sudo apt-get install pidgin-libnotify
Then configure it from Tools > Plugins > Libnotify Popups.
The Gnome way, adding the second panel back and a flipped Nautilus
I had emulated Windows’ look and feel shortly after I began using Ubuntu, but I have now became convinced of the Gnome way being the right way. I realized my brain was already confused with the location of the menus due to just the short dip into the Gnome default. That is to say, I found myself looking for the desktop menus from the top of the screen although I had only just touched that solution briefly in the beginning – what more proof is needed for the naturalness of the Gnome way? So, in an attempt to follow the Gnome philosophy to the strictest, I tried to re-organize my desktop back to the way it was right at the beginning.
It took me some time to find out how to add the second panel back, as most of the Ubuntuforums threads seemingly related were not, so here’s how to do it: point to the other panel you have, right-click on it and select New Panel. I do wonder if the Gnome people think this is the most accessible way of doing this; at least in my mind, the panels are added onto the desktop
so I would have expected the choice to add one to be available by right-clicking on the desktop. But apparently, the birth of a panel is more like the birth of an amoeba (where one becomes two) rather than the birth of life itself (where naught becomes one).
I tried to avoid the somewhat nasty way of removing all Gnome configuration files because I did have some settings I wanted to preserve. Unfortunately, at some point I ran into Bug #153382 (or a similar one), where Nautilus makes the desktop disappear, starts hogging up the CPU and spews error messages into a logfile in the home directory. It was only due to finding the logfile that I found out what was going on in the first place, and I have to say this is one of those bugs that, although quite easy to solve with some experience (the nautilus process needs to be killed), is probably a horrible experience for a beginner running into it.
In the end I did have to resort to logging out of Gnome and removing the configuration files before logging back in. Luckily, the issue of virtual terminals not being visible seems to have been temporary or at least not present when I needed a console, so I didn’t have to go casting rm -rf‘s blindly.
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Solved: Camorama displaying only part of Creative NX (PD1110, 041e:401c) webcam's picture, all blue
My Creative NX webcam seems to work out of the box with the gspca driver, but initially I had trouble getting a proper picture in Camorama. It seemed to be cropped down to only a small portion of what the camera can do, and the colors were all wrong, giving the image a strange blueish tint. The color and hue adjustments didn’t help.
Playing around with Camorama’s parameters I found that starting the application from the command-line with camorama -M gives me a full-sized picture. I have yet to discover how to apply the same to Ekiga, which has the colors correct, but the same thumbnail-sized image problem.
As for the color problem, there was a helpful hint at Launchpad: adding the Color correction filter in the Effects portion of Camorama’s window (Ctrl+E brings it up if it isn’t showing) fixes the issue.
ÄKT ajaa Pirate Bay -estoa Suomeen
Solved: svn: Working copy 'wp-content/themes/default' is missing or not locked
I ran into this problem when trying to upgrade several of my WordPress-powered blogs through Subversion. The cause was that I had replaced the default theme directory with a copy of my working theme, due to the ‘reverts to default’ bug which, by the look of things at WP’s support forum as well as my own experience, is still alive and well.
The default theme is part of the svn repository and svn expects to find its own data on the current status of the files, but a copy of my own theme doesn’t have the data, so it complains about the missing or not locked
working copy. The solution is to delete the default theme directory based on my own, then do a svn up to fetch a copy of the original default, then do a copying-over: cp -r my-working-theme/* default/
Now the working copy of the default looks like my own, yet is seen by svn so that a svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3/ (or whatever the new version is) is possible. Note that editing style.css is required to tell the default apart from the actual working theme. I also like to use the screenshot of the original default to make it stand out when the working theme once again gets replaced by the default.
WordPress 2.3.3 Released
WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. A flaw was found in our XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs.
Ubuntu: setting up SSHFS for elegant SFTP
I needed to edit data on my webserver, and initially, still thinking in Windows terms I considered installing gFTP. But then I realized that networking is much more integrated in UNIX, and a separate application is not necessary: mounting my server directory was as simple as choosing to do so with Nautilus’ File > Connect to server item and providing the credentials.
But there’s an even more elegant way of doing things. SSHFS integrates remote locations into your system seamlessly, allowing you to use them as if they were genuine directories under your local file system.
For Gutsy Gibbon, all I needed to do to get the basic SSHFS functionality going was to install the sshfs package. But then I went ahead and integrated my home directory on the web server so that it’s now mounted automatically at boot. For this I adapted a set of instructions provided over at Debian/Ubuntu Tips & Tricks, as well as ones given in an Ubuntuforums thread.
First, I created the local mount point for the remote location, and gave myself permission to modify it:
sudo mkdir /media/my-remote-login
sudo chown root:fuse /media/my-remote-login
sudo chmod g+w /media/my-remote-login
sudo adduser my-login fuse
Then I added the mount point to /etc/fstab, adapting Darwin Award Winner‘s instructions to my own liking, with the following line (note that it all goes on a single line, the line breaks inserted below are only due to limited column width):
sshfs#my-remote-login@my-web-server:path-to-my-remote-home-directory /media/my-remote-login fuse users,uid=my-local-uid,gid=my-local-gid,reconnect,transform_symlinks,BatchMode=yes 0 0
(You’ll find out your local uid and gid with id.)
After this, I had to do a sudo - my-login to activate the changes made to group settings (the adding of my-login into fuse), before the remote home was mountable (mount /media/my-remote-login) with my normal user account. (Otherwise the changes won’t be in effect until the next log-out and log-in.)
Then I adapted prankst3r‘s instructions for establishing trust between my local host and the remote server:
cd ~
ssh-keygen -t rsa
I left all the fields, including the passphrase, blank (just pressed enter).
cd .ssh
sftp my-remote-login@my-web-server:path-to-my-remote-home-directory/.ssh
put id_rsa.pub
quit
ssh my-remote-login@my-web-server
cd path-to-my-remote-home-directory/.ssh
cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys
chmod 600 authorized_keys
logout
After this I was able to log in to the server (ssh my-remote-login@my-web-server) without having to type in the password, and after the next boot, my remote home was fully accessible (with read/write/execute permissions) from /media/my-remote-login with the command-line as well as Nautilus.
Selvitys: puoluejohtajat kannattavat web-sensuuria
Solved: Nautilus: 'Show hidden files' in folder view not remembered
I had set Nautilus to show hidden files by default, yet wanted to deviate from it with my home directory. But each time I re-opened it with Nautilus, the hidden files were shown, so it seemed there was no per-folder memory when it came to this option.
I found an interview which mentioned Show hidden files is a per-window setting and has been stored per-folder since Nautilus 2.8 – but the key here is that it only does so in what is called the spatial mode. And Ubuntu, by default, comes with Nautilus set to the browser mode.
After catching up on this issue by reading The Spatial Way
by Colin Charles, I became a believer and decided to go with the spatial mode. The Gconf key which toggles between the two modes is /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser. After unsetting it, Nautilus now remembers I want to see my home folder without the hidden files by default. Yay!