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Somatic GDM

Somatic Icons

So, i imported alot of music to Rhythmbox today but some files wouldn’t just play. Checked the properties and it said:

The MIME type of the file could not be identified.

I googled around and found a tip to install gstreamer0.10-pitfdll (sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-pitfdll). Restarted Rhythmbox and voila, it works.

Pitfdll is a plugin for GStreamer media framework that enables use of binary QuickTime QTX and DirectShow/DMO DLL files as a playback codecs in GStreamer-based applications, such as Totem. For example, it can be used with propietary codecs for Microsoft DirectShow framework.

I work at Infocare where we fix computers all day long. I’m in the HP Notebook team so i’m all for laptops. Anyways, on my way out from the building on my break i met an older man in the stairs. He asked me if i worked here which i replied yes to. He showed me a piece of paper on which he had made a drawing of a blue screen. He asked me how he could recover some files and i gave him some tips.

After talking for a while i said that i was in a rush so he thanked me but before i left he had to give me a tip of his own. Every morning when it’s cold outside at his office the computer wont start. He had this trouble a long time so he took it in the kitchen to make some tests. It worked perfectly. This made him think. Could it be the cold outside? Next day he tried to heat it up with a hairdrier and it worked without any trouble. “Now, always remember to try this if you have a computer that wont start up”. I lol’d and took my break.

Okey, so i rented a VPS just to run some irssi and small services. Fine i thought until i discovered i’ve got give IPs. But what the heck should i do with them? Well, offer some friends their personal vhost could be a start but then i have to learn how to add them to my network interface (eth1 in this case). Without having a clue i turned to my guru, sniker, who showed me this:

eth1 was bound to 91.123.45.74. I ran ifconfig eth1:1 up 91.123.45.75 to get eth1:1 bound to 91.123.45.75. Next one is just ifconfig eth1:2 up 91.123.45.76. Easy thing, good to know.

eth1:1    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0C:12:34:56:E7
          inet addr:91.123.45.75  Bcast:91.255.255.255  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          Interrupt:169 Base address:0x1080

Works like a charm

It’s a keeper

So, i got my room mate a new laptop as a present since he got a new job. It has Vista installed by default but of course i installed something else, Ubuntu. So i was setting it up and did some SSHing from it just to realise that it was running UTF-8. This conflicting with all my servers was a problem since i was gonna borrow his laptop at least all the time.

Anyways; this is what i did as root

echo "se_SV ISO-8859-15" > /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

(Use en_GB instead of se_SV for english) This is to add the locale to the supported locales-list

Now, generate the supported locales

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Wait for all the text to pass and then change the local environment locale (gedit /etc/environment) to this:

LANG="se_SV"
LANGUAGE="se_SV:se"

Or if you’re using english as your language:

LANG="en_GB"
LANGUAGE="en_GB:en"

Now just reboot and everything should work just fine! Take care

We’d hate to see a linux user dead but sometimes you might have to kill all processes a user is running. I observed a discussion where some user told another user this was the way to do it was as follows:

kill -9 `ps -u username | grep -v PID | awk ‘{ printf (”%s “, $1); }’`

What’s up with that? Almost every dist up to date support pkill -u. To kill the user bob just use this:

pkill -u bob

and bob is no more (sorry Bob).

I run FreeBSD at my server. It’s a system i’m very pleased with for my server. Anyways, i was installing vlc from ports (package management) when bgfsck kicked in. This resulted in a really wierd crash and i had to reboot. When i got the system back i was able to SSH in to it and by the first look it seemed okey, like nothing was wrong. It takes about five minutes until i get a message at IRC from a friend asking me why he can’t FTP to my box. I look into it and notices that both the FTPd and the HTTPd is online but not working. I have no clue what to do so i start to google. Another friend of mine links me a page which turns out to be the answer.

vipw

Apparently the passwd file was out of sync and i had to just run vipw then exit. Voila, resynced and back with fully force. Cheers for simple solutions.

I reinstall my OS alot. Alot. My laptop gets a new OS a few times every month and this usually means the loss of bookmarks or manually backuping everything. I stumble some as well, and everything you like will be saved as a bookmark. All bookmarks will also be included when you “search” in the adress bar (e.g. writing CSS shows up all sites with CSS in the name/adress you visited, but it also includes your favorites).

Foxmarks is a, not new, but wonderful plugin to synch your bookmarks everywhere you go; home, laptop or work. You can login at their site if you are located at another computer, say at your friends house or an internet café, and access all your bookmarks that way. I used it for a long time and i will keep using it.

Okey. I canned Windows XP and installed Ubuntu. It took time since i play too many games to ditch Windows completely but when i got WoW running i had no real reason to hold on to it. The first thing i did was to install flash - everyone wants to use youtube etc. After the install of flash i notices how Firefox starts to crash all the time which was really annoying so i had to find out why. Apparently there is a glitch between the flashplugin-nonfree package and pulseaudio which makes Firefox crash. Too bad. So i googled some more and found a great tutorial on how to fix this problem (http://kemal.bioeng-network.org/2008/06/08/how-to-get-rid-of-annoying-firefox-crashes-in-ubuntu-hardy-flashplugin-nonfree/)

First of all i purged the flashplugin-nonfree and installed flash 10 (http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html) - see the above mentioned tutorial for deeper info. It worked like a charm with only one complaint - flash seemed to want all audiostreams for himself making me not able to listen to music in e.g. rhythmbox and firefox at the same time. Being on rhythmbox and then clicking up a youtubelink would produce a silent video. I had to shutdown rhythmbox and firefox then boot up firefox again to be able to hear sound. Very annoying.

I googled some more, made some posts at some forums - then i turned to #ubuntu at freenode and got help from jrib. He told me to try libflashsupport. Just sudo apt-get install libflashsupport.

Due to various bugs in the Flash 9 plugin sound output of Flash 9 through the pulseaudio sound server doesn’t work properly. This library adds a clutch to make Flash 9 sound output in pulseaudio possible.

It worked perfect and i haven’t got that shuvel in my eye anymore. Cheers.