Guide

Here are the steps I used to get X11VNC working on an Ubuntu (19.10) box. Hope this helps somebody else out there too.

Freeplane, a fork of the mind-mapping program, Freemind, works really well. Except for the fact that in my (K)Ubuntu installation, it sometimes hangs in the middle of editing a node. Once it becomes non-responsive, the only fix is to kill the process and restart the program. The version of Freeplane in Ubuntu 18.04 is 1.6.13. However, the current version (March 2019) of Freeplane is 1.7.7. So, it's highly possible that upgrading Freeplane to the latest version will fix this issue.

I needed to install Windows and downloaded the 4.7GB Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft's website. Since I only had Linux machines at my disposal (and no DVD drives), I had to look to install the ISO on a pen drive. While the purists advocated that I use dd to accomplish this, I found that getting the USB to be bootable was something of a chore. So I looked for a friendlier solution and this is what I found for Kubuntu:

So I tried playing a video on Netflix in Firefox and while everything worked including the previews while hovering over a title, the actual movie/TV episode failed to play and resulted in the following error:

The main thing that needs to be done is to enabled DRM support in Firefox's preferences section. (Look for a checkbox titled "Play DRM-controlled content".)

Today, I started dabbling in doing some screen recording in Linux and while I could find programs to record the screen, I couldn't get the audio working as I wanted. By default, the programs record either the system audio, or the mic audio (or if the program is shit, neither); they don't record both the system audio and the mic audio. The fix for this on my Kubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) system which uses the Pulseaudio system to manage audio is as follows:

I usually find it a chore to edit the MySQL conf files (as for one, I often have no idea which my.cnf file to edit!) One way to work around this issue, particularly if you want to change a setting temporarily, is to simply enable the change dynamically via the MySQL command prompt. This can be accomplished by modifying "global" variables which can be listed with commands like so:

So I upgraded my Linux box to the latest Kubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf!) and it's been an interesting few days ironing out niggles. One of them has been the missing partition manager icon which (IIRC) was present in 14.04 and where I could control which partitions were automounted at login. From the looks of it, there is no easy solution for this like installing a package or some weird Plasma widget. The only solution I was provided on IRC was the following roundabout-borderline-hack:

I was looking for a way to add a custom context (right-click) menu to KDE's Dolphin (in Kubuntu 14.10, Utopic) that (much like in Windows) would allow me to enqueue an entire folder/directory in Videolan. Many of the examples that I looked at were rather sketchy or incomplete. Here's a simple working example that might be of help to someone else out there. You can modify it appropriately to get it working for other applications as well.