December 21, 2008 at 12:34 pm · Filed under Linux

Now that I’m back from University for Christmas I don’t need to leave my Linux workstation on permanently. I’d like to be able to suspend and resume it, except I’m having one problem. On resume, the network card does not switch to gigabit, instead staying at 100mbit. I have Googled around but have been unable to find a solution. For now, if I need gigabit speeds the solution seems to be to remove the r8169 module and insert it again:

sudo rmmod r8169
sudo modprobe r8169

Bear in mind doing this will obviously cut out your network connection, so don’t do it over SSH!

Does anyone know of a proper solution? Or a more elegant hack.

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November 17, 2008 at 9:16 pm · Filed under Linux

Here’s my set up:

• Firefox 3 is installed using the default Ubuntu packages
• I’ve installed Firefox Minefield (Firefox 3.1) to /opt/firefox
• I set up a shell script to run as root daily via cron (dangerous I know, but it’s only readable+writable by root) which downloads the latest 64-bit nightly from Mozilla and extracts it, and recreates the symbolic link to it in case Ubuntu has updated and overriden it at some point (optional).

The script is as follows, be careful of any line breaks my blog puts in, watch for the semi-colons to indicate true line breaks:

#!/bin/sh
cd /opt/;
rm firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
wget "http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2";
rm -rf firefox/;
tar -jxvf firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
chmod -R a+r firefox;
rm /usr/bin/firefox;
ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox;


It’s crude, but it works. If you are running x86 you’ll need to adjust the wget and tar lines to the correct source. Hope someone finds this useful.

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October 3, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Linux, gaming

Today I got an Atmosphir beta invite, and I decided to try installing it on Linux first, before Mac or Windows. There were a couple of things I needed to do in order to get it to work correctly on my 64-bit Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex box.

1. Firstly, I installed Atmosphir to /opt/Atmosphir. I don’t know if this had an effect on the problems I had, but anyway.
2. After installing, I tried to run it, and got the following error:

   game: error while loading shared libraries: libpq.so.5:
   cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

   This can be fixed by downloading the 32-bit package of libpq5 (much the same way as I did for Flash Player 10) and extracting it and copying the file libpq.so.5 into the Atmosphir directory. At the bottom of this post I have provided a copy of this file (and the file in the next step) for those that don’t want to go through the faff of downloading the .deb and extracting it themselves.

3. I then got another error:

   game: error while loading shared libraries: libgnutls.so.26:
   cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

   The same method applies, download the 32-bit package of libgnutls26 and extract the libgnutls.so.26 file, again I’ve provided it in the archive at the bottom of this post.

4. Success! The game now starts. However I was getting some sound related errors, and there was no sound:

   ALSA lib ../../src/conf.c:2700:(snd_config_hooks_call) Cannot open shared library
   /usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_conf_pulse.so
   ALSA lib ../../../src/pcm/pcm.c:2196:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default
   Couldn't open audio: No available audio device
   

   After a quick bit of googling, I discovered people get the same error when trying to use Skype with PulseAudio, and there is a quick fix solution available which also does the trick for Atmosphir. Great!

Hope this helps anyone that has any problems with the new Atmosphir Beta. I’ve already played it a bit, and I think it’s a great idea and seems great fun to play, and works brilliantly on Linux which is awesome to see. If you don’t have a beta invite yet, head on over to the Atmosphir site and fill in the registration form, they are giving out beta invites over the next couple of weeks, so you might get lucky!

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October 3, 2008 at 2:30 am · Filed under Linux

Today, Ubuntu announced the first Intrepid Ibex beta. I gave my Linux workstation an upgrade immediately to give it a try. A few days ago, I had manually installed Flash Player 10 using nspluginwrapper, and wrote a guide about it. I received a suggestion that you can also use an Intrepid Ibex package to install Flash Player 10 on Hardy Heron, which is a great suggestion and a lot easier than my method.

Now I have Intrepid Ibex, and that package is available, installing Flash Player 10 on 64-bit Ubuntu is a snap:

apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Yup, that’s it. Reload Firefox and you’re done! I must say though, it seems a little less stable than it was in Hardy Heron, but then Intrepid Ibex is still in beta.

Edit: A quick test suggests that Minefield is a bit speedier using Flash Player 10

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