Matt Van Stone

I am the worst for bookmarking everything and anything I come across. Sites I need to remember for once because I have to reboot to make some settings stick, or random sites I think I might need one day. What ends up happening is I get a bookmark menu with 100,000 unsorted bookmarks that I could lose and not miss at all because I don’t even know what is in there.

Every once and a while I clean them up (deleting 90% of them) and come across a few gems. Here are some decent sites that I have bookmarked over the past year:

Mandolux – High resolution quality wallpaper pictures for multiple monitors
Howto: Backup and restore your Linux system
Upcoming.org – events in your area
YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com – leave a ticket for that a-hole who parks like one.
Cute Overload
How to search for deals on Amazon
Uncyclopedia

Huh, I thought there would be more than that.

I know… shut up about Linux already.

If you have changed any of the system colors, icons, or fonts in Ubuntu you probably will have noticed sooner or later that when you open a program like Synaptic Package Manager or pretty much anything under the System > Administration menu, the theme is still the default one.

Well this is because all these applications are launched by root and the root profile doesnt have these customizations. It is an easy fix that I found on this Gnome customization thread on ubuntuforums.org.

Just run these three simple commands to create links to your theme, icon, and font folders in the root profile.

NOTE: This trick really only works if you are the only user on your system, or if every user has the same theme, icon, and font settings. Because it links to your theme, if someone else logs into the computer who has a different theme and opens any root application they will see your theme for that app, not their own. There really is no workaround for this.

Anyway, run these three link commands:

sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root/.icons
sudo ln -s ~/.fonts /root/.fonts

Here is a before and after screenshot of what it looked like on my workstation.
View the before image
View the after image

I complained a while ago that there was no Flash 9 for Linux. It has been a pain working without it for a long time, but the wait is over. Adobe has released Flash 9 for Linux and it is great. Now cool flash applications like Digg Swarm work.

Get Flash 9 for Linux here.

One thing about Ubuntu I find is it is more geared to higher resolutions… either that, or they like huge ass fonts and icons at lower resolutions. I still dual boot with Windows XP for a few reasons. I have a Harmony remote that can only be updated through Windows, and I use Guitar Pro 5, which I haven’t taken the time yet to try and get working through Wine.

Anyway, every time I boot in Windows I am surprised at how much bigger my monitor looks. Fact is, it looks bigger because XP came out when 1024 was pretty much the highest resolution anyone used. When you run it at 1920×1200 it seems like such a higher resolution because the fonts and icons are not scaled larger to match the it. Then I boot back into Ubuntu and everything seems so large.

It is actually pretty simple to modify these settings. In fact I fixed it by changing two simple options.

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I was browsing the Faqs, Howto, Tips & Tricks forum on ubuntuforums.org and came across a script to automatically compile the beta versions of Tcl and Tk and then recompile amsn with anti-aliasing support.

I knew this has been possible, but I wasnt really interested in putting the work in to have more buggy beta software running. But since I found this script and it seemed to be working flawlessly for a lot of people I gave it a try.

See the forum post here: Automatic Script for Anti-Aliasing aMSN

Read the notes in the post before you try to run the script. There are some conditions that may affect some users. It worked fine for me though.

Here are my before and after pictures:

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I am so happy right now. First tonight I got my mouse working in Ubuntu 6.10 without having to reseat the USB dongle every time I start up. Now I have all 8 buttons and both the vertical and horizontal scroll working.

It was pain staking, I’ll tell you that much. I got most of my information from ubuntuforums.org, but some of it was all me.

First off, my setup was a bit different than most users on the forum. I have the Logitech MX5000 Bluetooth Desktop which comes with an MX1000 mouse and an MX5000 keyboard. Most people on the forum just have the mouse. In the average user’s case only one device would go through the USB receiver making it easy for Linux to identify. In my case both the keyboard and mouse go through the same receiver, so specifying to evdev which device was the mouse got a little trickier.

If you are having a problem getting all of the buttons on your Logitech mouse working I would suggest you first read over this post at ubuntuforums.org. It is very informative and has helped many people.

Let me outline some of my specifics here. The following code snippits are what is currently working on my computer:

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I am writing this while it is still fresh in my mind. After running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft for a few months now and having to reconnect my USB dongle for my Bluetooth wireless keyboard every time I started it up, I finally got annoyed enough to try and fix it.

I installed Edgy right when it came out and right away realized my keyboard and mouse were not working. I went back to a wired one so that I could do some reading on the issue on ubuntuforums.org. Right away I discovered that others were having the same issue, but there wasn’t much feedback, so I just let it be. The most I could find was the peripherals would work again if you unplugged and plugged back in the USB adapter. This was all 2 or 3 months ago.

Tonight I went back on ubuntuforums.org to find quite a bit of replies and a lot of new posts around Bluetooth and Edgy. Most had to do with mice not being recognized by built-in Bluetooth receivers. However, this wasn’t my issue. My issue was specifically with the Logitech MX5000 desktop including the MX1000 mouse. Digging a bit more I found the official bug report and in there I found some help.

First off I found that if you remove all of the bluez packages in most cases the bluetooth mouse/keyboard will start working again. This was the case for me. I did a quick

sudo apt-get remove bluez-cups bluez-pcmcia-support bluez-pin bluez-utils

then rebooted and to my surprise my mouse worked without having to touch the dongle. Just to make double-sure I did a complete shutdown and power on, and again it worked.

Don’t get too excited though… this is really only a workaround. If you use any other Bluetooth devices (phone, headset, camera, etc), removing the bluez packages will mean you will no longer be able to connect these devices. However, that didn’t matter in my situation because I don’t have any of those.

From the bug report I also found that this seems to be a bug at the kernel level with bluez and it should be fixed when Ubuntu goes to kernel 2.6.19. The only thing I’m not sure about is this post:

The kernel patch applies to all platforms (it changes arch-independent sources).

But the bug doesn’t occur on the other platforms:
- x86 is 32bit userspace on a 32bit kernel
- amd64 is 64bit userspace on a 64bit kernel.

The bug only appears when a 32bit userspace is used on a 64bit kernel – this is the powerpc64 platform.

So the kernel patch applies to all platforms, but it only fixes breakage specific for powerpc64.

So this may mean that the bug is only fixed on the powerpc platform. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Here is the link to Bug #32415: Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard Broken in Dapper/Edgy/Feisty encase anyone is interested in reading up on it. Oh come on… I know you are excited.

Ok, so here is the news for today. I tried to buy a chocolate bar from the vending machine today. I had 4 quarters, 1 nickel, and what I thought was 2 dimes. The machine kept on spitting out one of my dimes, so I looked at it and realized it was a 20 Lipa piece from Republik Hrvatska, AKA Croatia. This is not the first time this is happened to me. Aside from the odd American coin in my change once I got some random Oriental coin for a quarter… it’s not even close to the same size and it feels like it is made of aluminum.

Speaking of this vending machine, I have been choked for a month because all of the 3 Musketeers chocolate bars have been gone. Then I just realized today that there is a whole row of them but there is a Hazelnut crapbar in front of them. So I have to sacrifice $1.25 if I want to get to the 3 Musketeers.

Here is a little tidbit for you, apparently Americans hate it when they get Canadian quarters in their change because stores there wont accept them (if noticed). Here in Canada nobody cares because they are at least equal currency.

Programmers have already figured out how to bypass the HD-DVD DRM and have begun extracting HD-DVD movies and putting them on bit torrent.

Right now if you search for HD DVD on thepiratebay you will see a few titles at the top including Pitch Black, Batman Begins and The Chronicles of Riddick all in their 1080p glory.

Each torrent is about 20GB and as far as I know the only way to play them is using PowerDVD on a computer. That is unless you have an HD-DVD burner, which you do not.

I would like to download one and try it on xbmc, but I’m pretty sure xbmc’s 700MHZ processor is not powerful enough to playback HD content.

I think that this along with the porn industry adopting HD-DVD as their main standard has pretty much destroyed any hopes BR had of surviving.

I’m hoping that maybe now we will start seeing some 1.4GB HD-DVDRip XviD files popping up. I wonder how a 4GB HD-DVDRip XviD file would compare to a 4GB DVD?