A while ago, mintupdate stopped working for me, claiming it was unable to grant execute permissions to the non-admin user. Investigating a bit further, I found that my regular user “hoover” had gone missing (for whatever reason) from the “admin” group; this can be fixed by re-adding your regular user to this group.

Simply open a shell and type

sudo usermod -G admin <your_username>

and mintupdate should work again.

The recent google chrome beta release caught my interest because it seems that extensions are now enabled (one had to jump through burning hoops to enable them in earlier beta builds; ok, ’twas only a command line switch, but still …;-))

I installed the latest beta from the Debian beta channel, and after installing a couple of extensions, I find chrome now offers a much better browsing experience than previous Linux builds. In order of usefulness, I installed

• adthwart (simple adblocker for chrome with more features on the way)
• gmail checker
• rss notifier
• gpdf (converts pdf links in docs to point to google docs and its conversion tool)
• Wave notifier (ok, not all that useful, but it’s still nice to have it available)

Using these extensions (available from here), I’m ready to give Chrome another try as my primary browser for a while. The speed sure is 2nd to none (esp. in the JavaScript department), and even Flash based movie playback works better than in my standard Ubuntu Firefox setup.

Today I was forced to manually extract the contents of a debian package which could not be installed the “normal” way using dpkg due to broken dependencies.

Afer some googling, I found the following command line on Vijay’s blog:

dpkg-deb -x {deb-package name} /var/tmp

which extacts the files from “deb-package-name” to a dir of my choosing to /var/tmp.

From there, I could install them by tar pipe (after checking the directory contents first of course, as to not overwrite anything important using

cd /var/tmp/dir; tar -cvpf - . | tar -C / -xpf -

I hope this may help someone stuck in the same hole in the future. Thanks to Vijay for the original posting!

After updating virtualbox to version 3.1 today, I faced the problem of having to update the guest additions that come with the new version on a headless xp guest. Here’s the command line to attach the guest iso to the xp guest instance:

VBoxManage modifyvm rfactor --dvd /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso

Make sure to use the correct path to the vboxguest iso file (this example is from CentOS 5.x).

Hope you find it useful, thanks to Sasquatch from the virtualbox forums for the help!