Steven Harms

Life, Linux and Technology

Archive for November, 2008

Holidays etc

Nov 29

Posted by Steven Harms in General | No Comments

Been doing the thanksgiving thing, didn’t have time to catch up on things yet, but I am very happy with all the cool stuff going on this last bit:

I installed Fedora 10, this new boot thing doesn’t show up on any of my systems (Mine are all currently Nvidia and Intel chipsets), so that was not a big feature for me. I do like their default system fonts much more, a lot easier to read. USB Creator worked great, I installed from a usb key. Package manager is definitely not as good as OpenSUSE or Ubuntu, much harder to use and find good packages, but it’s sufficient. And you can see boot messages by hitting escape, which Usplash doesn’t do in Ubuntu.

Flash 64-bit on Ubuntu Intrepid

Nov 17

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 20 Comments

Download and install Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64 (or x86_64):
Ubuntu download screen

Download 64-bit flash from here.
Adobe Labs Logo

If you have flashplugin-nonfree installed, now is a good time to remove it as we will be using the labs version:

~$ sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree

This leaves behind some junk. To remove them:

cd /usr/lib
sudo find . -name "npwrapper.libflashplayer.so" | xargs rm

And now install the plugin:

cp path_to_so_file_you_extracted.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

Start firefox and have fun. Pandora.com no longer crashes:

Pandora.com website

And Hulu.com is working awesome:

Hulu.com website

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Adobe releases alpha 64-bit flash

Nov 17

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 1 Comment

I just bought a AMD Phenom 9850 and am running amd64 on it, so this is excellent news:

“Furthering Adobe’s commitment to the Linux community and as part of ongoing efforts to ensure the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, an alpha version of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 11/17/2008 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation.”

ECS GF8200A under Ubuntu Intrepid

Nov 15

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 1 Comment

Bought a new motherboard, everything works out of the box so far except for sound.

For sound I had to:


echo "options snd-hda-intel model=auto probe_mask=1" >> /etc/modprobe.d/options
modprobe snd-hda-intel

Then everything was good. Taken from this thread.

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Workspaces

Nov 11

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 2 Comments

http://pthree.org/?p=720: “I’m curious how many workspaces you use, and what, if any, each workspace is assigned to”

I use 3 monitors, with the middle monitor having 6 workspaces:
1. Firefox + Gnome Terminal
2. Terminator + Gnome Terminal (all monitoring servers)
3. VMWare Workstation 6.5 (Change management software is windows only)
4. Gwibber + Xchat
5. Aqua Data Studio + Gnome Terminal (Generally Python programming)
6. Gnome Terminal + Galeon (Web Development (django or symfony))

ATI Cards

Nov 9

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 15 Comments

If you have an ATI card and it runs compiz very smooth and plays videos, what model do you have? Please comment below with the fglrx_info output and which distribution you run.

I have an ATI 3870 that when compiz is enabled gets all choppy, and I am having a hard time believing I am the only one, but I need to do something about it so I would love to hear some success stories and maybe its just my specific model.

I have tested it in Windows and everything works, including a bunch of games games at 1680×1050, so I have to believe its purely my driver version (using the one shipped in Intrepid) that is causing this.

Self Explanatory Perl Code

Nov 7

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 8 Comments

For some reason I had to ask on IRC what this meant, because it doesn’t google well:


$| = 1;

I don’t know why I didn’t understand that intuitively :) At any rate, the answer is:

LeoNerd: No, it forces the currently selected output filehandle not to buffer its output

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Liberal Intellectuals

Nov 7

Posted by Steven Harms in General | 16 Comments

I love how I keep hearing from people that Sarah Palin didn’t know which countries were in North America, which I assume is a ‘telephone effect’ of the original statement that she didn’t know all the countries in NAFTA.

Next time someone says that, just ask them, ‘Which countries make up North America?’. What? It’s more than Canada, Mexico and the United States? Today while you are doing whatever you do, ask someone. (Dramatic news guys voice) The answer might suprise you:

  • Antigua and Barbuda
  • The Bahamas
  • Barbados
  • Belize
  • Canada
  • Costa Rica
  • Cuba
  • Dominica
  • Dominican Republic
  • El Salvador
  • Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat)
  • Grenada
  • Guatemala
  • Haiti
  • Honduras
  • Jamaica
  • Mexico
  • Nicaragua
  • Panama
  • Saint Kitts and Nevis
  • Saint Lucia
  • Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
  • Trinidad and Tobago
  • United States of America

Moral of the story is, don’t make fun of people if you are in the same boat.

Creative open sources their driver

Nov 6

Posted by Steven Harms in Linux | 4 Comments

Kudos to Creative today for open sourcing their sound driver:

“Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.”

More at Phoronix

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Ubuntu Open Week

Nov 5

Posted by Steven Harms in General | No Comments

I didn’t realize it was Ubuntu Open Week until 5 minutes ago (thanks jcastro’s identica!), so here is a reminder from me. Fire up Xchat and head to #ubuntu-classroom: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek