Linux

I installed MySQL on my local server today and when I went to access it via mysql_secure_installation to set my root password etc., I ran into the following curious error:
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

I ran into the following warning while trying to install a package from the IUS third-party repository for CentOS:
warning: ius-release-1.0-6.ius.el5.noarch.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 9cd4953f.

I ran into this curious predicament earlier today when I found that the numeric keypad was not working in Kubuntu. Now, I have a KVM setup here and therefore could easily verify that the keyboard itself was working fine. This meant that the problem was a software issue.

Earlier today, I wanted to prefix a number of image files on a server with a 0. If this was on my desktop, I would have simply used a graphical tool such as the excellent Métamorphose. However, in this case, only a command-line was available. While Google threw up a number of bash scripts, I was curious to see if this could be done in a cleaner and more concise manner. Following the excellent reference to sed and more Google magicking, I arrived at

I performed a fresh install of Kubuntu's new distro - Lucid whatever - today. As per usual, there is no front-end to configure Samba and I had to do it the old-fashioned way. The following are steps that should walk you through a basic configuration on creating a share that can be accessed from Windows:

1. Install Samba using sudo aptitude install samba smbfs
2. Navigate to /etc/samba/

While trying to check the vhost configuration on my Kubuntu dev box, I had to run httpd -S. Of course, since ubuntu renamed httpd to apache (a bit like calling a Veyron a Bugatti), I had to run apache2 -S. This however led to the following error message:
apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}

If you, like I was, are alarmed at the number of console-kit-daemon-s being listed by htop, calm yourself. It is a misrepresentation of threads as separate processes. To get a better view of what's going on, select "Setup" in htop and under "Display options", check the "Tree view" and "Display threads in a different colour" boxes and save the changes.

Compiling KTorrent 3.3 RC1 on Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic with KDE 4.3:

Update 1: This works with 3.3 final as well.
Update 2: This works with 4.0 beta1 as well.

1. Install cmake and related tools:
   sudo apt-get install cmake automoc build-essential gettext
2. Install other required libraries:
   sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev kdebase-workspace-dev kdepimlibs5-dev python-kde4 libboost-dev libtag1-dev libqca2-dev libgmp3-dev

I'm pretty sure that this wasn't happening with the 9.x releases. But, I found that when I middle-clicked in Opera to get the scroll icon and scroll up/down a page, all that happened was that whatever was in my clipboard got pasted into the page, with the page trying to navigate to the clipboard text. In Opera's defence, the paste action is generally the default action across all applications in Linux. However, this also made this behaviour inconsistent across different platforms and even across other browsers on the same platform.

I made a mistake earlier today when looking for a GUI application to manage samba shares. I installed the wrong application - gadmin-samba (which is quite fugly and buggy) - instead of system-config-samba which is clean and has worked well for me in the past. gadmin-samba added all sorts of nonsense and in a bid to reset the samba configuration, I nuked the files in /etc/samba to give system-config-samba something of a fresh slate.