Tag: ubuntu

Categories
android

Getting android emulator running on Ubuntu 9.10

I had a little trouble getting the android emulator running on my laptop. I wanted to start debugging why andnav2 is no longer working. Hopefully Nicolas can get it fixed, but it appears that he’s quite busy 🙁

The first problem I ran into was that the buttons in the tools/android application where not responding properly. Starting tools/android with the env variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 fixed that problem. Next problem was that the ssl mirror for getting the different SDK versions was not working. A quick google revealed that adding a sdkman.force.http=true to ~/.android/androidtool.cfg fixed that. Do not try to just remove the http. You’ll get the SDKs, but it will not work.

Last problem was getting java jdk working. I settled on openjdk as it seems to be the way forward. Be sure to use java-alternatives to set your java version. Sun-java6 seems to be 9.04 so I should probably remove that at some point. Just don’t want to ruin my webbank 😉

After getting everything up and running I tried the debugging tool and it appears to be really neat. It has tons of debug information, even down to when the GC is running, and was able to give me a proper backtrace of the problem. Another really cool thing is that it’s extremely easy to test ones application one 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 by simply running 3 different emulators. Or different screen sizes for that matter. One can also see some of the goodies coming in android 2.0. The browser seems to have gotten a nice overhaul. Can’t wait for HTC to release an updated ROM based on 2.0.

Categories
ubuntu

Font problems with QT programs in Ubuntu 9.10

I upgraded early to Ubuntu 9.10 release and have been overall very satisfied with the changes. 3d effects are back, thanks to fixed intel drivers, kernel has been upgraded and suspend + boot is faster, and Emacs has been upgraded to 23 🙂 I just had one problem when upgrading, namely that QT applications would use a non-hinted font which made Skype and Virtualbox would look like crap. It took a bit of googling to find out what the problem was. Using qtconfig-qt4 did not work for some unknown reason. I followed the guide on the link, and got fonts working again by simply copy/paste in his .fonts.conf file into my home directory.

Categories
Blog

+1 Ubuntu

I was flaming Ubuntu in an earlier post for their lack of quality in their releases, so I thought it would be fair to give them credit when it is due. They have a project called One Hundred Paper Cuts where they try to fix low hanging fruit, easy bugs but annoying bugs. Bugs that when stacked together really can make you go from loving a piece of software to hating it. When I look through the blog post for their round 6, I really like what they are fixing.

We need more of this in software. It’s so easy, and has become so accepted, to ship a half-baked product and just slap a beta sign on it nowadays. Release early, release often is great, but there is also a time for making fixing all the small annoying bugs. If they plan on fixing this bug, then this is a step in the right direction.

Categories
Blog

Running Chrome in Ubuntu

Getting Chrome running in Ubuntu is now pretty easy, simple add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main

Then you can install Chrome using the package manager and it will keep itself updated. Sadly the browser is quite alpha (no flash, random errors, no tabs saving on exit) but they update it every week and it runs insanely fast compared to firefox.

Categories
Blog

Making hibernate work after harddrive upgrade

I recently upgraded the harddrive in my trusty old IBM T60. I mirrored the hd using a little dd magic and everything worked fine, including the IBM rescue partition. The only thing that wasn’t working anymore was hibernation in Ubuntu. This was because it relied on wierd UUIDs instead of actual device names. Fixing it was pretty easy, once you know what the problem is. First step is to fix up /etc/fstab so that the swap partition has the right UUID. You can get the UUID of a device using something like:

sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda4

Next step is to fix up the location of the resume partition. Open /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and change the UUID to the same as you just put into fstab. Then run:

sudo update-initramfs -u

And you should be running again 🙂

Categories
On the web

Random Ubuntu notes

There’s an annoying problem in Ubuntu 9.04 that if you have set your machine to automatically login, but have a password on gnome keyring manager, then it will prompt you for the password before wireless is enabled. There is a bug about it here on launchpad. And as usual the Ubuntu guys doesn’t seem to want to take responsibility for the software they are providing. Reminds me of this thrashing bug reported over 3 years ago and it’s still open. It’s actiually the first result on google (out of 544.000) if you search for thrashing hell 🙂

Another thing I noticed was that I was looking through the system messages and found the following wierd message.

Jul 17 16:46:35 arj-laptop pulseaudio[3290]: main.c: Called SUID root and real-time and/or high-priority scheduling was requested in the configuration. However, we lack the necessary privileges:

Jul 17 16:46:35 arj-laptop pulseaudio[3290]: main.c: We are not in group ‘pulse-rt’, PolicyKit refuse to grant us the requested privileges and we have no increase RLIMIT_NICE/RLIMIT_RTPRIO resource limits.

Jul 17 16:46:35 arj-laptop pulseaudio[3290]: main.c: For enabling real-time/high-priority scheduling please acquire the appropriate PolicyKit privileges, or become a member of ‘pulse-rt’, or increase the RLIMIT_NICE/RLIMIT_RTPRIO resource limits for this user.

Which was easy enough for me to fix (sudo addgroup arj pulse-rt), though it still would have been nice if this was done properly. This might help some people who has been getting skipping music.