Another Opinion Among Many

I took the plunge and upgraded my Ubuntu install from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron and now apt-get doesn’t work.  Everything that depends on it or anything like it doesn’t seem to work.  dpkg still does.  So, if I update and upgrade (or dist-upgrade), it’ll fetch the packages, just as the update-manager does, but it will crap out with a segmentation fault when its time to install the packages.  I’ve joined Lymatas thread at the Ubuntu forums.  This will be the first time that I’ve ever asked for help, as the solution has always been a search query away.  The solution presented (which is the one that helps most people) does not work for me.  If anyone has overcome this problem, let me know how you solved it.  I’m about to ask a question on LQ for the first time.

I’ve decided that Lymatas has a different problem and have created my own thread - the first ever linux question I’ve posted to a forum (will also request help at LQ - this is getting to be ridiculous).  Check out my request right HERE and see if you can help me kill apt and ressurect it from its death! (or something like that).

I thought that I’d follow up on my complaint about the non-working PenguinTV on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. From a forum post, I found a workaround:

In a terminal, type export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox and then export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox and then execute PenguinTV: PenguinTV &, which allows the program to find what its looking for.

That’s a bit arduous, so why not automate it? I did so, and it is really a hack, but I thought that I’d share it with you. Anyone who has created bash scripts before (or batch files in Windows/DOS) will find this to be quite trivial, but there are many out there who still haven’t “gotten their feet wet”.

So, the first thing that you’ll want to do is open your favorite editor. For quick and dirty scripts like this one, I use nano, as many systems have it included and the learning curve is quite small. So, for nano, you would open a terminal and type nano -w Pengi. I use Pengi as the name for my script. you can use whatever you want. The -w flag for nano causes it to continue beyond the border of your terminal when writing a line, keeping you from truncating a long command. Its not really necessary for this script because the commands are quite short, but its a good habit.

Here’s what you put in your editor:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox

PenguinTV

Save the file.  Ensure that you’ve typed each command on a new line.  Then change it to executable with a quick chmod: chmod a+rwx Pengi

You can now open PenguinTV on the command prompt by typing /home/your-username/Pengi
That’s not the end of it, though, right?  You want your nice little icon to execute the file when you click it, I am sure.  Whether I use Gnome, KDE, or XFCE, I’ve become accustomed to putting a quick launch for my favorite applications on the taskbar for easy access.  This is the case for PenguinTV as well.

Its quite easy, in these desktop environments, to change the attributes of an application launcher.  Its even a tad easier than when using Microsoft Windows, as you don’t have to remember to put quotes around the application path.  So, you would right-click the PenguinTV icon and select “properties” from the menu.  In the “path to executable”, you would replace “PenguinTV” with “/home/your-username/Pengi" (without the quotes, of course) and click OK.  You should be in business and PenguinTV should open with the right environment variables to launch successfully.

I found a nice entry today that you might like if you want to speed up your Ubuntu. Its pretty much common sense, but its a nice collation of tips. Here’s the article: A Quick Way to Improve Ubuntu Linux Operating Speed Performance.

Have you had a problem with an application that you got from outside the approved Ubuntu mirrors? Did it refuse to run? Did you know that you can execute a program from a command prompt by typing its name and hitting ENTER? Did you know that most programs will give you extra info via the -v (verbose) switch?

I have recently had that problem with a rss aggregator named PenguinTV. Its nice and simple and will grab just about any audio or video feed, like Miro, without the heavy system requirements (it uses the default apps to play the media, for example, instead of handling that itself). Its ideal for podcast fetching. The problem is that the version that is available in the software showcase does not work without telling the program some things that it should figure out itself. I tried the solution on the forum post about the same problem that I’d encountered of trying to get the latest .deb from the project’s home page. However, I was getting a “bad syntax” error.

This is because Ubuntu has switched from bash as its default shell to dash (lighter and faster, closer to the original ash shell). On nearly every distribution of GNU/Linux, /bin/sh is a symbolic link to /bin/bash, so nearly all executable scripts in /usr/bin will begin with the shebang #!/bin/sh. With /usr/bin/PenguinTV, open it up with a text editor as root and change the shebang to #!/bin/bash and it will run, as the developer is using bash!

…now if I can only find out why it sometimes core dumps…(I just found gPodder, which might be the ultimate solution)

I am playing around with an old Acer AcerNote Lite.  Its not got a lot going for it by today’s standards.  It is a cute little laptop, and was likely quite a nice little item when new.  It would have come originally with Windows 95 on it and I am certainly not going to even try to reinstall that (I’d have to have the floppies).  The specs are:

• 120mhz Pentium processor
• 8MB system RAM and 32MB RAM module
• 1GB HD
• Chips & Technologies video
• Floppy
• no CD Rom

This should be interesting.  So far, I’ve gotten the Debian Etch floppies to start an install.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’ve got to get a 16 bit ethernet PCMCIA card to proceed any further, as I’ll need to get the rest of the system off the internet.  Perhaps I’ll try for DSL and see if I can do the floppy netinstall hack mentioned in the forums.  Wish me luck!

So, a few weeks ago, Ubuntu “upgraded” Firefox 2.0.0.12 (which is a decent release) to Firefox 3 Beta and I couldn’t view any java applets any more.  The reason is because some of the file paths are changing and the plugins need to be linked to a different spot.  I had to try Opera but it crashed.  That left me with Konqueror, which is not native to Gnome, for the time being.

That has just changed.  I just found Bug #173966 and there was a hack proposed that helped me to get back on track.  The solution, for now:

cd  /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so .   <–note the “dot”

Your plugin path might be different, but that’s where one place mine can be found (actually, its a symbolic link to the plugin, which is in  /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so)

I’ve made a few additions to the original post about hacking your Hardy Heron to accept Java as it stands.  Check it out and read the comments too.  Jazz has added a lot to what I’ve said.  Don’t forget to visit the forum thread that started this all.