Jason's questions

Earlier, I was getting the following error when execuing apt-get update:

Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/deb/dists/http/ppa/ubuntu/main/binary-i386/Packages  
404  Not Found

I found the corresponding deb-src inside the file deb_http-ppa-precise.list within /ect/apt/sources.d/ containing the lines

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/deb http/ppa/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/deb http/ppa/ubuntu precise main

Upon commenting out those lines, apt-get update ran without any reported errors.

I'm curious as to why these particular lines were the cause for the reported errors on update, and are the packages linked to that ppa important?

Today, when executing apt-get update after adding the R language repositories to apt, I received the following erros

Err http://ppa.launchpad.net http/ppa/ubuntu/precise Sources          
  404  Not Found
Err http://ppa.launchpad.net http/ppa/ubuntu/main Sources             
  404  Not Found
Err http://ppa.launchpad.net http/ppa/ubuntu/precise i386 Packages
  404  Not Found
Err http://ppa.launchpad.net http/ppa/ubuntu/main i386 Packages       
  404  Not Found

From the paths listed, they are from the Ubuntu Precise distribution, which is a LTS version. To fix these errors, what are the replacement paths?

I found

http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-ppa/lxc-lts/ubuntu/dists/precise/

but would like to confirm that this is the replacement path for the packages.

I have a new 1TB laptop drive that I want to clone an existing drive to. The issue is that I want to reorder and resize the existing partitions.

The existing partition table for the drive is

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048    24578047    12288000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT  11GB (former recovery partition of a Windows drive)
/dev/sda2   *    24578048   216989695    96205824    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT  92GB Windows install partition
/dev/sda3       216989955   863465471   323237758+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT  308GB Windows/Linux universal storage
/dev/sda4       863467518   976771071    56651777    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5       863467520   976771071    56651776   83  Linux            55GB Ubuntu Partition

I want to change the ordering to

2 x 110 GB for both Windows and Linux
1 x  25 GB for web server and development
1 x 684 GB for Windows/Linux universal storage.

I can create these partitions and copy the corresponding partion over using

dd if=/dev/sdaX of=/dev/sdbX bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

but that leaves the MBR untouched. If I copy over the existing MBR, it will be invalid since the order of partitions is very different on the new drive.

How can I resolve this issue?

My MySQL/MariaDB installation got corrupted, and I'm trying to remove and reinstall via apt-get Unfortunately, I'm having a major issue with apt-get freezing after stopping the mariadb server.

This is the output I'm getting

jason@asus:~$ sudo apt-get install mariadb-server-core-10.0 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  mariadb-server-10.0
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  mariadb-server-core-10.0
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 25 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/5,486 kB of archives.
After this operation, 15.3 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Selecting previously unselected package mariadb-server-core-10.0.
(Reading database ... 361764 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking mariadb-server-core-10.0 (from .../mariadb-server-core-10.0_10.0.2+maria-1~precise_i386.deb) ...
Setting up mariadb-server-core-10.0 (10.0.2+maria-1~precise) ...
Setting up mariadb-server-10.0 (10.0.2+maria-1~precise) ...
 * Stopping MariaDB database server mysqld     

After that last line, apt-get freezes with no progress over 10 minutes.

I'm having some issues pairing an Apple Wireless Keyboard with my Asus laptop running 12.04 and Win7. It does not have native Bluetooth, so I'm using a generic Rocketfish USB adapter.

I did get it to the PIN step, but mistyped and ended up cancelling.

Now, in the Setup New Devices, I notice that an entry flickers from time to time in the search box. But no entry ever shows up.

What I've done so far:

• sudo rfkill list shows that hci0: Bluetooth is not hard or soft blocked
• sudo hcitool dev prints out hci0 00:02:76:2E:5D:4F
• I installed the linux-firmware-nonfree package
• Batteries are not an issue, keyboard works when booted in Win7

During the search process, when I turn on the keyboard, the keyboard light stays lit for ~4 seconds or so and then goes out.

Any other solutions?

I've looked around for this, and can't find an easily implemented solution.

Currently I'm working on an application that deals with panoramas. As they come out of the batch stitch process, the dimensions average 18000x4000. Using ImageMagick, how can I downscale those images to a specific height value while maintaining aspect ratio?

According to the manual, the convert operation takes in both height and width to resize to while maintaining the same aspect ratio. What I'd like is to put in 600 and 1000 in my existing resize script function and have both a regular viewable image as well as a reduced size.

I just cloned the Linux partition of my laptop to be used on the desktop.

However, this was just a straight DD execution, and the MBR of the new drive is not affected. How can I change the new drive to be bootable?

The exact DD command I used was dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdc5

Normally I like it when a terminal window pops up immediately after startup, since I'm a heavy CLI user in linux. However, my preference is to have the terminal maximized, particularly on my laptop, and the standard xfce4 startup execution leaves the terminal window to standard size.

I've tried the following:

• Checked the .desktop files in both /usr/share/applications & /.local/share/applications
• Checked xinitrc in /ect/xdg/ for terminal startup. A change here resolved an issue with both xfce & gnome screensavers running simultaneously, but did nothing for the terminal issue.
• Checked Application Autostart in xfce4-session-settings, but there's no default terminal entry. When I add one, two terminal windows pop up on startup.

According to several guides I've found, editing the xinitrc file is key to the startup. However, I found no explicit terminal execution calls in that file.

What is needed to modify the default terminal startup settings?

EDIT

After further investigation, it turns out it was a setting in GNOME that set the process off. I switch between GNOME, KDE and xfce for desktop environments, and the terminal popup was based on the GNOME startup settings. When that was modified, the terminal now shows up full-sized with no problems.

At my school's Linux cluster, its possible to run executables without the ./ prefix. However, on my home machines, I have to do this.

I tried adding the code folder to the PATH via

export PATH=/home/jason/Code/:$PATH

This worked when I wanted to have some custom scripts available for autocomplete, but the compiled executables aren't showing up.

How can I set up my home machines to execute without the ./ prefix?

I implemented the answer to this question and now the title bar is gone from the terminal. I found that the python script decorator.py had to execute twice to have the effect applied. Rather than tapping out ./decorator.py twice every time I started a new terminal, I created maximize to execute the script twice. This script is hotkeyed to Ctrl-Alt-Y.

Currently I've used

gnome-terminal --maximize -e /home/jason/maximize

gnome-terminal --maximize -x /home/jason/maximize

as arguments for Ctrl-Alt-T.

The issue is I can see the outline of a new terminal flash on screen, but it doesn't exist for more than a fraction of a second. How can I make the new window more persistent?

I'm using XFCE on 10.10 and this is just one of those "is this even possible" type questions.

When I have the terminal maximized, is it possible to remove the titlebar, including the close, minimize and maximize buttons?

In essence, it'd be nice to have a fully maximized, transparent terminal overlay. I tend to use terminal text editors alot, and this would be an interesting effect.

I installed the KDE graphical interface to run alongside GNOME for my 10.10 installation. For the most part, it seems to work well, and the extra eye candy is appealing. However, there is one thing that is bugging me, and that is color inversion.

In GNOME, all I have to do is press the Win-N keys and the application window inverts colors. This is especially useful when reading text, since I find it much easier on the eyes to read white on black text.

However, this combination doesn't work in Kubuntu. Is there a hack or workaround existing so I can have this functionality in both window managers?

I already dual-boot my laptop with a Windows 7 and an Ubuntu 10.10 partition. Since this is both a development and experimenting system, I made a small 15 GB partition for the purpose of trying out new distros and see what I like. Essentially, this is an experiment partition where I can screw around and see what works and what doesn't.

I installed the beta of 11.10 last week, but don't like it too much as it seems to shift quite a bit towards Windows/Mac GUI-centric usage, while earlier Ubuntu distros were a good split between GUI/CLI interfaces.

My issue is it installed a new GRUB overlay. If I reformat the partition, will the OS links in the bootloader be untouched, or do I have to re-install GRUB after the partition format?

I dual-boot my laptop due to lousy VM performance, and have a new 500GB/7200rpm drive coming in to replace the stock 320GB/5400rpm drive. I have the drive set up in three partitions: one for the Win7 system files, one for storage, and the third as the ext4 Linux file system. The system file and storage partitions are both NTFS.

What I'm planning to do is use the system image creator built in Win7, then move that over to the new drive. However, how can I migrate the Ubuntu partition, and how do I make sure that the Grub bootloader isn't overwritten by the Windows loader?

In my Systems Programming class, there are weekly programming experiments, and I'm having trouble with the current one.

The objective is to write a C program that slowly writes a string of text to a file, metered by usleep() in a 100 count for loop.

The goal of the experiment is to observe the file size buffer in action via the watch command. However, I can't get it to work using watch -d ./output

What syntax do I need for the watch command to see the changes made to the file size?

I'm trying to get Subclipse working in Eclipse Galeilo, and to do that I have to install the JavaHL library.

I installed the library using sudo apt-get install libsvn-java, but the eclipse.ini file has to be modified to take in the new library as an argument.

First change to the ini file was -Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni/, which produced the errors
"no libsvnjavahl-1 in java.library.path"
"incompatible javahl library loaded. 1.3.x or later required."
according to the install printout, version 1.6.12 was installed.

So, I added libsvnjavahl-1.so to the file path above, and produced the following errors:
"no libsvnjavahl-1 in java.library.path"
"no svnjavahl-1 in java.library.path"
"no svnjavahl in java.library.path"

What's going on here?

As I'm teaching myself PHP and MySQL during break, I'm experimenting coding in a Ubuntu virtual machine where Apache, MySQL and PHP have been installed and configured to a shared folder.

I'm not a big fan of Kompozer because the source code layout is a PIA, so I've started checking out gPHPEdit. However, since using it, I've come across two issues:

1. when I edit the .html and .php files, sometimes the file extension will change to .html~ and .php~, becoming invisible to the browser. The only solution is to switch to Windows, right click and rename the file extension.
2. In Ubuntu Firefox, when I click on my prpject's Submit button for in a practice form, a dialog box pops up asking what Firefox should do with the .php file, rather than simply displaying it in the browser. When I do this in Windows Chrome & Firefox, it goes right to the response page.

I'm not sure if this behavior is limited to gPHPEdit/Kompozer, but I've never noticed this happening in Dreamweaver. Any solutions?

EDIT 1 The behavior in Point 1 occurs both when Dreamweaver is open in Windows accessing the same files and when it is not. I changed the extension filename of welcome.php, added a comment in gPHPEdit, and the file changed to welcome.php~ upon saving.

EDIT 2 Using Geany in place of Kompozer/gPHPEdit has solved this problem.
Point 2 behavior is resolved after closing then restarting Firefox.

I have a Win7 box with an Ubuntu 10.10 VM accessed in Virtualbox.

The Ubuntu install has the ex4 filesystem. Can I access the shared folders in both Windows and Ubuntu without corrupting the data?

I made this mistake when dual-booting my laptop and made changes to a folder in Ubuntu. When I tried accessing that data in Windows, the access time was very slow, basically about 10% of normal. The only way I could fix it was to restore the data from backups and not make changes in Ubuntu.

If I do this with the shared folders, will the same thing happen?