Joe Fleming dot net

If you Google “ubuntu flash sound” you’ll find a LOT of information about flash sound problems and how to fix them. The consensus seems to be installing alsa-oss and configuring Firefox to use it. However, try as I may, I couldn’t get it to work. Then I read somewhere that you needed to set other programs to use Alsa instead of OSS, and that did the trick. YouTube seems to lock up Firefox from time to time so I’m still waiting on a more permanent fix, but this works well enough for now.

All of the domains that I oversee (and those of most all my friends as well) all live on a server on DreamHost. Their plans are amazing; tons of storage space, tons of bandwidth, unlimited domains and emails, shell access and a slick administration tool. That being said, I’ve always stuck with PHP because it’s all I know and it’s very simple to get working. That all changed recently when a friend of mine and I decided it would be fun to learn Python.

DreamHost is an amazing hosting company. Not the best or fastest servers in the world, but by FAR the cheapest and plenty enough for our needs (and apparently the needs of MANY others too). I learned this weekend that their support for running python over their FastCGI (which you have to use) doesn’t work as advertised though. And even when I scoured the ‘net for answers they all said the same thing. The defacto tutorial seems to be A tale of Pylons, Python and FastCGI on Dreamhost, referenced by several sources and many people in the forums. Sadly, that tutorial doesn’t work as-is, if it ever did. It’s extremely close, but not complete. I also found a tutorial for rolling your own Python and combined the two (along with this forum post) to get it all working. This worked for me and I’m guessing it’ll work for a lot of other people trying to run Python on a DreamHost server (and not using Django I should add).

I’ve been using VirtualBox for a while now after finding it in Automatix in Ubuntu. Anyway, until now, I’ve been perfectly happy not using USB devices with it. For the most part, I still am, but I was curious how hard it was to set up, so I looked it up. Here’s what I found (originally posted here)

-Install the other OS

-Create a group called “usbfs” and add yourself to it.

groupadd usbfs
usermod -aG usbfs 

-Edit /etc/fstab and add the following, changing the group ID to match that of the usbfs group you just added (tail /etc/group)

# 1002 is the USB group ID
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=1002,devmode=664 0 0

-In terminal, issue the following command to see available USB devices

VBoxManage list usbhost

-Use the output of this command to set up the filters for USB devices under VirtualBox.

-Reboot your machine. This is required to both recognize the new group and new mounting options

*USB DEVICES HAVE TO BE UNMOUNTED BEFORE VIRTUAL MACHINE CAN RECOGNIZE THEM*

There it is. Now, simply unmount the USB device from the host OS before booting the guest and you’re good to go.

I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux for a few years now and it’s by far my favorite distro out there right now. It’s simple to use, quick to install and everything works out of the box. I used to run Gentoo but I got tired of compiling everything all the time to install things and spending days on end configuring the machine just to use it. I’m a huge fan of the debian packages now and Ubuntu makes everything that much easier.

That said, the install on my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 8500) has been bugging me for a while. The touchpad on the thing just wasn’t sensitive enough and the Ubuntu configuration did nothing to change the speed. Today I did a little Googling and found this site. On it were some instructions on how to make the Synaptics touchpad faster.

Basically, all you need to do is edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to change the speed settings. Locate the InputDevice section that uses the synaptics driver and add the following lines:

Option  "MinSpeed" "0.5"
Option  "MaxSpeed" "3"
Option  "AccelFactor" "0.05"

Note that these numbers are a little different from the site linked, but they feel right on my machine. I am running on a 15″ WSXGA+ screen after all, so I have a lot more pixels to traverse. Play with the values a little and see what works for you.

EDIT: Apparently Ubuntu has taken up the HAL system. Jay took the liberty of posting an update to tweaking your mouse settings. Kudos!

I’ve set up Mediawiki in a few times now, both at work and for personal use. Each time I do it, I end up having to learn how to set up access restriction again. That is, creating custom namespaces and restricting access to those namespaces to people that belong in specific groups.

The reason I do this is to keep of people out of articles that only privileged users should really be seeing. Articles about server configurations, software development, new ideas for sites, etc. Making a hidden namespace and allowing only specific groups to access it is the simplest way to go about this task.

Doing this is pretty straightforward. I won’t get in to all the specifics though; instead I’ll post links to the exact information you’ll need to pull it off.

User Rights
Custom Namespaces
Group Permissions
Setting permissions for a Group on a whole new Namespace

There you have it, nice and easy! Now I just need to fix/reinstall our personal wiki….

So, I just picked up a Dell for my Mom. It was a pretty boss deal and I got a widescreen 20″ LCD for $177 out of the deal.

Anyway, I go to install the software my Mom is going to use and I’m shocked at all of the garbase software that comes installed. Some Corel photo software, McAffee, Google Desktop….. the list goes on. Yes, nothing useful; no Firefox, no Gaim, no CDex, nothing! To top it off, the computer crashed while I was trying to uninstall McAffee’s garbage software and the load of other software that comes on it.

So, what gives? Can’t they at least include SOME software that people might actually use?! I can’t believe they are selling these computers to average people and that the people don’t have more problems with them. So, I’m reinstalling from the restore CD, and if that fails, I’ll have to get me a non-OEM copy. Too bad I can’t get my Mom on the Linux train…..

UPDATE: Posting from the machine right now. Turns out the CD Dell ships with the computer is ONLY the OS, so none of their retarded software is included. Once I got all the drivers on here, the machine has been running pretty well. Add Firefox, Clamwin, the Combined Community Codec Pack, Gaim Pidgin and 7-zip and it’s ready to roll!

UPDATE 2: Looks like I’m not the only one who sees this as a problem. I found an article through BadVista that sums it all up pretty well.