Linux

So, I've been facing some DNS issues with my Ubuntu box and needed to do some debugging. While I was certain that my router was assigning the Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) via DHCP to my machine, I needed to make sure that they were actually being used. Usually, I would be able to tell by looking at the output of /etc/resolv.conf oslt. However what I found in resolv.conf was

So I have a Xubuntu box, an old PC that was running Windows previously. All is peachy with the Linux install bar one thing: every time I shutdown the system, it shuts down fine, but immediately restarts again. This wasn't happening with Windows and appeared to be an issue particular to Linux or Ubuntu.

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".)