NVIDIA 173.14.05 Drivers Out

(32-bit | 64-bit)

These came out a couple of days ago, but I just got them installed today. So far everything seems fine – stress testing (“games”) to be performed later!

ubuntustudio-look ate my babies!

I haven’t been blogging too much lately because I have been doing a lot of recording and so I haven’t been messing about with anything else in Ubuntu.

About a week ago I installed some ubuntustudio packages, one of which was ubuntustudio-look so I could get the theme and images. I noticed at the time that one of the packages it removed as part of the installation was ubuntu-desktop.

I thought that was a little strange, but I figured it was just one of those things I didn’t understand.

Today, however when the updates were pushed out (many of which had to do with open office), it caused a big problem.

I got all kind of update and packaging errors, the first of which indicated that I didn’t have a *-desktop package installed, so the open office updates would not apply.

As I’ve been going through my day I’ve had to remove and add lots of packages myself through Synaptic and apt-get to try to take care of things as they pop up.

I havent’ been writing down the exact steps, but my advice is DO NOT INSTALL ubuntustudio-look. I’m pretty sure it broke something by removing ubuntu-desktop.

Customizing Ubuntu Appearance

One of the things I’ve been doing lately is twiddling with desktop appearance. I’ve just about settled on the basic desktop configuration I’ll be using (TwinView + 1 Seperate X Screen), and so I’m doing some basic appearance twiddling.

Here are some things I’ve been trying out lately!

VirtualBox

In my continuing quest to both try new things in general, and try new things that will help me be more productive, I recently set up VirtualBox.

Before, I had left WinXP running on my laptop, and I would remote desktop into it to run any Windows-only application I required. (About 3 of these.)

I want to eventally remove any installed Windows altogether, and just bring up a virtualized WinXP when I have to run one of these applications. It’s a minor step in one sense, but I like the idea of removing Windows entirely from any “real” machine I have.

Dual-Booting Ubuntu and WinXP on my laptop

I may have to do some travelling soon, so I wanted to get Ubuntu on my laptop. Not only would this reduce my time having to mess about in Windows, but it was would be a good chance to learn some new things about Ubuntu.

Changing system configuration: switchconf

As I haven’t found the perfect configuration for my system (yet), I sometimes want to use different configuration files, like selecting a different xorg.conf.

My previous method had been to keep the various configuration files in /etc/X11, and then copy the desired one over xorg.conf and re-start X. This isn’t really a bad solution, but I thought I might look into an alternative way: select the xorg.conf I want at boot.

One dozen links

I subscribe to a lot of feeds related to Ubuntu (using Liferea as my RSS client), and sometimes I flag things because they interest me, but for whatever reason I haven’t actually gotten around to trying them out.

I thought it might be neat if I dumped the links into a blog post every so often, so I figured a dozen was a nice number to start with…

Search command line history

Ha! I ran across this today – very useful! You can use “CTRL-R” to search through your command line history.

This beats “arrowing-up-and-down” when you know you used the command a while back!

More shortcuts here.

Removing a left-side key in gconf

Today, I was cleaning up my system a bit, and I wanted to remove a gnome-terminal profile that I no longer wanted to use. (In my specific case: /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/trans, a custom profile I had created for a transparent terminal).

I opened gconf-editor, and tried to delete the key from under /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles. However, this doesn’t work — there isn’t a “delete” option for things on the tree menu on the left.

I did find a method, though – which may or may not be the best way:

1. Un-set all the information in the key:

$gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/gnome-ternimal/profiles/trans

2. Re-start gconf-editor (if you like)

The strange thing is that although all the keys on the right disappear right away, the folders on the right are not updated. (I’m assuming you have gconf-editor open the whole time, of course.)

There should be a left side “remove” or “delete”, I think.

Hackety Hack Hack

I haven’t posted lately because I finally got started on a bit of coding! I false-started on an earlier project, because I couldn’t get my head around it and didn’t know where to start.

However, I came across another idea that interested me and seemed simple enough that I could get going on it!

So, here is my Launchpad project: G15 Server Browser for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars! To be honest, I’m really hoping one or two people get interested enough in this small project to want to participate – because I would really like to learn more about the Open Source development process.