Running Kubuntu on my 2018 DELL XPS 15 laptop is a joy, when I can reduce the brightness down to its minimum. During daylight hours, the minimum is bright enough and saves on battery usage. But during the evening, when I’m tired from staring at monitors all day long, I found that my eyes were begging me to stop using the laptop. Using the brightness controls on the laptop’s keyboard causes the brightness to step up and down by distinct levels.

TLDR; Install gnome-keyring If you are not using the default install of Ubuntu, you might not be using Gnome. This is the case for flavours such as: Kubuntu (KDE Plsama), Lubuntu (LXQt), Xubuntu (XFCE), and so on. And if you have installed Skype using snap, then you will likely find that it will always ask you to login upon loading, even if you have it configured to automatically run at login.

I keep forgetting the steps required for this, so thought I should write them up in one easy to remember blog post for myself. My desktop set-up consists of 2 x 1080 and 1 x 4k display. Making sure that applications are readable is a bit of a farce. But as long as I ensure that certain applications only ever appear on the correct monitor, means that I can alter the launcher to set the correct DPI scaling.

I used to use a 2 command 1 liner to update my system: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade That was easy enough to type out now and then. But over time it grew to include removing and cleaning downloaded packages as well. Then there’s the matter of knowing if an update requires a system restart. The lazy me put it all into one bash script and made it globally accessible and executable:

Something changed recently, preventing a VM from fully provisioning. Tracking it down was a bit of a PiTA. OS: CentOS 6.9 Ruby: 2.4 - installed from source with the gearlingguy.ruby ansible role Gems to be installed: sass Output of attempting to install the sass ruby gem: $ sudo gem install sass Fetching: rb-fsevent-0.10.2.gem (100%) Successfully installed rb-fsevent-0.10.2 Fetching: ffi-1.9.21.gem (100%) Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing sass: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

NewRelic no longer offers server monitoring for free accounts, so what are the alternatives when you’re on a skin-flint budget? There are lots, but I’m not going to review any of them. Instead, I’ve been tasked with getting Amon running on a DigitalOcean droplet so that it might be appraised. Amon can either be used as a SAAS, hosted by Amon themselves. Or it can be run “On-Premise” by cloning the git repo to your own server.

Bringing up a vagrant machine is as easy as vagrant up. If you’re a web developer, it would be nice if it were to add the private network IP address to /etc/hosts of the host machine. Thus giving you instant access to http://my-awesome-site.dev/ This doesn’t happen by default, but it is possible with the use of a plugin. The one I like to use is vagrant-hostsupdater. Install thus: vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater When you bring up the vagrant machine, it will now automatically add the VM’s name to /etc/hosts.

This tweet has to have been the most popular thing I have ever said. At time of posting it has gained 80 retweets, 25 favourites and many replies/questions. Work recently bought me a new workstation, so the 1st thing I always do is to dual boot with Ubuntu. Some might consider me an edge case user. Though as a developer, I like a rather particular set-up. That is, 3 wide screen monitors with the central one rotated 90 degrees for my IDE.

Example user ‘iain’ sudo mkdir -p /chroot/iain/home/iain sudo useradd -M -d /home/iain iain sudo passwd iain sudo chwon iain: /chroot/iain/home/iain sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config # At the end of the file, add: Match User paypoint ChrootDirectory /chroot/iain AllowTCPForwarding no X11Forwarding no ForceCommand internal-sftp sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

If, like me, you can’t wait for Ubuntu 12.04.1 to be released, you can force an upgrade of your favourite OS OS. sudo apt-get update; sudo do-release-upgrade -d If you are going from the previous LTS 10.04, then the -d is important. Otherwise there would be no upgrade to offer. The upgrade process should go smoothly enough. Except for when it comes to the kernel. Bytemark VM’s make use of kernels that sit outside of the VM itself.

Current project requires a couple of VPN tunnels to be set up. An IPsec and a PPTP. The IPsec will wait for another day, the PPTP is set up and ready to go. One thing that wasn’t quite right with the tunnel though, is the static route created by PPTP missed out a large chunk of the server’s network. Starting the tunnel sets up the routing rule of 192.168.100.111 to be sent to the tunnel.

Web server: Linux (Ubuntu on my dev setup), Apache, PHP 5.3, Symfony 1.4, Doctrine 1.2. Database server: Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, MS SQL Server Trying to get Symfony to talk to the database server has been a painful experience for the last few days. But perseverance has paid off. Lots of Googling with trial & error has resulted in actually achieving a development setup that will mirror the eventual production setup.

Via the Ubuntu Software Centre: Search for thunderbird Click on the search result “Thunderbird Email” and then on the “More Info” button Enable at least the “Calendar Extension for Thunderbird - Google Calendar support (xul-ext-gdata-provider)” Install the add-ons Open your Google Calendar in your web browser In the left-hand column, under “My calendars”, hover over the calendar of choice and click the down arrow that appears after the calendar name Select “Calendar settings” Close to the bottom of the page will be the “Calendar ID” (in my case it is my full email address.

It’s finally happened. I’ve become so fed up of Windows 7 freezing while I’m working that my workstation now runs Ubuntu 11.04. I would have done it a long time ago, except the lack of hardware compatibility kept putting me off. That said, there are 2 final hardware items that I need to cater for. DisplayLink USB graphics adaptor for my 3rd monitor. Skype ATA device so I can use my desk phone with the Skype Out number.

Installed Ubuntu 10.04 from ISO onto a blank virtual box machine. All worked well for a while, until I recently did an aptitude safe-upgrade. The next time I booted the system, mysql failed to start and refused to do so when I issued: sudo service mysql start It would just hang there. Tracked the issue down to this bug. How I maged to get it to work: In a terminal: