Quick install tip for Steam’s beta linux client on Ubuntu/Kubuntu AMD64 system. Installing Steam client Download linux installer Linux installer is available at http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/; which gives me the steam_latest.deb (on 21 December 2012). Install package and dependencies So I run (bold commands are those entered, you shouldn’t need the first bit if you’re on a [...]

Another quick post: how to install ia32-libs when it fails with bluez install. ia32-libs install failure fix Problem with bluez dependency So, attempting to install ia32-libs (as a dependency of teamviewer) and I keep getting failures with bluez and bluez-alsa. Why are they dependencies? Search me, it seems that ia32-libs is just a grab bag [...]

Thunderbird interaction log Record HTTP, IMAP and SMTP connection details Simple one-liner (well 3 in 1) to enable logging for Mozilla Thunderbird on Linux (I’m using Kubuntu 12.10 Quantal at the moment): export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=timestamp,imap:5,smtp:5,nsHttp:5,nsHostResolver:5; export NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/tmp/imap$(date +%s).log; thunderbird

Digikam can’t yet store metadata in video files so instead one can create a thumbnail file and store the metadata in that. Digikam uses exiv2 and this feature is apparently imminent. Here’s my find command to create a bordered thumbnail image: find . -iregex “.*\.\(mov\|avi\|mpg\|mp4\|mpeg\)$” -fprint0 ~/find-video-thumb-$(date +%s).log -exec convert ‘{}[2]‘ -bordercolor Red -border 10%x0 [...]

Lower than possible MTU is suboptimal, higher is flaky and may break networking completely. How to find the right value? Just ping it? Simple command line Here’s a slightly time intensive way that uses a tool you should already have at hand, ping. ping -M do -c 8 -v -n 8.8.8.8 -s 1464 Ping sends [...]

Installation of ttf-mscorefonts-installer fails for non-obvious reasons. This deb package is needed for WINE installs. MS core font install Installation failure Attempting to install on Kubuntu 12.10 (quantal quetzal) I get the following error in the console: user@comp:~$ sudo apt-get install –reinstall ttf-mscorefonts-installer Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done 0 [...]