Category Archives: Linux

Or, Gigabyte BIOS considered harmful After changing the motherboard, a computer became unbootable because the Gigabyte BIOS created a Host Protected Area (HPA) using sectors already allocated to a disc partition, corrupting the partition table and overwriting data. What Gigabyte are … Continue reading →

When debugging website problems I often run tail on /var/log/apache2/error.log or on /var/log/apache2/access.log. Today I needed to monitor both at the same time. One solution is to open two terminal windows, however this uses up valuable entries in the alt-tab … Continue reading →

Valve's Hardware Survey for July 2013 shows an increase in usage for every recorded Linux distribution, with each distribution seeing increases between 7-22%. As every single distribution seems to be increasing in popularity, I interpret this to mean that as … Continue reading →

I recently had an error crop up with an installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition. When upgrading a kernel, or adding/removing certain software packages, or typing "dkms autoinstall" the following error appeared: dkms.conf: Error! No 'BUILT_MODULE_NAME' directive specified for record … Continue reading →

It turns out that the fonts in LMDE look a bit different to those in say Ubuntu. This is partly because of Ubuntu's theme, and partly because Debian's font rendering is a little dated. There is a guy over at … Continue reading →

One of the benefits of cross-platform software such as the Thunderbird mail client is that its often quite easy to transfer data from one platform to another. The data that Thunderbird creates (that contains your account settings, downloaded emails, mail … Continue reading →

One of my motivations for installing Linux Mint Debian Edition was to see for myself the efforts Valve have been making over the last few months, porting most of their games and their Steam platform to Linux. It turns out … Continue reading →

When you install Chromium in the latest version of Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), typing anything in the search/address bar takes you to an awful custom search engine that wastes loads of space and hurts my eyes. So, how do … Continue reading →

I installed 64-bit Mint Debian Edition today (LMDE) but I had a problem getting the image onto the USB stick. I used LinuxLive (LiLi) Usb Creator version 2.8.22 released June 1st 2013, however the default settings resulted in a usb … Continue reading →

I recently needed to build GNU Octave from source, as the version available in the Ubuntu repositories (3.6.2) had a crash that reliably triggered when I attempted to run a matlab script from a lecture I had been watching (a … Continue reading →

I upgraded some packages earlier (including a kernel) and received an odd error from grub (version 1.99-21ubuntu3.9) $ sudo grub-install --recheck /dev/sda /usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: not a directory. Auto-detection of a filesystem of /dev/sdb1 failed. Try with --recheck. If the problem persists … Continue reading →

Since a recent burglary I have been using ZoneMinder to provide CCTV security for my house on my Ubuntu 12.04 machine. I noticed earlier today that zoneminder had stopped running over the weekend and when I tried to start the … Continue reading →

When you install the MythWeb module, the default security settings in Mythbuntu allow password-less access from anywhere. If you wish to be able to schedule (or watch) recordings when you are away from home then you may want to allow … Continue reading →

I bought the recently released Shuttle XS35GS V3 (also called XS35GTA V3) to use as a mythtv frontend. As usual, nothing works correctly first time round and there were a few things I needed to set up manually to get … Continue reading →