Posts tagged with “howto”

Fix Title Bar Issues in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

Towards the end of November, I upgraded (read: completely rebuilt) my Linux partition from 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). I’ll have more to say about the latter in a future post, but after the upgrade I was immediately faced with two problems. One, the inability to establish a VPN connection, that was critical to my ability to use this as my primary work computer and the second, an issue with my title bars that, though extremely annoying, was really just aesthetic.

The solution to the VPN issue is detailed in an earlier post and today I finally got around to fixing the title bar issue. It took me a while because, though the solution itself is relatively simple, I had a lot of trouble finding the entire solution in one place. Thus, the birth of this post.

The Problem

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but unfortunately I neglected to take a screenshot before fixing the problem. Nonetheless, I’ll try to keep my description well under a thousand words.

Frequently and inconsistently, my active title bar would go grey and the appearance would fracture. I don’t know how to describe it any better except to say that if Picasso himself had painted a title bar in shades of grey, it would have probably looked much like mine. Cubist, indeed.

The problem, in a nutshell, is with the NVIDIA video driver. If you don’t have an NVIDIA video driver, you probably don’t have this problem. Intrepid Ibex ships with three proprietary NVIDIA driver versions: 96, 173 and 177. I don’t remember which was installed by default, but I encourage you to trust me when I say that not one of them worked.

The Solution

First, of course, you need the right driver. I read somewhere that version 180.06 worked as expected so that’s the one I downloaded. I’ll save you the suspense and tell you that this version did work for me. It can be downloaded from the NVIDIA site, but be sure to select the 32 bit or 64 bit version, as appropriate. I downloaded it to my desktop. Once you have the appropriate driver:

  1. Close everything except for a terminal window. I do mean everything because you’re about to stop the X Windows process.
  2. In the terminal window, type sudo killall gdm and hit Enter.
  3. Once the screen goes black, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to a new terminal.
  4. You should see a terminal prompt so switch to the directory where you downloaded the driver file. My command was cd ~/Desktop.
  5. It may be sufficient to just use sudo here, but just to be sure, I dropped into a root shell by typing sudo -s and hitting Enter.
  6. Execute the driver file. If you didn’t rename the file, the terminal command should look something like this: ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-180.06-pkg2.run.
  7. Follow the prompts through the installation process. You may see some scary messages about the driver having “no precompiled kernel interface”, but allow the install to do what it needs to do (it’ll ask to check for one and, failing that, it will ask to compile its own). I let it go about its business and had no problems at all.
  8. Once the install is complete, you can probably just type startx and hit Enter, but again, I wanted to be really, really sure, so I did a full reboot. If you used sudo -s as I did and choose to simply restart X, I’d recommend logging out of the root shell first or else you’ll start X as root.

That’s all there is to it. So far, everything looks good, but I have noticed one thing that looks odd to me:

Ubuntu Hardware Drivers Window

Seems Ubuntu thinks I’m still using version 177. As I said in my last post, Ubuntu is pretty solid, but not everything “just works”.

Intrepid Ibex VPN Connection Fails

At the end of last week, I performed an upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Although it’s not really part of this story, I should specify that I tried to perform an upgrade. The upgrade was so catastrophically botched somehow, that it ended up being a complete repartitioning of my work laptop. Nonetheless, over the weekend I got back to a reasonable level of stability and productivity except that I was completely unable to connect to my office VPN.

Evidently this is a pretty well-reported bug affecting a number of folks. My attempts to connect to VPN “out of the box” were greeted with a complaint that “no valid VPN secrets were found.” A number of folks reported success if they simply removed their password from the configuration dialog, but that didn’t work for me. After doing so, I got a spectacularly unhelpful message that my “Connection to [my network] failed.” Super. Thanks for playing.

I spent hours searching and trying various “solutions” before finally stumbling on a clearly articulated set of instructions that worked. They did, however, require updated network-manager packages. In case I ever have to do this again, I don’t want to spend those same hours, so I’m going to try to document the steps I took so I can reflect on them later. Maybe they’ll help someone else too.

To get those add the following source to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu intrepid main

Once done, update:

$ sudo apt-get update

Once updated, system updates should be reported and they should include network-manager and network-manager-pptp. Those need to be installed. Once everything is installed, these instructions should finish the job and provide a working VPN connection.

Ubuntu is pretty solid, but not everything “just works”. Quite.

Extended Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User

This morning I read David Pogue’s excellent article offering tips for average computer users. I like to think of myself as a power user, but there’s some really good stuff in there and I learned a few things. Nonetheless, a couple of his tips either didn’t go far enough to suit me or I thought they could be extended slightly to add usability without increasing complexity. I haven’t included all of David’s tips here, but only those that I wanted to extend. Read his article for all of his tips. You won’t be sorry you did.

David’s tips that I chose to extend are in the primary list below. My extensions are italicized in a nested (read: indented) list.

  • You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.
    • If you’ve highlighted editable text (e.g. in an email, form field, etc.), you can just start typing. The highlighted text will be entirely replaced by what you’re typing. You don’t have to hit Delete or Backspace to explicitly clear the text before typing.
    • To copy the highlighted text, save a few clicks by using the Control+C keyboard shortcut rather than right-clicking and selecting the “Copy” menu item. To paste the text, use the Control+V shortcut.
  • When you get an e-mail message from eBay or your bank, claiming that you have an account problem or a question from a buyer, it’s probably a “phishing scam” intended to trick you into typing your password. Don’t click the link in the message. If in doubt, go into your browser and type “www.ebay.com” (or whatever) manually.
    • A helpful “trick” is to simply mouseover the link first (but don’t click it!). The destination will appear in the status bar of your browser (usually in the lower left corner). If the destination is anything other than what you’d expect then beware.
  • You can open the Start menu by tapping the key with the Windows logo on it.
    • You can open Windows Explorer by pressing Windows+E
  • You generally can’t send someone more than a couple of full-size digital photos as an e-mail attachment; those files are too big, and they’ll bounce back to you. (Instead, use iPhoto or Picasa–photo-organizing programs that can automatically scale down photos in the process of e-mailing them.)
    • Better yet, don’t send more than one or two photos by email at all. Upload them to Picasa, Flickr or some other online repository and send a link in the email message. Your recipients will thank you.

Quitting Caffeine the Mac Way

From time to time, I find the need to start Caffeine on my Mac, but my use is infrequent enough that it’s not something I like to keep open and available all the time. Invariably, once it’s running, I forget how to quit the application to get it off of my menu bar. It’s not an easy thing to Google so, for the sake of my own sanity, I give you:

  1. Cmd+Click the menu bar icon (the coffee cup)
  2. Select the Quit option

It’s a simple enough process, but I guess it’s just different enough from that of other menu bar icons that I can never seem to remember it.

Renew a Mac's DHCP Lease Via Terminal

Being a long-time (and still part-time) Windows user, I’ve spent many a not-so-happy second typing the following:

> ipconfig /release
> ipconfig /renew

Today, though, I made a few changes to secure my network and needed to renew the DHCP lease of my Mac. Usually, I’m sitting in front of the laptop so I can just use the System Preferences GUI, but not today. Today I had to remote in so I only had the command line available and I realized that I had no idea how to map the Windows commands above to the Mac terminal. Mostly for the sake of posterity:

$ sudo ifconfig set en0 BOOTP
$ sudo ifconfig set en0 DHCP

In typical Unix fashion, there’s no output to indicate that succeeded or did anything at all, for that matter, but it seems to do the trick.

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