Fran's blog

A very simple script for restarting NetworkManager on kubuntu 9.04:

#!/bin/bash
killall NetworkManager
sleep 2
/usr/sbin/NetworkManager –pid-file /var/run/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.pid

Remember that you need root priviledges for executing it, so invoque it through sudo.
This script may be useful if you have problems with NetworkManager like me. I’ve had problems in the past with iwl3945 driver that comes with kubuntu 9.04, but those [...]

If you plan to use firefox as default browser on kubuntu, you should go to “System Settings/Predefined Applications/Web Browser” and add:
/usr/bin/firefox
As web browser.
But if you want to open URLs also in a new window, you should use instead:
/usr/bin/firefox -new-window
This is a good idea if you use Show Desktop functionality, otherwise if you go to the [...]

As I told in previous entry, I should downgrade to kubuntu 9.04 after an upgrade to 9.10 due several problems with nvidia drivers. Although one thing that I’ve found better in 9.10 than in 9.04 was the iwl3945 driver for my wifi hardware. In 9.04 the driver is flawly and gives a lot of problems, [...]

I upgraded my Acer laptop from kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 some weeks ago, and since them I was having lot of problems, some minor ones, but other actually serious: random hangs, devices that dissapear (specially sound ones but also wifi), and returns again after next reboot, keyboard that does not work anymore, etc.
This morning my [...]

Yesterday I passed my examination for orange belt easily at my karate dojo. My Sensei told me that “If you continue training so hard, you’ll soon remove me from my post.” He also said that I did it with real kime, that’s really good. So I’m very happy with the results.
My exam consisted in some [...]

I’ve recently upgraded my kubuntu distribution from 8.10 to 9.04. I spent sometime tweaking somethings that works in a differente manner now and so. One of these things was the printer, an HP PhotoSmart 5180C connected by ethernet that stops working.
After many hours broken my head agaistn the keyboard, I’ve found that the real [...]

I’ve been using rdiff-backup for sometime for my own projects, and I’m actually very happy with the way it works with incremental backups of three of my servers and two desktop computers. But there’s a thing that really sucks: when a connection to a remote host fails, next time it will try to regress all [...]

Or an alternative title: “Be very careful when you cut and paste from web pages”.
I’m a bit tired of doing var_dump debug on PHP, as today I debug lot of PHP lines every day and use complexer architectures as Joomla! CMS than simpler LAMP, I need to set up Eclipse to work with XDebug [...]

I’ve found this problem many times in VirtueMart forums, but never solved. If you do not know that, VirtueMart is a virtual shop component for Joomla CMS. It’s a good piece of code, however it has some problems -often not very important ones-, and its customization sometimes need hacking its code a bit.
I’m building one [...]

I’ve wrote this script to restore rdiff-backups with regular users conserving the files ownerships.
The problem is that in modern UNiX systems -like GNU/LiNUX- regular users cannot change the owner of files because this is a security thread, so to allow that rdiff-backup could restore file ownership it must run as superuser -root-.
This script acts as [...]