If you’re ever installing Ubuntu, and it fails while installing HAL with this error message:
“Your account has expired, please contact your system administrator”
Type the following:
sudo passwd -u root
…which should fix the problem. It’s a most strange error — I got it while installing ubuntu-desktop inside a VM made by ubuntu-vm-builder.
Just for the record, purchasing games with Steam running on Wine + Linux works fine.
steam:// URLs that websites tend to use to launch the Steam purchasing app don’t work when you click on them in your browser, but if you change to your Steam directory and add the steam:// as a parameter to Steam.exe (you can find it in the HTML source of the web page), it works:
cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Valve/Steam wine Steam.exe steam://purchase/469
The above command will launch the purchasing dialog for the Orange Box — substitute the parameters as necessary. To prove it works, here’s a screenshot:
The Wine version I used was 1.0-rc1, running on Ubuntu 8.04 (amd64).
I have a Compaq Evo N610c, and yesterday I got Suspend to RAM working on Ubuntu 8.04!
It’s actually really easy, and just involves tweaking a configuration file.
Firstly, make sure you are not using uswsusp or suspend2 (TuxOnIce). If you’re unsure, run the following:
sudo apt-get remove uswsusp suspend2
All you have to do is open up /usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux in a text editor, and find this line:
QUIRKS=""
Change it to:
QUIRKS="--quirk-vbe-post --quirk-vbemode-restore --quirk-vbestate-restore"
Finally, save the file. Now, try suspending! Make sure you save all your work, because it still may crash. You can either use the Suspend command in the Quit menu in GNOME, or type “pm-suspend” in a terminal.
If you’re lucky, like me, your Evo should now Suspend to RAM and resume successfully!
Last night, I put Ubuntu 8.04 (running the GNOME desktop) on an SD card of mine (thus disabling my camera for the time being) and booted it on the OLPC XO-1:
I avoided doing this for a while, as I know it kind of defeats the purpose of having an XO, but it’s been educational doing it, and I’m impressed with the results.
First thing I noticed was the speed. It’s much faster than I thought it would be, and about the same speed as Ubuntu would be on a 300MHz or 400MHz Pentium II desktop.
The webcam is detected as /dev/video0 and shows as a Video4Linux 2 device to GStreamer; however, it bombs out with some error that I can’t make head or tails of. Also, neither Cheese nor VLC will display the webcam.
Initially, I thought the audio was broken, but I found it was because the user I had created hadn’t been added to the audio group. Editing /etc/group and doing a logout-login cycle fixed that.
The touchpad was very finicky — much more so than in Sugar. Most annoying was that “tapping” had been enabled, where tapping on the touchpad would result in a mouse click. Well, it didn’t even need to be a “tap” — even lifting your finger off the touchpad lightly would sometimes result in a mouse click or two.
Fortunately, by adding the line “option mousedev tap_time=0” to /etc/modprobe.d/olpc.conf.dist, the tapping was disabled. Much better.
Been doing some video playback and audio playback — video is not too bad, but the audio is crackly. Probably PulseAudio’s fault. Need to work on that.
Next step: trying out Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition (a.k.a. hildon-desktop).
Yesterday, I received a .docx (in MSOOXML format) file from somebody. I was just about to reply with a polite message asking them to transfer $549 to my bank account for a copy of Office 2007, when I tried opening it, OpenOffice.org (2.4rc2, currently in Ubuntu Hardy, and according to Cafuego, it also works in 2.3) popped up, reading it fine!
Copyright © 2010 by Jeremy Visser and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License unless otherwise noted.