Ubuntu

In work I wanted python2.7 for using some latest modules. I run Debian 6.0 ie., squeeze in my laptop, but python2.7 is available in Wheezy or Debian testing. In order to install python2.7 from the testing repository add the following in your sources.list file ie., /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://mirror.cse.iitk.ac.in/debian/ testing main contrib

After adding the testing repository, do an update and then install python2.7 package as follows:

$ sudo aptitude update

$ sudo aptitude install python2.7

Gone are those days when we want to boot a downloaded ISO image from an USB stick, we need to perform lot of black box operation in order to put/align things in the USB stick so that it could be made bootable.

I didn't follow the Debian stuff for a long time though I use Debian in all my machines. Surprisingly last week we had the much awaited release of Debian 6.0 (squeeze) and I was over joyed on seeing that! I was longing for that.

With the new release of Debian 6.0 we need not do any special things in order to create a bootable USB stick of the Debian ISO. Just a plain 'dd' of the ISO will do the magic. For a long time in order to create a bootable USB stick we had to depend on tools like usb-creator both for Ubuntu or Debian, but now things are pretty easy and straight forward. I am not sure whether this works for Ubuntu yet, may be the next release 11.04 will have such a feature, but as of Debian 6.0 it works.

Often we find that our time zone is not what we expect to be in our Ubuntu/Debian boxes soon after installation. Specifically in Debian these days during installation we don't have fine grained control to choose our timezone like 'Asia/Kolkatta', instead we choose 'Eastern' and later decide to change it. In order to change the timezone in command line use the following command in your Ubuntu/Debian boxes,

# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

The above brings up an ncurses based interface where you can have fine grained control of your timezone selection.

I was reading through this post and thought I can share my recipe for the same problem. In the past (3 years back) I had the same difficulty of instructing emacs to goto a line. Each time I want to do that I need to "M-x" and type "goto-line" (tab completion is there). But this is annoying since I may need to do this 'n' number of times while writing code.

If you see Java Runtime Environement (JRE) plugin not available in your Iceweasel or Firefox system and auto installation fail, asking you to do a manual install, then install the following package which will automatically put the JRE plugin in place in Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

# aptitude install icedtea6-plugin

The above loads JRE plugin in the web browser. I really wanted this in order to attend webex sessions from my Debian/Ubuntu boxes. Check your browser's Tools->Add-ons->Plugins which will have "IcedTea Java Web Browser Plugin" loaded after installing the above package.

Recently Yahoo changed the way in which we connect to the IM, which broke Pidgin clients in Debian Lenny and Ubuntu systems, specifically pidgin client version 2.5.7 and below. We can correct it by doing the following if you don't want to upgrade your clients to something latest, Go to your yahoo account settings in Pidgin. You'll see two tabs at the top. Go to the second tab(advance). There you'll find, "scs.msg.yahoo.com" and a few other web addresses change it to *cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com*. Thanks to Vipin M of AU-KBC who gave this piece of info via ILUGC mailing list.

Subversion 1.6 supports caching of user passwords/passphrases in encrypted form using KWallet. I tried to get a feel of this feature, so started compiling the subversion sources with KWallet support. The following assume you already have kde desktop packages installed in your ubuntu/debian box. In order to get KWallet support in subversion we need to pass "--with-kwallet" option to the configure script. While configuring subversion if you get the following error

checking whether to look for KWallet... yes
checking for QtCore, QtDBus, QtGui... yes
checking for kde4-config... yes