Kubuntu

After my upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04/Precise Pangolin, I found that while KTorrent worked, it was buggy as right-clicking on torrents did nothing. I blamed this on a configurational mishap during the upgrade and lived with it as I could do perform most operations using the main menu or the toolbar buttons. However, with most sites moving away from .torrent files and toward magnet links, I found that KTorrent wasn't playing nice with the magnet URIs.

So I tried updating one of my boxen running the Lucid Kubuntu LTS to the new Precise Pangolin beta. During the upgrade, I received an error message stating that adobe-flashplugin could not be upgraded. I ignored it and continued with the upgrade and all went swimmingly. Once the upgrade was completed and I had rebooted, when I tried to run an apt-get update, I ran into an error with respect to the adobe-flashplugin package. When I tried to remove it, it did not work. As a stop-gap measure, I removed a number of packages that depended on it including Firefox and sun-java6.

On an Ubuntu box, I tried using the locate command to find information about a package and ran into the following error:

mlocate: can not stat () `/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db': No such file or directory

The locate program (should) routinely builds a database of files on the box and searches it when we call it. As the error message states, this database appears to be missing thereby leading to the error. Fixing it is as simple as calling:
updatedb

which should build the database.

Hope this helps!

One of my laptops which is running on Kubuntu Lucid decided to stop connecting to my network today. I found that the KDE network-manager applet (or is it a plasmoid? :S) had decided to disable itself. Clicking it stated so with no option to re-enable it (nice UI, boys). Getting to the commandline and starting the network-manager service did not help. I also found that accessing the System settings networking configuration gave me corrupt XML file errors.

I ran into the following error when I added a new repository to my kubuntu box and ran apt-get update:
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room. Please increase the size of APT::Cache-Limit. Current value: 123123. (man 5 apt.conf)

To fix this, navigate to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d and edit the file related to debconf which in my case was 70debconf. Add the following line to the bottom of this file and save it:
APT::Cache-Limit "200000000";

One of my local servers died a quiet death last week. Much as I tried to revive the li'l bitch, she refused to accede to my plaintive entreaties. She is now consigned to a forlorn corner and I am yet to see to her last rites. In the meantime, I have recently introduced a new addition to my family of servers through the cannibalisation of older (and now retired) members of the same. So, I settled on trying to see if I could save the soul of my now recently defunct Kubuntu box by simply transferring its hard drive to this new server. When I tried to do so, this is what transpired:

Finding all the members of a group is an occasional requirement and while there are a number of ways to do this by parsing the /etc/group and /etc/password files, Debian/Ubuntu come with a simpler solution that performs all this skulduggery for you. This is the members function that can simply be installed using sudo apt-get install members . Once this is done, members of a group named foo can be listed using:
members foo.

Earlier today, I noticed - in htop - that a particular process, let's say 'foo-123', was running even though I had removed the package 'foo' many days earlier. I tried removing it again and found that I was right and that the package had already been removed. The package dependency list was way too long for me to go removing them one by one, or parsing them out and removing the lot.

IRC, however, was very obliging to my query and provided me with the below-pasted nifty solution that did not allow any odd gimmickry:
sudo aptitude search '~i' | grep foo

I ran into this curious predicament earlier today when I found that the numeric keypad was not working in Kubuntu. Now, I have a KVM setup here and therefore could easily verify that the keyboard itself was working fine. This meant that the problem was a software issue.

I performed a fresh install of Kubuntu's new distro - Lucid whatever - today. As per usual, there is no front-end to configure Samba and I had to do it the old-fashioned way. The following are steps that should walk you through a basic configuration on creating a share that can be accessed from Windows:

1. Install Samba using sudo aptitude install samba smbfs
2. Navigate to /etc/samba/