Category Archives: OS

Operating Systems

Date Display in Ubuntu

Hacks & Slacks, Ubuntu

Don’t like the normal date display in Ubuntu?  It can be slightly modified using the usual methods, but if you want full customization you can do so with a tool called the dconf Editor.  It’s a part of the dconf-tools package:

sudo apt install dconf-tools

Once you have it installed you can then run the dconf Editor.  To create your own custom display for the time and date, dig down to this location:

Com –> Canonical –> Indicator –> Datetime

Change the time-format to “custom” and enter your desired pattern.  I used this:

%a %d %b %H:%M

or

| %a %d %b %Y | %H:%M |

or

| %Y-%m-%d %a | %H:%M |

Feel free to experiment with other variables.  This first configuration gives me day date month 24-hour:time.

Have fun with that.

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Store Blocked in Win10 after Upgrade

Windows

I updated many (near 50) virtual Win10 machines to the latest release build.  Took about two hours per machine.  At least some of those machines no longer were able to access the Store.

The Store Is Blocked
The Store Is Blocked

I love reading “Check with your IT or system administrator” because that’s me.

Google has a lot of results for 0x80070EC, but including Win10 and Store helped me track down a Registry key location.  Since we have no Group Policy in place concerning the Store, I went ahead and remove the restriction.  You can find the key in question at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –> SOFTWARE –> Policies –> Microsoft –> WindowsStore and it’s called RemoveWindowsStore.

Edit the Registry
Edit the Registry

You want to change that 1 to a 0.

Edit Dword
Edit Dword

No reboot required.  Go Store all you want.

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Clementine DB Error (crashes)

Applications, Ubuntu

I was having some trouble starting Clementine this morning.  This came after I initiated a reboot.  Reboots and further attempts to start Clementine all ended in Clementine crashing.  Something was seriously misaligned.

I started it from the command line (by typing clementine and hitting Enter).  This also resulted in a crash but did give some interesting output in the Terminal.  Near the end I found this information in an error:

CREATE TABLE directories (  path TEXT NOT NULL,  subdirs INTEGER NOT NULL)

A quick search found this article which did have a viable solution.  It is a rather heavy-handed solution and I do not recommend it unless nothing else works.

Instead I modified that solution into one which didn’t delete all of my playlists and configuration changes for Clementine.  First I simply moved the entire Clementine configuration folder (similar to their deletion except I still have the files):

mv ~/.config/Clementine ~/.config/Clementine_old

Starting Clementine in the usual manner now worked.  So the theory was sound.  Now I wanted to see if I could get my database back.  I closed Clementine and ran this command:

mv ~/.config/Clemetine_old/clementine.db ~/.config/Clementine/clementine.db

When I launched Clementine again I had my database back (including all of my playlists).  Next I wanted to see if I could keep my old configuration file so I again closed Clementine and ran this command:

mv ~/.config/Clementine_old/Clementine.conf ~/.config/Clementine_old/Clementine.conf

This also worked.  So it would appear that it was perhaps not file corruption (as the article linked above suggests) but rather something more subtle and complex.  Regardless, at this point I was satisfied with the success of my fix, but my scientific curiosity was wondering about the other files.  Altogether there were six files in the Clementine configuration folder:

Clementine.conf
clementine.db
clementine.db-journal
clementine.db.bak
clementine-scope-backup.db
jamendo.db

(The clementine.db-journal file may not be present on all systems.)

I have no idea what those other four files do (well, except the jamendo.db folder which is presumably the database if one uses Jamendo through Clementine), but I tried moving each one back into the main folder one at a time (restarting Clementine between each one).  None of them had any effect.  This further supports the thought that it was a problem with file corruption.

I’m still not clear what caused the issue, but this is as far as I am willing to investigate at this time.  Hope this helps you.

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USB Drives Mount as Read-Only

Hacks & Slacks, Ubuntu

Today Nautilus decided it just didn’t like my mounted USB devices.  At first it was a brand new 64 GB FAT32 drive, and so I figured I would just reformat it.  This didn’t change anything; Nautilus (the file browser in Ubuntu 14.04) was insisting that I had read-only permissions on the drive and would not allow me to write to it.

Apparently there is a bug (not necessarily in Nautilus because I am told this will work with other file browsers) that is pretty easily fixed.

Open your terminal and run these two commands:

mv ~/.config/nautilus ~/.config/nautilus-bak
sudo killall nautilus

The first one moves the configuration file for Nautilus (modify if you are using a different file browser) to a backup copy.  The second kills (stops, terminates) the running Nautilus session.  You will need to launch a file browser window to get Nautilus (or other) running again, but that should return your USB drives to writable.

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Skype Lacks Win10 Love

Applications, Windows

Building out new Win10 machines on our network, specifically a master of masters in VMware’s esxi.  Probably this can happen in a bare-metal Win10 installation as well.  I haven’t tested it much beyond what you find here.

I tried installing Skype from the Web.  I suppose there are those who will whine I’m supposed to install it from the Windows Store (or however they have branded their store in Windows 10).  Regardless, since I want to ensure I am getting the full version (and not some stripped down Metro-we-don’t-call-it-that-anymore-and-besides-we-don’t-use-it-but-we-do version) I downloaded and installed from the usual executable.

I tried this and it failed.  I found myself caught in an installer loop.

12-10-2015_[1]
So exciting to get started…
12-10-2015_[2]
Fuck Skype Click to Call. Seriously, who does this?
12-10-2015_[3]
Oh, yes. Just what the doctor ordered. Not!
12-10-2015_[4]
The Moment of Truth
12-10-2015_[5]
This looks like the same installer?
12-10-2015_[6]
Yeah, every time…
Since I have not yet installed using the regular installer successfully, I cannot say whether this is by design.  Which is to say, perhaps Microsoft is attempting to force users to use the installer found in their store.  If this is the case, they are doing a lousy job of communicating this fact.  Regardless I was able to get an installer that worked.

Go get this one instead:  http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-msi

That will work.

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How the Application Experience Service Fux Firefox

Administration, Virtualization, Windows

I have been having this problem on a VM pool replica master.  Don’t worry about what that means if you are not familiar with machine pools (VMware); it’s not important.  The important part is that I was not able to save certain files I was downloading with Firefox to the Desktop.

The download process would proceed as expected up until the end of the download.  Then when Firefox would merge the two files of the download into the single file which was the actual downloaded file, it would fail.  Every time.

I tried running Firefox in its safe mode (no extensions).  Nada.

I tried using Revo Uninstaller to utterly remove all traces of Firefox (as IE, Chrome, and Opera did not have this issue) from the machine.  After rebooting and re-installing Firefox the problem persisted.

Eventually I found an obscure mention of a service called Application Experience.  If that service is disabled, this sort of thing can happen.  I checked my personal VM and found that this service was set to Manual.

So I changed that replica master to Manual and rebooted it.

No problem saving the 64 bit Java installer downloaded through Firefox to the Desktop.

It’s an odd connection.  Hope this helps you too.

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The New Disk Utility in El Capitan

Mac, News & Annoyances

Two steps forward, one step back.  Often in computing it’s a way of life.

There are a lot of new features in El Capitan and its related hardware.  If you want to learn about them you can find hordes of information in them Interwebz.  But if you are thinking something might be amiss, you’ll have difficulty slogging through the praises to locate the deficiencies.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple and Macs.  Well, I dislike them only as much as I dislike all computers and operating systems.  Same thing.  It’s just that Mac fans, greater than any other group of technology adherents, have the awesomest rose-colored glasses.

If you gander at this article on the latest version of Disk Utility, you will find much praise.

It made sense that repairing permissions on files for which OS X knew precisely what settings should be in place could fix random faults…. Even so, from all reports, permissions repairs had little real effect for years—it just made us feel better.

So here at work we support more than 200 Macs.  I can assure you that at least some of the time Repair Permissions does actually fix permissions and thus fix issues facing real users.  Yes, that gives me all the feels; but it does that by actually fixing problems.  It is not praiseworthy to remove such functionality.

Have the new security measures introduced in El Capitan removed the need for future permissions repairs?  This remains to be seen.  Nonetheless, it was doing good work.  Whether that work is now unnecessary is yet an open question.

What about Disk Repair?

Select a drive or a partition and click First Aid, and a seemingly much-changed repair operation proceeds.

It doesn’t just seem different.  It works differently and in at least one scenario fails utterly to repair the disk (presumably the partition table).

I used dd to copy a drive from an ssd to a thumb-drive of smaller capacity.  After dd finished it’s copy operation I checked the drive in GParted which reported no partitions.  This was likely due to the partition table including a partition-end beyond the end of the drive.  This is expected.  Just need to repair the partition table.  The drive booted as expected; all the data was good.

I attached that drive to an El Capitan machine and discovered the new Disk Utility.  Being that all the usual repair options were missing I ran First Aid.  That completed successfully.  Nothing was changed: GParted still reported no partitions.

I then attached the drive to a Yosemite machine and ran the old Disk Repair.  This also completed successfully.  The difference of course is that when I checked again using GParted the partitions were listed correctly.

In short, the Disk Utility on Yosemite was able to make the necessary repairs while the new Disk Utility on El Capitan was not.

I don’t know that the new Disk Utility will be of any use to IT professionals.  I recommend you keep a bootable Yosemite around in case you have need for these useful tools.

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UniFi Controller and Ubuntu

Networks & Wireless, Ubuntu

I bought a UniFi wireless access point.  Expensive but supposed to be about the nicest you can get for the money.  I have high hopes.

Anyway, I was a little worried about getting it set up using their software as so much of the talk was Windows centered.  I didn’t need to worry.

This article gave me the commands I needed to install the software and run it on Ubuntu natively.

First add this repository:

deb http://www.ubnt.com/downloads/unifi/debian stable ubiquiti

Then run these commands in sequence (make sure you are up to date before you begin).

##
#

# First get the key for the repository you just added
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv C0A52C50

# Update your repository lists and install unifi
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unifi

# Check to see unifi is running
sudo service unifi status

##

You are supposed to be able to visit https://:8443/ but I had to add localhost to the URL, so you may want to try this instead:

https://localhost:8443

When you first visit the controller, it will walk you through a basic set up process.  That’s pretty much it.

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File Sizes in Ubuntu

Applications, Ubuntu

So you may find that you would like to sort out some file size information.  Of course you can access any directory (or file) and look at its properties using the file browser (Nautilus), but you may want to dig deeper or you may want to get a broader picture.

First, from the command line you can just list out the directory contents thus:

ls -alh /path/to/directory

This will give you file sizes and the number of items in each directory in human-readable numbers (MB or GB as it were).  You might also like to see how large directories are, and you can do that like so:

du -hcs /path/to/directory

If you are not so interested in the terminal, there are a couple of good GUI applications for sizing matters.  There is Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab from the terminal) and Graphical Disk Map (gdmap from the terminal).  Both are small and both are in the repositories and can be installed easily:

sudo apt-get install gdmap

sudo apt-get install baobab

Finally, to get an overview of all disk usage, I like the terminal command df:

df -h

This will list your partitions and their usage.  These ought to cover just about any size question you might care to have answered.

 

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Shortcut the Long Way ‘Round

Hacks & Slacks, Windows

Sometimes you want an application to start when you log into a machine.  In most new versions of Windows you can manage this within the Task Manager, there is a Startup tab.  However, in Windows 2012 R2 there is no such tab in the Task Manager.  Yet you may still wish for one.

Fear not; there is a solution.

If you want to add a startup item for the currently logged-on user only, use this command:

shell:Startup

If you’d like something to start for any user which logs in, then use this version instead:

shell:Common Startup

Now normally you can simply drag while holding the Alt key and when you drop you drop a shortcut in that location.  This is true even for the first version of this command above; if you drop into that folder while holding the Alt key, you drop a shortcut into that Startup folder.

However, the Common Startup folder is a dangerous and protected system folder.  You will not be able to create a shortcut in that folder.

And just where do you think you're going?
And just where do you think you’re going?

So I said Yes and then moved that into the Common Startup folder.  I had to confirm I wanted to do it, but it allowed the shortcut to be placed.

World’s smallest hack?  Go MS!

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