Running Ruby 1.9.1 with RVM on Ubuntu karmic

It’s finally time to try out things with Ruby 1.9 – people start complaining that my libs don’t run with 1.9. Sorry for that. I’m still sticking to “Never touch a running system!”, so why should I use Ruby 1.9 when 1.8 works great? RVM First I discovered rvm which is a great tool for…

Skype complains “can’t write to file” when receiving upload

When a friend tried to upload some files via Skype to my PC it kept failing, Skype 2.1.0.47 for Ubuntu complained “can’t write to file” as soon as I accepted the upload. Here’s the solution: First, I created a world-writable directory mkdir /home/nick/skype-uploads chmod 777 /home/nick/skype-uploads I opened the File Transfer dialog, clicked the sprocked…

OpenOffice Impress doesn’t show videos on Ubuntu

After copying a presentation from my laptop to my desktop box (which’s running OpenOffice.org 3.1.1) the embedded AVI videos didn’t show up anymore. The error message: “The format of the selected file is not supported.” It turned out that the JRE was missing gstreamer. The solution sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Painless text-editing with Scribes 0.4 on Ubuntu

Colleagues keep laughing at me. It seems that I missed the point in a programmer’s life where he faces a shimmering light at the end of the dark terminal tunnel, where he suddently gets enlightened… and switches to eclipse or Textmate. Being an IDE-reject I’m used to work with bare-bones text editors, which support syntax-coloring,…

Running Xubuntu/intrepid on my IBM X31 laptop

After more than a year of marriage my X31 laptop and gutsy had to break up again. I had to upgrade my linux distribution due to some very old, outdated packages. As usual: problems after upgrading. Did I notice that I really hate to upgrade things? Well, here are some directions which should ease your…