Ubuntu Karmic Koala

Oh my GOD! This release is the best ever! Not only the best Human Gnome theme, but also a new sound system that now lets my Sound Blaster card work on a Pulseaudio server! FANTASTIC! Bye-bye dual headset setup :) You should definitely install/upgrade to this baby!

Back to the roots

I have given a test drive to the new KDE4 with Kubuntu in the past 1 or 2 weeks.
Despite the very sleek desktop and feature rich basic applications like Dolphin, it has major drawbacks which makes this window manager - and the distribution itself - to wait for a whole year for me.
Note, that I love it, and just think that more time is needed to be as bugfree as the Gnome version is. It has to work out of the box, or mostly out of it when we speak about sound, flash plugin and crash handling. Nothing more actually but these 3 made me to change back to the basic Ubuntu with Gnome.
I really wish that Kubuntu would stay at least this stable as it is now.

With the reinstall of the good old Ubuntu my subconsciousness solved the problem of not being able to get any sound out of my - not so cheap - Soundblaster card. Now I am soooo happy to have so much power in the music I am listening to. This card has that much power that I had to readjust and decrease my 2.1 system's preamplifier. It ROCKS! Better than in Windows because it's out of the box - as I have not yet installed any packages nor updates yet - and as far as I can remember it's much louder. Ubuntu be praised ^_^

First good impression of KDE4

I have just made up my mind to try the new KDE4 with aptitude install kubuntu-desktop. My first 30 minutes was with setting up things, then I have started to massively use it. I somehow missed the mush blows and whistles of the Compiz-Fusion stack, but hey, this KDE4 integrated OpenGL desktop is much more responsive and faster. The mouse and keyboard shortcuts are much more to my liking too. Also it is not yet the most stable edition, but I was still able to restart Plasma from Alt+F2 when it crashed on me when tweaking the Desktop Effects.
All in all I am just using it for the second day but the first meeting was so vivid that I have decided to install a fresh Kubuntu on the home box too. Though it was time to clean my partitions and get rid of the almost never used Windows partition.

A little Adobe Air alternative

I got a bit bored of opening a whole new, plugin stuffed Firefox or other browser just to access my Gmail. So I knew about Prism from Mozilla. It's something like Adobe Air but in a more intuitive and user friendly way, even for Linux users (like me).

I made a new Prism app from the Gmail window and voila, a totally independent Gmail application window comes up. This is something like starting Thunderbird.

Opera 9.64 font antialias on Linux

Edit: note, that Opera 10 comes with the correct settings set.

If you have the same problem with Opera on Linux displaying chunky fonts on some websites, like this one:

Then here is the solution: type opera:config to your URL bar. Then a config page will load. Type into the search field 'enable core' as this will narrow down the options in the whole configuration system of Opera to the one we seek, named Enable Core X Fonts. Default it is enabled and we have to disable it, leaving the checkbox unchecked. Next step is to click on save.

We will get a reminder window that we have to restart Opera to activate changes.

Let's do that and go back and look at the website that was so ugly before:

Ubuntu + Ruby + Apache

This is my working, not fully tweaked Apache-Ruby combo for Ubuntu version 8 and 9.

Install apache eruby and the apache ruby mod
sudo apt-get install apache2 eruby libapache2-mod-ruby

Enable the actions mod for later use
sudo a2enmod actions

This is the cogwheel of all, do not miss this link!
sudo ln -s `which eruby` /usr/lib/cgi-bin/eruby

/ect/apache2/mods-available/ruby.conf Create this file with this content
AddType text/html .rhtml

RubyRequire apache/ruby-run
RubyRequire apache/eruby-run

# Execute *.rbx files as Ruby scripts

Options +ExecCGI
SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::RubyRun.instance

# Handle *.rhtml files as eRuby files

SetHandler ruby-object
RubyHandler Apache::ERubyRun.instance

/ect/apache2/mods-available/actions.conf Paste the following code
Action application/x-httpd-eruby /cgi-bin/eruby

/ect/apache2/mods-available/actions.conf Add this index file to the DirectoryIndex list
index.rhtml

/etc/mime.types Append this line to the file
application/x-httpd-eruby rhtml

Finally reload or restart apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

And for the testing, use this line for an index.rhtml file
<% puts 'Hello World!' %>

Fix sound in Unreal Tournament 2004 under Ubuntu

I am using Ubuntu 9.04 now. I had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to get sound working. Then I have found a solution given on a forum.

Create a backup of the file ut2k4dir/System/openal.so, to lets say openal.so.bak. Then symlink the file /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 to ut2k4dir/ystem/openal.so.

That fixed the problem for me. ^_^