Aslak Johansen's Weblog

Upgrade to Oneiric breaks VMWare Player

aslakjohansen — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:32:56 +0000

After upgrading the Ubuntu install on my laptop from Natty to Oneiric my VMWare Player failed to start. It gave a error about not being able to compile the wmmon module. The compile process reported errors like:

/tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:783:59: error: ‘SPIN_LOCK_UNLOCKED’ undeclared here (not in a function)

The fix was to repeat the official installation instructions. No need to remove the old one first. This upped the major version number in the progress.

Grouping Facebook Contacts in Empathy

aslakjohansen — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:22:57 +0000

You can’t. Facebook doesn’t support editing of groups in their jabber implementation. The trick then becomes to assign groups through facebook.

This is done by logging into facebook and choosing ‘Edit Friends’ from the ‘Account’ drop-down menu. The process is first to create the groups (lists in facebook-lingo) and then to assign contacts (friends in facebook-lingo) to them.

Modifying message of last commit in GIT

aslakjohansen — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:01:03 +0000

You wrote the wrong description for the last commit and it annoys you. What to do?
git commit --amend -m "The correct description"
This will modify the history. Further discussion here.

Binary Drivers and Kernel Updates

aslakjohansen — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 20:28:56 +0000

Binary drivers tend to be build against a specific kernel. When the kernel is updated the driver will break if not rebuild. Ubuntu has a mechanism for dealing with this, but it depends on the linux-headers-generic package being installed:
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic
Specific drivers may need a few hints to realize that they should rebuild (normally done at boot-time). This page covers the specifics for the proprietary nvidia driver.

Gnome 3 Reference

aslakjohansen — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:27:36 +0000

To be updated …

Gnome 3 themes on Natty

aslakjohansen — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:09:03 +0000

Installed Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04) and quickly became annoyed with the new ‘unity’ interface. The old ‘classical gnome’ option worked fine, but I decided to try installing Gnome 3 from PPA.

I ended up with some fallback theme. With some inspiration I managed to fix it using
sudo apt-get remove gnome-accessibility-themes gnome-accessibility-themes-extras sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-standard
and then choosing the ‘Adwaita’ theme.

List of Graphical Interfaces to GIT

aslakjohansen — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:03:46 +0000

Linux

Giggle

OSX

Windows

TortoiseGit

Skype via Empathy

aslakjohansen — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:36:51 +0000

This thread describes how to do skype chatting in empathy.

The steps to follow – for ubuntu users at least – are:

Install skype: see link.
Install pidgin-skype: sudo apt-get install pidgin-skype
Start skype.
Go to empathy’s account manager and add a bigbrownchunx-skype-dbus account for your skype identity.

Maverick and rpy

aslakjohansen — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:52:11 +0000

The version of python-rpy and r-base-core does not match in the current Ubuntu. A workaround is suggested via the relevant ubuntu bug entry: Pull python-rpy from ppa:bigmadwolf/misc instead.

BOINC Control Issues in Maverick

aslakjohansen — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:21:06 +0000

A bug in upgraded Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) installations has caused the boinc manager to lose its menubar. As a result the option to control the execution policy is gone.

The same control is available through the commandline,

boinccmd --set_run_mode always

for starting and

boinccmd --set_run_mode never

for stopping.