05 Dec 2010
When I bought my Toshiba laptop and opted for 64-bit Debian Squeeze I made one compromise, I gave up Skype. This was for the simple reason that it would not work on 64-bit Linux (or 64-bit anything, come to that). Later I heard from several people that you could install the 32-bit version using the 32-bit libraries, but I was conscious that this was sub-optimal and in any case Skype should be punished for being closed source and, perhaps more to the point, for not providing a 64-bit version.
05 Dec 2010
A while ago I wrote:
“For some reason it is not saving a bookmark when you stop watching a recorded program in the middle, so that you have to find where you were manually. This worked fine on our old machine, so just need to find out what is wrong. I can research this when I have time.”
Read original post.
Well I am delighted to say that this was fixed by an option in the Playing TV settings for saving bookmarks.
23 Nov 2010
I am a rank amateur at both tar and mt. This page constitutes no more than you could discover yourself by reading the manpages for tar and mt, or Googling.
You have been warned!
Simple instructions
20 Nov 2010
I know nothing about Ruby on Rails, but this is how I ended up successfully (I think!) installing it. There may be better ways.
Download and Compile Ruby
At the time of writing, the current version is 1.9.2
- http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/
19 Nov 2010
You’ve inserted a disk or memory stick in your thin client, and nothing happened, what next?
Check lts.conf
Each user you wish to be able to access their local devices needs LOCALDEV = True in lts.conf, alternatively you may add to the ‘[default]’ section to make this global.
15 Nov 2010
Which such cheap PCs now available, does it really make sense to build your own? I think so, and these are the reasons why:
Despite the cheap PCs, there are still some direct savings to be made, obviously Linux users can save the Microsoft licence, but there are other savings too. For example you can re-use components from your existing PC, this might be a short-term way of you getting the PC that you want, and then replacing the components over time.
28 Oct 2010
Following the forking of OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice under the auspices of the new Document Foundation, I decided that I should take a look.
First I removed OpenOffice:
$ sudo apt-get --purge remove ".*openoffice.*"
18 Oct 2010
I need a way of creating some quick and dirty web apps for internal use. To this end, I decided to give Ruby on Rails a try. Unfortunately it is in heavy development and the Debian packages have not kept up. I decided to try and install from source, and, after several blind alleys, I ended up with quite a simple installation…
14 Oct 2010
A quick post regarding the issue of myth-backend having to be restarted on every boot, this was easily fixed simply by editing the upstart configuration /etc/init/myth-backend.conf and adding and udev to the “start on” line. Now Myth comes up correctly first time every time!
06 Oct 2010
These instructions have not been tested since re-writing, in particular there will be permissions issues.
Step 1: Install Wine
Please visit for instructions on how to install Wine:
