Khanun Fodder

vesamenu.c32: Not a COM32R image

Knut Torgersen — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:57:55 +0000

A rather annoying error when attempting to install Linux on a computer for a neighbour:

vesamenu.c32: Not a COM32R image boot:

The solution was ridiculously simple: Hit the Tab key and enter the command live. Problem solved.

Huawei U8800 boot menu

Knut Torgersen — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:59:02 +0000

To get the boot menu where you can among other things factory reset the Huawei U8800, do the following. If your phone still has the “old” 2.1 or 2.2 versions of Android, just power off and then restart. If, on the other hand, you have 2.3 (Gingerbread), you may have to power off the phone, slide off the back cover, take out the battery, wait a few seconds, reassemble and then do the following:

Press and hold the Volume up+Power keys and keep holding them until your phone vibrates. After a few seconds, you should get an exclamation point inside a triangle and a 3D android, followed by the boot menu. Now you can reset to factory default. You do this with the menu item wipe data/factory reset. Do under no circumstances select wipe cache partition, as this will brick your phone unless you know excactly what you are doing!

Interestingly, all menu items are all lower case, for some reason, with no initial capital letters. To select an option, arrow down with the volume buttons and select using the power button. Do check you have te correct option before doing this!

Removing a service/upgrading MySQL

Knut Torgersen — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:06:01 +0000

I found out I should upgrade my MySQL from 5.1 to 5.5. No big deal, I thought… But of course the installer did an excellent job of being difficult. First, the installer did not at all mention it found an already existing version of the software, attempting a parallell config, something I of course did not detect until it complained about the service port 3306 already being used. Ignore and continue.

Next, it wanted to install a service so MySQL would run on system startup. Great – do that. No? MySQL already exists as a system service. OK – cancel install and remove version 5.1, then rerun the config… No. The config proogram was not visible in the menu and I didn’t bother looking for it, so I reran the install.

This time I got a maintenance install asking if I wanted to repair or remove, so I removed. Now I essentially had a system with no MySQL at all. So what happened? Complaints about the MySQL service running, of course. So, I had to delete the service. Manually. Great.

I opened the command prompt “Run as administrator”, mind you, and ran the following:

C:\Program Files\Console>sc delete MySQL [SC] DeleteService SUCCESS

And then I continued the setup. Woohoo…! MySQL service still running. How great that the installer does not check to see if there are any changes. So I quit the setup and uninstalled/reinstalled once more. This time it worked.

MP3 revisited – Fedora 15

Knut Torgersen — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:28:10 +0000

New Fedora and – you guessed it – new “denials of service” regarding MP3 music and other goodies. Turned out that it was “easy” getting what I wanted. Do these two:

[root@saruman ~]# rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm [root@saruman ~]# rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

followed by:

[root@saruman ~]# yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree gstreamer-ffmpeg

And – now it works.

No connection to network

Knut Torgersen — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:56:24 +0000

Annoying. My freshly installed Fedora 15 connected just fine to the Internet, but refused to even show my local network. Nothing. Actually, all I got was “Failed to retrieve share list from server.” Nice.

First thing I tried was adding one of the missing items to /etc/hosts/ – nothing useful came out of that. So I moved on. Next item was checking the Samba installation. One article I found said not trusting “what should be installed to actually being installed”, so I ran the following command as root:

[root@saruman ~]# yum install samba

And, of course, still nothing. Boot, then? Since I installed a new package? Nope. OK, what’s the status of two essential services, then?

[root@saruman ~]# service smb status smb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd daemon used to provide SMB network services. Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb) Active: inactive (dead) CGroup: name=systemd:/system/smb.service [root@saruman ~]# service nmb status nmb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd and nmbd daemons used to provide SMB network services. Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/nmb) Active: inactive (dead) CGroup: name=systemd:/system/nmb.service

Oops…? Let’s restart them and try again.

[root@saruman ~]# service smb restart Restarting smb (via systemctl): [ OK ] [root@saruman ~]# service smb status smb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd daemon used to provide SMB network services. Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb) Active: active (running) since Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:29:37 +0100; 5s ago Process: 1811 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Main PID: 1821 (smbd) CGroup: name=systemd:/system/smb.service ? 1821 smbd -D ? 1823 smbd -D [root@saruman ~]# service nmb restart Restarting nmb (via systemctl): [ OK ] [root@saruman ~]# service nmb status nmb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd and nmbd daemons used to provide SMB network services. Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/nmb) Active: active (running) since Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:29:59 +0100; 3s ago Process: 1870 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/nmb start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Main PID: 1879 (nmbd) CGroup: name=systemd:/system/nmb.service ? 1879 nmbd -D [root@saruman ~]# service smb status smb.service - SYSV: Starts and stops the Samba smbd daemon used to provide SMB network services. Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb) Active: active (running) since Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:29:37 +0100; 35s ago Process: 1811 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS) Main PID: 1821 (smbd) CGroup: name=systemd:/system/smb.service ? 1821 smbd -D ? 1823 smbd -D

You guessed it. No success so far. BUT… I did not get an error message. Hmm… Wonderful. A complex problem. Same basic result, but different causes. Next one out – the firewall. It turns out that the firewall is set to maximum security, meaning it does not allow certain types of traffic. The following command starts your firewall GUI:

[root@saruman ~]# system-config-firewall

Now, two rather essential services are not ticked off: Samba and Samba Client. I enabled them (as in the printscreen above), pressed the Apply button top left and tried again.

Touchdown!

GUI Font reset

Knut Torgersen — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:49:04 +0000

One of my neighbors rang the doorbell last night, gave me his laptop and asked if I could have a look at it. It wasn’t very hard to discover what he wanted. All menus and all writing on the screen were total and utter gibberish. At first, I believed he’d turned on Burmese, but after a closer look I guessed it had to be a symbol font.

By glancing at the top left symbol, I figured it had to be Ubuntu Linux (with Gnome) of some recent version, meaning I would be able to get into things by figuring out what to press by looking at the icons in the menus, so I opened a command shell and started typing exactly the following:

gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name

gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/document_font_name

gconftool-2 --unset /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name

gconftool-2 --unset /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font

gconftool-2 --unset /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_font

The gibberish after the --unset switch is not a file path you can expand automatically, so just type the first one, hit Enter, and then modify the line as needed for the rest. If using bash or similar shells, arrow up to retrieve the previous command line should work, saving you a lot of typing.

Well, already after the first entry, I was able to read the menus on the desktop again and after #3, even the command line looked way better.

Oh, NO! I forgot my Windows admin password locally on the PC!

Knut Torgersen — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:31:05 +0000

Instead of crying and thrashing your desktop (and eventually reformatting your PC when you sort of calming down), download this utility:

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Burn the image to a disk, boot from the CD and follow the instructions.

Enabling MP3 and other no-nos on Fedora 12

Knut Torgersen — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:59:46 +0000

First, go here: http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

Then, RPM Fusion free for Fedora 10, 11 and 12

Then, yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-flumpegdemux gstreamer-tools gstreamer-python gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-bad totem-gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-bad-extras

Simple “reset” of Notes

Knut Torgersen — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:18:45 +0000

If your Notes is in trouble, you can try and fix it by deleting three files. Close notes if it is running. Locate C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\Data\ and remove

desktop6.ndk (or desktop8.ndk)
bookmark.nsf
cache.ndk

Alternatively, rename or move the files out of the way. Restart Notes and see if it works. if it didn’t, see this article.

“Reset” Notes so you can reconfigure it

Knut Torgersen — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:02:25 +0000

If Lotus notes goes dead for some reason and it refuses to start og gives off strange error messages, you can reset it and reconfigure the user from scratch as if Notes was recently installed. Do this:

Delete these files from C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\Data\

bookmark.nsf
cache.NDK
names.nfs
desktop6.ndk (or desktop8.ndk)

Find notes.ini in (normally) C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\ Find the section timezone and delete this line and the rest of that file. Restart Notes and it should ask you to setup the user again.