Kubuntu

KTorrent on the LTS release of Kubuntu—Precise Pangolin aka 12.04—is perfectly fine except for the fact that it comes only with version 4.1. Unfortunately, this package is missing a few features that I was looking for, especially the option to add magnet links via its web interface.

Upgrading from 4.1 to 4.3 (the latest version at the time of writing) is pretty straightforward if one is happy to accept PPA sources.

Attempting to update flashplugin on Ubuntu Precise resulted in an error. Removing the package and reinstalling it resulted in the following:

My upgrade from Lucid to Precise did not go well and I've been battling errors ever since. I ran into the following error when trying to reinstall the php5-gd extension for PHP:
No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already

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.