cyborgworkshop.org

Another failure of Ubuntu 8.10,   they forgot to include the /etc/X11/rgb.txt file. All of the symlinks on the filesystem that refer to that file still exist, but not the file itself.  This gives TK applications, like crossover office and wish, all sorts of trouble and will give you odd errors like the “Black” error. To fix it, download the rgb.txt file from here,  put it in /etc/X11 and log out of X windows.  I’m giving ubuntu one last shot before I kick it to the curb.

This has got to be one of the most disappointing bugs I have ever seen. Ubuntu 8.10 was shipped with the inability to be configured with a static IP address. As soon as you reboot, the configuration goes back to DHCP! This really blows my mind and has me thinking hard about picking a new distribution.  In the meantime, you can work around this monumental snafu by following these directions.

vi the /etc/network/interfaces file.

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

delete anything talking about eth0 and in this in it’s place.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Your IP)
netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Your netmask)
gateway xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (Your default router or gateway)

Now edit /etc/resolv.conf

sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

And add the following

nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (The IP of your DNS server)
search abc.def.com (your domain, ala cyborgworkshop.org)

This is the last part. we have to get rid of the network manager that runs at boot and is the cause of all of this embarrassment, so run the following.

sudo update-rc.d –f NetworkManager remove

Reboot and you should be good to go.

Anyone on a Unix system that uses readline (most) should be able to use these handy little dance moves.

• Ctrl a          Moves the cursor to the start of the line
• Ctrl e          Moves the cursor to the end of the line
• Ctrl r           Context search of your history, hit ctrl r and start typing. Hit ctrl r again to scroll
• Tab             Seriously, you don’t know about tab completion?  How do you dress yourself every day?

Lots more of that here, but those are my most frequent.

If you install the lightning calendar extension version .8 in thunderbird on an ubuntu box, you get a really nasty mess of an email client. You can’t create a new calendar, dates don’t show up right. It just flat out doesn’t work. To flat out make it work, all you have to do is install libstdc++5 BEFORE you install lightning.

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

tada, works like a charm.

For better or worse, vmware server puts a file onto your harddrive that it uses for memory of a virtual machine. Anyone that has ever had a server that has had to dig into swap knows how much your machine will drag when hard drives are substituted for memory.  Since vmware puts the memory file on disk by default, you are essentially always hitting the drive for most memory operations.  On my workstation (dual quad core with 16 gig of RAM and a 4 disc RAID 5 array) my machine would come to a crawl everytime a VM got busy due to high IO waits.  To fix that, we’re going to mount /tmp as tmpfs (a RAM backed file system that uses physical memory as the disc instead of a hard drive, wicked fast) and tell vmware to store all of it’s memory files in that directory.  This is a two step process. The first is to add the following line into /etc/fstab and then reboot

tmpfs        /tmp        tmpfs    size=12000000k 0 0

Replace the size parameter with the amount of memory that you would like to dedicate to VMs.
Now stop vmware and add the following line to the bottom of /etc/vmware/config

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

Reboot and restart your wicked fast VMs!