So, once in a while, Pidgin will play a sound and the sounds seems to lock up a repeat. Well, I tried something tonight, I thought, maybe if I enabled alsa-utils service in Ubuntu 8.04 it would stop it. Well, all I got was a crackling sound after enabling and disabling it, restarting, etc.

So, what I did was (mind you, the service alsa-utils is not running) I typed: /etc/init.d/alsa-utils reset to fix it, sounds returned to normal after that.

Ubuntu, still not okay for grandma.

Note, I had to re-set all my volume settings after doing this, my music was all super-quite and I almost freaked again.

Please Google Liferea if you’re confused right now.

If you’re like me, and you all obviously aren’t, you like Liferea, but it always wants to handle media - and you get updates in between Lab Rats and Boag World (Google those, I’m to lazy to link right now, really lazy). So, you want to continue using Liferea while you watch Lab Rats - remember, you’re like me right now!

So, you want Liferea to open your media in your media players (I like totem), look out for the attachment icon next to the filename, click right click it, download copy to your clipboard, type start totem Totem, Open Location, love yourself! Go on, go get a bananna!

But wait, your Liferea shut down? Didn’t someone at Dell just say Linux stuff rarely crashes @ Ubuntu Video? - Google that too. Anyways, I figured out what was wrong. Liferea wants to use wget to download your enclosures, and wget lives in the hood, Liferea is high class shit!

So, go to your preferences and find the enclosures tab and see wget, changes that to gwget. This did not work all the time.

Toodeloo!

Oh fine, here’s a screenie.

Freaking Liferea! Where’s that bananna!

I’ve been using gPodder for about an hour to watch some shows. It’s like what Miro should’ve done. Oh and use Miro Guide to find some channels.

If you’re like me, and use Apache 2 now, and you’ve noticed the new sites-available and sites-enabled folders in /etc/apache2 and it made you smile.

Also, I have a folder called Projects in my home folder where I work on a number of sites, and I wanted to have an easy way to edit/create files in my sites-available folder, and re-link them (even a new one) in my sites-enabled folder.

Also, I wanted it to edit /etc/hosts so I can use sub-domains like project.localhost.

Well, here’s a little script I use,

echo Edit and create Apache 2.2 Sites Script
echo Created by Aubrey Island - http://imaginecambio.com/
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
echo Creating backup of hosts
sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak
echo Starting gEdit use the new document to save a new site to sites-available.
sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/* /etc/hosts | sudo gedit --new-document
echo Removing gEdit backup files, this may produce an error - ignore.
sudo rm /etc/apache2/sites-available/*~
echo Clearing sites-enabled, this may produce an error.
sudo rm /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/*
echo Creating links -> sites-enabled
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/* /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ -s -u
echo Restarting Apache2
sudo apache2ctl restart

Here’s what I use to create a new VirtualHost in the new document, if you’re just editing, just ignore the new document.

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName gazouiller.localhost
DocumentRoot "/home/aubrey/Projects/gazouiller"
</VirtualHost>

You can add a localhost sub-domain by going to System -> Administration -> Network in Ubuntu 8.04, and add something like 127.0.0.1 subdomain.localhost. This script will manually edit /etc/hosts for you to edit.

Here’s some screen-shots of the process.

Running the script in terminal.
gEdit opens with all the previous avalable files (sites) and /etc/hosts.
A previously available site on localhost.
Creating a new site.
Saving a new site to sites-available.
Updated links in sites-enabled equal to sites-available.

You can save the file in your home folder, something like .editapachesites and do a sudo ln -s .editapachesites.sh /usr/bin/editapachesites create a launcher in your Menu. (Hasn’t happened successfully for me, yet!)

You guys have got to check out the Linux Haters Blog.

Another luser mantra that makes me cringe: “Linux has an awesome software packaging system.”

If someone does tell you that, make sure you penis-slap him or her in the face. They deserve it. Don’t have a penis? Here, use mine. There’s more than enough of it to go around.

So lets take roll, shall we? RPM? Deb? tar.gz? ebuild? Oh, there’s only four of you? Oh, that’s not so bad, right?

Oh, and check out the new Linux category! Yes, Linux deserves a category and Windows doesn’t!

So, the other day I restored a few files in my home directory to get this nag from Ubuntu when I logged in saying the .dmrc file did not have correct permissions.

I searched around and found if you set the /home/<username> folder permissions to 700, it would fix it, and it did!

But then I tried to bring up http://cobweb/ which apache tries to load /home/aubrey/Sites/cobweb

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:

NameVirtualHost cobweb:80
<VirtualHost cobweb:80>
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

 DocumentRoot /home/aubrey/Sites/cobweb
  <Directory /home/aubrey/Sites/cobweb>
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   allow from 127.0.0.1
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

/etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 cobweb

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
127.0.1.1 aubrey-laptop

So, after some tinkering, I found out the proper permissioin for the home folder is 701, and after that, apache loaded http://cobweb/ correctly.

Happy camping!