Mostly Harmless

Kubuntu is currently my desktop OS of choice for 40+ hours a week of paid eye strain. It’s a good OS, basically Ubuntu with KDE as the desktop environment, however over the three or four years I’ve been using it the quality of the package management GUI applications has been somewhat variable.  What we have [...]

It was with a little trepidation that I kicked this one off. However, absolutely no problems what so ever. Nice

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now to make my quick solutions posts more readable. Only tested it on one post so far but seems to work on latest WP and Thematic.  The little plugin allows you to display  Linux terminal input / output in a “pretty” fashion in your posts, [...]

Odd error when running yum update on my slice. This appears to be a currently outstanding bug which can be worked around by issuing a

user@computer:$ yum clean metadata

or

user@computer:$ yum clean all

The former worked fine for me. Original error shown below.

user@computer:$ yum updateSetting up Update ProcessResolving Dependencies–> Running transaction checkTraceback (most recent call last):File “/usr/bin/yum”, line [...]

One of the things about having your own little server, not really used for anything absolutely critical to anyone is that you can install updates as soon as you like. Non critical updates are one of those things that you have to do sooner or later and for non critical systems it can often be [...]

By default, Hsphere runs SMTP on port 587 as well as the default of port 25. This appears to be recommended as part of the setup for SPF, so that roaming users can send messages where port 25 is blocked and not fall foul of strict SPF records.
Edit: As defined here

I Decided back in the Summer that I would ditch Servage when my renewal came around in the Autumn, I’ll discuss why in a separate updated final review. In short I wanted a system I had as near to 100% control over as possible, so that meant a VPS. Hosting my own and my family’s [...]

Learning to use the command line is one of the hardest things about moving to Linux, however once you’re used to it, doing things becomes second nature and you actually miss being able to use the terminal in those cases where you have FTP access but no shell account. For some things using a GUI [...]

After adding a PCI soundcard to my machine for the purposes of having a gameport my Kubuntu 7.04 install wasn’t always choosing to use the on-board Intel chip for sound meaning I could near nothing. The solution seems to be the following
sudo asoundconf list
Names of available sound cards:
au8830
Intel
sudo asoundconf set-default-card Intel
sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
* Shutting [...]

Doing an OS upgrade is often troublesome. It is better to back up your data and do a clean install. Most of us don’t for various reasons. I always try upgrades before clean installs – it’s probably a form of self abuse.
This version of Kubuntu has a shiny new upgrade wizard which made this a [...]