I upgraded to a 500GB hard-drive and installed windows 7 on it. I then moved my current ubuntu installation from the older HDD to the newer one on another partition, but of course there was no bootloader to load it. I had GRUB2 on older hard drive. I googled about how to recover GRUB2 but couldn’t find one. All I could find was solutions to fix corrupt Grub. So, I just reinstalled grub and then upgraded it to Grub2.
Here’s how to do it:
Boot into Ubuntu Live CD.
Mount the root disk (Disk on which Ubuntu is installed).
mkdir /media/root
mount /dev/sda7 /media/root
where /dev/sda7 is your disk.
Read the rest of this entry »
I was excited for the Karmic Koala (v. 9.10) which came out yesterday and I happily started the download and kept the computer switched on overnight for the download to complete. When I woke up, surely the download was completed and I went on to install the downloaded packages. Which the installation was taking place, power went off and computer switched off abruptly. I was in shock and feared I wouldn’t be able to boot into Ubuntu again.
My fears came true when booting process stopped at “waiting for /dev/sda6″. I waited for quite a while but it would never proceed to next step. I pressed Esc and I was dropped into root terminal. I at once did
dpkg –configure -a
That didn’t help much. It gave me error “Read-only file system”. So, I made the file-system writable by doing
Read the rest of this entry »
Today I experienced a rather strange problem in Ubuntu. It crashed. Actually it wasn’t completely crashed, the mouse clicks weren’t working, I couldn’t switch using Alt+Tab, I could only use the program which was on the screen. The panels weren’t working, though the shortcut keys were. Fortunately enough, I had assigned shortcut key to open the terminal and it was working, so I could even access the terminal.
Fortunately, firefox (shiretoko) was running as the frontmost application and I was able to access the internet. I searched for How to kill X and was presented with many solutions.
I tried killall X in terminal but it didn’t work. Suddenly, I remembered that X was called Xorg in jaunty. I did this:
Read the rest of this entry »
My laptop has a synaptic touchpad and its horizontal scroll was not working ever since I moved to Ubuntu. I didn’t pay attention to it in the beginning as it was not much of a use. But later on it started bugging me so I finally decided to resolve this problem.
Well, installing gsynaptics and enabling the horizontal scroll didn’t work for me but that may work for you. So try this:
In terminal, type:
sudo get-apt install gsynaptics
Type in your password and let it install the package. After installation, go to System->Preferences->Touchpad.
Read the rest of this entry »
So, you just want to keep a partition for Windows XP and another partition for all your applications that you install. You can change it in all the installations manually but changing the default location is a much better idea. And there are also some applications which don’t let you change the default path.
XP uses the C:\Program Files directory as the default base directory into which new programs are installed. However, you can change the default installation drive and/ or directory by using a Registry hack.
Run the Registry Editor (regedit)and go to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
Read the rest of this entry »
Well all OSes have bad programs, Linux has it too. Some times they stop responding and unlike windows, they don’t make the whole OS unresponsive. The application alone is unresponsive but you can still use other applications normally. Killing an unresponsive application is fairly easy job in Ubuntu.
Bring the unresponsive application to the front, the app must be having a desaturated look because its unresponsive (if its not, check again… it must not be unresponsive). Launch the terminal and type:
$ xkill
The mouse cursor will change to a cross, click anywhere on the unresponsive application and it will be killed.
To get things done faster, you can type xkill in “Run application” dialog box too. Press Alt+F2 to bring the run dialog box and type xkill and enter. The mouse cursor will change to cross and click on unresponsive app to kill it.
Alternatively, Read the rest of this entry »
So, you thought you would make a web application but didn’t know where to start?
This is the place to start. You need a web server installed on your computer before you start any kind of web programming be it PHP, ASP .Net, ColdFusion, JSP.
For developing in PHP, you would have to install an Apache HTTP server, php interpreter, MySQL server. Installing all of them would be a real headache and so would be configuring them to work with each other. To simply this we have WAMPs(Windows Apache, MySQL, PHP).
One such WAMP distribution is XAMPP which is cross platform and has many features inbuilt like filezilla ftp server, a mercury mailing server etc.
To install XAMPP first download the installer file for your OS from the following link:
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
Read the rest of this entry »
.