Daniel 'MaTachi' Jonsson

Monthly Archives: May 2011

Set Up Your Own Cloud Storage With ownCloud

Last Sunday on The Linux Action Show they talked about free and open source applications that replaces Google’s services. One of the applications that they brought up was ownCloud, which is a is a file hosting service that works like Dropbox. ownCloud is a web based application that you host on your own web hosting service, which means that you have full control of both the application and of your files. The current stable version is 1.2 and can be downloaded from their website:

ownCloud started as a project not long ago, which means that the development hasn’t come very far yet. But I think it’s promising.

Make Gedit A Powerful Programmer Text Editor With GMate

On the latest episode of The Linux Action Show they mentioned a really cool plugin package to Gedit that adds many useful features for programmers. It’s called GMate and can be found here:

Here are the installation instructions if you are running Ubuntu (or Mint):

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-on-rails/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gedit-gmate

GMate also comes with A LOT of themes and some syntax highlighting improvements.

Disable Add-on Compatibility Checking In Firefox 7.0a1 Nightly

I just updated my Firefox installation under Linux Mint 10, so now I’m apparently using Firefox 7. Can’t say that I have seen anything new from what is in the Firefox 5 beta, but whatever.

Because I updated Firefox it disabled all my add-ons, as usually. To get them working again in Firefox 7.0a1, follow these steps:

  1. Open a new tab.
  2. Type about:config in the address bar.
  3. Right click anywhere on the page and click on Boolean under New.
  4. Enter this as the preference name: extensions.checkCompatibility.nightly
  5. Click OK.
  6. Choose false and then click OK again.
  7. Restart your browser and all your add-ons should be runnable again.

Since we don’t have to type in the version number in the preference name any longer (extensions.checkCompatibility.XXX), I suppose that we won’t need to update this in future versions of Firefox.

Possible Solutions To Two Wine Problems

I have for some time now tried to get games like Team Fortress 2 and Mirror’s Edge to run in Linux Mint 10 64-bit through Wine. However, it haven’t gone very well so I’m only able to play them with really, really bad performance. But maybe will some of the stuff that I found help somebody else, so I will post what I found in this blog post. The graphics card that I have is an Asus Radeon HD 6870, and the driver is the proprietary display driver (CCC 11.5) found on amd.com.

My games won’t start – nothing happens

Try to update your system with aptitude. That was what solved the problem for me.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install
sudo aptitude upgrade

(Not really sure why sudo aptitude install installed some updates when I first ran it)

No direct rendering

I had the problem that running glxinfo | grep direct in the terminal returned the following line:

direct rendering: No (LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT set)

However, if I ran it with sudo (sudo glxinfo | grep direct), it returned:

direct rendering: Yes
  • Here is a link to a thread with somebody having the same problem. The first possible solution that is given in this thread is to add the following lines to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file: 
    Section    "DRI"
Group      "video"
Mode       0660
EndSection
  • The second one that is given in the thread is to add your user account to the video group. To find where you do this, open the MintMenu and search for Users and Groups.
  • Another suggestion that I found was to type this line into the command line: 
    unset LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT

    This did only work for me in the current open terminal window. So when I opened a new one, it went back to saying No.

  • The final solution, that actually worked for me, was to disable the Compiz desktop effects.

Here is the thread where I got to know much of the stuff above: http://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?p=61294. But as I said, I still have pretty bad performance in my games and I’m to lazy to fix it. I think I will keep on gaming on Windows, and doing all other stuff on Linux.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei Linux Mint Wallpapers

I have modified five Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei wallpapers that I found on the Internet with Linux Mint logos. Not much work done, but on the other hand it didn’t take much time. They are all in 1920×1200 (HD?).

Tane Kitsu - Linux Mint

Tane Kitsu - Linux Mint

Kanako Oora - Linux Mint

Kanako Oora - Linux Mint

Meru Otonashi - Linux Mint

Meru Otonashi - Linux Mint

Miko Nezu - Linux Mint

Miko Nezu - Linux Mint

Shouko Maruuchi - Linux Mint

Shouko Maruuchi - Linux Mint

If you, like me, have two monitors, you may find this wallpaper nice on your desktop:

Kanako Oora & Tane Kitsu - Linux Mint

Kanako Oora & Tane Kitsu - Linux Mint

Here is a screenshot of my desktop:

My Desktop

My Desktop

Monitoring Bandwidth From The Terminal With bwm-ng

I found a really neat terminal application that monitors the bandwith to and from your computer. It’s called bwm-ng (Bandwidth Monitor Next Generation) and can be installed with the following command if you are using a Debian-based distro:

sudo aptitude install bwm-ng

Here is a screenshot of the program in action:

bwm-ng

bwm-ng

You can find out more about this app on the following links:

Why Aptitude Is Superior To Apt-Get

Yesterday I was messing around in the terminal and googeling for cool and useful commands. I had seen the command aptitude being mentioned a few times before in forum threads and such, but I had never tried to use it myself. However, yesterday I did try use it didn’t take long time until I realised how superior it’s to apt-get.

Instead of ranting about what it does better than the other myself, I will link to an article from 2007 that describes everything very well:

How to Use Double Dash in WordPress

To make WordPress stop converting two dashes into a single one, follow this guide:

  1. Open wp-includes/formatting.php.
  2. Navigate to line 56.
  3. Change line 56 and 57 from: 
    $static_characters = array_merge(array('---', ' -- ', '--', ' - ', 'xn–', '...', '``', '\'\'', ' (tm)'), $cockney);
$static_replacements = array_merge(array('—', ' — ', '–', ' – ', 'xn--', '…', $opening_quote, $closing_quote, ' ™'), $cockneyreplace);

    to:

    $static_characters = array_merge(array(' - ', 'xn–', '...', '``', '\'\'', ' (tm)'), $cockney);
$static_replacements = array_merge(array(' – ', 'xn--', '…', $opening_quote, $closing_quote, ' ™'), $cockneyreplace);
  4. Done!

Ubunchu! – The Very Best Manga

Ubunchu!The other day I found a really great manga when I was searching for an anime character on Google. It’s called Ubunchu! and it’s about, as the name suggest, Ubuntu! :)

The story is about the SysAdmin club on a Japanese school, and it starts out with the club’s three only members deciding what operating system to install on their computer. They agree to try out Ubuntu, and the following chapters are about different Ubuntu and Linux stuff. Like one chapters is about the terminal and how you use commands, and another one is about how you use the forums to get help.

Check it out, it’s really great I must say!