Recently apt-get update started throwing notices which read:

Ignoring file 'opera.list.distUpgrade' in directory '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/' as it has an invalid filename extension
Ignoring file 'opera.list.save' in directory '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/' as it has an invalid filename extension

It occured because sources.list.d directory isn’t supposed to contain files with .distupgrade and .save extensions, but since I upgraded my distribution from 10.04, backup copies of the source files were made with .distUpgrade appended to them. Similarly .save files were not supposed to be in the directory which made it throw this error. Fortunately you can suppress this error by executing the following command:

sudo sh -c "echo 'Dir::Ignore-Files-Silently:: \"(.save|.distupgrade)$\";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99ignoresave"

This will suppress the error. Next time you run sudo apt-get update you wouldn’t see those errors.

Cheers!

Yesterday after upgrading the packages VLC refused to start giving out following error message:

VLC media player 1.1.1 The Luggage (revision exported)
vlc: unknown option or missing mandatory argument `--user-agent="VLC media player"'
Try `vlc --help' for more information.

To solve the error, just reinstall vlc:

sudo apt-get install vlc

Cheers!

I came across this error while trying to run BloGTK.

I tried installing it from repositories but it failed:

sudo apt-get install python-gtkhtml2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package python-gtkhtml2 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package python-gtkhtml2 has no installation candidate

There’s a bug filed for this.

To solve the error, I downloaded the appropriate .deb package from here and installed it:
http://packages.debian.org/testing/python/python-gtkhtml2

Cheers!

Seriously guys, I got this error and I was laughing hard. The error is just too funny, don’t you think? Yes, it is but not for developers like me. Problem to this error is almost undetectable and there are more than a dozen reasons as to why this occurs and this often baffles developers.

This error generally comes when :

MySQL connection times out.

The MySQL server shuts down.

The connection is interrupted.

The query you are performing is too large for server to handle.

The query you are performing takes more space than allowed (default: 16MB).

While these are some common reasons, there maybe some unknown reasons to come across this error. I faced one of those unknown reasons. Read the rest of this entry »