Tip

I have a Gigabyte board with an nForce 430 chipset that supports RAID. I was hoping to use it to create a simple RAID1 mirror using two hard drives to protect my previous MP3 collection. The system in question is an updated Kubuntu Gutsy box.

Before we start, this is the first time I am playing with RAID and the information below might very well be wrong. Please feel free to correct me :)

(What an attention seeking title :S)

I find it highly annoying when Firefox allows certain pop-ups to open when I click on form elements such as textfields etc. I also find it highly annoying when it allows windows to resize the browser - nothing like clicking a link and the next second finding the browser in a minuscule rectangle on the top left of your screen. While I'm at it, I also dislike websites using the "_blank" attribute to force a link to load in a new window.

The following are the steps to rectify this:

I had an issue earlier today where my microphone was not being detected on my semi-new Windows box. The system uses a Gigabyte motherboard with onboard Realtek audio. All drivers from the driver CD had been installed. But my microphone and front panel input options in the Windows Volume Control were all greyed out.

I am not sure what the exact solution was, but I did all the following things:

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.

Recently, when I was just about to shut down my Windows box, I noticed that my ethernet system tray icon was all lit up even though I had closed all applications. These kinds of things usually point at some kind of trojan in your system. So, I took some time to investigate it.

Unlike Linux where updates for both your hardware and software are taken care of neatly, Windows usually requires some manual labour when it comes to keeping drivers for your hardware up to date. This niche can be filled through the use of Driveragent, a service that checks your present hardware setup and recommends appropriate updates.

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.

I had an issue today where I was stuck with a non-functioning board and 3 power supplies. I couldn't get any response from the board regardless of which power supply unit I was using. However, while the board was new, the power supplies weren't and I really had no way to isolate the issue between the two. Rather than messing with any of my working systems, I wanted to test the PSUs without having to connect them to a motherboard.

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.