/dev/how-to

How To

dev@joseyamut.xyz:~$

  • Ubuntu 16.04 10-year Support
    Yes, Ubuntu 16.04 codenamed Xenial Xerus is officially supported by Ubuntu up to 10 years. As most of us already know, Ubuntu versions that start with an even number and end with 04 are LTS or Long-Term Support. These LTS versions are supported up to 5 years. By default. That means Canonical will have regular security/maintenance updates for LTS Ubuntus during that time period. Unless… So where’s the other 5 years? It turns out they have this program that extends that to the other 5 years. This is called the Ubuntu Pro. It is free up to 5 machines for…
  • NieR:Automata and DLC Country Locked
    For the Nintendo Switch game version. This is a fantastic game! Loving it. I happened to stumble upon a games news article talking about which Nintendo Switch games to play that have recently been released or coming out soon. That was in October. A month or so later, and here I am playing NieR:Automata The End of YoRHa Edition for a week, and, did I mention I’m loving it?! I am 5 years late too. This isn’t really a new game, but new to the Switch though. NieR:Automata The End of YoRHa Edition is a 3rd person ARPG. And like…
  • Rewriting Nested If/Else
    An often overlooked (perhaps) way to write cleaner if condition statements. This is not about having to go through all the refactoring into a Factory pattern, Switch statements, and other possible conditional logic methods just to avoid our classic if condition. Rather merely making it look better, when the scenario is right for it. Of course. I mean if I really only need a simple if statement, I’ll just write it as one and don’t need to overcomplicate things. Now, diving right in. There is a tendency to write this kind of if/else block of code (example shown below) as…
  • I Forgot My Linux Desktop Password!
    Uh-oh! If you’re forgetful like me, chances are that you may come into this situation one way or another in the not so distant future. Bless you if you never do. I really hope you don’t. Write that password down somewhere. Safe. Not on a piece of paper please. In any case, if it does happen to you one day, don’t fret. You’re not alone. And there’s a solution. Here’s what I did to be able to login again to my Linux desktop. This happened on my Manjaro Linux. Recently. It is running on my Ubuntu as a guest operating…
  • A Multiple Of 3 or 5?
    Saw this problem on the Internet about Multiples. Thought I might solve it. Don’t know why I dislike these kinds of things, but still want to try to solve it. It always seems tricky, although elementary? For transparency I only reviewed the Maths definition of a Multiple just to make sure if memory has not failed me yet. I promise. Scouts honor. 🖖 And on how to determine if bigger numbers are multiples of 3 or 5 at the later part of this writing, reviewed those after writing my short piece of Java code below. What is a Multiple in…
  • Subscribe To Read Full Article? Nope. Reader Mode.
    One of the things I find quite nice on my Android smartphone is the Google news feed that it sends me consistently for my reading pleasure. This Android feature can be quickly accessed by swiping from the left when I’m at my home screen. I often do this, usually after I wake up. That is, just browse through the feed and read news that I might find interesting, before I get up to make some coffee. It also follows my likes or things that I search for on Google (So Google is tracking people’s Android usage patterns, not a secret)….
  • Nintendo Switch Send To Smartphone Connection Failure
    Nintendo Switch‘s Send to Smartphone feature as a way to share screenshots and videos from Album to smartphone keeps on failing to connect. 🙅 I don’t know why. I must have tried this three or four times, but each time it would fail to work. This sucks! 🙄 I have a Samsung A52 phone with Android 11 OS on it. For the other sharing method, which is Post, that one works flawlessly. One of the troubleshooting steps Switch suggests when the phone cannot connect via QR code is to add the network manually. The other suggestion when you still can’t…
  • Spotify Doesn’t Seem To Be Working
    I had this issue with Spotify on Android Auto recently. The Spotify app was working on my phone yet somehow it would not show on my Mazda’s head unit display. Spotify was working fine on my Samsung A52 phone that time I connected it. In fact, I can still select songs from the phone and it plays through my car’s speakers. The only thing is that nothing is showing up on the HU screen, except for the following error message: Spotify doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. Restarted/reconnected Android Auto several times. To no avail. Finally, I looked…
  • Show Outdated Notification In A WordPress Page or Post
    What is this outdated notification? The quick answer is that it is a warning text shown somewhere on the web page that says the article was written on – insert old date here – and the information in the content may be out of date. This may be kind of redundant when your article has a date published displayed on the page. The idea is to put emphasis to the readers that they may be consuming older content when it may not be so obvious at first glance. It can be more meaningful for published content like a tutorial or…
  • How I Get Free AWS
    How indeed? By simply attending Amazon Web Services (AWS) events. That’s it? Yes! No hacks. No scams. Nothing shady. 100% legit. Once I completed the event and a few requirements, AWS gave me credits. These AWS Credits can then be redeemed and used for their products and services. For my needs it pretty much takes my costs down to zero for a period of time. How much is it worth? I suppose it depends on the event. So far I’ve gotten USD $25 to $50 worth of credits. Not bad. For someone else that is peanuts. Right? For me it…
  • I Finally Shrunk My AWS EBS Volume
    And this is for Linux only. There is no short way to do this. It is not supported directly through the AWS Console where I can just push buttons and click away. It took SSH-ing to my Linux server. Typing in some terminal commands. Starting/stopping my EC2 instance a couple of times. However, it is not that hard to do. It probably took me about 1 hour to complete everything because I made a couple of mistakes along the way. Mileage may vary according to how large the EBS volume is, and how much data is in there. In my…
  • Divide A List To Sub-Lists Via Collectors
    Consider a List of Color objects with attributes of index, name and group. This object is defined as, Group is simply an Enum of, My list of colors are the following, Now, I want to divide these colors into their own sub-lists of color grouping based on the value of the object’s Group attribute. Traditionally, this can be done with the venerable for loop and some if-else statements. If I want to not write it with a bunch of if-else statements, the Java 8 Stream API approach can be utilized. For multiple groups, one way is to use Collectors.groupingBy to…
  • Rewriting Nested Ifs With Java 8 Stream
    Say I have these numbers in an array, for example: I want to do something with that set of numbers, such as taking out null values, and extracting only the odd ones. Too take it further, maybe I want an even number or two mixed in the processed list as well. So I have this block of code with a loop and some nested if-else statements in it that will do just that. Method 1 First I check for null values on line #6. The list is using Integer, not int (primitive). Nulls are possible. Then next if is to…
  • Thymeleaf Basics In Spring Boot
    I recently started on the path on building content on the fly that gets sent out as soon as possible, using a template engine, but from a back-end perspective. If that makes sense? This is for an event-driven application that sits there and listens for incoming messages. A simple one. Consume the message as soon as it comes out of the queue. Inspect and analyze its contents, looking for specific keys in the payload that sets off those triggers. Compose a message and then send it about its merry way. That’s about it in a nutshell. This differed in my…
  • When API Response Is In Array
    From time to time I get some of this odd API response from requesting information for a specific something. I expect the response data to be a simple JSON object. Instead I am looking at a JSON array. I suppose that is still simple enough and it’s not so odd. This kind of response happens all the time, right? It does makes the response formatting weird in that why does it have to be in an array when it’s expected that only a single element is returned in the response. Say for example I have this API endpoint here to…
  • Nested Java Bean Validation
    Somebody asked me recently why their POJO validator was not working as expected. They had already followed the “code I wrote” down to a T. Emphasis on the quotes, because trust me that block of code for bean validation they used as reference from an older project I did, was pretty much a very trivial few lines. Then again, everything is almost like that in Spring Boot. Also it was more of correctly annotating the beans, rather than on whether or not there was something lacking with the Validator. By the way, for context, this bean validation is the JSR…
  • Spring OAuth2 Using Password Grant Type With Additional Headers Continued
    Part 2 – Accessing a Resource Recap This is a continuation of the previous post that I made some time last month. You can start reading from there to get more context – https://www.joseyamut.xyz/2021/02/24/spring-oauth2-using-password-grant-type-with-additional-headers The first part dealt with getting the access token from a 3rd party token service provider using a password grant. The token can then be used to access secured resources, like for example GET-ing some reporting data or POST-ing some additional data. That was also all about an OAuth2 flow that does not really follow the usual pattern – point in case additional headers to go…
  • Spring OAuth2 Using Password Grant Type With Additional Headers
    Part 1 – Getting the Access Token In this example, I am using the older Spring Security library which is: spring-security-oauth2 The JAR file can be found at Maven public repositories here. Dependency For my case, I am specifically using the release version below because I am trying to match some limitations (Such as what are available for download from a private repository). Then add it via gradle or some other such tool. implementation group: ‘org.springframework.security.oauth’, name: ‘spring-security-oauth2’, version: ‘2.3.8.RELEASE’ Access Token Request Details The specifics for my use-case are simple. I was given a bunch of information to be…
  • Read YAML in Spring Boot
    Properties written in YAML format in my opinion reads better, far better for a human, especially when an application has tons of properties in there. Well, after all YAML was designed to be a human-readable data-serialization language. Officially it complies with JSON and is a subset of the latter (depends which version though as I’ve read). Oh, YAML stands for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language“. It’s silly, right, but yeah. What’s this about? I kind of thought of using YAML to hold the paths to cherry-pick JSON fields and their values that I’m interested in. I don’t want a whole huge…
  • OpenVPN GUI Client For Linux
    Not that long ago, I wrote about creating my own VPN (Virtual Private Network) for personal use with OpenVPN. In that post I also recounted how I used it for work purposes back when I was still in Singapore. That was several years ago. That time I had no issues connecting to the VPN server without having to pull up a Linux terminal and typing in commands. Not that connecting to an OpenVPN server would be very hard via command line. There is no difficult-to-remember options as long as you have everything written down in a configuration file (To which…
  • Creating My Own VPN With OpenVPN On AWS
    Now I have always thought about getting a VPN subscription for some time. Already researched a bit about it several times before. I always somehow keep on having second thoughts about getting one for several reasons that I won’t mention here. I’ve already implemented a VPN back when I was still in Singapore, using OpenVPN. It wasn’t so hard. Just a simple one. Stable. It was used to secure or isolate my source code somewhere. The idea was that the code was to sit on a repository on a Linux server running on an EC2 instance, and it can only…
  • Offline JSON Formatter
    One of those people who is guilty of frequently relying on online 3rd party JSON formatting tools so messily formatted JSON strings or one-liners can be saner to read. If you are like me who deal with JSON almost every day for development, reading log messages, error tracing, etc., readability for JSON is a must. A readily available tool or alternative should be within your arsenal, just an arms length away whenever you need it. Also, if you deal with sensitive information, better stay away from copy-pasting JSON string into 3rd party online formatter tools. You don’t want to accidentally…
  • Format JSON String From IntelliJ IDEA
    How many countless times must I have found myself with a piece of JSON string that is formatted in a way that makes it very hard for me to read. Perhaps you’ve also experienced this several times too? As a back-end developer, having to deal with a lot of JSON is unavoidable. Heck, I deal with it on a daily basis for years now. So if a JSON object is returned as one very long line, getting the necessary information out of it by eye becomes very hard to do. Yeah, minification can be both good and bad. Lightweight Options…
  • Assigning Numbers to Groups – Problem #2: Distribute 1 Per Group or Even/Odd
    The other day I was trying to assign a container of, let’s say, numbers distributed across 20 groups, to a container with a smaller size that can only hold up to 6 groups. The bigger group has values from 0 to 19. It also means that group 0 will always have zero number value, 1 will be 1 and so on. This finite range of values comes in randomly. Take note that the producer of these values will most likely have distributed the numbers as evenly into evens and odds. That means if there were 99 values distributed across 20…
  • Removing Null Values In A List Using Java 8 Stream
    The other day, I was working on a huge JSON object that had a number of collections in it. The entire object had to be saved into a relational database, which means I was mapping out the raw JSON data to its logical representation as database tables. Though the object wasn’t that complicated, it did come with a lot of unique fields. Hundreds. It is such a tedious chore to map out all of those properties. Plus, the datasource is a third party, and the object definition I have of the payload wasn’t that up-to-date. Not to mention discovering unknown…
  • Access EntityManager From Spring Data JPA In Spring Boot
    Using Repository implementation with Spring Data, one can develop applications with an underlying database rapidly in Spring Boot. The Spring Data JPA handles the abstraction of the persistence layer quite well. Many times you probably won’t need anything else beyond what it has to offer. A lot can already be done with the exposed methods for data access from the interfaces alone. Of course, it goes without saying that sometimes more is needed. There are limitations, and sometimes using an @Query annotation does not satisfy the requirements. This is when the need to access the EntityManager becomes handy. A more…
  • Deserializing JSON Object With Unknown Properties
    As a back-end developer, consuming JSON objects is pretty much very common. I think it is second only to publishing data in JSON format, the other end of what is usually a 2-way street. We may have a REST API endpoint that accepts orders for an online food delivery service that takes in JSON formatted data. Perhaps you have a client application that subscribes to a message streaming service where the payload is, again, JSON. The thing is that JSON is quite ubiquitous when it comes to transferring data over the wire for as long as I can remember. Most…
  • Using OpenShift Secrets With Spring Boot + Kafka
    Going to skip right away to the juicy stuff as much as I can. I won’t discuss about what OpenShift is or what the Secrets feature does. This is only about my experience the first time I dealt with Secrets and how I used it for a Spring Boot Kafka consumer/client application. The problem I needed to solve was to use Secrets to store a Java KeyStore (JKS). Then plug that into the container of the app. JKS in Java is the proprietary means to store SSL certificates for establishing secure connections – a requirement for the app to connect…
  • WordPress: Show Posts of a Category in a Page
    I had this custom page on my WordPress site where I would show only posts from a specific category. This was done manually, as in I PHP-coded a function into one of the theme’s PHP files to accept a shortcode, so it would do what I wanted it to. There is a big chance that there is already a plugin that does this very thing, but the ones I found were complicated or over-engineered for what I need. I just wanted it to be simple. So as a chance to learn more about the inner workings of WordPress, I searched…
  • Fix ./gradlew Permission Denied On OpenShift Deploy
    Something I encounter every now and then on application deployments. This is common especially on the first time you commit/push your code to your Git repository with CI/CD configured. Might have labeled or titled this article wrongly. The error does not happen when the app container is being created on OpenShift. It does not even reach that part during the build process. Instead this happens at the 1st step, when the app is being built/compiled. So the pipeline will fail right away. But what I meant is that the process won’t be able to deploy to OpenShift since the build…
  • Getting That Ubuntu Snap Icon Right On Unity Shell
    Ever wondered why after installing that Ubuntu Snap application on your desktop, initially the icon is shown correctly as it should be on the Unity Dash or the Unity Launcher when you locked it there. But subsequently, the icon DOES NOT load properly after the next reboots? To put it accurately, it goes away and you’re left with a generic file icon that looks terrible or is not representative of the application at all. Worse, when you have it locked on the Launcher, then you click on it, the right icon appears down at the bottom of the stack leaving…
  • Get User List in a Microsoft SQL Server Database
    There are 2 ways that I know of. I tend to always do what is easier. That is through the GUI application that is Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Option 1 Login into Microsoft SQL Server. Select the database. Go to Security. It usually is down at the bottom. Click on the yellow folder icon to expand it if it isn’t already. Users sub-menu is right under it. Open it and the list of users are right there. First option is quicker. Assuming you are on a Windows OS, of course, and you have SSMS installed (which almost always…
  • Extending Android Device On Desktop
    Rediscovered this really cool app named scrcpy recently. I think I’ve read about it before but never bothered about it. Until now. Because my needs have changed and I actually have a use case for this app now. More on that later down there. scrcpy – Now that is just a weird name. Need I say it is hard to pronounce? Doesn’t even make sense, does it not? It supposedly is short for Screen Copy. Because that’s what it does, copy or mirror your android screen over to your desktop (and more). In a nutshell, this app lets you fully…
  • Running on PHP-FPM
    Have used FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) in other projects before. It really makes a whole lot of difference in page loading time. I don’t know why this has not become the default since PHP is literally everywhere and conventional PHP implementations are slow-ish. Also, it is not that complicated to set up. Of course, I am assuming you have a normal one like I do. WordPress works with php-fpm right off the bat when I checked. Since I have not done heavy customizations that prevents this from working without lots of tweaking, then I should be good to go. Note:…
  • Website Output Compression For Faster Page Loading Time
    For the longest time I did not do anything to improve my websites’ loading time. Well that changed the other day. I forced myself to do it. Partially that is. I have not done much to change the settings on the configuration files of Apache2, MySQL and PHP. If I remember correctly, I have done those way back. So I left it as is. Perhaps I will revisit it one of these days. What I did instead was to make sure I have compression enabled, and included some additions site-specific. Secondly, shift to php-fpm (which I will write about in…
  • Upgrading Ubuntu LTS, PHP and WordPress
    These are the things that I did to upgrade my AWS EC2 server. Not exactly the instance but the software that is running on it. I am jotting this down since I might have a use for it some time later. Perhaps somebody in a similar situation as I am will find it useful too. Commands will be prefixed with a :~$ to be more readable and obvious. But do not include it when typing the same commands in your terminal. e.g. :~$ sudo ls -la should just be sudo ls -la when you copy/type it in. So without further…
  • Viber For Linux Desktop Looks Huge
    Well, I installed Viber for the Linux desktop today. Yet again. I remember installing it not so long ago only to end up uninstalling it straight away because the application window looked disproportionately huge on my Ubuntu 16.04. The issue is still present now. Describing it, below are a few of what I noticed when Viber was first launched after install. The application window would not fit the screen resolution properly. Parts of the window won’t show because it’s too big. I could not resize the application. Maximize doesn’t work too. The fonts are very large. Everything looked very odd….
  • Bug #1592669
    First encountered this bug in 2017. It is almost 2 years now and they still have not gotten to fix it. Well, somebody actually said they already have a fix for it but have not committed it yet since according to them, and I quote: “We’ve had a fix for this in review for a while, but haven’t been able to push it to completion (it’s a fairly big change to how the packaging works).” You can find all the information about this bug at this page – https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mysql-5.7/+bug/1592669 Anyway, this bug is related to how the MySQL Server is…
  • Run Pipelight On Firefox
    Netflix is perhaps one of the biggest users of Microsoft Silverlight. Based on my browsing habits, I rarely encounter websites using Pipelight technology.  Most other sites are either using the good old Adobe Flash or HTML5 for streaming. Besides, most of my online streaming needs are quite satiated by YouTube. While Netflix is not available in Singapore, I do, from time to time, log on to Toggle.sg to watch some local shows. On Android there is no problem. Toggle.sg has an official Android app and I can watch anything they have to offer on their website from it. However, on…
  • Restrict Linux User to SCP or SFTP Only
    Here’s a neat little program to restrict server access of Linux user accounts to SCP and/or SFTP only. It is called rssh. What it does is, and I quote: rssh is a restricted shell for use with OpenSSH, allowing only scp and/or sftp. It now also includes support for rdist, rsync, and cvs. For example, if you have a server which you only want to allow users to copy files off of via scp, without providing shell access, you can use rssh to do that. So how I stumbled on rssh was one born out of desperation. One of the…
  • Save A File When Not Opened With Root Permission On Vim
    This is the scenario.. . You open a file using `vim` (or `vi`), let us say /etc/apache2/apache2.conf, and start editing furiously. A couple of minutes later you try to save it only to be greeted with an error saying – “E45: ‘readonly’ option is set (add ! to override)”. What a bummer! You have already modified a lot of things at different lines only to remember that you are not logged on as root, nor did you use the sudo command before you opened the file. On Ubuntu, this is probably very common. I somehow always get myself into this…
  • Bind Super Key To Application Launcher on KDE
    So I have been using KDE for the past 2 months now and have been loving it. Then again I have always been a KDE lover. Since I started using Linux for my desktops I have used a lot of desktop environments (DE) such as XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment and Gnome (Of course, it’s pretty much the default DE of several distros!), but I kept going back to KDE. I want my eye candy. And I also want it smooth and stable. KDE is pretty much that. Plus it is very customizable. Yet despite that level of customisability, it puzzles me…
  • Eclipse Error: Workspace In Use Or Cannot Be Created, Choose A Different One
    Ever encountered an error like this one where Eclipse will not proceed to start until you choose or create another workspace? But you are sure you already have the correct workspace set in your home directory somewhere and it is writable. Well I did. But the issue came up only because I copied the workspace from another user (from my other Linux account), and also copied the Eclipse installation (I did not install from the Ubuntu Software Center or by apt-get). There are a number of ways to get around this issue. If you search on Google, many of the…
  • How To Force Disconnect A Login Session That Is No Longer In Use
    Usually when I connect to a remote server via SSH, I am very fond of opening 2 or more connections to that server on several terminal windows. Often I close the terminal window before doing a proper `logout` from the SSH session. In most cases, the SSH connection should disconnect and the corresponding process will no longer be there. But in other instances that process will continue to run on the remote server. This has happened to me several times. There are 2 ways that I have found out to force disconnect (or Kill) the unused SSH sessions on the…
  • Notes On Nagios Configurations
    The last 2 days I was setting up Nagios to monitor a few local and public servers on both Linux and Windows OS. For Linux, everything was smooth-sailing. Other than some typos in the configuration file, I hardly encountered any issues at all. Most of the issues I’ve encountered so far were on Windows servers. These are the few things I’ve found out. (1) When you explicitly set a command (with parameters) for one of the plugins, DO NOT use the same name as the plugin name in the command_name value. define command{ command_name     check_nt command_line     /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nt -H…
  • When Remmina Can No Longer Connect To Remote Server
    This happened to me just recently as I was trying to connect to a remote Windows server using Remmina Remote Desktop Client. I was getting an error after entering the login details, so I could not login to the remote server. I have been using this tool for a long time and it has always connected successfully to all of our Windows servers. So what is different today? I don’t remember changing any of the settings for Remmina or on any of the Windows servers. Searched the web and the following is one of the most common ways to fix…
  • Printer Driver For Fuji-Xerox DocuCentre-II C3300
    Today, I was trying to print something at work and found out that our old Brother MFC 8840D printer was now replaced with a Fuji-Xerox DocuCentre-II C3300. The printer comes up in the network and is successfully identified (full printer name), but the driver is not listed anywhere. At least I didn’t find one that is close to it. There is a generic option but I did not bother to try that. Instead I opted for this solution: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/124442 The above requires the source code to be compiled. You may want to read up on the following: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CompilingEasyHowTo Or you…
  • “Could not open a connection to your authentication agent” SSH-Add Error
    When `ssh-add` does not work as expected because a ‘Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.’ error comes out, this might help: eval `ssh-agent` There are environment variables that needs to be set and doing the command above will essentially do just that but with far lesser key strokes. It is also easier to remember since those archaic commands and environment variables that needs to be set always escape my mind. However, do check that an ssh-agent daemon is running in the background. This can be done easily with `ps aux|grep agent` command. Supposedly, the agent should be…
  • Eclipse IDE Global Menu Hack On Ubuntu
    If you are among the countless people using Eclipse IDE as your platform for software development in Java (or other supported languages) on Ubuntu, then you may have noticed that it does not integrate at all into the global menu on Unity. Not a deal breaker actually, right. This does not even hamper you with your work at the least. I know it doesn’t for me. However, if you are one of those who always strive for consistency on their Ubuntu desktop, then maybe this one bothers you a bit. I’m not the least bothered but after getting back to…
  • Torchlight: How To Get Fullscreen On Ubuntu 12.04
    The 6th installment of the very successful Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) includes the acclaimed Adventure RPG (ARPG) Torchlight. Released back in 2009, this is the first part of the franchise from Runic Games. This particular game (well actually it was Torchlight 2, the sequel) has caught my eye, and interest, for the past month since it is being regularly mentioned in forums as one of the more anticipated ARPG games this year. Naturally when I saw it being offered on HIB I could not resist. I was curious what it had to offer, and to boot, it can run on…
  • GRUB2 Issues With Ubuntu 12.04 Installation
    This is by far the weirdest Ubuntu install I have had so far in my more than 2+ years of using the said Linux distro. You see, I started using Ubuntu with version 10.04 Lucid Lynx. It’s not that I’ve not had my share of experiences with weird Linux installs and failed Linux installs. On the contrary I have experienced a lot of that, but not with Ubuntu…  until now. So what happened? In a nutshell this is what I did: 1) On my Acer 4750 notebook, I had Windows 7 give up as much as space as it will…
  • A Bluetooth Quick Fix Hack For Ubuntu 11.10
    This is a fix on how to access the files on your phone via bluetooth on Ubuntu 11.10. I found it recently when I realized that bluetooth on my laptop was not working like it did on Ubuntu 11.04. Sure, the bluetooth dongle and my phones are detected without problems. Even searching for other active bluetooth devices within range is done correctly. However, connecting to my phone on bluetooth is not working properly after it has been paired with my laptop. While I do not use bluetooth to transfer files that often – it is awfully slow – there are…
  • Enable Realtek USB 2.0 Card Reader On Ubuntu
    In my first and last attempt months ago, I used the keucr module which is a pretty common SD card reader driver to make my laptop’s built-in reader to work. It failed miserably. I half-heartedly searched a few more times on Google but didn’t find a solution. That time I really had no use of the card reader. Eventually I forgot about this, and as I rarely (or never) use the reader, I never bothered to fix it until now. I still rarely use the card reader but I want everything to work on my Ubuntu Natty. The main reason…
  • Change The Default Plymouth Ubuntu Theme Background Color
    Well, I am now very pleased with the way my Plymouth Ubuntu theme looks. It is now more consistent throughout the entire boot process. In line with what I mentioned in my previous article about looking for a minimalist Plymouth theme with a dark/black color scheme, apparently I did not have to look any further. The default Plymouth theme for Ubuntu is already perfect. It is is simple, yet elegant enough, and does not break whenever a disk check happens on every nth boot. To change the background color to black we only need to edit 2 lines. Open the…
  • Make Plymouth Start Earlier In The Boot Process
    Starting Ubuntu 11.04 I have observed that Plymouth starts late in the boot process. Often you can only catch a glimpse of it before GDM/LightDM pops up. The same is true for Ubuntu 11.10. After a quick search on the Internet, I found out that Ubuntu 11.x versions appear to have gone away from the framebuffer technique that was used in earlier versions. Accessing the video memory directly through the framebuffer is an old technique.  The newer way, supposedly, is to have Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) handle  the graphics card and setup the display resolution early in the boot process…
  • Change Guake Width Permanently
    Guake has this annoying thing when used on Unity. It does not adjust its width to compensate for the Unity Launcher when it (Launcher) is set to Never hide. The result is part of it is outside the screen, particularly the right side where the scrollbar is located, and the Add A New Tab button is also hidden as a result. I have mentioned this in a previous post – Use Quake-like Terminals. Supposedly Guake’s width and height can be adjusted on the fly like any other normal window. However the new width (or height) is not remembered. It will…
  • How To Try Ubuntu The Safest Way
    Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot was released the other day and with it comes a plethora of new things. I am not going to walk you through all the new changes you will find in this release. No. That would be boring and you might fall asleep if I post an 8-page blog entry just to list down all the cool stuff. Instead, you should do the discovering yourself. Because seeing is believing and I for one am very satisfied with the way Oneiric Ocelot has turned out to be – it is damned faster than Natty Narwhal by far! I…
  • When LibreOffice Causes Ubuntu To Lock Up
    This is a known bug. One that has been mentioned several times on the Ubuntu and Linux Mint forums as far back as July this year, and maybe even earlier. Honestly I don’t remember this happening on my old desktop computer – Intel Core 2 CPU with a 250GT NVIDIA graphics card. Lately, I’ve been having these lock ups one too many times since I purchased my notebook barely a month ago – Intel i5 2410 with dual GPU (Intel HD Graphics and Radeon 6470M). On both desktop and notebook, I have Ubuntu 11.04 installed with the main difference being,…
  • Sharing With Windows The Ubuntu Noob Way
    You are in a Local Area Network (LAN) at home. Your wife or girlfriend’s laptop has Windows running on it. How do you share files with her without using a USB flash disk or any other removable drive? Optical disks are so passe. No, bluetooth does not count and sharing large files that way would take forever because bluetooth is just too slow. Send the file through Skype? What if you had no Internet connection? How do you even see the other computers on the local network? Windows and Linux aren’t really the best buddies when it comes to local…
  • Simple Fix On Dash Hiccups In Ubuntu Unity
    On two of my Ubuntu 11.04 installs – on my notebook and the other for my desktop – Dash defaults to full screen mode. I guess it has something to do with the size of my monitors and Ubuntu automatically determines what is best for my screen. My notebook has a 14″ screen, while my almost 3-year old desktop has a 17″ Viewsonic.. . quite small by today’s standards. Dash, by the way, is the default main menu for the Unity desktop. This is the counterpart to Kicker (I fancied this one way back when I was still using Suse/OpenSuse),…
  • How To Force Reboot A Frozen Ubuntu Safely
    (Well, technically, this technique should work on most, if not all, Linux distros.) What to do when your Ubuntu crashes or freezes? We all have encountered this before for no apparent reason. Either it does not reach the desktop and you are left staring at a black screen or a pretty wallpaper. Another not so apparent reason might be the result of installing that new graphics driver or simply an unstable system app. It could be the kernel after you upgraded to a higher version. In moments like this there are several things to do without hitting the power button….
  • How To Know If Graphics Card Is Enough To Run Unity
    Make a live CD or USB of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. You only need to write the ISO to a CD. Get UNetbootin to make a live USB. Adjust the BIOS on next boot to make sure that the boot device first priority is either an optical device or USB. Once you get to the desktop environment, the live Natty Narwhal run should be able to detect if your graphics card supports Unity or not. You’ll know it doesn’t if the classic desktop is loaded instead of Unity. There is also a list for Unity Hardware Requirements although it is…
  • Not So Obvious Firefox How To’s
    Although I regularly “clean up” my Firefox’s forms/search history, browsing/download history, cache, cookies and all that at work for privacy reasons, I tend to be more lenient when it comes to my home PC. However, you can never be too overconfident that you are totally safe from everything. There is a wealth of personal information that can be taken from your Firefox history and these are not protected by encryption or other secure means. It is always a good idea to clear a few things you do not want lying around. Case 1: Accidentally typing your password in the username…
  • Hide Your Disks Or Partitions From Nautilus
    Ever got tired of Nautilus showing all disks or partitions present on your system? While it helps you access these devices quickly, sometimes it becomes an eye sore when there are too many disks with long funny names, and add to that your external disks, flash and CD/DVD drives – the list becomes confusingly long. For several reasons you also don’t want your Windows partition’s drive C: or your other Linux distro’s root drive to show up too. If you’re like me where you have a common space for both operating system’s to store and retrieve files, then you don’t…
  • How To Set Default Desktop Session On Ubuntu
    If I remember correctly, Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and Maverick Meerkat (10.10) lacked the concept of a “control center.” Although the app is readily available, Ubuntu did not make use of it “visibly.” The control center remained hidden among the multitude of apps that comes pre-installed with the operating system. Natty Narwhal has the Control Center (a.k.a System Settings) prominently right below Shutdown in case you’ve missed it for some reason. There is a reason for this, of course. The main menu structure supported by Ubuntu in the said versions made a control center redundant. Everything a user needs to…
  • Add More Options To Firefox Quicklist
    The default Unity launcher quicklist for Firefox could certainly do with a few additional options. It’s easy to add a few more. This tip I got from AskUbuntu. There are more quicklist tips available and you can read it at this page – http://askubuntu.com/questions/35488/list-of-custom-launchers-quicklists-for-unity. I only wanted to add a few more useful options than the ones given. The tip at AskUbuntu only included Safe Mode and Profile Manager. These two options I almost never use. I haven’t even used Profile Manager since the Mozilla days back when Firefox was still not an option. What was the name of that…
  • Fooling An Ubuntu AppIndicator Icon Into Reading PNG
    I’m using this appindicator on Ubuntu 11.04 that has an icon that doesn’t blend too well with the Radiance theme. Although the icon is monchrome-ish, I think it was intended originally for the Ambiance theme. On the panel it looked the odd-man-out because it had more white color than black. Searching for the name of its icon using Synaptic (there you will find what files each package contains and where the individual files are placed), I found out it was under /usr/share/libindicator/icons/hicolor/scalable/status. I had planned to edit it, unfortunately, the file was of SVG type. Gimp can’t save as SVG…
  • Get Rid Of Obese Scrollbars on Ubuntu Natty
    The default scrollbars for applications that don’t support the overlay scrollbar are too fat and ugly. They could certainly use a little workout to shave off a few excess weight. If you can’t wait for another six months for Ubuntu to roll-out support of the overlay scrollbars to all applications like me, well, let us at least force these obese scrollbars to become thinner. HOW? Feed them a veggie-only diet? Perhaps. Workout at the gym? Not really. How about we edit the gtkrc file? YES! I am sure we can override all themes to follow one scrollbar style, but for…
  • ROOTing A LG Optimus One Android Phone
    ROOTing a LG Optimus One Android Phone is easier now, thanks to z4root by Ryan ZA. All you have to do is download/install the z4root application from the Android Market. The z4root is a one-click-root type of app for dummies that seems to have been made specially for non-developers and/or those who dread the alien-like instructions of how to root an Android manually. I would sure like to try it manually but don’t want to mess up my “kinda new” LG Optimus One. I remember those days when I tried to re-compile a kernel for Red Hat 9 just to…
  • Solving arrays – problem #1: Closest to zero
    I have been reviewing arrays for an exam. What better way than to solve array exercises.  This is one of the many that I’ve finished. Elementary, you might think, but I’ve been out of this kind of programming for a while. For this exercise, it’s about looking for the number closest to zero. Since the original problem (the first 3 lines commented) doesn’t state any other conditions like, “in case there is more than one number closest to zero, return the first element found that is closest” or “check an element in the array with a value of zero then…
  • Getting the front panel audio jack working
    What is the front panel audio jack? On most modern PC ATX case, provisions for microphone and audio jacks, as well as USB and Firewire ports at the front are common.  This makes it more convenient to plug a USB drive or headphones instead of connecting it at the back where traditionally the jacks and ports are located. The front panel audio jack has the same function as the one at the back of the case.  It lets you connect speakers or headphones.  Usually this is the green-colored jack. There are cases where the front panel audio jack will not…
  • How to stop MySQL from running on boot
    Wondering why MySQL server stubbornly kept on starting itself on boot although you turned it off on BUM (BootUp-Manager) or chkconfig? Well, stop wondering now! The file that controls MySQL to start on boot is located  in the /etc/init directory in a file aptly named mysql.conf. In order to stop the service from running again on boot, comment out a couple of lines as shown below. # start on (net-device-up #          and local-filesystems) What happens is that the upstart init daemon being used by Ubuntu looks into the /etc/init directory and start or stop processes based on events.  That is…
  • Front panel audio jack not working on Ubuntu?
    Got a new Sony MBR-XB500 headphones (with extra bass) last week and it seemed to be well worth it.  Except that I ran into a few problems when I plugged it into my desktop front panel audio jack.  No sound came out both on Ubuntu 10.04 and even on Windows XP. The rear jack worked fine for both Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows.  I re-checked the audio settings on Windows using Realtek’s software and found out that it wasn’t detecting the headphones when I plugged it in.  Bingo!  Hardware issue. Rummaging quickly through all the mess in the room, I was…
  • How to make OpenOffice.org go faster
    this has been around for a while.  i’m posting this on my blog because i keep on forgetting the steps.  at least i don’t have to search the web for it now.  and i’m spreading the `love` too!  hehe.. . 😛 here are the three (3) easy steps to make your OpenOffice.org start up faster.  many people find OpenOffice.org a bit slow and heavy.  this is very noticeable when you start it up.  while there is a quickstarter applet for this, i never liked to use it. it’s only eating up valuable memory. note: before you do this, start OpenOffice.org…
  • non-KDE app filechooser trick
    did you ever get annoyed of that non-KDE application using KDE’s native file chooser taking up the entire width of your screen whenever it is opened?  this seems to be a common and persistent problem for non-KDE applications that use the KDE file chooser to open or save files.  a good example of this is OpenOffice.org.  here is a simple trick to solve that problem. Step 1 > Click on the file chooser icon as shown in the image below.  Or you can click on the File menu and then selecting Open. Step 2 > When the file chooser dialog…
  • removing a row from a table
    i’ve had trouble removing a row from a table using javascript. the tricks i’ve learned assumes that i am dealing with a div always. in some cases, i can’t help but use a table. a quick google search offered me a lot of solutions. this is the one that worked in my case, and is just 2 lines! for convenience i just placed it in a function. function removeTableRow(row,tableid) { var r=row.parentNode.parentNode.rowIndex; document.getElementById(tableid).deleteRow(r); } so using the function above, you have the following line somewhere: onclick=”removeTableRow(this,’myTable’)”; and somewhere else you have a table that is defined like this: <table id=’myTable’>…
  • password-less ssh logins
    logins can be such a hassle when you have a lot of servers to maintain. unless if you have a photographic memory, then maybe you won’t have to always open that secret file where you keep your passwords. the key to password-less ssh logins is via private and public keys. and doing this is very easy. all you need is the ssh-keygen tool. most of the time this tool comes installed with your favorite Linux distro. 1.) generate the key ssh-keygen -t TYPE -f OUTPUT_FILE the options shown above are the most basic. TYPE is the type of key to…
  • making Kubuntu hibernate
    it’s my first time to install Kubuntu. and it was a laptop install. everything just works out of the box. well, almost everything. hibernate, one of the most important actions that an OS could do on a laptop, didn’t work. well i’m partly to blame. i didn’t allocate enough swap during the install. now in case you are having problems trying to make hibernate work on your laptop coz it complains that there is not enough swap space, here’s my advice. 1.) make sure your swap space is as big or over the size of your system memory (RAM). if…
  • get values of multiple input elements from a form
    have you ever had a riduculously simple problem on how to get the values of, say, multiple checkboxes in a form? getting the value of an element in an HTML form is easy. in fact, it’s the first thing you would learn in web scripting languages such as PHP. (aside from echo “Hello World”) let’s say for example that your form is dynamically created with many checkboxes for the purpose of letting the user check as many as would require him/her. good if your question has always the same number of answers/options. what if it’s not? here’s a tip i…
  • set squid proxy outgoing IP
    last week had me working on setting a squid proxy server with multiple IP/domains. the plan was to have squid route outgoing traffic to as many IPs that the server carries. the server only has one physical interface. the rest of the IPs are tied to it via aliases or a virtual interface. you can easily do this with the following command: ifconfig ethX:Y <IP_ADDRESS> where X is the number of your physical ethernet device, and Y is the number designated (arbitrary) for the virtual interface. you could also add the broadcast and netmask address in the same line as…
  • create a Klonie, build your Weemee
    there is this personalise option in Skype where you can “create your skype identity” by making your own avatar. you have 2 options: Create a Klonie or Build your Weemee. seemed kewl. tried it. i built a Weemee first. this one has lots of options to customize your Weemee. from hair color, facial expression, down to shoes. but after everything was done, i was taken to a “purchase authorization” page where (you can already guess why) i have to pay about 1.50 Euros for the Weemee! weeee.. . are you kidding me?! pay for this? so i’m a thrift. sue…
  • grub basics – booting from command prompt
    the common things i tend to forget. one way or another a Linux user will have to face this problem one day.. . so in case there’s no grub boot menu, or you need to edit something, just go to the grub command prompt. press ‘c‘ and you will be taken to the prompt. enter the following: grub> root (hdX,Y) grub> kernel /vmlinuz-i386 root=/dev/hdaX grub> boot sometimes you also have to specify the initrd image. it is imperative that the initrd image must match with the kernel you used in the above. if there is a trailing -i386 in the…
  • SUSE Kickoff Menu
    how to build SUSE Kickoff menu in 7 steps a lot of the steps in this how-to is taken from the Building KDE From Source Step By Step tutorial. i would suggest that you thoroughly read that tutorial if you find some aspects ambiguous. let’s assume that all the needed tools and libraries for compiling/building KDE are already installed on your Linux. the KDE version i have on my system is 3.5.5. also make sure that you have installed liblazy. if not, you can get a copy here. at the time i compiled the Kickoff menu, i couldn’t find a…
  • send text messages via Google Talk
    Google not so recently added another service that would allow you to send messages to a cellphone in SMS format through your GMail or Google account. supposedly it only works in the US. that is, you must be a subscriber of one of the major US carriers like Verizon, Cingular, Sprint and/or T-Mobile to name a few. for us here in the Philippines who just love FREE text, that just sucks, huh?! well not really. here’s a step by step guide on how you could go around this US-only limitation: 1.) you must have a GMail account. if you don’t…
  • getting away with RPM dependecies
    yes i’m still old school. most of the time i download the source, compile, and make an RPM package out of it. i prefer it this way. like when i do major upgrades short of distro upgrades. i download the RPM packages first, then install it manually. the thing with this method is that you get into a lot of RPM package dependency issues. so you end up looking for an update for another group of packages. good if there are updates. what if there weren’t any? or sometimes the supposedly updated package needs a dynamic library file that’s older…
  • mounting FAT32 partitions ready for read-write
    don’t you just get annoyed when you couldn’t write anyhing to your FAT32 partition everytime it’s mounted? unless if you were root, in most cases you wouldn’t want to do that while doing petty things such as copying your MP3s or videos to it. now why FAT32? aren’t most Windoze filesystems nowadays using the newer NTFS filesystem(FS)? well you couldn’t really write to NTFS. Linux only has read-support for it. so for dual-booters like me i prefer to keep a rather large portion of my 2nd hard drive into a format that’s friendly to both Operating Systems(OS). this way i…
  • booting M$ Windoze from another physical drive
    most of the modern installers that come with common Linux distros nowadays are always able to add an entry into your GRUB or LILO boot menu that let’s you boot into an existing Windoze install after installing Linux. if your Linux and Windoze are on the same drive, the menu entry is straightforward. sometimes, you just have one too many drives on your box and being primarily a Linux user, you’d want this drive to be the primary master. it’s common knowledge that Windoze won’t boot if you have it as a slave. i don’t know how true this is…