Frustrated with gmail offline on ubuntu
I’m so tired of gmail’s bugginess with gears on Ubuntu. It behaves in the most erratic and unpredictable manner. Ironically, the problem arose when I was sending a mail while I was online and was almost a disaster. Email attachments are not attached always when sending with offline enabled. I found this out the hard way. Also, every now and then I see a pop-up message saying “Google gears is not compatible with your build …” yada yada yada. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m also a heavy user of google docs offline, but this unreliability is killing me. So, as of today, I’m off to Thunderbird 3 for all my offline email solutions.
With google docs, I really like the idea of one copy with multiple editors and being able to edit docs offline. But with google gears being so buggy on ubuntu and with Google officially declaring there will be no further development on gears, I don’t know if I can keep using it. If anyone knows of a similar arrangement that works with OpenOffice docs or with any online doc editor with good offline capabilities, please let me know.
Update:
After googling for Google docs alternatives, I found the following websites:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-great-alternatives-to-google-docs-you-should-consider/
http://www.digitalprank.org/zoho-google-docs-alternative/
Apparently, Zoho is a suite of rich office applications which provides both online and offline editing of documents. The interface looks very good and it appears to have many more features than google docs. Although offline editing is limited to the most recent 25 docs that you edited, it still looks very promising. Unfortunately, it uses google gears as well which leaves me at the mercy of that bug-ridden utility. But nonetheless, as of today, I’m going to start using Zoho and see how it works as an alternative to google docs!
Restore default settings in gnome on ubuntu
I got tired of the Mac theme for ubuntu and decided to get rid of it (also realised that Ubuntu needs to be unique and not look like a mac clone!). So after mucking around with the settings for a while and finding that it’s not easy to undo the damage, I started searching online. That’s when I came across this post and the idea is so simple that I wondered why I didn’t think about it to begin with. Take a look, it’ll reset your ubuntu gnome desktop to ‘factory settings’ 
.
Update: As mentioned by A Y Siu in the comments, it would be safer to rename your folders using mv rather than delete them flat out.
Thunderbird vs Gmail
Extremely satisfied using GMail? Happy with it’s offline features? Well, here’re a couple of lifehacker articles which might convert you to thunderbird. I was kind of exploring the possibility of shifting to thunderbird, but I don’t really send/receive email that much. Besides, the conversation view of thunderbird isn’t as sleek as GMail’s. But from what I see, thunderbird does a good job with offline and multiple accounts. Hit the links below to check it out:
http://lifehacker.com/314574/turn-thunderbird-into-the-ultimate-gmail-imap-client
http://lifehacker.com/5426234/make-thunderbird-3-your-ultimate-onlineoffline-message-hub
http://lifehacker.com/259385/always-view-messages-in-threaded-view
Posting on wordpress via email
Just found out about the email blogging features in wordpress. This is the first post I’m making via email. My only beef is that the email address is an assortment of randomly generated characters and you can’t actually specify the email address you like. So, your blog may have an email address like xyzblah23 (no you can’t choose blah!).
On the plus side, it has (or is supposed to, I can’t tell since this IS my first post!) full support for emails sent in HTML format. You can insert images in your email and they’ll show up on your post. It also supports tags, categories and other features which can be specified in square brackets [].
For full specifications and details, hit the link below:
Personal Diary options for Ubuntu
Looking for some software for a personal diary, I came across the following two utilities for Ubuntu:
It’s a pretty good diary option, but has a very major drawback – the diary entries are stored in plain xml on your hard disk and it doesn’t need a password to login. In fact, it doesn’t have a password option. If you want a diary just to take notes of your daily tasks or an alternative to an online blog (why?), you can go ahead with this.
This is exactly what I was looking for. It has password protection, keyboard shortcuts and easy to use interface. It even has a shortcut to insert the time in your diary post! It’s as if the developer was reading my mind. I would highly recommend this for anyone looking for a personal diary. Just remember that it needs gtkspell installed for python otherwise it won’t even start. If you’re using ubuntu, just search for it in synaptic and install the python libraries for gtkspell.
Update:
Almanah looks good, but again the main negative for this one, just like thotkeeper, is that it isn’t password protected. But apart from that it has a nice calendar and the ability to store the diary entries in encrypted format. One unique feature about Almanah is the ability to add a definition to some text. This definition can be used to link your text to a file, note or a URL. Pretty neat. Plus it’s available in synaptic, so you can give it a shot.
Acer 4530 and Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10)
Karmic has been out for a week now. Finally got over my insecurities and opted for the complete distro upgrade in the update manager and let it run overnight. By morning it was almost done, just cleaned up a few packages and fixed menu.lst and we were done.
But a reboot showed that it wasn’t to be a smooth transition. There were 2 kernels installed, 2.6.31-14 and 2.6.28-16. Trying out the first one caused my boot up screen to flicker and it didn’t even reach gdm. The flickr even prevented me from logging in. I think it was around the point when the console read “Starting consolefont and terminal yada yada” when it started doing it.
A search on the forums suggested that the problem might be because of the nvidia drivers. Which was exactly the problem. As per my earlier post, since I had installed Nvidia drivers manually, the updated didn’t install the drivers.
So, to fix it, I booted into the recovery kernel and dropped into a root terminal with networking. But for some reason the wifi wouldn’t work so I couldn’t connect to the net for synaptic to install the correct nvidia drivers (yes, they’re using 185.18.36 now, which is slightly later than the one I installed). But fortunately, I still had the drivers in my home directory. So kicked it off from the command line (no need to sudo since I was root).
But then the nvidia installer complains saying I need to be in init mode 3. So I quit the installer and ran telinit 3 (as mentioned in the installer itself!) and I was given a nice little login prompt.
Logged in and then ran the installer as sudo and waited for it to complete. Rebooted and everything works now.
My desktop works fine, and my MacOs ubuntu theme is intact.
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- my desktop
PS: Initially, since I was having problems with kernel 2.6.31-14, I booted using 2.6.28-16 which actually worked and was able to log me in via gdm. But the touchpad wasn’t working. This seemed like a really strange issue. So I searched the forums for this and found this post. The touchpad started working after putting it in the options file and rebooting.
But with the new kernel, after fixing the flicker issue, it was causing the mouse to be a bit sluggish and the scroll wasn’t working either. So I tried commenting it out and rebooting and the mouse is working fine now.
Ubuntu Jaunty: Error authenticating packages partial upgrade
Was getting this error when trying to do a partial upgrade in Ubuntu (I didn’t select ‘Partial Upgrade’, it brought it up on its own). Then checked in Synaptic->Repositories->Authentication. Apparently, http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty was not authenticated.
A quick google brought me to this post. Looks like I’m not the only one with this problem. I followed the instructions left by one of the users and that fixed the authentication problem.
Then tried running the Partial upgrade again and it worked!
Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) on Acer 4530 – nvidia drivers
Using the default recommended version of the nvidia drivers (180.44), I found that while running compiz-fusion and AWN my screen would hang every now and then for no reason. It would hang if I played around with the wobbly windows for too long or sometimes even if I just minimized firefox.
The only way to reproduce it seemed to be to use the j2ee version of eclipse ide 3.5 (Galileo) and click on Windows->Preferences. The screen would hang for sure and only way to fix it would be a hard reboot.
After a post on the compiz-fusion forums it looked like the problem was because of the driver I was using. Also, on the nvnews forums, I found this thread which showed that a lot of people were having trouble with the 180.* version of the nvidia drivers.
So, I installed envyng from synaptic and downgraded the drivers to the next recommended version i.e. 173.14.16 which made my browser fonts look like crap and slowed everything down. Atleast it stopped hanging, but I couldn’t bear the slow crawl of the display.
So, I finally bumped into this blog post which explained how to manually install the drivers on Ubuntu.
DISCLAIMER:
- I presume you are already using the nvidia drivers but are having frequent performance problems because of the &%#@ 180.* drivers. If you do, then you can use the existing xorg.conf with your new drivers and it’ll work just fine.
- I don’t know how to uninstall the drivers. I know the driver installer from nvidia has a –uninstall option, but I haven’t tried it. If you did and it worked for you, please leave a comment.
These are the steps I followed:
- Download the latest nvidia drivers. I downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run from the nvidia site. It’s available under GeForce 9Mobile series and Linux x86.
- Install envyng-core from synaptic. The text version will be all you need.
- Go into console mode using Ctrl + Alt + F1. Before that copy all these steps into a file in your home directory so that you can read them when you’re in console mode. Before going to the next step if you need to get back into X, press Ctrl + Alt + F7.
- Login using your username and password
- kill gdm/kdm using sudo killall gdm or sudo killall kdm. You cannot uninstall/install drivers unless you kill X.
- Use envyng to uninstall the drivers: Type envyng -t and select uninstall drivers.
- Backup your existing xorg.conf using:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_good_backup
I would highly recommend this step so that you don’t lose your good working xorg config. You will need it after you install the new drivers. - cd to the location where you’ve downloaded the latest nvidia drivers.
- Give execute permission by typing:
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run (or whatever your version is) - Run the drivers using:
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-185.18.31-pkg1.run (or whatever your version is) - Follow instruction on the blue screen.
- After completing installation, copy your old good working configuration of xorg.conf using the following command:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf_good_backup /etc/X11/xorg.conf
This is assuming you already had the ubuntu recommended drivers installed before this. If you didn’t then you will probably need to do some poking around to get your xorg.conf working properly. - Reboot and enjoy your new slick and better performing compiz-fusion!
After doing this, I downloaded the jee version of eclipse 3.5 and clicked on window->preferences and it worked fine! Looks like it’s working great!
It has only been a few hours since I installed it and haven’t seen any problems yet. If I do find anything, I’ll update this post.
iPod Ripper
I’m finally done with the iPod Ripper. Easy enough to be done in a week, it took me more than a month. Thank you very much procrastination! Any case, I’ve been able to finish it and uploaded it to www.mediafire.com. Follow the link at the end of the post for the iPod Ripper’s page. Bugs/comments/issues/questions/feedback – please leave a comment and I’ll try to answer them.
c25k (Couch to 5 Kilometers)
Thinking about running, exercising, doing some physical activity but don’t really want to? We’ve all been there, me more than most people. If, like me, you feel lethargic and lazy all the time, here’s some inspiration:
I first saw it over here.
The c25k is a program that was originally devised by the nice people at Cool Running. It’s a program that’s devised to get people who’ve been slacking without any exercise to running upto 5km at a stretch in about 9 weeks (~3 months). I tried this program once and gave up since it was very boring. But I recently found this thread on the Cool Running Newbie forums where a bunch of people decided to start the program together. This sounds like a really good idea since people will be able to provide inspiration to each other and also keep up the pace. I’m sure there are a lot of such threads where people keep each other motivated to ‘Just do it’!
I didn’t realise that c25k is such a well known accronym. A google for c25k shows a whole lot of sites for this. You have podcasts, resources, communities and even an app for the iPhone/iPod touch which helps you complete the course.
I hope I’ll be able to keep up with this program. Given the long weekend that’s coming up, and the trip that I’m making, I’ll need to try a little harder to keep up with everyone else on this program.
