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In this article we’ll set up a subversion server that will allow remote access. We will use Ubuntu, but the process isn’t that different if you are using a different distro.

First of all install the subversion package. In ubuntu thats:

sudo apt-get install subversion

Create a directory where you will store the subversion repositories. (we use /var/repos in this example.) Then, add a user for the svn (we’ll use the username svn), and give it ownership of the repos directory.
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I got Firefox 3.6 in a Lucid alpha update on 27 January. The problem is that it wouldn’t start. I tried it with a new profile, which made it work. So I ran firefox with the -safe-mode argument and disabled all add-ons. Then in firefox, I tried each add-on to figure out which one’s weren’t working, and left them disabled.

To do this, open up a console and run the following:

firefox -safe-mode

You’ll see the following dialog box:

Select the first checkbox (Disable all add-ons), and press the Make Changes and Restart button.

When Firefox starts up, go into the Tools->Add-ons menu. And try enabling each add-on and restarting firefox. If it starts, then the add-on is working. If it isn’t, run firefox in safe-mode and disable the last add-on you enabled.

In my case, Adblock Plus, Better Gmail 2, Better GReader, Firebug, FoxyProxy, Ghostery, HttpFox, NoScript, Nuke Anything Enhanced, and User Agent Switcher were working. DownThemAll, Greasemonkey, and Stylish were not.

click image to enlarge.

Mozilla have released the new major version of Thunderbird. It has huge improvements in the interface. First of all, the inboxes of all your mail accounts are grouped together and they’ve been moved to the top. You can also view a collated list of emails from all your accounts by clicking on the top level Inbox.

Gmail users will love this version of Thunderbird. Setting up a new Gmail account is as simple as entering your username and password. You can see all your tagged emails in separate folders too.

The POP3/IMAP account setup process has also been totally simplified where it asks you to enter just the email address and password, then tries determine the server information from that. Even when it can’t autodetect the server, it populates most of the information in the manual setup window.

The main user interface is now tabbed like firefox. opening an email now shows it in a new tab instead of a new window. Search results are also displayed in a new tab.

The search feature is one of the most improved features in Thunderbird 3.0. The search results look similar to a web search with the title and summary of each email matching your search. Additionally it also allows you filter the search results based on a number of criteria, all without having to rerun the search.

And last but not least, being a sister-product to firefox, it has a huge number of add-ons.

All in all it’s a great email client. Its available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Get it at Mozilla Messaging.

If you are getting the VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode error dialog shown below …

… it is because you have the kvm and kvm_intel kernel modules enabled. You will need to unload them using the following commands:

sudo modprobe -r kvm_intel
sudo modprobe -r kvm


You should now be able to start your Virtual Machine.

If you want a permanent solution, you need to disable full virtualisation for qemu/kvm using the Boot-up manager. You can do so by following these steps.

1. Install the Boot-up Manager:

You can do this via the Software Center, where you can find it in the System Tools section:

Alternatively, you can install it by typing the following in a console:

sudo apt-get install bum

2. Start the Boot-up manager from the System > Administration menu.

3. Untick Full virtualization on i386 and amd64 hardware and click Apply.

Note: VirtualBox will still run under full virtualisation provided your system supports it.

ArsGeek has a tutorial on how to fix your Windows MBR with an Ubuntu LiveCD.

While many distributions of GNU/Linux have been more than suitable for most users, there have been quite a few obstacles preventing it from getting into their desktops. One of the main reasons behind this is that Windows comes preinstalled with almost all new PCs, and most people including those that are moderately tech savvy are afraid of installing GNU/Linux or even any OS on their computer. Keep reading »

In a small windows network you can contact (i.e. ping etc.) one windows computer from another using their name even if there isn’t a DNS server in the network. However, from a computer running linux, you would need to know the ip address of the computer you want to contact. The “computer name” the windows computers use in this instance are their netbios names which other computers discover using WINS resolution. Linux computers are usually not set up to use this.

The most common solution is to just add just add the PCs to your hosts file. But that would become tiresome if you have more than a couple of computers, and would not work at all if your computers use dynamic IPs.
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After playing around with Vista for a couple of days on my new HP dv2899ea Artist Edition Notebook, I had decided it had to go. For starters it had a restore partition that had taken up 12GB and for some reason the actual supposedly fresh installation took up at least twice as much. But I made a set of system recovery discs on just in case if for some reason I decide to install it again. That took about a year and a half to create! (OK, may be it was a little closer to a couple of hours.) Keep reading »

There are a fair few project management tools available for Linux that differ in simplicity of use as well as the features they include. Most of them would be suitable for smaller projects, but there are a couple that would be as suitable for complex large scale projects as the commercial solutions such as Microsoft Project.
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Reading this blog post about the OS as a platform I recalled a gripe I often have when installing software on Linux… the lack of a common interface for applications to register themselves with the OS/Desktop Environment. By that I mean, there is no facility for an application installer to say: Keep reading »