/home/shane/stuff

I had this amazingly infuriating problem up until a short while ago, whenever I edited the programs to boot at start time, the sessions manager (System -> Preferences -> Sessions) immediately forgot my changes, without an error box or anything. After a tip from the forums, I ran it in the terminal, which pinpointed the problem, the system couldn’t write to a folder called autostart in the folder .config.

Fair enough, so I changed permissions on this folder to be writable by all. Still no luck.

After about a month of being bloody pissed off with this arrangement, but unable to fix it, I happened across a tip that suggests deleting the folder and recreating it. So simple, but it might just work….

And it did! So if you’re having the same problem, heres how to go about fixing it.

1. Open a terminal and run the command “cd .config”

2. Now, check the permissions of the files in this folder, run “ls -l”, this lists the properties of the files within the current folder. We’re interested in the properties of the “autostart” folder.

3. Find the line corresponding to the autostart folder, it will be the top one, or very close to it, now, after the series of letters ( e.g rwrx–r–rw etc.) it should list your username as the owner of the folder. If you see ‘root’ here, this may be your problem, you can remedy it by running the following command,

“sudo chown username autostart” (Replacing ‘username’ with your username obviously).

4. Try the sessions manager again, if it doesn’t fix your problem, we’ll move onto the next step.

5. Once again navigate to the .config folder, this time we’re going to delete the folder and recreate it, so run the following command, it will do both operations at once.

“sudo rm autostart;mkdir autostart”

6. This should fix the problem, so give sessions manager a go again.

Let me know if this works for you, it drove me crazy for a while, hopefully you found this post before it does the same to you!

BTW – I’ve typed this whole post without looking at the keyboard once, my own very blunt way of teaching myself to touch type! Its a pain in the arse, but I’ll let you know if it works!

Ok…hardy isn’t running fine for me…

Thats a picture of a graph of my CPU usage.

The high bit was compiz.real or Xorg, I’m not sure, ‘top’ and System Monitor tell me different things, hogging my CPU big time. It happens at random intervals and is really annoying.

It has to be a compiz problem cos if i run ‘metacity –replace’, the usage goes back to normal, as can be seen on the graph.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any known solution?!

I should mention that I’ve got an Intel integrated graphics card – the 945gma I believe, so unfortunately, the nVidia fixes posted don’t really help!

—–EDIT——-

Just thought I’d stick up some new screenshots of what the top command outputs, and what the system monitor outputs

I spotted this great post on the Ubuntu Planet, it should answer any questions you may have about upgrading! Take a look

Happy Hardy Day everyone. Its that time again, the new Ubuntu release is currently being installled on hundreds of PC’s worldwide. Get your copy here, and enjoy!

I just set up conky on my Hardy machine, its as simple as can be, a quick “sudo apt-get install conky” did it for me.

The cool thing about it is that you specify exactly how it works, by creating and editing a file in your home directory called .conkyrc , this file is a little hard to understand so you’re better to (like I did) use a pre configured file, I’ll post mine here, along with a screenshot. It makes your desktop look seriously l33t!

.conkyrc

Yup! Hardy CD’s!

Decided this time i couldn’t wait for the full release, so I’ve installed the beta…its running great…

Ah the terminal, the terrifying black box that scares many new users off. “But don’t you have to program it and use it all the time?” is regularly heard from uninformed Windows and Mac users. Once you give it a go though, the terminal is your friend, the stigma lifts and you realise its your flexible customisable friend! One thing that I find really annoying though, is the way that you have all these commands and keywords to remember, I especially have using chmod and all its options, as well as tar. They’ve got loads of different arguments when in reality, you only use one particular combination all the time.

Heres where your .bashrc file comes in, with this file, you can make it easier to execute the commands you enter most often, imagine instead of having to type “sudo mount -t vfat /media/sbd1″, which I have to do everytime i want to mount my external hard drive (If you know of a fix, please tell me!), all you have to type is “mhd”!

This is really simple to do, all you have to do is add this line to your .bashrc file – alias mhd=”sudo mount -t vfat /media/sbd1″ Now every time you type mhd, it executes the command shown. Here’s a step by step

1. Open a terminal

2. Open the .bashrc file, “sudo gedit /.bashrc”

3. Add the required lines

4. Save the file

5. Run the following command, “source /.bashrc ”

6. You’re good to go!

Well heres a blantent and complete rip off! Ubuntu have created their own version of the Dell Ideastorm website, called Brainstorm, to find out what the community want from Ubuntu, log on and voice your opinion!

Link

via (The Xubuntu Blog)

If you’ve been following Ubuntu planet recently, you can’t miss the accounts of people documenting their journey to becoming a MOTU (if this acronym is foreign to you click here). It sounds like an interesting thing to do, as you learn loads and are also contributing to the community by packaging applications to make it easier for users to install them.

The main motivation behind this is to contribute to the community, which, bar a little Irish translation on Rosetta, and I suppose, this blog! I haven’t really done at all, plus it gives the opportunity to learn a load more about the operating system.

So at the moment, I’m reading the pre-requisite documentation to get a feel for the process, there’s a lot to go through, and I don’t know if I have the experience for the job, but I think I’ll give it a go! Hopefully the fact that I’ll be soon training as a system admin for my university compsoc may help.

What I want from you is your thoughts on the whole system,  if you are a MOTU, training to be one or anything like that, let me know how its going/ it went and if it was worth the hassle!