Author: cobra_admin

Unfortunately, you cannot play all DVDs in Ubuntu out of the box. Some packages need to be installed manually due to legal issues in some countries. If you find yourself getting errors like VLC is unable to open the MRL, chances are this is your problem. It’s a simple fix (paste this into a terminal/console): …

Doxygen highlighting is set up by default on most Vim installations, but for some reason it’s disabled. There are two options for enabling it. First, it can be enabled globally. This means adding the parameters to the global Vim configuration. Note that you may need to be root for this to work (ie: sudo echo …

If you’re trying to compile C programs for Linux on an AVR32 architecture, you’re going to have to get the avr32-linux-gcc cross compiler. Note that you can’t use the avr32-gcc compiler, as this compiler makes programs which do not run on an operating system (ie: they talk to the system directly), which will not run …

Let’s say you have a file type whose contents are in XML format but have a different file extension such as .tim . If you want to edit these files with Vim with syntax highlighting, simply add the following to ~/.vimrc (affects only your Vim environment) or /etc/vim/vimrc (affects everyone’s Vim environment): au BufNewFile,BufRead *.tim …

If you’re getting a FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user [username] Error when attempting to connect to postgres as a specific user, chances are you need to change some security settings. Postgresql, by default, only allows you to connect to postgres if the postgres username is the same as your username on the operating system. In other …

The learning curve for LaTeX documents can be a steep one. This step-by-step guide covers installing and setting up the LaTeX environment, and creating and compiling your first document so that you can read and distribute it. Setting up the LaTeX environment A few things need to be installed before we can start creating documents. …

There are times when you want to pause a process and continue it later. For example, when a process is using all the computer’s resources and you need to access something or execute something else. This can all be done via the kill -STOP and kill -CONT commands. First you need to grap the pid …

Some mail servers require you to connect on a certain port. Evolution (the default mail client for the gnome desktop environment) doesn’t have a setting for the server port number. You can set this by adding :[port_no] to the end of the server address. For example, to use the mail server mail.example.com on port 587, …

One of the niceties of linux distros like Ubuntu is that you can ‘mount’ ISO files. An ISO file, or ISO image, is an archive of a CD or DVD. By mounting an ISO file, you can read the data as though you inserted the CD into your computer. Ubuntu will even regard it as …

This is a very specific post about using the £8.97 VGA webcam from Tesco with Ubuntu 10.04, namely with Skype. These instructions might work with other webcams and/or other linux distros, but I have not tested this personally. If this does/doesn’t work for your webcam/distro combination then please leave a comment describing your experiences. Okay, …