Linux

If you, like moi, just upgraded to Intrepid Ibex, and found that your VLC doesn't work any more, this here is the fix:

• Right click on an audio/video file and select properties.
• Click the edit icon (spanner) to get to the options page.
• Select VLC media player in the application list and click the edit button on the right.
• Select the application tab on the top and look for the command wxvlc on this page.
• Change wxvlc to just vlc. Click OK a few times to save the changes.

... and that's it.

Hope this helps :)

An excellent story on How to make money with free software has been doing the rounds today, and deservedly so. While I won't spoil the surprise for you here, I must say that I like the back better than the front :)

If you are using Skype on Linux and run into the error message "P2P connect failed" while trying to sign in, then your configuration file is very likely corrupt. The fix is to just delete the .Skype directory from your home directory and restart Skype. If you have anything worth saving inside this directory, you can simply rename it instead or alternatively, back it up elsewhere prior to deletion.

The version of Skype on my system is 2.0.0.72 and it was installed (and upgraded) from the Medibuntu repository. I'm pretty certain that the previous version was working fine.

I use SoundKonverter to accomplish all my ripping and trans-coding tasks. It's something of a front-end for all the command-line apps and is a serious time saver.

If you follow the posts on this site, you'd have noticed my issues with the recent Hardy upgrade. While I thought they'd been fixed in my fstab, this was apparently not the case. When I rebooted the machine next, I couldn't even get to the shell as I encountered the message - Unable to execute /bin/sh - Permission Denied.

The Flash plug-in for Opera in Kubuntu has been FUBAR-ed and it seems that it's caused due to an Opera bug w.r.t Flash player 9.0.115 which is fixed in the 9.50 betas. However, since Kubuntu etc. are still using 9.27, the only way to fix this issue is to go back to 9.0.48.

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade my Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 install to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron. While I didn't have any specific feature that I thought I might need, I really wanted to see if an upgrade would help me access my digital camera which isn't terribly well supported in 7.10.

If you are experiencing speed issues with your CD or DVD drive, here are some tips that might help:

1. Make sure that you use an 80-conductor data cable and that it is fine.

If you run into an error message along the lines of mount: /dev/sdb2 already mounted or /media/data1 busy, and the disk has not been mounted, it usually indicates that something has locked it intentionally to prevent it from being mounted. In my case, the culprit was dmraid, a RAID management tool that I am not using any more. Uninstalling the package did the trick. (Removing the array configuration from dmraid would probably have sufficed)

hth.

I have a Gigabyte board with an nForce 430 chipset that supports RAID. I was hoping to use it to create a simple RAID1 mirror using two hard drives to protect my previous MP3 collection. The system in question is an updated Kubuntu Gutsy box.

Before we start, this is the first time I am playing with RAID and the information below might very well be wrong. Please feel free to correct me :)