hello, hellm

I was pretty excited to upgrade to Firefox 3 beta 5, but I knew I could expect some extensions to crap out on me for a while before they were updated by their maintainers.  I threw caution to the wind and updated Ubuntu.  “Eek!” I cried, “no Firebug!”  Firebug is one of my indispensible front-end tools.  I love it (and depend on it!).  So, I looked around the internets a bit, and decided to try the 1.1 beta.  No luck.  Then I learned that there’s an Ubuntu package for firebug.  Here’s what to do:

1. upgrade to Firefox 3 (you’ve probably already done that part!)
2. uninstall your current (broken) Firebug from the Tools > Add-Ons window
3. run “sudo apt-get install firebug” from the command line

That should do it.

A client was having some ongoing trouble with Ubuntu Dapper getting confused about which sound card to use with Skype - and whether to use a sound card at all. They didn’t have any need for the PC speaker, so we took the easy way out on their machines: we disabled the onboard card in the BIOS. Works like a charm!

Over the weekend, I took the leap to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. This was a much smoother process than my last upgrade. My wireless broke again, but all I had to do was undo my “fix” for ndiswrapper, installing the latest version:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils-1.8

After a restart, my wireless card was recognized, and Network Manager took care of the rest. I must say: so far this distribution is making me pretty happy. It’s really starting to feel like the promise: everything just works.

I’m a fan of the Mozilla application icons, and I find the Ubuntu replacements for Firefox and Thunderbird a bit disorienting. That’s why I’ve used a script to restore the Mozilla icons. I was mildly dismayed to find it didn’t work after upgrading to Edgy - that’s because “Edgy is the first version of Ubuntu that symlinks /bin/sh to /bin/dash instead of /bin/bash” (says rama001). Like it says in the first link above, use this instead:

sudo bash restore_mozilla_icons

Or change the first line of the script to:

#! /bin/bash

I’d waited this long to upgrade to Edgy because I’d heard stories about X not working after upgrade (I’m rather partial to my graphical user interface) and I’ve spent some time wrangling with ndiswrapper and Network Manager to get my laptop’s internal Broadcom adapter working with WPA encryption, so I felt sure that would break.

Good thing I decided to try this on my laptop first. First, I had no X - despite that both xserver and ati support were installed. That meant that the fixes suggested for other users, installing or reinstalling those packages, wouldn’t work. Of course, I tried anyway, but to no avail. I decided to run the reconfigure wizard for xorg, and the conf file it created let me login to X. I haven’t looked at the files to determine the actual cause, but it’s clear that Edgy found something awry in the conf that worked with Dapper.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

And my wireless was gone. The culprit, as it so often is, is ndiswrapper. I tried a few approaches, but the one that seems to have done the trick (let me know if this doesn’t work, or if there’s a better solution):

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.8
sudo apt-get remove ndiswrapper-utils-1.1

I was getting an error running modprobe ndiswrapper before this approach. Afterward, it ran successfully.

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

However, Network Manager couldn’t see my wireless card until I restarted X (restarting the Network Manager daemon and other network services wouldn’t do it). When X came back up, so did my wireless connection.
Success!