Linux

I upgraded to Feisty over the weekend. Everything appeared to have gone through smoothly. However, I found that I could not access my Feisty shares from my other Linux / Windoze boxen. The connection just failed. I could however access other samba and windoze shares _from_ the Feisty box (which was living up to its name :S). So, I tried going into System Settings, Sharing to sort things out by fiddling with the options, making everything readable and writable by everybody, enabling guest account access and so on and so forth.

All to no avail.

Many moons ago, I had to run an update to the nVidia driver for my Kubuntu box. After installing it, I found that the next time I ran X, my display was offset by about 50px to the right. Normally, it would have been possible to fix this via the monitor, most of which have a convenient "auto" button to solve such issues. However, my set-up involves the use of a KVM switch, which allows me to use a single keyboard, mouse and monitor for more than one PC (four in my case).

Problem: I've set up Samba on my Linux box and can access my Windows shares fine. However, every time I want to access a file from my Windows share, Linux, difficult motherfucker that it is, downloads the file, stores it in a temp directory and then plays it.. So, if I want to play .. say a 1.4 GB movie, I have to download the entire damn thing across my network to see it.. Not Good Enough.

Edgy (and apparently Dapper as well) have this rather annoying issue where the "Sharing" screen in System settings (Kubuntu) is greyed out even after entering admin mode, or if you open the fileshare module using kcmshell as root. The fix for this is to just open up your package manager and install the base Samba package which hadn't been installed.

Setting up Samba will be a very annoying procedure otherwise.

Following my recent adventures with Azureus, I found that Azureus was crashing on a regular basis and often not starting up at all. Running it from the command line gave me an error similar to the following:

An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine

and a lot of mumbo-jumbo following that.

This error has been reported all over the place, including at bugs.sun.com (who decided to close it.. thanks guys! :S). But no apparent solution was being provided anywhere. Azureus was definitely stable when running 1.4.2, although it wasn't exactly performing up to par. So, this was definitely a java compatibility problem.

... and don't bother installing a 64-bit version of a distro, unless you _really_ need it. I was aware that most people stated that it made no whit of difference to average desktops unless there was some serious number crunching involved. I knew all this, but still went ahead and installed it.. Serves me fucking right.

The performance (in terms of speed etc.) isn't the problem with my new Kubuntu install.. it's the package support that's the real pain. Talk about a waste of time :S

Installing Java 5 for example is a real pain, and apparently to get it working in FF, I'll have to install the 32-bit version anyways.