Kubuntu

So once you have your MythTV setup and connected to your TV, how do you continue to manage it with just a remote control? Well there are lots of options. There is the obvious solutions like VNC. VNC is nice, but it can be cumbersome, even on a local network segment.

But for things that don't require a "desktop" I like to use X over SSH. It's faster and more responsive than VNC. One of my favorites is when I have to run mythtv-setup. It works great using ssh. To run it remotely from my Mythtv I run the following

ssh user@mythtvbox -CX mythtv-setup

The "-C" turns on compression, which generally speeds things up. The "X" tells ssh to forward an X Windows session for the app to your desktop. It works really nicely. 

You can even do this with the mythfrontend as well. Its just faster if you have some configuring to do than to run around and plug in a mouse and keyboard and sit on the floor 3 feet in front of your 50' LCD TV. But don't expect to be able to stream video that way! :)

I've been having the absolute worst Firefox experience in Kubuntu recently. I can't pinpoint the exact time that it started but it got a lot worse when I upgraded to Flash 10 (what a hog! Adobe seriously? Flash 10 runs about as well as a Microsoft OS does!).

Once Flash 10 was there scrolling in Firefox became impossible. It was as if my whole computer was locked for about 5 seconds. Then it would scroll... slowly. Painfully even.

After poking around in Google for a while and not finding much in the way of solutions, I decided to try some new video drivers. I uninstalled all of the Ubuntu Nvidia drivers and downloaded and installed the 177.80 drivers. 

Wow! What a huge difference. Not only that, but almost all of my issues with hibernation (it was intermittent, but sometimes it didn't work) are gone now too. 

One thing I did run into was that I didn't uninstall the Ubuntu Nvidia packages and just ran the Nvidia installer. After a reboot, the Nvidia drivers didn't load properly. the i2c_core module was not loading, unless I unloaded and reloaded the Nvidia driver. Once I uninstalled all the Nvidia related stuff from the Ubuntu repository and reinstalled the latest Nvidia driver all those problems were resolved.

I recently needed to bring up a java app that I hadn't used in quite some time. At least as long as before I had Kubntu 8.04 installed. Back then I was using Java 6 (1.6.x) as the default JRE on my latptop. Now however, the app was failing with all kinds of errors.

As with any OS that can use Java, just because you have a java version installed, doesn't mean that version is the one that is launched by default. I have Java-gcj, Java 5 and Java 6 all installed on my Kubuntu 8.04 laptop. Java-gcj was currently the default java version.

In Linux, the way the java default is setup is both elagent and confusing all at the same time (Linux in a nutshell if you ask me, and I love it!). In Linux the /usr/bin/java file is really just a link to the java version that you want to be the default. But /usr/bin/java links to another link to /etc/alternatives/java which in turn links to the actual java binary at /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java. 

Summary

Tools used: 2 Kubuntu 7.10 PC's, Gizmo VOIP client, Gizmo VOIP conference feature, Icemat Audio headset and usb card, Audacity audio editor, Podsafe Music from http://music.podshow.com,

Process:

1. Use only SIP compliant VOIP clients (iChat, Gizmo, Ekiga) so that everyone can use the Gizmo VOIP conference call number.

2. Use two Gizmo clients on your end. One to participate in the call and one just for recording. The PC that is recording with Gizmo should have its speakers and mic turned off. Otherwise strange echoing or feedback will occur.

3. Everyone call in using the full phone number that you get from Gizmo (It should look like 1-222-xxx-xxxx). Using other methods doesn't seem as reliable.

4. Record the call. Everyone will hear a message that says that the call is being recorded. Make sure that at the end of the call everyone is off mute and you record about 10 seconds of “silence”. This is for later on when you use the noise filter feature in Audacity.

5. Hold your podcast session

I've been messing around a lot with virtual technologies recently. Partly due to the virtualization technology that we have been using at work, but mostly because its cool and every once in a while I need to run something in Windows and I don't want to reboot on my dual boot laptop.I ran out of room on my 8gb windows vmware partition. I decided to double the capacity. Easy enough. I've done this before. I'll just run the vmware command:vmware-vdiskmanager Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk -x 16Gb Then I will just boot up from the gparted-clonezilla livecd and expand the NTFS partition.

I've upgraded 3 machines to Kubuntu 7.10 already. I've upgraded all of them using the online method. My gaming desktop was the smoothest. That is also the machine that I've hacked up the least, so that is to be expected. I used adept_manager and upgraded to the RC version of Kubuntu a week before 7.10 was released officially. My personal laptop was a nightmare while trying to use adept_manager. It was never able to really even start the upgrade process. It kept giving me an error about how some other process must be using the apt database. Which was total crap. I even turned off the auto download of security patches. I had read that some other people that got that error did that and it worked for them. Not for me. Finally after running "sudo dpkg --configure -a", few apt-get clean up commands and a reboot, I did finally get it to work... kinda. The process kept on hanging with adept_manager. Additionally my laptop was confused as to what Ubuntu distro it was (ubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu). I reinstalled the kde-desktop packages to fix that. Then I finally just gave up and went all command line on its butt.

I recently put together an awesome new desktop machine for gaming. Of course I immediately put Kubuntu Feisty on it. When compiz-fusion came out I slapped that on there too. It worked great... except for the ccsm (CompizConfig Settings Manager) App. Just about everything in that application was black text on a black background. I thought perhaps it had something to do with Compiz. I removed Compiz, but then noticed that Kino had the same problem.I thought that it must be a GTK app issue so I searched Google for "black menus gtk". Sure enough here is a post on the Kubuntu Forums.