mt-daapd is not the answer

Depending on how lucky you are, mt-daapd / Firefly Media Server might or might not work for you.

The problem at hand is how to elegantly share media files in your LAN without resorting to NFS exports or Samba shares.

Migrating from KMail to Evolution

I've decided to give Gnome one more go (I've been a KDE user so far) so I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. What's more is that I decided to use only GTK applications, nothing Qt whatsoever. At least for a while, to see how it goes : )

So far, nothing but confusion. What was notable though was the painful migration of my e-mails from KMail to Evolution.

Asus Pro57Vr notebook (M51VR) and Linux

I bought this Asus Pro57Vr notebook (scroll and click "Specifications") about 10 days ago; it's reported as M51VR on Ubuntu.

It's very nice, for its price. Plus, I've grown fond of Asus over the past years, due to the great quality/price balance. After I've stuffed my desktop system with a lot of Asus components, I thought I'd buy a laptop from them as well.

svn bad commit?

Suppose you do a bad svn commit. Here is a quick hands-on.

Pidgin bug -- update

After more than half of year after noticing the issue and getting frustrated with the "can't set new Yahoo! avatar in Pidgin" bug, it seems that things have finally gotten a move on!

Midnight Commander transparent color scheme

Midnight Commander (or "mc") can have transparent panels instead of the ugly, dull default blue. So can "mcedit", its text editor.

Here's how to do it. Edit the file ~/.mc/ini and add at the end the following:

Postfix on FreeBSD - Maildir delivery

Suppose you have a clean FreeBSD install and you want to get Postfix as your MTA.

Current setup:

• OS: FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE
• SHELL: bash
• no previously installed MTA present on the system

Triple boot pain

Today I went at a friend's place to help him set up a triple boot system. The PC is brand new and bleeding edge (it will be used primarily as a gaming device), but the guy was still curious about Linux. So I told him about Linux in general and offered to install Ubuntu. He agreed and we went on with the partitioning scheme.


The HDD had 500 GB and we agreed to set up the partitions as follows:

* primary partition - 50 GB - Vista Business x64
* primary partition - 50 GB - XP Professional x64
* primary partition - 25 GB - Kubuntu 8.04
* extended partition - ~375 GB
- 4 GB - Linux swap
- the rest - big storage partition

OK, so when all this was settled, I started the Vista install. It went OK, no troubles whatsoever. Then came Kubuntu - all went fine. I used GRUB in order to be able to choose between the two operation systems.

Manually modifying a .deb package

From time to time, you might be facing a binary .deb package that you have to tweak for suiting your own needs or for testing purposes. By "a binary .deb package" I mean the final .deb, with a few configuration files and pre/post-inst/rm scripts and not the source files for the .deb themselves.

So, what to do if you only want to change, say, the behavior of a postinst file and then have the .deb prepared for installation?

First of all, the .deb itself is a kind of an archive. This is why you can browse its contents while in mc, for instance ("Midnight Commander").

Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD and weird SATA HDD

Today I went at a friend's to help her set up a new PC in a dual boot configuration (Windows XP, which was already installed, and Kubuntu 8.04).

XP came preinstalled so I burned a CD with Kubuntu 8.04 and booted from it... just to find out that there was no normal way of detecting the HDD as device.