[Sun May 31 08:50:10 CDT 2015]

To my surprise, the version of GNOME bundled with Debian jessie does not show a button to put the laptop in suspend mode. I kept looking here and there, but couldn't find anything. It appears to be another instance where the GNOME developers, in their zeal to simplify the product (something that, I must say, I appreciate in general), changed for this new release. So, according to this page from the Debian Wiki, you can either press the Alt key before clicking the shutdown button or, alternatively, install the suspend button GNOME Shell extension. Either will do.

Another minor complaints with this new release of GNOME that I haven't bothered to investigate yet is with the way to set a new wallpaper. If I use the default dialog they have in the GNOME settings, it shows a set of wallpapers and pictures taken from somewhere in my hard drive. However, I cannot see an easy way to add new ones to that selection. The old version had a "plus" button that made it quite easy for me to do so. The new one, though, doesn't. Yes, I know I can open a picture in ImageViewer and set it as my wallpaper from there, but it doesn't get automatically added to the gallery mentioned above. So, if ImageViewer becomes the dialog to select my wallpaper, why have it in the settings at all? Ah, OK, I see. I can open a folder in the file viewer, and then drag and drop a particular picture into that gallery. {link to this entry}

[Sun May 24 16:34:52 CDT 2015]

Well, well, well. Here's another issue that's been bothering me ever since I upgraded to Debian jessie. For whatever reason, things are configured in such a way that, if IPv6 addresses are available, it will configure one and will also add IPv6 DNS servers to the resolv.conf. Since my Internet provider —Comcast— supports IPv6, my laptop also configures an address. The problem is that, aside from the fact that Comcast's IPv6 DNS servers don't appear to be as realiable as their IPv4 ones, it breaks the VPN connection to my workplace using the OpenConnect VPN client. Well, as a matter of fact, it connects fine. The problem is with the name resolution. And it doesn't have much to do with OpenConnect, but rather with the fact that my workplace doesn't announce any IPv6 DNS servers, so name resolution completely breaks. The solution? Disable IPv6. Don't bother with the GUI. Simply follow the directions from the Debian IPv6 Wiki page. Log in as root, and add the following lines to the file /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.wlan0.disable_ipv6 = 1

Notice that the last two lines refer to particular network interfaces on my own system. Things may be slightly different in yours. Just run the following command to see what interfaces are currently configured before you add the lines:

# ifconfig -a

After that, reboot the system. IPv6 should be disabled and, from now on, the name resolution will only use IPv4 addresses too. {link to this entry}

[Wed May 20 15:26:52 CDT 2015]

Here is another little config that broke after upgrading to Debian Jessie. Mind you, it's not Debian's fault. In this case, it's the solution to allow the mutt email client to view .ics files, which I documented here about three years ago. The thing is that upgrading to the latest Debian release broke the Ruby script because it needs an older version of the icalendar gem. So, the fix is as easy as installing the older version with the following command:

# gem install -v 1.5.4 icalendar

Now if, for whatever reason, you ended up installing both the old and the new version of icalendar, you will still need to remove the old one. Either that or perhaps you can fix it by making some changes to the script. However, I didn't want to bother with that, among other things because I'm not familiar with Ruby. {link to this entry}

[Sat May 16 21:22:27 CDT 2015]

After upgrading my laptop to Debian Jessie I still had to reinstall the Citrix ICA client for x86_64 (amd64) architecture. The instructions from the CitrixICAClientHowTo published by the Ubuntu folks worked just fine. It was easier than I thought. Or, at any rate, considerable easier than in previous occasions. {link to this entry}

[Fri May 15 20:07:07 CDT 2015]

And here is another one. The instructions to install the latest 64-bit version of the Spotify client on Debian jessie can be found here. It works like a charm. And also, if you want to change the wallpaper in the new GNOME (yeah, don't ask), follow the directions from this other page. {link to this entry}

[Fri May 15 19:54:52 CDT 2015]

Here's another trick. After installing Debian jessie on my laptop, I truly didn't like the default settings of xterm. Yes, I know, there is also gnome-terminal, which is the default. However, for whatever reason, I ran into some problems with UTF-8 in gnome-terminal, and it also did a couple of other things I didn't like. So, I decided to give xterm a try. However, as I said, I don't truly like the white-on-black default. So, how do you change that? Simply create a new XTerm file in your home directory (watch out, it's case sensitive), and add a few lines like these:

XTerm*Background: white
XTerm*Foreground: black
XTerm*font: 9x15
XTerm*geometry: 80x42
XTerm*font: *-fixed-*-*-*-18-*

That's it. That will do. {link to this entry}

[Wed May 13 16:53:23 CDT 2015]

OK. This issue with VirtualBox on Debian has been annoying me for a while now, but I haven't been able to find a fix or workaround until today. Mind you, the problem is not limited to Debian at all. While searching around, I've seen repors from people who run other Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS X who ran into the very same issue. I'm referring here to a very annoying error that shows up whenever you try to start any virtual image, which simply shows the following on the screen before exiting:

Failed to load VMMR0.r0 (VERR_SUPLIB_OWNER_NOT_ROOT).
Unknown error creating VM (VERR_SUPLIB_OWNER_NOT_ROOT).

There are variations of the error, but the VERR_SUPLIB_OWNER_NOT_ROOT is always there. Well, for whatever reason, the whole /usr directory was owned by user ID 501. Not sure where that came from. In any case, running the following command and reinstalling the VirtualBox software fixed the problem:

# chown -R root:root /usr

Now, hopefully, I haven't broken anything really bad. For the time being, though, VirtualBox is running fine, and so are the other applications I've been running.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Forget about all that! After I rebooted the system, I ran into all sorts of problems. Definitely not recommended! Once I ran into that, I just chose to upgrade to Jessie, which is the most recent stable release. Yes, I could have run the following command to just reinstall all the old packages from scratch, but why do that when there is a new release out?

# aptitude --reinstall install '~i'

{link to this entry}