Linux

Konversation is an excellent IRC client for KDE. However, it lacks a rather fundamental (IMHO) option - event notification via console/system beeps. While it has notification options to alert the user via ogg, wav and other sound formats, if one does not have external speakers / headphones, one does not get alerted. As a result, one misses important messages and thereby one gets mucho cranky.

Twice over the last couple of weeks, I've added a new drive to my Kubuntu box and run into the error hal-storage-fixed-mount refused uid 1000 when I attempted to access any existing partitions via Dolphin or Konqueror. The first time this happened was with a Windows drive with NTFS partitions and the second time with a drive from another linux box with reiserfs partitions.

This site is fast dwindling into a Linux help site :S

Anyway, today's issue relates to a rather odd video issue I've been facing on an infrequent basis. Every now and then all video on my Gutsy box just goes out of whack. Playing any file which would have played fine 10 minutes earlier would display a screen full of garbled lines. The audio is always fine.

If you constantly see a gnome_screensaver_control error dialog when you open Mplayer in Kubuntu, you can fix it by unchecking the "Stop XScreenSaver" option in Mplayer preferences (under the Misc tab). The preferences and other menu options can be reached by right-clicking on either the video or controls windows.

Looks like a packaging issue.

This is something of a personal reminder of the stuff I do after a fresh installation of Kubuntu:

• Install the following apps:
  1. synaptic
  2. firefox
  3. pidgin
  4. whois
  5. traceroute
  6. sun-javaX-jre
  7. sun-javaX-plugin
  8. sun-javaX-fonts
  9. vlc
  10. mplayer
  11. vim
  12. vim-gtk
  13. msttcorefonts
  14. qcomicbook
  15. flashplugin-nonfree
  16. unrar
  17. unace

If you ever find yourself running into a monotonous

"The following packages have been kept back"

error message when you run sudo apt-get upgrade, then the "fix" is to either run apt-get dist-upgrade which is quicker, but sounds more ... dangerous or to run apt-get install [package list] where package list is a list of all packages that have been kept back.

Following my recent adventures with my motherboard, I wanted to set up a temperature sensor on my Kubuntu desktop, so that I could keep an eye on my motherboard temperature. Searching the repository came up with a number of potential options including ksensors. However, when I installed ksensors I couldn't find a temperature option; just memory usage and stuff.

One of my linux boxen (my fastest with the best hardware) died a couple of days ago :( Motherboard issues. My two other Kubuntu boxen are stocked with hard drives and therefore, when I wanted to retrieve data from the hard drive of my busted PC, I didn't want to risk fucking around with the already overloaded PSUs of said boxen. However, my sole Windows box was pretty free, but obviously Windows does not understand Ext3.

The Linksys WMP54G, a wireless adapter that I bought after much (but apparently insufficient) research, is essentially not very Linux friendly after all. The card is detected by Linux as the following:
00:0c.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI

The following applies only for KDE 3.x and was the original article:

KDE for all its eye candy and general slickness really sucks on some basic points. One of these is with auto-starting programs upon login. Suggestions to get this working almost always involve having the use the command-line or following a prolonged series of steps for a task which should ideally involve no more than a few clicks. Usually, most people suggest the following as a solution even to newbies: