When I upgraded to Kubuntu Lucid Lynx, they promised:

Firefox now integrates better with KDE, providing native KDE file dialogs as well as respecting your default choices for opening files, as set in KDE.

I was excited, no more having to keep a separate favorite places for Firefox and Dolphin.  In reality after I upgraded I saw no such “integration.”

So several months later it bugged me enough to take another look at the problem.   Reading the same copy as before I noticed a new sentence that either I missed or wasn’t there before:

Our Kubuntu Firefox Installer makes sure the necessary packages are installed, if you have installed Firefox manually you will need to install kmozillahelper for the integration.

Hmm…  since I upgraded and didn’t install from scratch it seems that I needed to install the kmozillahelper package.  Once I did and restarted Firefox, it worked.   One step closer to an integrated desktop.  Now I I could find a way to do this in chrome, openoffice.org, gimp…

I jumped onto Google and had to do a bit of searching before I found this post in the Boxee forums.  The culprit seems to be … wait for it …  pulseaudio.   That would definitely explain why it worked on Kubuntu.  Anyway the crux of the fix is as follows:

sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound
sudo killall pulseaudio
sudo restart gdm

In the original post he killed pulseaudio before he removed it, but I found that it would just pop up again in a few seconds. Also he said to restart the computer but I found that just restarting X was enough.

It turns out somewhere between 8.04 and 10.04 they took keyboard and mouse configuration out of the xorg.conf file.  It was easy to figure this out because the install left me a nice message in the xorg.conf saying you don’t do that here anymore.  So after searching I found this forum post on Ubuntu forums about getting your old Microsoft serial mouse working with 9.10.  The heart of the solution is to use gpm and input attach to tell X11 about the mouse.   I ran the following commands to test this:

sudo apt-get install gpm
sudo inputattach –microsoft /dev/ttyS0

It worked exactly like promised, I was now able to mouse the pointer around with my mouse. To make it permanent you need to edit /etc/rc.local to add the inputattach line.  (additions are in bold)

sudo vi /etc/rc.local

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will “exit 0″ on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

## added serial mouse input ##
inputattach –microsoft /dev/ttyS0

exit 0

[~/public_html/drupal/sites/default/themes/clean_fixed]# svn commit
bash: svnserve: command not found
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly
svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
svn: ’svn-commit.7.tmp’

Crap there goes an hour.  I googled the problem and found that apparently this is a common problem for servers in the BlueHost family.   For some reason a recent update changed the way SSH looked for applications.  It used to be OK if the application was in your path.  So now you need a way to tell SSH where to look for svnserve.

I found the answer at the Subversion Community forums.   A user there was complaining about the exact same problem.  Another user pointed out the site with some Subversion ssh configuration tricks.

Basically what the fix amounts to is directly pointing to the application in the command section of the ssh key in the authorized_keys file.  So on my SVN server I inserted this text in front of every key used for accession SVN.

command=”$HOME/local/system/bin/svnserve -t ” ssh-dss AAAAB3N…

After the fix I now get the familiar:

[~/public_html/drupal/sites/default/themes/clean_fixed]# svn commit
Sending block.css
Sending style.css
Transmitting file data ..
Committed revision 548.

I just replaced my headphone connector on my 1st Gen iPod Touch when I had it open to replace the battery.  Now I can actually use it as an iPod again.  Good timing too, because the dock connector on my 1st Gen iPod Nano that I had been using to listen to podcasts is now pretty much shot, so I have no choice but to use my iPod Touch as my sole device for podcasts.

Even if I had a computer running Windows, I would refuse to degrade it by installing the piece of crap Apple calls iTunes, so the only way I can get podcasts on the iPod touch is using the iTunes store on the device itself.  The problem is not every podcast is listed on the iTunes store.  There’s no way to get non-iTunes approved podcasts on the device. I found a work around using Dropbox.  I remembered that Dropbox on the iPod Touch will play any media file located in the dropbox.  So I set up a folder called Podcasts and sub folders for each podcast in my dropbox  and told my podcatcher (Amarok) to download the renegade podcasts there.

When I want to listen to a non-Apple-approved podcast, I open up the Dropbox app on the iPod Touch and simply go to the podcast’s folder and select which episode I want to listen to.  If you want to listen somewhere you don’t have wifi access you need to favorite the file by pressing in the little star at the bottom so that it gets downloaded locally to the iPod Touch.

I needed to figure out where the cache directory was located and how to move it.  Moving the cache directory in Firefox is simple, you just goto about:config and change the value of browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. Heading over to the Chromium Project I found a page that described where the cache was located for Linux:

~/.config/chromium/Default

It turns out that Chromium follows the XDG Base Directory specs.  Applications that follow these specs will store  config, data and cache directories in the locations specified by their corresponding environment variables.  The thought behind this structure is to clean up the user directories and make the different desktop managers play nicely with each other.  From the specification:

$XDG_DATA_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific data files should be stored. If $XDG_DATA_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.local/share should be used.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific configuration files should be stored. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.config should be used.

$XDG_DATA_DIRS defines the preference-ordered set of base directories to search for data files in addition to the $XDG_DATA_HOME base directory. The directories in $XDG_DATA_DIRS should be seperated with a colon ‘:’.  If $XDG_DATA_DIRS is either not set or empty, a value equal to /usr/local/share/:/usr/share/ should be used.

$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS defines the preference-ordered set of base directories to search for configuration files in addition to the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME base directory. The directories in $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS should be seperated with a colon ‘:’  If $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is either not set or empty, a value equal to /etc/xdg should be used.

$XDG_CACHE_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user specific non-essential data files should be stored. If $XDG_CACHE_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.cache should be used.

Bingo! $XDG_CACHE_HOME sets the location of the cache files and if it isn’t present it defaults to where the Chromium project says the cache files are stored.

The final piece of the puzzle is figuring out where to put the environment variable so that next time you log into your desktop it actually gets set.   This is where the Ubuntu Community Documentation saved me.  It turns out that there is a file in each individuals home directory called:

~/.pam_environment

It may or may not be present.  If it isn’t just create it.  This file is  specifically for setting environment variables.   It’s not a script file like .profile, so stick to variable assignments.

So I set:

$XDG_CACHE_HOME=/tmp/benjamen/.cache

and deleted the default .cache directory in my home directory.  Now when I back up my home directory I don’t waste time and space backing up the cache files.

References:
User Data Directory [The Chromium Project]
XDG Base Directory Specification [freedesktop.org]
Environment Variables [Ubuntu Community Documentation]

On and off for the past few weeks I’ve been crawling through the system logs and BIOS trying to find an ACPI error or other warning that would explain why the kernel feels like it needs to reboot.  Then on a whim I turned off Wake On LAN.

I had turned on WOL because I thought it would be cool if I could turn on my computer from another computer, netbook, or mobile device before I go downstairs to use it.  It turns out that WOL on this particular motherboard doesn’t work the same as other computers.  Usually you need to send a magic packet to wake a computer up, but for some reason my computer wakes up with a simple ping or any other traffic sent to it’s address.

Turning off WOL did the trick, the computer actually shuts down when I tell it to shutdown.  So, either there is some traffic from the network directed at my machine or the same flaw that makes the motherboard wakeup without a magic packet keeps it from powering down.

I had previously tried many different graphics cards and a new power supply and finally came to the conclusion that it must have been something to do with my motherboard since my wife’s computer with nearly the same monitor didn’t have the same problem.  It really didn’t occur to me that it could be the cable.

So what’s wrong with using the VGA cable, well for one I was losing a few lines of my desktop on the top edge of the monitor, you’d think that the resolution would be 1:1, but evidently something is lost in the digital to analog to digital conversion.  I could live with it, but it constantly annoyed me every time I noticed the tops of windows being cropped.

A few days ago I was particularly annoyed, so I did some more research and I found a few other possible causes besides overheating graphics cards and bad power supplies.  There were posts about some bad nVidia graphics card drivers, but I wasn’t running  the specified version.   So on a whim I took the DVI cable from my wife’s computer and replaced mine.  What do you know, it worked.

Until now I didn’t think that the quality of the DVI cable mattered.  It’s a digital signal so unless the cable is very long one cable shouldn’t be any better than another.   Evidently I was wrong.    I purchased a cheap DVI-I single link cable from Best buy and now my display runs just fine over DVI.

So I was playing around in my Google Voice account and for the heck of it decided to see what would happen if I clicked on the “Activate Google voicemail on this phone.”   At one point I know Tracfone was using T-Mobile in my area, so I had tried using the T-Mobile settings to forward voicemail, but Tracfone must have changed to AT&T, because I tried using the AT&T instructions and it just worked.

Initially I tried calling my cell from my land line to test the voicemail switch, but for some reason instead of getting a greeting I went straight into the voicemail backend, you know the “you have X new messages” part.  It turns out that I have direct access to Google Voice enabled on my land line, so it was going through some sort of causality loop.  I temporarily un-enabled GV on my land line and called my cell again — this time I was greeted by my on cheery voice telling me to leave a message.   Unfortunately (or fortunately) this means if my wife calls my cell phone from our land line she can’t leave a message, but I’ll still get a missed call notification

I needed a way to tell the SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer) that DosBox should just use my soundcard like KDE was doing.  One of the steps that kept coming up in the PulseAudio “fixes” was to type the line:

export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulse

or

export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=esd

before running DOSBox.  I wondered if there was another setting for soundblaster or intel.  So I googled SDL_AUDIODRIVER and found that there was a dsp option.  So I typed:

export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsp

before starting DOSBox and viola I have sound.

*I’m not entirely sure it was necessary but in the process of trying to get Pulseaudio working I installed libsdl1.2debian-all.