In this post I’m going to describe the way I have configured my setup to automate my bedroom-lights. In this particular setup I use the following components,
The goal of the setup is to automate the lights so that they can be turned on in the morning, I imagine that if I wake up to a light instead of a buzzer I will be in a better mood and it will be easier for me to get up. The other goal is to be able to control the lights from my phone.
Lately (or actually since way back, I’ve just started to notice it a bit more nowdays) I’ve been getting this annoying error when downloading subtitles from opensubtitles.org, smplayer finds the subtitle and starts to download it, but fails at random points during the download and throws the error “failed to download subtitle”. Today I set out to fix this annoying problem – however, it didn’t take me long to find out that there actually was a bugreport on this, and that the bug also been fixed in later svn-revisions.
I checked out the latest source (3614 as of writing) and built the packages for Ubuntu 10.04/11.04, feel free to grab them them here (10.04) and here(11.04).
Once downloaded, just install them with dpkg,
I’ve packaged (and will probably make newer packages as newer builds arrive) the Spotify client for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. There is probably not a lot of “private users” using Rhel 6 Desktop, since it’s more a corporate distribution, but hey ! working people also want Spotify ;) The package should probably work on Fedora as well, however I leave no guarantees, if it doesn’t, feel free to rebuild it. You can grab the spec-file here. The package is built with Gnome-support and should integrate nicely with menus and Spotify url’s.
Edit 20140107,
* There is a better way nowdays, use the “old method” (the new method is only working in fedora atm) described here
There is a very annoying sound (a drumroll) at the login of Ubuntu 11.04 (I think it applies to earlier version to, although this method of disabling it does not, it should however work on Fedora 15). There is a gui (System/Administration/Login Screen) for making this happen, although it seems rather broken (read about it here). Nowadays dconf (gsettings is the api) is used as backend rather then gconf, although not all applications has adapted this, gdm has.
If you’re using the “Ubuntu Classic (No effects)”-mode in the latest Ubuntu (11.04 as of writing) there is an annoying problem with playing fullscreen flash – it doesn’t work. The picture will either freeze or get black, sound is still playing though, but there is no way you will get any fullscreen.
If you’re a Linux user and a paying customer to the great Spotify-service you nowdays have a native functional client,
Although this client works pretty much out of the box, there are some things that you may have to do by hand.
The other day I got a request from a developer at our company regarding drop_caches. You can read about what it is and why it could be useful here, but to make it short, this person wanted to do some benchmarking and needed the page/inode/dentry cache to be freed. Since this is needed to be done by root, this caused a problem (developer is not root, our infrastructure setup doesn’t allow our developers to be root atm). Although I came up with a pretty neet sudo rule that does the job,
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Just put the above command in /etc/sudoers for affected users and they should be able to free page/inode/dentry cache as they wish.
Keep it simple.
There is a really annoying problem with the flashplayer in Fedora 14 when it comes to playing flashvideos with mp3’s in them. You will hear this kind of clipping/high pitched sound which is really unbearable. Luckily there is a quite easy solution, download this script (Ray Strode, Red Hat) and apply it to your libflashplayer.so,
It took a couple of days, but SCM Microsystems did actually answer my email, although it was very unsatisfying. It’s actually so bad that when you read it you get kind of angry because of their incompetence in this matter.
So it turns out that the Rhel6 image is missing libnsspem.so (a library used by curl to initialize nss as the ssl-engine) which breaks the ssl-validation in anaconda. This is normally not a problem, however if you for some reason have password-protected repository’s and don’t feel like sending your password in clear text over the network for every client/server you kickstart-install, this is going to be a problem.
Luckily there is an easy fix for it – include the necessary library in the Rhel 6 install.img-file.