I ended up in a situation where Google Earth updated, and the new version does not work. I wanted to revert back to the just prior version, and I discovered I had not made a copy of the prior version's package file. Browsing Google's APT server greeted me with many unhelpful 404 pages... browsing the APT server discouraged!

So there is a standard to how the repositories are laid out. Knowing certain things allows by substitution to correctly arrive at, in this case, other versions of packages that should be also on the APT server.

A very annoying problem came back to a Xubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) system quite suddenly and annoyingly would not go away. This system would not obtain a DHCP address. The Network Manager tray icon was not even the "spinning" icon indicating it was trying to obtain an address from the DHCP server. I checked around the Internet for suggestions how to resolve this issue. Nothing we located and tested resolved the issue.

I found myself trapped within a Vinagre Remote Desktop Viewer VNC session to a remote Linux server console. Trying all keys to find the magic key to pop mouse control back to my local Linux system, finally I found it: the F10 key! In the mean time, I had found the key to make the Vinagre on-line help come up, was navigating through it using keyboard only... and what few help suggestions there were, they always told to go to the Vinagre menu to click on something...

Some time ago, I was lamenting that Bash did not have something comparable to PARSE found in Rexx / Open Object Rexx. Shortly I received a reply from Dallas Legan that he had built a tool capable of exposing the power of PARSE and allow it to be used within Bash scripts. That concept totally rocks! That tool may be found here:

"A Simple, General Command Line Filter In REXX"
http://www.scoug.com/os24u/2001/scoug010.parsetool.html

For some time I had been of the opinion that sending emails from the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) simply had to be more complicated than with Windows using Blat. Not so! Over the weekend I learned of sendEmail which offers equivalent functionality.

There is a nasty / annoying bug in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Linux which prevents attaching USB storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDD) and Flash memory stick drives. With the assistance of others in the Ubuntu bug tracker system, I just arrived at a little script which successfully corrects the Plug-n-Play (PnP) detection problem. It is as follows, fixext_backup.sh:

Note: You need to run this script as root (aka sudo the script).

I recently got a bit bored with my usual Clearlooks GNOME theme. I wanted something with non-rounded controls and dark blue active title bars. Here is what I came up with.

1) First I added a couple of Ubuntu GNOME theme related packages. Both are required as Mist comes from one and Gion is in the other.

2) Next customize the Mist theme as follows:

System \ Preferences \ Appearance \ Mist \ Customize...

Some time ago I found documentation lacking for how to successfully configure name-based Apache Virtual Host (Multi-Site) and allow one of the domain names to have mod_ssl (SSL) enabled while having only a SINGLE static IP address. The answer turned out to be... "You must set up your Apache configuration files correctly!" Here is what I discovered.

I recently switched my email client from Mozilla Thunderbird 2.x to Mozilla SeaMonkey (latest) as Mozilla Thunderbird 3.x is so undesirable. Things were working quite well. I found the place to set which component of SeaMonkey it opens to on start up and selected the Mail component.

However there was one annoyance! In Firefox when a web page has a mailto: link, clicking that link would not open a new SeaMonkey email window... I would only see the SeaMonkey program flash in the lower panel within Ubuntu Gnome desktop.

There seems to be a bug in Ubuntu in that when you reboot the system all remote CUPS printer connections are forgotten. This sounded like something needing a bit of scripting magic, so I went searching for how to accomplish that. Turns out it was quite simple actually. The utility lpadmin will be your friend to command line administer printers / print queues. The first lpadmin command attaches to the CUPS shared network printer queue via the IPP protocol, and the second lpadmin command sets the printer as the system default.