Kubuntu

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/

While trying to check the vhost configuration on my Kubuntu dev box, I had to run httpd -S. Of course, since ubuntu renamed httpd to apache (a bit like calling a Veyron a Bugatti), I had to run apache2 -S. This however led to the following error message:
apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}

Compiling KTorrent 3.3 RC1 on Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic with KDE 4.3:

Update 1: This works with 3.3 final as well.
Update 2: This works with 4.0 beta1 as well.

1. Install cmake and related tools:
   sudo apt-get install cmake automoc build-essential gettext
2. Install other required libraries:
   sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev kdebase-workspace-dev kdepimlibs5-dev python-kde4 libboost-dev libtag1-dev libqca2-dev libgmp3-dev

I made a mistake earlier today when looking for a GUI application to manage samba shares. I installed the wrong application - gadmin-samba (which is quite fugly and buggy) - instead of system-config-samba which is clean and has worked well for me in the past. gadmin-samba added all sorts of nonsense and in a bid to reset the samba configuration, I nuked the files in /etc/samba to give system-config-samba something of a fresh slate.