Craig Mayhew’s Blog

After a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic I found that the additional hard drives kept asking for a password each time I logged in and accessed them for the first time.

To fix the problem, simply install pysdm:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Then run it as root:

sudo pysdm

Choose your device and then mount your partitions accordingly.

After upgrading to Google Earth 5.1 I now get the following error when starting from command line. Error: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libgoogleearth_lib.so).

It’s also worth noting that if I click the Google Earth icon it just sits there with no errors.

To fix this simply remove or rename libstdc++.so.6 and libgcc_s.so.1 in the installation directory.

For some people this will be:

cd /opt/google-earth/

For others (me included) this will be:

cd ~/google-earth/

To rename the files:

sudo mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.orig
sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.orig

Now Google Earth should start without the error!

CUPS had me chasing around for a while to fix this issue. Whenever I tried to print I realized there were no printers and going to “System -> Administration -> Printing” caused the error “There was an error during the CUPS operation: ‘httpConnectionEncrypt failed’” when I tried to connect to the local CUPS service. The “/etc/init.d/cups” file had completely disappeared and reinstalling the cups package didn’t fix it! In the end I marked the cups package for “complete removal” which also removes the configuration files. After this I then reinstalled CUPS, “/etc/init.d/cups” reappeared and it worked once again. Unfortunately I had to reinstall my printers on this machine.

Steps were:

1. Complete removal of CUPS package including the configuration files
2. Reinstall the CUPS package.
3. Start the CUPS service with “sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart” in the terminal.
4. Reinstall your printers
5. Print stuff!

Unfortunately the IPv6 issue is still at large in Karmic Koala and will effect just about every internet application.

The problem is caused by Ubuntu requesting everything by IPv6 first even if there are no IPv6 Interfaces configured and timing out each time when it doesn’t get a response.

The workaround in firefox is to go to “about:config”, just type it into the address bar and hit enter. Then change the value network.dns.disableIPv6 to TRUE.

The bug can be tracked here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/417757

Ubuntu 9.10 doesn’t come with VPN connectivity out of the box. So you need to install 3 packages to get it to work. Symptoms of these packages not being installed are grayed out “Add” buttons and grayed out “Apply” buttons in the VPN connection manager.

Here’s the command to install the 3 packages:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp network-manager-vpnc network-manager-openvpn

I have no idea why Ubuntu doesn’t include these packages by default. Looks like a great many people are having this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-pptp/+bug/107738

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic Koala and fully expected this to break my VMWare server install. Sure enough I got plenty of errors when trying to compile VMWare Server with the latest kernel. Here’s the solution:

Download VMware Server (2.0.1 or 2.0.2) – in gz format. You will also need a license key.

If you have tried to install vmware server already and something went wrong during the install, then do these two steps first:

first, delete the vmware modules

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

if needed (you’ll know if you need to do this one):

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Install:

Run vmware-install.pl. Somewhere in the installation process you should be asked:
Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
you should answer: no

Then run the patch vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh.

sudo ./vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After this, run

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If the vmware-config.pl aborts, because it couldn’t shut down all vmware services then kill them manually and then rerun vmware-config.pl:

kill -9 $( grep -i vm | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And hopefully that should work!