This is probably my shortest post, but I hope it’s as helpful to others as it will be for me as I need to remember how to auto start a program in Gnome 3.

1. press: alt + F2
2. Type: gnome-session-properties
3. Click on “+ Add”
4. Name: Application Name
5. Command: Application command e.g: skype
6. Click “+ Add” and you are done.

Technorati Tags: applications, auto start, configuring linux, Gnome, Linux, OpenSUSE, startup

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• December 22, 2008 -- Using Zypper

I have been using Spotify on Linux for quite a while now, under Wine. Suddenly it decided not to work a any more.  I was getting the following error when trying to run the new 0.6.2 version.  “The program Spotify.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close.”

Trying to run it from the command line showed me yet another error message: “wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0×00000068 at address 0x7bc368b5 (thread 0042), starting debugger…”

UPDATE: Please first try the WinHTTP.dll fix posted by Nick in the comments section.

My simple solution: After searching in various forums and blogs and trying a myriad of  “fixes” that took me nowhere. The simplest answer I found was to remove the Spotify app from Facebook. I can now listen to my Spotify  play lists on my Open SUSE Linux. It does mean that you will be without the Facebook integration, which for me is not a big deal.

To delete Spotify from your Facebook account go to Privacy Setting >> Apps and Websites >> edit (Spotify) >> remove application

Spotify does have a Linux version of its software, which is currently in preview version and only available for Debian/Ubuntu  paid subscribers.  On their website they said: “As we haven’t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version (Linux Preview) is only available to Spotify Premium and Unlimited subscribers. “  Fair enough I would say…

Technorati Tags: error, Facebook app, installation, Linux, Privacy settings, Spotify, Spotify.exe, wine, wine: Unhandled page fault on read access, WineHQ

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• December 21, 2011 -- Auto start a program on Gnome 3
• December 14, 2011 -- Show Desktop icons in Gnome 3 on Open SUSE 12.1
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• April 22, 2011 -- Has the iPad really overtaken Linux?
• April 8, 2011 -- Linux turns 20

I was recently having connectivity issues at home, with the wireless router being at one end of the flat and the living room right at the other end. Having an ethernet connection in the living room, I decided to add a secondary WiFi and dug up an “old” Netgear wireless AP.

Not wanting to keep switching from Wireless #1 to wireless #2 all the time, depending on which was in closer range, I decided to give the devices the exact same name. Now it doesn’t matter where I am in my flat I am always connected to the same wireless network, and with a 100% strength.  The trick for it to work well is:

1. Each device has a different IP address within the same subnet
2. Both devices have the same SSID
3. Each device broadcast on a different channel
4. both devices use the same security settings (WPA is safer than WEP) and same access key

Technorati Tags: Connectivity, Internet, networking, WiFi, Wireless, wireless range

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I was getting this very vague error message on a new installation of BuddyPress when attempting to create new Forum topics – There was an error when creating the topic.

FIX:
After trying various proposed fixes I realised that my Groups had been created before the Forum was installed so I checked the database and there were no forums relating to my groups on the table wp_bb_forums. The solution is simple! Just go to group page > Admin > Group Settings  and uncheck the option “enable discussion forum“  the save changes then check “enable discussion forum” and save the changes again. This will create a Forum entry on the database for that specific Group.

Hope this helps anyone struggling with this same error.

Technorati Tags: bbPress, BuddyPress, Forum error

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This is a question I keep being asked.

I normally use Facebook as a news reader while having a few friends’ status updates scatered  throughtout my feeds. Sometimes though I do wonder what my friends are up to.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have only your friends updates on a page without all the fan page noise?   Well it’s easy and I have been doing it for a little while. It’s not new stuff but I am amazed at the ammount of people that didn’t know how to find it.  So here is the Facebook Friends’ Status Update for Dummies, in picture.

Enjoy!

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‘Google Alerts’ is still on Beta but proves to be a very handy tool. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.  Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

* monitoring what’s being said about your company or brand online
* keeping current on a competitor or industry
* keeping tabs on your favourite sports teams
* Keeping tabs on backlinks to your blog  (also available on google webmastertools)
* Keeping tabs on contents of comments in your blog
* and more

You can use a combination of more advanced features of Google Web Search to setup your Alerts. 

A good example of brand monitoring is this blog post  “What Are They Saying About You Online?” by Michael Hyatt in his Intentional Leadership Blog.

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Today I had a few complaints from users not being able to download PDFs from one of the sites I manage. Users were not able to get beyond the registration page which kept hanging due to an error on reCAPTCHA.  The error caused the $rep->is_valid to return null. I am not sure if the problem was in validating the reCaptcha words or if it was in sending a response back. The fix was pointed out by reCAPTCHA support in a Google group. I just want to make it more public here.

Update your current recaptchalib.php with the one from http://code.google.com/p/recaptcha/downloads/detail?name=recaptcha-php-1.10.zip

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Is it possible to change a YouTube  video thumbnail? The thumbnail is a still frame that represents your video. When you upload a video to YouTube, it generates 3 still images from the video to be used as thumbnails, interesting enough the default image appears to be the second still.

You can use this tool to check the available thumbnails to any video.

Changing the thumbnail

You can only edit your own videos and only use the thumbnails generated by Youtube. To change a video thumbnail follow these steps.

1 – go to http://www.youtube.com/my_videos and login to your account
2 – Select “edit” on the desired video
3 – On the following page, under, “Video Thumbnail”, click on the thumbnail you wish to use. Once you’ve chosen your preferred still, the border around it will become highlighted.
4 – Then click on “Update Video”

It may take a few minutes for the change to show,  you may want to refresh your browser cache if the thumbnail does not appear.

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Great tips on the use of Redirect 301 and rel=canonical among some other good stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hSoXutuj0g

Technorati Tags: crawl, duplicate content, Google, redirect 301, rel canonical, search engine, search ranking

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As usual this post is a self help note, but as it’s public I hope it helps someone else. If you want to open .eps or .ps files with GIMP on Windows you will need to install Ghostscript (download it from http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/). After successful installation you will need to create an environment variable called GS_PROG on Windows. To do this just follow these steps:

1. Right-click on the ‘My Computer‘ Icon and select properties
2. Click on the advanced tab
3. Click on Environment Variable button
4. Under either User variables or System variables click on “New”
5. Set Variable name : GS_PROG
6. Set Variable path: C:\Progam Files\gs\gs864w32\bin\gswin32.exe   – this is where yous gswin32.exe resides, make sure you type the correct path.

Click “OK” for everything and then open GIMP, you should now be able to open .eps and .ps files

Extra information: .EPS/PostScript (.PS) is a  file that may contain 2D vector graphics, bitmap images, and text; includes an embedded preview image in bitmap format; often used for transferring image data between different operating systems. Adobe Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop or CorelDraw are the kind of programs that normally use/open these files.

Technorati Tags: .eps, Environment variable, Ghostscript, GIMP, GS_PROG, Microsoft, postscript, Windows

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CRE Loaded was giving me the error  1062 – Duplicate entry ’2147483647′ for key 1 – when trying to add a new product.

Cause: for some unexplained reason the auto_increment ID field on Table “products” has gone up to 2147483647 which is apparently the maximum number of rows permitted in an INT column.

Fix:

1. Go to your phpMyadmin interface
2. Backup your database (make sure you know how to restore it if needed)
3. Browse the products table (select to sort the fields by Descending order)
4. The top item should now have the ID = 2147483647
5. Change the ID to a number up from the previous item (e.g.: Previous was ID = 301, than change the ID = 2147483647 to 302)
6. Repeat same process with table “product_to_categories”
7. Return to table “products”
8. Select the SQL tab
9. run the following SQL Query :  ALTER TABLE products AUTO_INCREMENT=303   (note that 303 is the next number up from the example on step 5, you should use the next number up in your situation)

It worked perfectly for me, hope this helps.

Technorati Tags: 1062 - Duplicate entry '2147483647' for key 1, CRE Loaded, Database, MySQL, PHPMySQL

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I was having problem Login in to Linkedin.com from work (also was one of the company directors), I went through my whole network and firewall setup looking for any setting that could be blocking their site.  I was getting a “Connection Timed Out” error.

The solution was also simple but still poses a question to me.  I deleted the LinkedIn cookie from my Firefox and it started working straight away, the interesting bit was that as soon as my computer gained access also did the other computers on my network.  So if you are having problem loging in to LinkedIn on your network and clearing your cookies does not sort it out, try asking you coleagues (who use LinkedIn) to clear their browser’s cookies. I will report this to LinkedIn to see if this has any foundation.

Technorati Tags: Cookie problem, LinkedIn Timeout, Social Networking

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Offline Blogging Tools let you comfortably write and effortlessly publish new entries to your blog.  I personally like the easy to use Scribefire, a Firefox addon, but there are many others our there.  Here is a shortlist…

Scribefire

Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux

This is an addon for Firefox so you need to be using Firefox (clearly)

BlogDesk

Platform: Windows

BlogDesk is totaly free of charge and optimized for the blog systems WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine.

BlogGTK

Platform: Linux

BloGTK is a weblog client that allows you to post to your weblog from GNOME without the need for a separate browser window. BloGTK allows you to connect with many weblog systems such as Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, and more.

Windows Live Writer (by Microsoft)

Platform: Windows

WLW is a desktop application for publishing to blogs and works with almost any blog provider in the world including Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, WordPress and more.

Qumana

Platform: Mac, Windows

Great for bloggers on the move. Qumana features include easy text formatting and image insertion, simple Technorati tagging, advertising insertion with Q Ads and more.

Technorati Tags: Blog, BlogDesk, BloGTK, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Linux, Mac, MovableType, Qumana, Scribfire, Serendipity, Windows, Windows Live Writer, WordPress

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• November 11, 2010 -- IPV4 is almost exhausted.. time for IPV6?

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between
multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its
own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users
with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its
own monitor(s). 

Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse
off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of
all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems.
Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop
together and, if screen locking is enabled, only one screen requires
a password to unlock them all.

You can get synergy working on computers running different Operating Systems, the sharing is done via your local network and hosts are linked via the hostname or IP address. Setup is very intuitive. To install just follow these steps.

For Windows download it from http://synergy2.sourceforge.net

For Macs you can use the SynergyOSx or QuickSynergy

For Linux you can use QuickSynergy

• OpenSUSE go to http://software.opensuse.org 
• Ubuntu $sudo apt-get install quicksynergy 
• Other distros download it from http://quicksynergy.sourceforge.net

Watch this video with an idea of what is possible with Synergy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id3GHAruhAk

Technorati Tags: Cross-platform, Linux, Mac, QuickSynergy, Sharing periferals, Synergy, Windows

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Sometimes (just sometimes) a Linux Desktop user needs to run a program eg: Nautilus as the root user which you can easily do with the commandline $sudo nautilus.  If you have the command line shell open why not do you file management throught it? Well it’s nice to have more options like a Desktop launcher (Shortcut) that will open an application as root and prompt for the root password (all as a GUI).

This can be achieved using gnomesu or kdesu, depending on the Desktop Manager. Installing is very easy, can be done via the CLI (Command Line Inteface) or usign your package manager by searching for libgnomesu0 and libgnomesu-common (for Gnome users), the kdesu comes installed as part of the base installation of  KDE.

The CLI installation route on Gnome

Debian based distros (eg.: Ubuntu)

 $ sudo apt-get install libgnomesu0 libgnomesu-common

Suse Linux

$ sudo zypper in libgnomesu0 libgnomesu-common

Note that on Ubuntu you have to activate the root user account and give it a password:

1 – Go to Main Menu>>System>>Administration>>Users & Groups
2 – Unlock the Application (requires user password)
3 – Select Root account, activate it and under properties change password

Usage:

1 – Testing: press ALT+F2 and at the prompt type gnomesu Nautilus, a password prompt should appear, so type the root user password and Nautilus should open with root previledges.

2 – Desktop Launcher (Shortcut): (CTRL+ALT+D to show Desktop)

• right-click on your Desktop
• Select “Create Launcher”
• Add Name: (Can be anything eg.: Nautilus as Root)
• Command: gnomesu nautilus (nautilus is the application I want to use, you could use any othereg.: gimp, gedit, etc)

That’s all

Technorati Tags: Gnome, Gnomesu, Linux, Root user, Suse Linux, Ubuntu

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Full DVD support on Linux is an old issue. It has to do with the Linux distros not being shipped with the w32codecs and the libdvdcss2, for legal reasons in some countries. The users must then download and install them by themselves with no clear guidance.

Here are the simple steps for installing these libraries under Debian based distributions.

The GUI Route: (CLI users forgive me but if there’s a GUI, users diserve a choice.)

1 – Download the w32codecs

2 – Download the libdvdcss2

3 – Double click on the packages, one at a time and use the Package Installer to install them quickly and painless

The CLI (Command Line Interface) route

cd Desktop

wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/w/w32codecs/w32codecs_20071007-0.1_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20071007-0.1_i386.deb

wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/libd/libdvdcss/libdvdcss2_1.2.9-0.0_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.9-0.0_i386.deb

See this relared post about OpenSuse and SLED10

Technorati Tags: DVD Support, libdvdcss2, Linux, Ubuntu, w32codecs

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I acquired a 3G Mobille Broadband – Huawei E156G – USB Dongle and really wanted to get it going on my Linux (Ubuntu) laptop. After much looking around and trying several unsuccessfull ways of doing it found a very easy and working solution.

Basically Linux will recognize your Huawei E156G USB Dongle and you can check that by listening to your USB devices, just run the following command on yor terminal  lsusb this should output something like this:

Bus 005 Device 002: ID 12d1:1003 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem

Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

if this is working, follow the tutorial on this post 3G Mobile Broadband with Ubuntu-EEE

Technorati Tags: 3G Broadband, Connectivity, Huawei USB, Linux, Ubuntu

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