stevey.eu

Keyboard / Xorg Issues (November 2008)

rose2088 — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:40:45 +0000

Recently I came across the issue of having a new keyboard as my wireless one failed on me. The only problem with this being that my Intrepid install was setup for the previous, which just so happened to have a slightly different layout.

For anyone in the same boat, the solution is relatively easy. In a terminal:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Remember when entering your root password no characters will be displayed. Follow the prompts and the additional information you are given and you should then be good to go. Bare in mind by default the text entry sections will contain your current options so will need to be cleared or altered to suit. If you have any concerns regarding the old file, it is automatically backed up.

Any questions feel free to ask.

Removing Evolution Mail Is NOT dangerous in the slightest… (August 2008)

rose2088 — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:38:57 +0000

I have noticed for a long time now, much talk of how to remove Evolution from Ubuntu, understandable, if like myself, you use another client for your mail/news. The parts of these discussions that concerned me is the number of people adamant that it will kill your installation. There are tales of GDM breaking, no home folder being found, so on and so forth, however removing just the Evolution packages with the exception of evolution-data-server-common will not affect any dependencies other than asking to remove any other libraries or packages dependent on Evolution alone.

People really need to stop with the scaremongering on the forums and other places of support. It does the community no good. There is enough explicit proof that the only package related to Evolution that depends on others that are still needed by the system is evolution-data-server-common there is no possible way that removing the others would harm your installation in any way whatsoever!

My question to those concerned and involved with spreading incorrect information would be, did you try it yourself in the first place? Did you remove only the Evolution packages?

If the answer to the above is no and you were removing numerous other packages at the time, I suggest you take another look as I am 99.9% certain something else would have broken GDM or any other package you are complaining about.

To cite one of the sources of this information: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=891058 I won’t list them all, Google will do a far more thourough job.

Ultamatix. (November 2008)

rose2088 — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:38:02 +0000

A rather important article came to my attention this evening, the one and same Matthew Garrett whose post I referenced regarding the countless flaws in Automatix has gone through a much similar process with Ultamatix: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/99905.html I had been planning on doing similar, but now there is little need for me to. How anyone can condone it and even think to use it is laughable. The way it and “Ultimate Edition” is advertised like the best thing since sliced bread is pulling the wool over a lot of peoples eyes. TheeMahn is self proclaimed as “no newbie to programming” and as Matthew so nicely explains, if ever proof were needed ” it’s a perfect example of how experience doesn’t imply competence.”

I stand well and truly by my point regarding usage of command switches such as –assume-yes and –force-yes being utterly stupid in this context, it probably is not just me, but surely something that is billed as useful and to help you, would want some form of user input would it not?

One would also believe someone claiming that they are not new to programming would not need to run round the houses and make countless assumptions in their code:

#since we have root we need to discover normal username so we can create
the shortcut & set proper permissions
NU=$(cat /etc/passwd | grep 1000 | cut -d: -f1)
sudo chown $NU:$NU "legends_linux-0.4.1.43.deb"
sudo chmod +x legends_linux-0.4.1.43.deb
sudo dpkg -i legends_linux-0.4.1.43.deb
List of fail:

Assuming that the user has uid 1000

Chowning a deb to the user for no obvious reason (hint: a user can delete root owned files that are in the user’s home directory)

Making a deb executable for no reason whatsoever

Assuming that user information will be in /etc/passwd

Not just, say, passing the user’s name to the application IN THE FIRST PLACE

I won’t quote Matthew’s entire article, I will let you read it in your own time, but it would be sufficient to say, don’t install Ultamatix, don’t let anyone else install it if you can help it. It is aptly described as crap.

Firefox .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 Removal (August 2009)

rose2088 — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:35:08 +0000

Upon installing the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (kb951847) you will, without consent or warning during installation, a new exstension for your Firefox web browser Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0. It provides ClickOnce functionality for Firefox.

You will notice it is not compatible with the latest builds of Firefox so it does not install properly, but all the same, an option to uninstall would be nice, seeing as it was silently installed in the first place.

Since its release Microsoft have released an update to allow removal, and also provided instructions how to remove it manually, see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/963707

I will also list here the manual method, in a more straightforward manner:

If you want to completely kill the extension, with Firefox closed, delete the folder:

%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Windows Presentation Foundation\DotNetAssistantExtension

and delete the registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions\{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}\

It is also benificial to then head to about:config in your address bar and search for the string general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet right click it and select reset.

You will now be completely rid of the assistant.

To add ClickOnce functionality to Firefox should at least be at an individual users discretion, rather than behind their backs, in a manner that screams SpyWare to most.

Creating digital audio backups using Audacity and PulseAudio (March 2010)

rose2088 — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:33:58 +0000

No Wave Out or Stereo Mix in Audacity stopping you from digitising all those old cassettes and vinyl records?

The solution is relatively simple and only has a small number of steps. This article is written on the basis of using Ubuntu 9.10 and Audacity 1.3.8 to create digital audio backups of all your older formats.

stevey.eu does not encourage or condone illegal activities involving copyrighted materials. This guide is written with the intent of helping people create digital backups of cassettes/records they already own.

Prerequisites

Ubuntu 9.10 (of course!)

Audacity

sudo apt-get install audacity

PulseAudio Volume Control

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Once you have the above installed, we are good to go after a little setup.

Setting Up

Firstly, we will setup Audacity to use PulseAudio. After opening it, head to preferences via Edit > Preferences (or by hitting CTRL+P). We are looking for the section titled devices, it should be near the top in the left panel.

Here we need to change both devices from the preset of default to “pulse”.

Now, secondly to check everything is in order with PulseAudio we need to head to the Applications menu under Sound & Video open up PulseAudio Volume Control.

On the playback tab you will see a list of anything utilising audio playback currently. I suggest playing something such as a cassette you are planning to record to digital format, to test it is working. Much like the playback tab, the recording tab should show Audacity as we are using this to record whatever audio is being processed by our sound card.

Recording

I suggest here, pressing record in Audacity before playing your input, whether vinyl, cassette or anything else for that matter. You can always trim any extra silence out after recording. I also prefer personally to play the side of the cassette or record in its entirety then split it afterwards, as it is far less time consuming.

Conclusion

I am not going to sit here and write hundreds of words on how to use Audacity to edit your newly recorded backups, but I feel that in a few very short steps we have walked through how to use Audacity to make digital backups.

Old Content

rose2088 — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 09:57:34 +0000

So I’m going to be reposting a handful of older posts that I have located backups for over the next few hours.

Following on from this, I will then hopefully begin to actually use this blog thing again!