Category: Software

7-Zip Portable was very useful a few minutes ago! One of the drivers for my dad’s machine on my USB stick was a rar, which XP cannot open without external help. The audio driver has this 3D audio demo where, using only two speakers, it gives the illusion of the sound going around you either horizonally or virtically. It seems to do so by making front sounds tinny and back sounds full, top sounds full and bottom sounds muffled. Not perfect by any means, but still an amusing demo.

I have been having problems allowing Irfan to upload files to his web root directory in his home directory without having the webserver being forbidden from serving his site. It turns out that it works if I chown -R his directory with irfan:www-data (www-data as set as group in apache2.conf) and chmod -R everything to 755.

Gfire is an extension for Pidgin that allows for Xfire support. I compiled mine from source, partly because I can, partly because I was too lazy to google for a .deb, and partly because there’s no official Hardy AMD64 .deb availible on the above snapshot page. Here’s what I had to do to compile:

1. Download and extract source archive (should be in a directory path without spaces)
2. Install pidgin-dev and imagemagick
3. From the source directory, run ./configure –prefix=/usr
4. Run make
5. Run sudo make install

Done! You don’t even have to restart Pidgin, just add another account and it’ll be in the dropdown protocol list!

I’ve only tested this is Hardy Heron at the moment, but it appears that, given the proper repositories, it is now possible to install applications from the browser! It’s not only an idea, it’s in practice! This’ll let tutorials consist at least partially of application installation links! ^^

You know Brasero, the new (and very shiny) CD burning suite in Hardy Heron? I have had two problems with it thus far in the course of burning the RC ISO from my beta installation. My root partition for the beta only had around 550 MB left – not enough to mirror the ISO in a temporary directory. It failed with a vague error message:

Error while burning:

the selected location does not have enough free space to store the disk image (692 MiB needed).

Yes, the error message really was that poorly written. I tried another CD, thinking (incorrectly) that there might be something wrong with the CD itself, but I noticed that Brasero itself reported the CD with 702 MiB or so of space, and recordable. I poked around, and under the properties button next to the drive selection, I found a temporary directory with, you guessed it, around 550 MB free space. I told it to use my other ext3 partition, and it burned the disk happily. It then ejected the disk, then requested I put it back in for a read verify check. I did so, but Nautilus popped up first, showing me the contents of the disk, and there was also a package manager asking since there were packages on the disk if I wanted it to open. I said no. Brasero complained that the drive was in use. So much for read verify. I’ll see if I can post my errors somewhere where they can be addressed. Maybe they’re already fixed in the RC…

EDIT: Yup, it seems to be fixed now. I got a read verify to run.

EDIT2: It helps to disable the automatic display of the contents of new media in Nautilus’ preferences. To disable everything Nautilus does to the disk, you’d probably have to disable it popping anything up when a disk has software on it, too.

The Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta is released!

I’ve lately been enjoying the musical stylings of Zhaytee, who I came to know after the magnificent tracks for Minerva. Free official downloads of all songs, and even a zip of all of ’em at once is offered. I was pleasantly surprised.

The Ubuntu packages for Wine version 0.9.56 were taking a while to reach the repositories so I could upgrade with just two apt-get calls, which is rare. I got impatient, which is not rare, and just compiled my own version.  I uninstalled the repository’s version with apt-get get, checked running wine to make sure it was uninstalled, and ran a sudo make install after ./configure and make && make depend in the source directory. Easy. The problem was that then wine refused to run, saying it could not be found. I tried running make install after su’ing (changing to root) just out of desperation. It worked! So did sudo wine. That was weird. I tried a sudo whereis wine, and found it to be in /usr/local/bin/wine instead of the /usr/bin/wine that my bash was complaining could not be found. I hopped on the IRC and thought out loud, which I guess was a pretty annoying thing to do, but whatever, it helped. I linked /usr/local/bin/wine to /usr/bin/wine, which fixed the problem. This person in the channel told me I shouldn’t do that, and said that bash just needed to restart. I removed the link, (with the logical unlink) logged off my terminals, then logged back in, and it worked! Yay! Well, now I know what to do if I ever run into something like that again. You learn something every day, huh? 🙂