meta4r's blog

sh: kde-config: not found

Posted Fri, 2009-05-01 08:02 by meta4r

I finally updated to kde 4.2. Yes, I was a critic of kde 4, now I love it. It is fast attractive, and very usable. I had one major problem, some programs would not launch from the start menu, firefox, thunderbird, avant window manager, compiz, emerald, and etc... These applications would not start from krunner either. So, like any good linux user, I started them in the terminal. They would run but each would give the error:
sh: kde-config: not found
It took two days of searching to find a solution and here it is:
sudo cp /usr/bin/kde4-config /usr/bin/kde-config

Feisty Fawn with Beryl and NVIDIA (not a how-to)

Posted Tue, 2007-04-10 20:35 by meta4r

Finally, my AMD64 has working Beryl and Kubuntu. If there were party hat icons I'd sprinkle them all over this post.The solution arrived when my younger brother cleaned out his old office and found an NVIDIA MX440 that he had no use for. MX440 you say, obviously this story has a twist to it. I have had a partition with Feisty on it for several months now. I like the distribution. Everything seems faster. Unfortunately, it came with continued ATI Radeon 9600 configuration issues. My Radeon worked well in the Dapper. No Beryl, but it worked for google earth. And I had struggled to make it work. So I slapped that NVIDIA card in, tossed the ATI, and upgraded to edgy. Five hours later I was test driving a working install of beryl. (I also tried it in my test-install of feisty)A to B worked well. B to C was a nightmare. Just my luck that the day I pick to upgrade to feisty is the day the new NVIDIA 9755 driver arrived and dropped support for the MX440. Meanwhile, linux-restricted modules would provide it's own hidden barrier to installing the proprietary drivers from the company in the form of a module mismatch.

Edit fstab to mount partition at startup

Posted Fri, 2006-11-03 20:58 by meta4r

This example mounts the first partition of the first disk so it is available whenever you start your computer. Edgy does this by default but technique is useful for Dapper or Breezy or other distros.

  • First create a mount point for the drive sudo mkdir /media/hda1 note that you can mount the device anywhere and call it whatever you want. It may be a good idea to stick with the conventional locations of either /mnt/ or /media/. The hda1 part means hard drive "a" partition "1"
  • Open a terminal and back up the existing fstab file sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak
  • Edit the fstab sudo kate /etc/fstab
  • next, add this line to the fstab file assuming your hda1 filesystem is ntfs: /dev/hda1 /media/hda1 ntfs defaults 0 0
  • In the terminal again, enter sudo mount -a to refresh the fstab.
  • Enter cd /media/hda1 then dir to test

Flash Player Version 9 Beta

Posted Fri, 2006-10-27 23:13 by meta4r

Installed FlashPlayer 9 beta today and it works okay but you probably want to retain existing flash player 7. (backup instructions below)

  • First, I downloaded the beta from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html to my desktop.
  • Click on the downloaded file and extract to desktop
  • next, I used the find files gui to locate my existing libflashplayer.so location. It should be in a "plugins" folder.
  • next I backed up my existing file sudo cp /usr/local/firefox32/plugins/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/firefox32/plugins/libflashplayer.so.bak
  • then I copied the new file from desktop to plugins folder sudo cp /home/user/Desktop/flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/firefox32/plugins/libflashplayer.so(note you must insert your user name where I put user in italics.)
  • Finally, I tested the player by navigating to http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/ and my browser crashed. Don't worry, I simply restarted, navigated to the test page again and it worked fine. No more "You must have flash player 9 installed to view this content" messages. WooHoo!

Screensavers

Posted Fri, 2006-10-13 18:57 by meta4r

Ron down at the computer repair shop showed me this trick on his Red Hat system to run screensavers as a desktop background. Works on Ubuntu also.

  • From the settings program open "desktop/behavior" check the field to "allow programs in desktop window".
  • Open terminal and navigate to cd /usr/lib/xscreensaver
  • Enter dir and select a filename.
  • Insert filename into this code ./filename -root &
  • The ampersand at the end sends the command to the background and gives you a pid number. Type kill replacewithpid# to stop the process.
  • Depending on the capabilty of your system, you may be able to run multiple screensavers at the same time.
  • entering ./filename --help will give you more options for individual screensavers.

Webcollage is an xscreensaver that grabs images from the web and uses them to form a collage in the root window.

  • Assuming you are still in the /usr/lib/xscreensaver directory enter ./webcollage -root -dictionary /usr/share/dict/american-english to run.

Partition Easily using Gparted Live

Posted Thu, 2006-09-28 05:54 by meta4r

Well, well, well, it's been about 45 days since I last booted in to my XP partition so I decided to shrink it and make space for new partitions in order to install the latest Edgy knot.

  1. Downloaded Gparted Live 0.3.1-1 Burned as ISO using K3B.
  2. Booted into XP and verified that I had all my music, videos, and documents backed up to the fat32 partition. Deleted all copies on ntfs partition. Opened add remove programs and uninstalled all the Windows versions of programs that I also have on Ubuntu and all programs that I rarely used. Retained all programs that I might use if I ever boot into XP again. Opened and ran disk cleanup wizard. Ran disk defragmenter about five times.
  3. Rebooted with Gparted Live disk. Wow! Amazing program. Only 85MB on the disk and loads linux to ram in less than two minutes! Resized ntfs from 97GB to 40GB.
  4. Decided to use some of that 50GB of free space to try Edgy Eft Knot3. Downloaded, burned as ISO (K3B again), and rebooted. Booted live Edgy disk, clicked the install icon, and ran into a little problem. My disk already had four primary partitions and the newly freed space was not in the extended partition. Was unable to proceed using installation partitioner.
  5. Rebooted with Gparted Live disk. First, I moved my second primary partition (/home) as far left as I could enlarging it by about 10GB as I did. This placed the free space next to my extended partition. Second, I enlarged the extended partition to encompass the free space.

Combine .rar files using unrar

Posted Fri, 2006-09-22 17:10 by meta4r

Download all parts rar to desired folder.
(cd /download/folder/)
(unrar e part01.rar)
of course, you must enter the correct filename.
You will only need to unrar the part01.rar.
Unrar will extract and combine all parts and write completed file to your /download/folder/.
If there are broken parts, unrar will not save the combined file.
In that case add the -kb switch.
(unrar e -kb part01.rar)
I clean up the folder using
(rm *.rar)

Install Google Earth on AMD64 via chroot

Posted Thu, 2006-09-14 03:40 by meta4r

Some people are able to install Google Earth on AMD64. I was unable to. Here is a method to install it in a 32 bit chroot:

  1. Step 1:Follow the instructions at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24575 to install a 32 bit chroot.
  2. Step 2:Download Google Earth from http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
  3. Step 3: Move downloaded file, GoogleEarthLinux.bin to /chroot/home/user/ where "user" = your user name.
  4. Step 4:Open terminal and cd to /chroot/home/user/
  5. Step 5:enter dchroot
  6. Step 6:enter chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin
  7. Step 7:enter ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin
  8. Step 8: Follow the prompts to complete the installation.

XGL

Posted Thu, 2006-09-07 18:44 by meta4r

I would love the repositories to allow me to easily install Compiz on amd64 with ATI Radeon. I've followed dozens of installation guides, reinstalled everything, and finally given up (for now). My one consolation is that the xserver-xgl package by itself improves/enables transparency in KDE.

fglrxinfo: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1

Posted Mon, 2006-09-04 18:11 by meta4r

Look around the web for a simple solution to this fglrx error. Find anything?

Try this only after verifying that you do in fact have the identified files in the stated locations.
sudo unlink /usr/lib/libGL.so.1
sudo unlink /usr/lib32/libGL.so.1
sudo rm /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2
sudo synaptic

From there just browse to fglrx and choose the "reinstall" option. Test with glxgears.

Dapper Gnome Error

Posted Wed, 2006-03-15 07:33 by meta4r

I am relieved that in addition to Ubuntu, I installed Kubuntu. My KDE desktop is more than useful, it is essential as last week's updates damaged my Gnome. Now when I log into Gnome the splash screen appears, does its thing, then the panels try to load. The panels appear, flash eleven times, and then disappear. it leaves me with an empty brown desktop with nothing on it but a mouse cursor. The only control available is ctrl-alt-backspace.  If those keys are pressed while the panels are still flashing, the system returns me to the GDM login screen. If I wait until the panels stop flashing, ctrl-alt-backspace puts me at a login prompt in a shell. I have to then reboot to get back into GDM. Is this part of the reason the release date was moved back?