peter – Page 4 – RFC 3092

Getting Rid Of The Top Menu In Ubuntu

Posted on February 5, 2014 - February 12, 2014 by peter

A fresh installation on one of my machines and I decided to give Ubuntu’s Unity another try. And the first that jumped out at me was the more than annoying global menu bar on top of the screen. Apple might be everybody’s darling when it comes to UI design but they do not understand how this disrupts the workflow. Especially when you are using focus-follows-mouse, it is like playing roulette when you try to get to the correct menu.

But it seems quite easy to get rid of that annoying function by simply uninstalling some packages. And here is what I found you have to do:

apt-get remove appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt

Well, but that is not working for the Saucy Salamander (13.10). Why should it, it is new and shiny. So here is what you have to remove in addition:

apt-get remove appmenu-qt5 indicator-appmenu

And before I forget it. In the older Ubuntu versions you also have to disable the “Global Menu Bar integration” plugin in Firefox.

In pre-saucy Ubuntu versions you can also use a less invasive way of disabling the menu:

echo "export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0" > /etc/X11/Xsession.d/81ubuntu-menu-proxy

Nonetheless there are some problems. Some programs, i.e. Rhythmbox, require the global menu. So I simply resorted to not using them. But if you rely on them and you don’t want to have a global menu, then you have a problem. But maybe this will be resolved with the new per-application configuration in 14.04.

Adobe Acrobat Reader in Ubuntu 13.10 Foo

Posted on February 5, 2014 by peter

I guess more or less every Linux user has noticed that the official Adobe Acrobat Reader version is out of date and that Adobe has no intention to update it. So you are stuck with version 9.5.5, which is mostly okay especially when you need some features that are only available in the official reader.

And as a logical consequence, Ubuntu is not providing a package anymore in its newer releases. Especially when there are so many alternatives to the simple Reader functionality. But fear not, you can still install the Adobe’s Reader and there is even a .deb package on Adobe’s download site.

Because the package does not come through the standard repository you have to resolve the dependencies on your own… well, I mean tell apt to resolve the dependencies.

First install the package using the following command (change the file name as needed):

dpkg -i AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

If you see error messages about the wrong architecture, then you work on a 64 bit system and dpkg needs a little hint.

dpkg -i --force-architecture AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

Afterwards you should see error messages about missing dependencies. And now we fix them:

apt-get -f install

This should pull all missing libraries, install them and then wrap up the installation of the Acrobat Reader.

It seems that these steps are not enough on some 64 bit Kubuntu systems. You might have to install two additional libraries:

apt-get install libxml2:i386 lib32stdc++6

And now happy PDF reading… wait… can it be that easy? At least not on my Kubuntu 13.10. Reading on the screen is fine but printing is messed up. Every print out from the Reader scales down the output to about two-third of the original size. To make things worse, it does a really crappy job at scaling. The output is basically unreadable.

Picasa Web Album Download Foo

Posted on January 25, 2014 - January 25, 2014 by peter

I must admit, I don’t use Picasa. I actually don’t like all these image organization and album programs. But somebody shared a Picasa Web Album with me that had some really nice pictures of my niece’s wedding.

These were nice pictures and I wanted them on my machine. So, lets get on it and download them. This is not so easy, if you are not using Picasa. And that is not so easy on Linux. And the album had way too many pictures to download them manually.

The Firefox extension, or add-on DownThemAll! and it’s companion DownThemAll! AntiContainer are your friends when it comes to Web Album downloads from Picasa.

Once you installed everything DownThemAll! offers you a plethora of download options. For Picasa’s Web Album you choose the RSS feed link from the sidebar. Right click on it and select “Save Link with DownThemAll!” or go to the “Tools” menu and select in the “DownThemAll!” menu the entry “DownThemAll!…”.

The latter gives you a little bit more control over what is downloaded. For instance, you can select just image files or JPEG images. Either way, select a destination folder and click the “Start!” button. Sit back and watch it download.

The only downside is the image quality. I have not found any way to get a higher resolution image. The Flash or Shockwave based viewer shows beautiful HiRes pictures. But what I downloaded is much worse. Not really bad. But everything but good.

So, if anybody out there has an idea how to download the original resolution image in a shared Picasa Web Album, then let me know. I am all ears.

But until then, happy downloading.

npm “error parsing json” Foo

Posted on January 25, 2014 - January 25, 2014 by peter

I finally got a chance to update my test installation of Ghost. But as usual Mr. Murphy thought it would be a good day to say hello.

When running the installation using npm I got a ton of errors. Here an excerpt:

...
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/commander/1.3.2
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/methods/0.1.0
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/range-parser/0.0.4
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
npm http 500 https://registry.npmjs.org/buffer-crc32/0.2.1
npm ERR! registry error parsing json
...

As usual, I checked first if the problem was on my end. Of course it wasn’t. This was just an issue with npm and switching to a different server (in npm speak a registry) solved the problem. In my case the European server worked. Here the call to install Ghost using the European registry:

npm --registry http://registry.npmjs.eu install --production

Happy haunting.

CloudPress OC 6 Compatible

Posted on January 22, 2014 - January 22, 2014 by peter

After I finally updated Owncloud to version 6.0.0a, I could test the compatibility of my CloudPress “patch” with that release. And I can announce that CloudPress is Owncloud 6 compatible.

Netgear PS121v2 Print Server Linux Foo

Posted on January 15, 2014 - January 15, 2014 by peter

It is always fun to re-activate some old hardware. We had this HP laser printer sitting there with a Netgear PS121 (v2!) and it was just begging me to use it. So I thought, that is a quick and easy set up. Well it would’ve been if it didn’t have some nice surprises for me.

We had some other machines using that printer and it was an easy thing to get the configuration details from Windows. They all printed to a raw queue on port 9100. That sounds great. So I quickly set up the printer in a similar way using the PCL3 driver for the good old HP. The printer received data and started printing the test page. And it did a good job in starting it, but it printed only half the page. Afterwards the printer seemed dead. When I took a look at the print server I could see that it was switched off. Which is odd, because the print server does not have a power switch.

Anywhoo, I tried it again after restarting the print server. And I got the same result: Half a page printed and a switched off print server. A little bit digging on the internet revealed that I am not alone with that problem and that nobody knows how to fix it.

So I went with plan B and checked what ports are open so that I can try other options. Here is what nmap gave me:

Host is up (0.0078s latency).
Not shown: 993 closed ports
PORT     STATE SERVICE
21/tcp   open  ftp
23/tcp   open  telnet
80/tcp   open  http
139/tcp  open  netbios-ssn
515/tcp  open  printer
631/tcp  open  ipp
9100/tcp open  jetdirect

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.17 seconds

That looked promising and seeing ports 631 and 515 made me happy. But I knew out of experience that IPP will be most likely a pain in the behind to set up. So I went with LPD, but I needed the queue. So lets get into the web interface and read the queue information.

If I would’ve remembered the password for the print server web interface this would’ve been an easy task. Brute force password guessing gave me, after a lot of swearing, finally access to the server’s interface.

In the Server Status page you can find the queue name in the field Default Name in the form of PS******. Now comes the part that is important to know. You have to add a _P1, the port number, at the end in order to get the full queue name. This is of course not mentioned anywhere in the user manual and without it, it won’t print.

So your URI for the print server will look something like this:

lpd://host.domain.or.ip/PS******_P1

Happy printing and don’t forget this applies only to v2 of the print server. The older v1 is supposedly a different piece of hardware with most likely different problems.

Ubuntu Sleep Foo Resolved… Finally…

Posted on January 13, 2014 - January 13, 2014 by peter

The deed is done!

Finally!

If you don’t know what I am talking about, please read here, here and here.

I finally had the time to get down and dirty (literally!) and change the power supply. Well, the old one died on me and I had to replace it. Now the old 650W rests in peace while a brand new 850W does the job. And guess what, I was right. Replacing the power supply solved the “random” sleep problems of my server.

Finally I can watch TV, leave the office and do other stuff without having to fear that my server is in stand by.

And now to the next step. Get the OS moved to the new SSD. Not only a non-sleeping server, but also a fast one.

Although… my wife most likely to first clean the carpet…

Harddisk Foo

Posted on October 15, 2013 by peter

I had my fair share of harddisk failures in the past and last night I got hit again. If anybody had problems accessing my site, then please accept my apologies. One of the hard drives in my server failed, which in itself is covered by the software RAID. But for an unknown reason the MySQL server had some issues coming back to life. The InnoDB structures were destroyed and I had to recover all databases from backup.

All is back up and running now, except of course for the failed drive. And I am working on moving everything to a different machine as soon as possible.

I’ll keep you posted.

Windows Keyboard Typing Consecutive Numbers Foo

Posted on October 15, 2013 - October 15, 2013 by peter

This Windows Foo showed it’s ugly head today for the first time and I was simply flabbergasted. Whatever I typed, only the first letter appeared correctly and from there on the system was showing consecutive numbers. Something like this for good ol’ hello world:

H2345678901

It happened first in a Java application so, I suspected a problem with Java and a virus scanner, etc. But nothing could be found. After some testing, I saw that it happened even in native Windows applications like the Powershell or AutoCAD.

Some further testing revealed that the tilde (~) and the back tick (`) seem to work fine and that pressing SHIFT plus any key gives the appropriate symbol for pressing SHIFT and the number that would appear. To make it even more fun the same happened using a remote session.

The whole behavior made me cringe and I thought already I have a key logger or some other kind of malware installed. But the virus scanner showed no problem and in general the system seemed to be fine.

After some more digging and asking repeatedly the great wise oracle with the googly eyes, I found the culprit: GuardedID. According to some other posts a tool from Comcast called Constant Guard causes the same trouble. After de-installing GuardedID, all was fine again. I did my good deed for this Monday.

And now my question to the GuardedID makers: WTF?! This tool supposedly should prevent keylogging. The least I can expect is good programming and not a TheDailyWTF moment. And even worse. After looking at your web site I nearly had to puke. Are you really marketing yourself as a serious product with “as seen on TV” and some actor’s quote?! How about investing your money into a good product rather in cheap marketing campaigns!

R.I.P. Medibuntu

Posted on October 10, 2013 by peter

While trying to update my desktop box, which is still running Quantal, I saw these nice error messages:

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/free/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/non-free/binary-amd64/Packages  404  Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/free/binary-i386/Packages  404  Not Found

W: Failed to fetch http://packages.medibuntu.org/dists/quantal/non-free/binary-i386/Packages  404  Not Found

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

If course I first suspected my flaky TWC internet connection to be the issue here. But after trying to access the URL’s in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ I saw… nothing.

Long story, short, medibuntu reached it’s end of life and after all, it is not needed anymore. All but good ol’ libdvdcss is part of the standard Ubuntu repository now. Here is the official blog post from Medibuntu’s maintainer Gauvain Pocentek: The end of Medibuntu.

Please refer to Jonathan Ridell’s blog post Medibuntu to Disappear, libdvdcss now direct from VideoLan on how to get libdvdcss to work on Ubuntu from now on.