David Trebacz Blog

When I upgraded the machine from 11.10 Kubuntu 64-bit to 12.04, my machine essentially became unusable until I turned desktop effects off (ALT-SHIFT-F12). The story was well documented on the internet ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4ODQ - Good story on the failings of the 295.40 Nvidia driver that shipped with 12.04 LTS Kubuntu ). I suffered along not wanting to custom a version of Kubuntu expecting Canonical to relatively quickly update the version in the repositories - after all this is an LTS version. After 3 months of running my video on Kubuntu 12.04 by running desktop effects under the compositing type "xrender" for my Quadro NVS 210S/GeForce 6150LE graphics card instead of "OpenGL", I was fed up. Running under xrender was just as good as turning them off. I wasn't up to downgrading my drivers to the previous version or suffering through the continued development on the Nouveau drivers.  I even contemplated getting...

I'd like my newsreading activity to remain private and I enjoy using the PAN Newsreader . The newsreader is open and free, but unfortunately doesn't support SSL connections. My news provider astraweb does support SSL at no additional cost. So I decided to take the plunge an utilize stunnel to encrypt connections to news service provider on my 64-bit Kubuntu linux machine. Hope the following procedure helps anyone trying to do the same. Install stunnel4 form the Ubuntu repositories: sudo apt-get install stunnel4 Configure stunnel to start automatically by editing the main configuration file with nano text editir (my favorite) and change the ENABLED=0 line to 1: sudo nano /etc/default/stunnel4 ENABLED=1 Copy the example configuration /usr/share/doc/stunnel4/examples/stunnel.conf-sample to /etc/stunnel/ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/stunnel4/examples/stunnel.conf-sample /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf Edit the newly copied configuration file to make news request secure Uncommen...

I was looking for a simple method to understand regular expressions. In this particular case it was to analyze an ignore rule used by logcheck log monitoring tool. I knew that the Linux environment offered some powerful tools to use regular expressions, but I was looking for a simple pass in this string and show me what matches via my regular expression. After quite a bit of time looking at man pages for grep, I initially didn't find the simple solution that I was hoping to... AMD-ubuntu /USR/SBIN/CRON[9999]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) And it was ignored by the entry in /etc/logcheck/ignore.d.paranoid/cron ^\w{3} [ :0-9]{11} [._[:alnum:]-]+ /USR/CRON\[[0-9]+\]: \([_[:alnum:]-]+\) CMD \(.*\)$ The log entry I wanted to ignore was: Nov 2 19:17:01 AMD-ubuntu CRON[6877]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) The regular expression that I ended up using to ignore my routine CRON job log entries was: ^\w...

My upgrade to 9.10 Karmic Koala was less than smooth. Some of it may have to do with the machine being upgraded many times (starting with Hardy Heron -I think) and some of it may be due to running on PPA repositories during the last release to get the benefits of a of KDE 4.3.2 and upgrade Kopete and Digikam. The initial instalation failed leaving the machine at a command prompt. I then ran sudo dpkg --configure -a The only complaint was about my Apache configuration file. I decided to merge it and move merrily on. I rebooted, and everything seemed fine. That is until I realized that BackupPC (a backup solution I really like), wasn't running and neither was Apache. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start started Apache running. Apache started without any complaints, but BackupPC wasn't running. sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc start Everything was running as planned. Unfortunately on restart Apache started, but BackupPC didn't. I assumed it was something hosed in the init.d ...