Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I was driving through Kent today with Theo as a passenger. Luckily he had his shiny new HD camera to record this burning lorry we passed.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 I’ve found the network manager GUI to be far superior to the previous version I was using in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Unfortunately when I was using Ubuntu 8.04 I made some custom alterations to my network setup in the “/etc/network/interfaces” file. The Network Manager in 9.04 wasn’t keen on this and so refused to manage it, instead it displayed the message “Wired Network – device not managed”.

As a work around I commented out all of my changes by placing a # at the beginning of each line in my interfaces file:

Open the interfaces file in an editor:

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

This is an example of how my file looked before I modified it. Yours will be different:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth2 inet static
address 192.168.0.44
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1
auto eth2

And here’s the same file again, but I’ve added #’s at the beginning of each line so that they are ignored:

#auto lo
#iface lo inet loopback
#iface eth2 inet static
#address 192.168.0.44
#netmask 255.255.255.0
#gateway 192.168.0.1
#auto eth2

In order for the changes to take effect, we need to restart the network manager and the applet by running each of these in the command line:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

And now restart the network manager applet:

pkill nm-applet
nm-applet

You should now be able to manage the network connection from within the network manager applet.

Microsoft took a step to far recently when they installed an add-on into Firefox in a recent Windows update “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1“. As you can see in the following image I have disabled but not been able to uninstall the add-on.

The reason it can’t be removed is that Microsoft installed the add-on for all users but the Firefox GUI can only handle uninstalling add-ons for the current user. Microsoft have released a further update that installs the addon on a per user basis rather than for all users which enables you to uninstall it via the previously inactive uninstall button in the Firefox GUI. The download can be found here.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04, Gnome-RDP stopped working. When I opened it I was greeted with the following errors:

The settings database file has become corrupted or at least it can no longer open it. If your happy to cut your losses and start with a fresh settings file then run this command to rename your Gnome-RDP database file:

mv ~/.gnome-rdp.db ~/.gnome-rdp.db.damaged

This will mean you lose your Gnome-RDP settings and you will need to re-enter them, however you will be able to use Gnome-RDP again! The file will be renamed to .gnome-rdp.db.damaged so you can retrieve that file in the future.