Sunday, December 28, 2008

Adding something to the startup scripts.

Just penning this down because I am afraid I'm quite likely to forget !

First off, create a script in /etc/init.d/ which you want to be executed at startup.

Next, use the update-rc.d command

update-rc.d [script-name] start [seq-num] [list-of-run-levels]
[seq-num] = 0 - 99
[list-of-run-levels] = separated by space, and terminated by "."

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Saturday, December 27, 2008

Installing 32 bit programs on 64 bit machines (.deb packages)

Was trying to install adobe reader on my ubuntu 64bit box, and came across issues with 32 bit and 64 bit. Apparently, there's this program "getlibs" which will download all required libraries that your application needs. So if you need to install an i386 deb package, first force install it

dpkg -i --force-all package-name.deb

Then get all the libraries required by the executable

getlibs /path/to/executable

Getlibs can be obtained from http://www.boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs-all.deb
I gues, it should also be in the ubuntu repository. You should be able to do an

apt-get install getlibs

For more info, refer to the thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790

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Friday, December 26, 2008

Skype on ubuntu 64 bit

Upgraded my laptop to ubuntu 8.10 64 bit today. The Microphone works finally !!
Decided to install skype but apparently, the skype download page doesn't give a link to skype for 64 bit linux. The 32 bit version wouldn't install with gdebi ! Searched a bit online, and came across this page:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=432295

The gist of the page is

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2 libasound2-plugins; wget -N boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs-all.deb; wget -O skype-install.deb http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64; sudo dpkg -i skype-install.deb; sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb; sudo getlibs -p libqtcore4 libqtgui4 bluez-alsa
NOTE: That is the procedure for 8.10. For others it may be different.

Also, I'm not sure, but I guess, this link will work:
http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64
If anyone's trying to install 64 bit skype, please download that from the above link and try installing with gdebi / dpkg. If it works, that's actually a better option I suppose. Please post a comment, if did/did-not work for you!

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