What have you been fettling today (Tech-wise)

[ABlipInContinuity]

This thread seemed like a good idea. It works for bike fettling, so why not?

I've got my main PC's main OS updated to Vista service pack 1. Also swapped a disk into a caddy and formatted it ready to to backups.

The media centre project has been rejuvinated as I've fired up the spare PC we are thinking of connecting up to the TV in the living room. It seems to have a display hardware/driver issue which won't go away, so may need to scrounge a new video card from somewhere before that can continue. In the mean time, I'm installing the necessary firewall/AV on it and then working out how I can use it to play back media recorded from Windows Media Centre.

I think I might download Ubuntu and use it to overwrite the existing install of OpenSuse which co-exists with Vista on the main PC.

And I'm contemplating running IPCOP on an ancient pentium box that's acting as a shelf for the printer...

[Pingu]

I've been struggling to open files on the laptop (XP) with the desktop (Ubuntu). Samba seems to work intermittently 

[Craig]

On the media centre theme:
I've installed Ushare on my Linkstation NAS, so it can now work as a media server for the Xbox 360. I tried this a while back, but it didn't work - I've now figured you need to make sure Ushare is running with the "-x" option for Xbox compatibility. And I think you can only have one directory shared.
So now I can dump Xvid videos on the NAS and watch them through the Xbox which is connected to a projector in the living room. Its also good for slideshows of photos.
Though its not so good for MP3s, as Ushare doesn't support ID3 tags etc. So the Xbox doesn't sort the MP3s by artist / album, its just a long list of tracks, which is annoying if its over 4000 tracks.

I think I might try FUPPES instead, which apparently does support metadata and has other Xbox specific enhancements.

[ABlipInContinuity]

Ubuntu downloaded and currently being written to a CD. Install to commence shortly.

Any joy Pingu?

[Jaded]

I've been de-localizing my MacBook Pro with Drive Genius. 10GB of unused localizations. (sic)

[tonycollinet]

I've made a "Ubuntu onna stick" USB memory stick.

It boots fine in my work & home laptop - but won't boot on my desktop PC.

[ABlipInContinuity]

I've been de-localizing my MacBook Pro with Drive Genius. 10GB of unused localizations. (sic)

de-localizing?

I've failed to install Ubuntu onto my desktop PC.
Partway through the installation I get "The Display Server has reset itself 6 times in the last 90 seconds. Something is going on. Wait two minutes and retry".

I have tried an install in "safe display mode".
I can apparently edit a configuration file and make the defaut video mode VESA and then try installing my specific video drivers. I'll try that later on.

In the mean time, I'm trying to work out a quick way of printing multiple web pages.

[andygates]

It boots fine in my work & home laptop - but won't boot on my desktop PC.

BIOS settings > boot order?

[tonycollinet]

It boots fine in my work & home laptop - but won't boot on my desktop PC.

BIOS settings > boot order?

Done that - gives "boot error" - before it even gets to the Ubuntu bit. Must be s motherboard/bios issue.

[bobajobrob]

Trying to fix a problem with the flash plugin and pulse audio whereby sound is b0rked and flash video freezes after resume from suspend with one or more flash videos open in firefox. The best I've got so far is that killall -HUP firefox seems to fix it

[bobajobrob]

Fixed a problem with a corrupt firefox bookmarks database. It wouldn't let me create or delete and bookmarks, and I had bookmarked some, uh, undesirable stuff. Of course bookmarks are used like browsing history for auto-completion of URLs, so I had this stuff popping up randomly when I type in a URL, and no way to get rid of it. Fixed by moving places.sqlite and the bookmarkbackups directory, to force recreation of the bookmarks database.

[Pingu]

Ubuntu downloaded and currently being written to a CD. Install to commence shortly.

Any joy Pingu?

No 

[Pingu]

Installed Ubuntu 8.10 on Mrs P's brother's laptop  Can't change the screen resolution from 800x600 

[geraldc]

I've been using pwnage tool to unlock my 2g iPhone. That's so I can use it with a Hong Kong provider rather than roaming with O2.
O2 want to charge me £6 per mb for data usage while roaming. For £6 I can get unlimited data usage in Hong Kong with a local sim.

£6 per mb is ludicrous. That's £6000 per gb. I'm using a 3 3G modem, and 3 charge £10 per gb for international roaming.

[ed_o_brain]

Just finished installing Mozilla Sunbird onto my Aspire One. It caused a bit of a headache as it's not included in the software repositories. I even managed to get an icon onto the Linpus Linux desktop an everything.

I've kept some instructions so drop me a line if you need to know how.