ph-lee

The problem: ubuntu media centre that hooks up to an old TV which takes S-video. Graphics card or ubuntu isn’t capable of automatically detecting the TV.

The solution: [Bernades] has an article on how to get ubuntu to detect the tv and output it using XRandR.

xrandr --output S-video --set load_detection 1

xrandr --output S-video --auto

The problem is that this isn’t persistent and as soon as you reboot you’ll be back to square one.

[Ubuntu wiki] shows a script can be setup to run the above lines of code on startup. So in my case of using kde add the above lines of code to the following file.

/etc/kde4/kdm/Xsetup

Give your a box a reboot and your linux media centre should be configured to use your TV.

To get at it

sudo vim /etc/environment

To reload any changes you made

source /etc/environment

That’s it folks.

Easiest way to install flash on Firefox on ubuntu is explained at this faq at mozdev.org

If you’re wondering where your plugins directory is located there seem to be several. This article at lauchpad.net may give you the answer you need.

On top of that if you type in about:plugins in the address bar of firefox you can see information regarding plugins already installed, including flash.

I spent today upgrading ubuntu from 9.04 ( Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). However upon restarting GRUB loads and the kubuntu load progress bar screen loads. This is then followed by a blank black screen. At first I thought the upgraded had completely flattened my machine!

The first step is to get yourself to a console where you can actually do some stuff. So do a restart and when you see the GRUB loaded screen hit ESC. You can then boot into recovery mode to get into a console.

To get KDE and Xserver to start we need to get rid of the old xorg.conf. [ubuntuforums.org]

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

This should now get you some graphics.

Next we need to install the missing ati drivers. [launchpad.net]

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

After this you’ll want to configure the driver with aticonfig and amdcccle.

Hopefully after a reboot this should fix the problem.

This articles is regarding Mac OS X 10.6 with mysql 5.1.37.

I followed this article at hivelogic.com which required compiling mysql from source. It mostly worked with a few hitches which I’d like to share.

After following the article and attempting to run my rails app the first problem I hit was…

uninitialized constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes

this problem seemed to be that you need to specify the atchitecture as 64-bit when installing the mysql gem. So run the below command intead when install the mysql gem…

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-
config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Or if you already installed the gem just re-install with this command. The next problem was the following…

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

I’d move a project from ubuntu onto the mac I couldn’t find the mysql socket to use as it was specifying the wrong location. On the mac the file can be found at

/tmp/mysql.sock

So you’ll need to modify your database.yml file accordingly to point to this location

Hope this helps.