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!

If you’ve been wondering what’s behind Linux Mint 8’s fabulous OEM install, here’s the deal: Mint won’t boot into a desktop from the live cd, but straight into the installation routine.

Installation itself works as usual, however a default user called “oem” is created which you can later rename to your liking be editing & replacing “oem” in the following files:

/etc/passwd

/etc/shadow

/etc/gshadow

/etc/group

Summary: “OEM installation” is a quick, painless way to install Linux Mint 8 without having the live environment (GNOME and friends) taking up precious RAM that could otherwise serve as i/o buffer cache, speeding up disk / stick /cdrom access, generally speeding up the installation process.

I recently upgraded from Linux Mint 7 (based on ubuntu 9.04) to Mint 8 (based on 9.10), losing my dual monitor setup in the process. I have the gnome panel set on the large screen (DVI1), with the small 15″ VGA-connected monitor displaying a status page to its right.

In order to get the panel to display on the DVI display again (karmic put it on the 15″ vga one), I found the following command after a bit of googling:

xrandr --output DVI1 --mode 1680x1050 --output DVI1 --primary --left-of VGA1 --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768


The “–primary” option seems to have been the key to get karmic to recognize the bigger monitor again.