Lenny, Icedove and teeny tiny fonts

You know the font situation on debian and gnome isn’t terrible in lenny. Actually it looks fairly decent. Until you load icedove (thunderbird).

The fonts are teeny, pixelated and hard to read. Luckily it is a very easy fix.

Open icedove, go to “Edit -> Preference -> Advanced -> Config Editor

Change the value for “layout.css.dpi” from “-1″ to “0″

Restart icedove

Move complete

My move to rackspace is complete, dreamhost is only providing my DNS now. Being able to control my own apache configs is brilliant. And the site seems faster enough, perhaps even a little faster.

Setting up pptpd on debian (lenny)

There are other giudes to do this, but none seemed complete, I had to get the iptables rules from the debug document on poptop.org. I guess they are not always needed.
Continue reading ‘Setting up pptpd on debian (lenny)’

iPhone and Blackra1n

I tried the blackra1n jailbreak a couple of weeks ago. Wow amazingly easy and quick. I have since restored my phone to a pre-jailbroken state. To be perfectly honest I have not found a compelling reason to run jailbroken since 3.0. But I like to see whats happening on that front every once in a while.

Moving host

I am thinking of moving host again. I have no issues with dreamhost, but I have been playing with the rackspace cloud, and I like it.

I can have my own virtual machine, lowest specs, for abut the same price as dreamhost each month. And since it is my own box I can do whatever I like with it.

If this site got more hits, and I had to increase the specs, dreamhost would be cheaper, but no one comes here so rackspace will work super.

More importantly this lets me setup a vpn server outside of Australia. While I find it very unlikely that I will ever go to a site banned by the government’s filtering scheme, my protest is to simply bypass it.

http://nocleanfeed.com/

The move will happen over the next few weeks as I find time to install wordpress on debian and get it configured and hardened. The DNS will be staying on dreamhost, so I doubt any changes will be noticed.

Adobe air hard-codes web browser to firefox

I have been using chromium as my primary browser. Unfortunately I have been using some adobe air twitter clients, and they ignore my preferred browser setting.

I found this page: http://blog.andreaolivato.net/open-source/change-adobe-air-apps-default-browser.html.

I followed this except my link pointed to chromium-browser, and the file was simply “/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so”.

Ubuntu 9.10 has a broken tsclient included

The tsclient included with Karmic has a broken tsclient applet. It is a known bug, as simple as a typo. It was discovered over 4 months ago, and a fix has been made upstream.

For whatever reason, nothing has been done other than having the big confirmed.

If you depend on the tsclient applet, as I do, grab the package from debian and install it.

Grab the package for you architecture from here.

And simply install it with dpkg:

$ sudo dpkg -i tsclient_0.150-3_i386.deb

The only difference between this release and the one previous is the removal of this bug, which is a fairly serious bug. Including this in the karmic repo would be trivial, and it should have been done before the 9.10 went final.

Ubuntu tethering via Bluetooth PAN

I have been attmepting to tether my iPhone to my computer using bluetooth in Karmic.

Supposedy blueman can do this very easily (www.blueman-project.org). To install blueman just run:
$ sudo aptitude install blueman.

My experience with blueman has been very hit and miss however, the connection appears to be made via bluetooth but I can rarely seem to get NetworkManager to make a network connection. Sometimes I have success pairing the devices again.

Using the older pand binary I have had a lot more success. If you are not scared of the terminal, it isn’t difficult and appears far more reliable Continue reading ‘Ubuntu tethering via Bluetooth PAN’

Connecting to an Airport Express from Linux

Wow. Karmic actually did something that really impressed me, there is support for Airport express streaming in the standard repos.

To enable it:
$ sudo apt-get install pulseaudio padevchooser pulseaudio-module-raop pulseaudio-module-zeroconf

Then run System -> Preferences -> Pulse Audio Preference. Tick “Make discovereable Apple AirTunes devices available locally”.

Run RhythmBox, or any app which uses pulse-audio as its backend, and play some audio.

Run Applications -> Sound & Video -> PulseAudio Volume control.

Select Airport Express as the output for this app.

Screenshot-Volume Control

GDM Themes in Ubuntu 9.10

Like Fedora 11, Karmic includes a newer version of GDM that no longer allows theming.

But unlike Fedora, there is no preferences tool to change the background and gtk theme that GDM is going to use. So there appears no easy way of customizing the login screen without editing gconf, but there is a fairly simple way of doing this.

If you want to play with the look of GDM in Karmic, open a terminal and run this:

$ gksudo -u gdm dbus-launch gnome-appearance-properties

Changing the gnome appearance properties for user gdm, changes them at login.