Linux

Fix the button layout in Ubuntu 10.04

Posted by gkurts on April 20, 2010 at 9:21 pm

Love the new button layout in Ubuntu 10.04? Yeah, me neither. Thankfully, it’s absurdly easy to fix it. You can run this from a terminal window or from the Run dialog (Alt+F2).

gconftool-2 –type string –set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Bada-bing!

Crawling web sites with Perl WWW::Mechanize (and Moose)

Posted by gkurts on March 22, 2010 at 2:51 pm

My bank, while I’m very pleased with them overall, has a not-so-hot online banking system. My biggest (and simplest) gripe is the inability to get a daily email with the balance of my checking account. I’ve tried multiple ways with limited success, until I did it in Perl.
First, I outlined the steps required to log [...]

Getting current track information from VLC (using Perl!)

Posted by gkurts on February 9, 2010 at 7:16 pm

So I’ve already done a post on getting track information from Rythmbox, but VLC felt cold and left out, so here it is. The process is pretty much the same, just tweaked a bit for VLC.
First, go into VLC, Tools -> Preferences, click the “All” radio button (near the bottom), Interface, click “Main interfaces” and [...]

Putting a Recently Played Songlist in WordPress Sidebar

Posted by gkurts on January 3, 2010 at 1:39 pm

For no real reason other than saying that I did it, I wanted to have the last 10 songs that I’ve played on my PC listed in the sidebar of my blog. Simple enough..
Here’s what I have: I’m a fan of Last.FM, plus I have about 25Gigs of mp3s that I like to randomize. I [...]

Adobe Air, TweetDeck on Ubuntu 64-bit

Posted by gkurts on January 2, 2010 at 3:59 pm

In order to get Adobe AIR running on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu (may work with other distros – YMMV. I’ve tested this on 9.10 and 10.04), perform the following steps:

cd Downloads
sudo apt-get install -y ia32-libs lib32nss-mdns lib32asound2 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32stdc++6 lib32z1 libc6 libc6-i386 lib32nss-mdns libcanberra-gtk-module
wget http://downloads.gregkurts.com/getlibs-all.deb
sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb
Download Adobe AIR here
sudo getlibs ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
sudo [...]

Fighting with VMWare Clones

Posted by gkurts on January 1, 2010 at 5:53 pm

Why can’t things just be simple? Really, it’s only a few steps… Surely the folks at VMWare could fix this. Ugh!
When cloning a Linux virtual machine (Ubuntu Server, in my case – YMMV based on distro), the clone’s networking fails to start up. Doing an ifconfig only shows the loopback adapter and no amount of [...]