “GRUB_CMD_LINE_LINUX_DEFAULT”, and within the speech marks type a space, and then:

  ipv6.disable=1

• Save and close the file. Then type:

  sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

• Now restart Ubuntu.

Hey presto – Opera now runs faster than a greased whippet on steroids. Apart from issues uploading photographs to WordPress :/ and eBay, I’m very happy with Opera and trying to overcome my guilt at not using Firefox as much! Here’as a screenshot of Opera in action – the eagle-eyed will notice the “Distribution Upgrade” is running, as I take the next bold step in my Linux adventure and upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”.

Opera 10 screenshot