I have a Ubuntu 12.04 install on an external HDD. On my Dell Laptop, I tried to boot into 12.04 by connecting the USB 3.0 compatible external HDD to USB 3.0 port but it wouldn’t show the grub (v2.00-7ubuntu11) boot screen. A rather silly workaround helped, however. I connected it first to a USB 2.0 port so that the grub screen loaded. Then, I disconnected the HDD and reconnected it to USB 3.0 port and voila. I don’t know if it’s the BIOS or grub (or both?) but this is what I’m going to do from now on.

While trying to connect Samsung Galaxy S3 i9300 with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on Windows 7 64bit PC with Kies installed, the device driver installation failed and it showed “The device cannot start” in Device Manager. While searching for a fix, I found a XDA developer forum post offering a solution for this issue however, the fix didn’t work but thanks to the thread, I finally managed to get it working. I’m sorry but I don’t know how it works and why it works and the procedure involves editing registry so proceed with caution. Having said that, here is what you can do to get it to work.

Prerequisite:
Before continuing with the procedure, make sure you have the latest drivers for Samsung device. To do that, connect your device, wait for it to fail and then open Windows Update and click Check for Updates. If you find any Samsung driver update, install it and restart if you have to.

Here is the process:
1. Open Registry editor (regedit.exe)
2. Navigate to the following key and perform a backup by right clicking on it and selecting Export and save anywhere:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class

This step is a safety measure. You can restore the settings by double clicking the reg file if something goes wrong.
3. Now, under Class, find the following keys and look for UpperFilters on the right pane:
{36FC9E60-C465-11CF-8056-444553540000}
{EEC5AD98-8080-425f-922A-DABF3DE3F69A}

If you find UpperFilters, just right click on it and select Delete to delete the key.

4. Now, disconnect your phone if you have it connected and try reconnecting.

Hope it works for you too. If it doesn’t or if you mess something up, you may want to restore your registry by double clicking the reg file backed up in step 2 and look for some other solution. Best of luck.

Fedora 16 Alpha is coming out soon and they have selected Fedora 16 wallpaper. Here is how I installed it in Fedora 15:

cd /tmp
wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/verne-backgrounds/15.91.0/1.fc16/noarch/verne-backgrounds-single-15.91.0-1.fc16.noarch.rpm
wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/verne-backgrounds/15.91.0/1.fc16/noarch/verne-backgrounds-15.91.0-1.fc16.noarch.rpm
rpm -i verne-backgrounds-single-15.91.0-1.fc16.noarch.rpm
rpm -i verne-backgrounds-15.91.0-1.fc16.noarch.rpm

Then, select the new wallpaper in background settings.

I am a programmer and I can’t do without a clipboard manager. If you have never used a clipboard manager before, you don’t know what a great tool you are missing. GPaste is an excellent clipboard tool for Gnome-Shell, however it is neither available in Ubuntu repository, nor in any PPA (as of now). Here is how you can compile it. Open up the terminal and get going.

Install Dependencies

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev libglib2.0-dev intltool automake autoconf valac git libdee-dev gnome-tweak-tool

Download Source

cd; git clone https://github.com/Keruspe/GPaste.git

Compile and Install

cd;cd GPaste
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Restart Gnome-Shell
To restart, press Alt+F2, enter ‘r’ (without quotes) and press enter.

Enable GPaste Extension
To enable extension, open up Alt+F2>gnome-tweak-tool (or Activities>Applications>Other>Advanced Settings) and enable GPaste under Shell Extensions.

You should now see GPaste icon in the top panel. However, it may give the following error message:

(Couldn’t connect to GPaste daemon)

For this, add the GPaste daemon in startup as “gpaste –daemon” in StartUP applications and reboot.

I have just installed Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 11.10 Onieric Ocelot. In Gnome-Shell interface, there are no title bar controls for minimize, maximize/restore. To enable them, open up the terminal and type in (or copy/paste) the following command:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout --type string close,minimize,maximize:

Now, press Alt+F2, type in “r” without quotes and press enter. This will reload Gnome-Shell and the changes will come into effect.

Note: The above will set the buttons in left side as in Ubuntu default theme (or Mac OS X). To place them in the right (like Gnome 2 default, Windows), use the following command instead:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout --type string :minimize,maximize,close

Hope this helps.

I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot on my laptop. I had been using Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal on it and since I use this PC for work, I was reluctant in installing Gnome-Shell from PPA. But since Gnome-Shell is available in official repositories, I decided to give it a go. To install, just open Ubuntu Software Center, search for Gnome-Shell and click “Install”. After installation is complete, log out and when logging back in, select Gnome (see screenshot below).

I am using Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and had to setup M2Crypto required for a Python program that I am writing in Python 2.7 (32-bit). After hours of trying and searching, I finally managed to get it installed and working.

Here are some of the things that I tried, please move on to “How I managed to get it to work” if you don’t want to go through boring “What I tried” stuff.

What I tried:
First of all, I tried to install M2Crypto via pip. I got an error saying that swig.exe was not found, so I downloaded copy of swigwin and extracted it, then added the directory to system PATH. I installed easy_install (setuptools), opened the terminal and changed dir to Python27\Scripts and installed pip (easy_install pip). Then, I tried to install M2Crypto using pip:

pip install M2Crypto

Unfortunately, I got the following error:

SWIG\_m2crypto.i(31) : Error: Unable to find ‘openssl\opensslv.h’

SWIG\_m2crypto.i(45) : Error: Unable to find ‘openssl\safestack.h’

SWIG\_evp.i(12) : Error: Unable to find ‘openssl\opensslconf.h’

SWIG\_ec.i(7) : Error: Unable to find ‘openssl\opensslconf.h’

error: command ‘swig.exe’ failed with exit status 1

So, I downloaded openssl source files and copied the include directory to swig_dir/lib, then I got errors that from swig. I also tried giving build_dist parameter to setup.py but in vain. I was thinking of compiling openssl myself, but I figured that I would require Visual Studio (which I do not have). I thought of using MingW, but turns out you need to compile Python with MingW for it to work. I almost gave up on this, but I found that some developers had contributed build of OpenSSL and M2Crypto, so that I could just install them. Move on to next section to do it yourself.

How I managed to get it to work
I downloaded pre-built binaries of M2Crypto built against OpenSSL 1.0 from M2Crypto Wiki. The one that I downloaded is M2Crypto-0.21.1.win32-py2.7.msi. Then, I set it up. It detected my Python installation and installed the package. However, when I ran the Python script, I got the following error:

import __m2crypto
ImportError: DLL load failed

I don’t know if it was because I did not restart my computer after installation or if OpenSSL dlls were missing, in either case, you may want to install Win32 OpenSSL V1 Light and install it and it should work.

Hope this helps.

I am just starting with Python 3 on Windows and I wanted to install easy_install and/or pip for installing other available packages easily. However, I found that setuptools setup for Python 3.3.2 (the version I am using) is not available.

I discovered distribute, a fork of setuptools, which provides easy_install. I downloaded source from Python Package page for distribute and extracted it. In the elevated command prompt (cmd->Run as Administrator), I changed to extracted directory and then ran distribute_setup.py. Then, easy_install was successfully installed in Python_Directory\Scripts. Then, I could install pip by changing directory to Scripts and running the following:

easy_install pip

Hope this helps.

When trying to purge Gnome3 PPA, I had to cancel the ppa-purge process and when I tried to run the same, I got the following message:

Updating packages lists
PPA to be removed: gnome3-team gnome3
Warning: Could not find package list for PPA: gnome3-team gnome3

I had to add the PPA again to be able to successfully run ppa-purge. For example, if your ppa is ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3, you should run the following:

apt-add-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

Then you should be able to run ppa-purge again.

Note: In my case, I also got the following error after adding the PPA again:

E: Type ‘ain’ is not known on line 3 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gnome3-team-gnome3-natty.list
E: The list of sources could not be read.
Warning: apt-get update failed for some reason
PPA to be removed: gnome3-team gnome3
Warning: Could not find package list for PPA: gnome3-team gnome3

This seems to be some bug. I had to manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gnome3-team-gnome3-natty.list and remove the line containing ‘ain’. This should not be required in your case.

If this does not work, you should check if the PPA exists at all and if you have packages installed from that PPA.

I have installed sun-java-jre/jdk on my Ubuntu and Fedora. I am using svn for my project and have been running it well with my old Fedora 15 installation on my old PC. However, recently I installed Fedora on my other machine and installed Netbeans 7.0.1 on top of sun-java. Fedora did not handle graphics very well, so I installed Ubuntu alongside as well. But every time I tried to access subversion functionality from Netbeans, I got the following error:

org.tigris.subversion.javahl.ClientException: java.io.IOException: Duplicate extensions not allowed
OPTIONS request failed on ‘/relative/path/to/some/project/directory’

This happened in both of my newer installations, Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04, both with Netbeans 7.0.1. I tried several things but all in vain. Finally, when searching for installed Java related packages in my old machine (where subversion always worked), I found the required package. The cryptic error message will simply stop appearing and Netbeans subversion will start working after the installation of svn client adapter for Netbeans. Here is how you can do it from the terminal:

For Fedora:

su -c 'yum install netbeans-svnclientadapter'

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libnb-svnclientadapter-java

Hope this helps.