Nilesh Kapadia

I had a problem with Evince not being able to read PDF's. I was getting this error:

Unhandled MIME type: 'application/x-extension-pdf'

From what I read here there is a problem with files in /usr/share/mime not being readable, so I corrected that (sudo chmod -R +r /usr/share/mime) and it works now. I also deleted ~/.local/share/mime just in case.

After having problems with JavaSVN, I ended up having to use JavaHL. In Ubuntu (and probably other distros), this takes a bit of effort to set up. Read on for how I made a .deb package for JavaHL.

I've been considering switching from Debian sid/unstable to Ubuntu. I've been using Debian unstable for a few years now, and overall its been great. Apt is an excellent package manager. There are a huge number of packages available in the repository and I can almost always find what I'm looking for. Some of the packages are very bleeding edge, for example they had a PostgreSQL 8.1 package the day it went final. Though in other cases, usually when they are nearing a stable release, some packages are far from bleeding edge and very much trailing edge. There have been occasional broken packages which are fixed in a few days, especially when massive changes are in progress such as gcc or KDE upgrades. Lately things have been especially bad.

I just came across a CosmoPOD which is a free online desktop. It is a Linux system, running NoMachine NX Server, with KDE desktops (appears to be using kiosk mode which restricts what you can do, and it looks like no shell access). You have to download the NX client to remote access it. This is a great way to try out Linux, KDE, and apps like OpenOffice 2.0. It is also a good demo of NX, which is very fast.

Using rsync in combination with hard links, its very simple and easy to setup incremental backups in Linux (and UNIX). You end up with a full snapshot of each increment, accessible as if they were the original copy that was backed up.

Update 2005-09-27: I've unpinned all these packages. It turns out there was a package for 2.6.12 kernel, but they have changed the names used for the packages. For images, the package names start with "linux-image". For source the package names start with "linux-source". For headers, the package names start with "linux-headers". I've had some problems getting CUPS to work again, though, so I might try pinning gs-esp again...

Debian unstable has actually been a bit unstable lately. It normally isn't this way. I've had to pin a few packages to testing. Here is my /etc/apt/preferences:

It looks like the wget option "-C off" (which disables caching) was removed recently. I didn't learn about this until one of my automated scripts (e-mails me IP address changes of my home machine) quit working (wget was returning an error). Now I am using the "--no-cache" option instead. I wonder how many people were affected by this change and why they even made such a change.

I know I wrote an entry before with some links to how to do this before, but I just recently went through the process again and wanted to write down the specific steps.

First to install Java 5, go to the Sun download page, select JDK, and get the non-RPM installer for Linux.

I was always impressed with Microsoft's RDP protocol and Remote desktop software because it was so fast that it felt like I was using a local machine. I use it to connect to my work machine to do work (rather than try to run things on one my home machines because it ends up being faster than that). I wished that there was something like that for Linux. I didn't particularly like using regular remote X, so VNC was my main option. I looked at NoMachine NX, but I didn't want to pay money for software I wasn't going to put serious use into. There is now a free NX server, called--you guessed it--"FreeNX."

I found this page and this page useful in installing Java 1.5 in Debian Linux. I had Blackdown Java 1.4.2 installed already, but wanted to keep that installation. So I had to change the links in /etc/alternatives using the update-alternatives command. I wrote a quick script to go through all the Java-related links:

#!/bin/sh
update-alternatives --config java
update-alternatives --config javac
update-alternatives --config ControlPanel
update-alternatives --config HtmlConverter
update-alternatives --config appletviewer
update-alternatives --config extcheck
update-alternatives --config idlj
update-alternatives --config jar
update-alternatives --config jarsigner
update-alternatives --config javadoc
update-alternatives --config javah
update-alternatives --config javap
update-alternatives --config javaws
update-alternatives --config jdb
update-alternatives --config keytool
update-alternatives --config policytool
update-alternatives --config rmic
update-alternatives --config rmid
update-alternatives --config rmiregistry
update-alternatives --config serialver
update-alternatives --config libjavaplugin_oji.so