If you run Ubuntu and you suddenly discover that your /tmp is running out of space then open up /etc/mtab

Look for the entry that defines /tmp and put it in comment.

Don’t forget to do a reboot afterwards.

Those of you that have been following my twitter feed might have read that I recently had an unfortunate encounter with the street pavement after a fall with my bicycle. A lovely day turned into a nightmare after visiting the hospital, the doctors said that my jaw was broken.

I had surgery last week and I’m now slowly recovering.

I got a copy of the DICAM images (see my post from last year on how to open these on Linux) and was very curious to see how my mouth looked like.

I had surgery on crack nr. 1 and now my teeth are put in some kind of brace to prevent my chin from moving horizontally. The other cracks, 2 and 3, are not going to be treated immediately (either my body deals with it in the ‘natural’ way or I’ll have surgery in the far future).

Click on the images to get a more detailed view.

After the upgrade to Ubuntu 9 I was unable to use the numeric keypad on my external keyboard that’s connected to my laptop. I’ve switched every possible option in the keyboard preferences on and off and found out that you have to disable the Pointer can be controlled using the keypad option. That’s under System, Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse Keys.

My upgrade to Ubuntu 9 resulted in quite some frustration (ipv6, cryptodisk, …) but there’s one nice though … installing Google Earth is very easy.

Then double click on the .deb file that’s the result of the above.

Found on http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Jaunty#Google_Earth

Just a small reminder on how to create patch files.

Short entry as a self reminder. Change file permissions in a directory:

I’ve recently set up some new msql-servers that had to fetch their data from a shared mountpoint. I changed the mysql configuration so that it was no longer looking in /var/lib/mysql but in /mounted/mysql. Unfortunately mysql failed to start because of insufficient permissions( type=1503 operation=â€?inode_permissionâ€? requested_mask=â€?rw::â€? denied_mask=â€?rw::â€? name=â€?/mounted/mysql/ibdata1″ pid=7588 profile=â€?/usr/sbin/mysqldâ€? namespace=â€?defaultâ€?

This is caused by apparmor. You need to edit the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld and then look for the lines /var/lib/mysql. Replace this with your path and restart apparmor and mysql.

I had an issue on my workstation with Ubuntu 8 where whenever I played some sound with Firefox (a movie, music, …) I could no longer play sound with any other mediaplayer (banshee, …).

I resolved this by installing libflashsupport

Recently I needed to wipe a couple of disks because I wanted to sell them. I’ve played around with shred under Linux (like from a Knoppix live cd) but why go through all this hassle? I encountered Darik’s Boot and Nuke. Boot from the cd, select the drives and press F10. That’s all there is.

A recent upgrade of Hotmail prevented me from sending new mails with Firefox 3 on Ubuntu. I could hit “reply” but it was impossible to edit the body of the e-mail. The editor just remained disabled.

The solution to this is fairly simple. Open Firefox, type in “about:config” in the addressbar and look for the setting “general.useragent.vendor“. On my Ubuntu machine this was set to “Ubuntu”. If you change this to “Firefox”, quit Firefox and restart it then you should be able to compose new e-mails in Hotmail.

On the other hand you might also consider using a reliable free mail provider.