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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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 Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
I recently had a problem where a yum update broke things because of my umask setting, I needed to reinstall the packages.
Yum doesn’t have a reinstall feature, and I didn’t want to do a remove first, the packages were currently in use. So how to do a reinstall?
Remove the package from the RPM database without actually removing it:
# rpm -e --justdb --nodeps "package name"
The package is still installed but when yum queries the RPM DB it will find it missing and allow you to install it:
# yum install "package name"
As mentioned previously my posts will feature Debian and Ubuntu more prominantly now.
Epiphany is still the Gnome web browser, though I think Debian is the only major distro to make it the default. I like Epiphany, it’s smart bookmarks are tremendous, but the gecko backend is pretty crumby and the cause of a few major unresolved bugs. With Gnome 2.28 webkit has become the standard backend for epiphany making it a very cool option.
If you want some webkit goodness your current Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) release, it is pretty simple.
Edit the file “/etc/apt/sources.list” (use sudo to gain priveleges)
Add following lines:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/epiphany/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
Import the correct GPG key:
$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 2D9A3C5B
Update the source list and install epiphany
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install epiphany-webkit
I am moving into a new senior linux admin role. Hopefully it might make for some more technical posts. Though the new company uses more Debian the Redhat/Fedora so posts will start to skew that way.