Karmic Koala 9.10 – The _khAttAm

[SOLVED] Volume always muted on startup

I’m using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and I had been having a problem related to sound. Every time I started the computer, the volume was muted and I had to un-mute it as well as increase the volume. When I searched for a solution, it was brought to my attention that Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and 10.04 Lucid Lynx also had this problem. I solved it by simply removing the buggy package alsa-utils which was responsible for this. Removing also-utils also removes ubuntu-desktop meta-package, but it does not matter since it is just a meta-package. To those who do not want to remove alsa-utils or ubuntu-desktop, some people in the Bug report have said that removing the line

mute_and_zero_levels "$TARGET_CARD" || EXITSTATUS=1

from /etc/init.d/alsa-utils (to open, use gksu gedit /etc/init.d/alsa-utils) fixed the problem.

[SOLVED] Adobe FlashPlugin Problem in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx 64bit

I had posted about flash plugin controls not working in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala 64 bit here. I had moved to Ubuntu 32 bit for quite sometime and recently made a move back to Ubuntu 64 bit. I found the same problem with flash plugin controls in Ubuntu 64 bit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I haven’t found any specific patterns to when it does and when it doesn’t. If someone has, please do share.

In my previous post regarding the issue, I had suggested the installation of Adobe flash player 64 bit version from Adobe Labs website. The solution worked fine for me and it seems for most of the others, but the plugin was experimental and when someone needed to update, it was not available via repositories. It has been provided in a launchpad ppa repository currently which can be added by adding ppa:sevenmachines/ppa to Repositories in Synaptic, but it seems it is not updated as of now and the latest version available in the ppa is 10.0.45.2 while Adobe has already released version 10.1rc4. But since the latest version is not recognized by youtube, I think we should stay with the version in the repository.

Simply open up synaptic and navigate to Settings>Repositories>Other Software and click on Add. In the apt-line, enter ppa:sevenmachines/flash and close it. Then Click on the Reload button. Now, search for flashplugin64-installer, mark it for installation and click on apply.

When done, restart firefox and flash should run fine.

Please share your flash player 10 experience in Linux.

[HOWTO] Install GIMP 2.7 (with Single Window Mode) on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

GIMP 2.7.1 added Single Window Mode and GIMP 2.7.x can now be installed via PPA. It is available here for Jaunty, Karmic and Lucid. I have Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx installed and I installed GIMP 2.7.3 unstable. Here is how you can do it, but if you use it for production, you might want to wait for final stable release.

Launch Synaptic Package Manager and click Settings>Repositories>Other Software and then Add

ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

. Reload the software list and mark for upgrades. That will install GIMP 2.7 and you can enable the Single Window Mode by navigating to Window>Single Window Mode.

[HOWTO] Downgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx to 9.10 Karmic Koala

I was wondering if we could downgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. So I decided to put it upon test and I succeed. So, I am sharing this with those who wish to keep using stable Karmic Koala till the final version of Lucid is out.

Please note however, that all the installed applications will be lost, however the settings and files in your home directory will be preserved. So, for example if you have a huge list of saved sites on your Filezilla client, Filezilla will be gone, but when you install Filezilla on your Karmic, the settings should work. Also, your Firefox browsing history, preferences and other settings will also be preserved.

[SOLVED] Gtk-Message: Failed to load module “gnomenu-panel”

I am using globalmenu 0.7.9 (Mac OS X like Global menu for Gnome) from the globalmenu-team PPA (Karmic as Lucid is not available now) in my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. I get the following error on terminal when I try to launch any gtk applications from the terminal:

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gnomenu-panel": libgnomenu-panel.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "globalmenu-gnome": libglobalmenu-gnome.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

However, the gnomemenu-panel works fine, I wanted these messages to not appear.
I opened up /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules and found that the plugin had different files than listed in the error message. To fix the problem, I just created symbolic links to the existing files. This is how I did it from the terminal:

[SOLVED] ‘Murrine configuration option “scrollbar_color”, “gradients” is no longer supported and will be ignored.’

I am using balazan theme in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 4 from breathe ppa for Karmic Koala since Lucid PPA was not available when I started using Lucid. I saw this message when I launched gedit from terminal (gnome-terminal):

/usr/share/themes/balanzan/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:89: Murrine configuration option "scrollbar_color" is no longer supported and will be ignored.
/usr/share/themes/balanzan/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:93: Murrine configuration option "gradients" is no longer supported and will be ignored.

Seems like the theme I’m using has some depreciated configuration options after Murrine update. I opened the /usr/share/themes/balanzan/gtk-2.0/gtkrc file (as root) using the following command from Alt+F2

[SOLVED] “error: mountall Could not Connect to Plymouth”, “mountall main process (x) terminated with status 1”

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha on a system with Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L with Intel GMA 3100 onboard graphics. I upgraded to Lucid from Karmic Koala (9.10) and it was always showing these errors on boot:
“error: mountall Could not Connect to Plymouth”
“mountall main process (x) terminated with status 1”
Also, I could not experience Plymouth. I thought it was a problem with Plymouth and believed updates will fix it, but that did not happen till date. Today, I decided to fix it and went looking around for a fix and got it working.

I found this thread on Ubuntu Forums and was able to fix it by following it.
I checked by boot options and noticed that there was only “quiet” specified, and no “splash”. I added “splash” and it worked.

[HOWTO] Integrating newmat with Code::Blocks in Ubuntu

Newmat is a matrix manipulation library for C++. It can be used with various C++ compilers.

Here we will go through how to use newmat with Code::Blocks in Ubuntu. I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala with newmat 10 and Code::Blocks 8.02, however other versions may also work. Here is how you can do it.

[HOWTO] Make Docky 3-D Style in Ubuntu

Docky is a great dock for Linux and is based on Gnome-do.

Installation
If you haven’t already installed it, you can add the following repositories to your Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala or Lucid Lynx: “ppa:docky-core/ppa” in Synaptic Package Manager>Settings>Repositories then reload. Then you can simply install it from Synaptic.

[HOWTO] Change Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala to Linuxmint 8 Helena

As you know, Linuxmint is based on Ubuntu. So I thought, it might be possible to take Ubuntu as a base and turn it to Linuxmint with available Linuxmint software. Thats what I did.

I used Ubuntu Karmic Koala and turned it into Linuxmint Helena. You might use other Ubuntu base and turn it to respective Linuxmint distro, but you may need to follow different (yet similar) steps. Here is how I did it.