Archive for ◊ November, 2009 ◊

Ubuntu wifi cannot obtain ip address
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | Author:

After I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 I could no longer connect to secured wifi networks.
6 months later, I have found a fix! Here’s how I did it…

Open wicd, then
Preferences / Advanced Settings
Change WPA Supplicant Driver from ndiswrapper to wext.

I had to click on “Connect” to the wifi network 3 times before it connected – the first 2 times it connected then immediately disconnected.

Maybe the WPA Supplicant Driver was wrongly set because the upgrade to 9.04 replaced ndiswrapper with a better driver, but didn’t update this setting, but that’s pure speculation. Anyway, it now works!

Category: Ubuntu  | Leave a Comment
Ubuntu 9.10 Firefox 3.5 fonts
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | Author:

After upgrading to 9.10, the fonts in Firefox were too big and blurry. I fixed it as follows:

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
sudo mv 10-hinting-slight.conf 10-hinting-slight.conf.original
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-hinting-medium.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Restart Firefox.

Thanks to Carlo Hamalainen for providing the fix.

Category: Ubuntu  | Tags: , , , ,  | Leave a Comment
Ubuntu 9.10: Disable “shut down after 60 seconds”
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | Author:

In 9.04, Ubuntu introduced the ridiculous default of waiting 60 seconds after you clicked on “shut down” before actually doing it. Presumably in case you changed your mind. Yeah, really useful.
Upgrading to 9.10 re-introduced this “feature”, but it’s now even less obvious how to turn it off. Here’s how:

  1. Press Alt-F2
  2. In the Run Application window, type the following then click on Run:
    gconf-editor
  3. In the Configuration Editor window, go to Apps/indicator-session, check the suppress_logout_restart_shutdown checkbox, then close the window.

Nice.

Category: Ubuntu  | Tags: , ,  | Leave a Comment
Ubuntu 9.10 mounts cannot yet be mounted
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | Author:

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10.
On day 1, startup worked just fine. But that was because I went to make a cup of tea while it was starting up.
On day 2, I got this message during startup:

One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannnot yet be mounted:
/: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid-...(lots of letters and numbers here)
/tmp: waiting for (null)
/boot: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid-...(lots of letters and numbers here)
/data: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid-...(lots of letters and numbers here)
/windows: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid-...(lots of letters and numbers here)
Press ESC to go into a recovery shell

It was because I hadn’t made a cup of tea!
Seriously though, It’s not an error message, just a horribly worded message implying that ESC should be pressed, which it shouldn’t. Just by doing nothing and waiting (e.g. by going and making a cup of tea), Ubuntu eventually starts up completely OK.
Please Ubuntu, change this! My friend saw the message and now sees Ubuntu as less credible.

I’ll be posting more on Ubuntu 9.10, mostly whinges and fixes to problems, which is grossly unfair. I’m sure there are loads of great improvements too…

Category: Ubuntu  | Tags: , , , , ,  | Leave a Comment