Friday, February 26, 2010

Thunderbird Browser association lost after installing FF 3.6 on Jaunty

Thunderbird 3 was working fine until the upgrade. Then clicking links in emails just stopped working. I click, nothing happens. Eventually I figured out that the easy way (or the only way) to change the dead browser association is to try the links without FF 3.6 open. When I did that, Thunderbird asked what it should use to open the link, then I got to point it to the right thing. Not sure why, since I verified the default browser setting already, and FF 3.6 was from the Launchpad repository, not a version I downloaded directly from Mozilla...

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Live a Ubuntu life: SCIM

I needed to use SCIM for a number of applications on Jaunty, including Firefox and aMSN. The problem is with apps that weren't installed from Ubuntu repositories. The supplied Firefox 3.0 works fine, but not 3.5 or 3.6 I downloaded from Mozilla. There's no Ubuntu version of aMSN for that matter. The problem lies with QT it seems, which SCIM needs to run with and be compatible with the QT used to compile the target apps.

I solved the aMSN piece with help from this Ubuntu community documentation, but Firefox just wouldn't work. Eventually I installed FF 3.5 and 3.6 from Launchpad repositories, and that brought those apps in line with SCIM. BTW, that also solves my Java plug-in issue with them.

Monday, February 15, 2010

How to change port for NX

Sometimes you want your SSH daemon to run on a non-default (22) port, and this would affect your NX server as well, as it's based its service on SSH. So besides making the change in SSH, here's the places you need to modify for NX:
  • /etc/nxserver/node.conf
    change SSHDPort to your custom sshd port
    This file is /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg for NX Free Edition (non OSS version)
  • (this seems to only apply to non-OSS version)/usr/NX/etc/server.cfg
    change SSHDPort and SSHDAuthPort to your custom sshd port

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

VBox goes defunct

Sometimes when I use script to start a VirtualBox VM - usually I use that if the networking option needs to change by location - the VirtualBox process goes defunct. Then no subsequent run will go because of that stuck process. I'd have to find its parent (VBoxSvc) and do a "kill -9" on it.