Problems in opening home folder via Places in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

I have just installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) in my old desktop yesterday and I was encountering this annoying problem since yesterday. I even went to the point of reverting to old Ubuntu distributions! Everytime I clicked on the Home Folder menu item under the Places menu, an icon in the taskbar with title “Opening home folder” showed up but after a while, it disappeared and didn’t open the home folder. The same problem persists with all the menu items under the Places menu. It’s really an annoying bug! I wonder why the Ubuntu team allowed this bug to come unnoticed and eventually made it the official distribution of Ubuntu.

It was hard Googling for this problem and it’s solution. I have been doing so last night and even this morning and still to no avail. It seems I’m the only one afflicted with this problem. Not even a single entry mentioned about this problem. It seems most people are working fine with Ubuntu 9.04.

Luckily tonight, I came across this blog entry that discussed about this bug. Opening of home folder failed because Nautilus, while loading the Brasero library resulted in segmentation fault. You can see the segmentation fault if you run dmesg in terminal while the home folder is opening. As a fix to this bug,  you can run the following in the terminal:

sudo chmod a-r /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-2.0/libnautilus-brasero-extension.so

and viola, the problem is solved!

Smart Bro Prepaid

I purchased a Smart Bro Prepaid Internet Kit last Monday.  The price of the unit has gone down to Php1995 from the previous price of Php2500. Here’s a picture of the USB modem of Smart Bro Prepaid place side by side with some flash disks:

Smart Bro Prepaid USB Modem

It’s suppose to provide a maximum speed of 2Mbps using 3G.   At the Smart Wireless Center in Gateway, the connection that I have was 400+kbps for downstream and around 200+ kbps for upstream, which is not bad.

After using it for several nights, here are my observations about the Smart Bro Prepaid.

The good points:

1. The USB modem is handy. It’s small compare to the ones of Globe and Sun. I hope they included a lace for you to hang it on your neck.
2. Smart is the no. 1 wireless broadband provider and no. 1 cellular phone network in the Philippines which can be both an advantage and disadvantage.

But here are the bad points:

1. Here in Tondo, the speed sucks! I failed to get any 3G/HSDPA signal! Why I got was just GPRS/EDGE signal! And guess what’s my speed.
   That’s as slow as dial-up!!! The PLDT MyDSL Plan 990 that I have managed to have a speed of
   It seems Smart 3G signal is weak in my area. If you live in Tondo, Smart Bro is not a good choice. Globe and Sun are better.
2. To reload Smart Bro, you can either do it via AutoLoad or via Smart Bro regular load. Autoload for me is not good because you have to go to the hassle of reloading every 2-3 days since the load will just last that long. Smart Bro regular load is good but you need to use a Smart call sim to reload. Smart move from Smart, since this will force people to purchase a Smart sim. You can’t load from the Smart Bro sim since outgoing calls are barred. I wish Smart will be just like Globe where you can place the Globe Broadband sim in a phone and use it to reload.
3. The charging is per 30 minutes, which means if you consumed 5 mins, you will be charged 30 mins which is Php10. The charging mechanism of Globe is better because it is per 15 mins.

For now, I plan to just dump my Smart Bro. Anyone interested can contact me and I can sell it to him/her at a lower price.  Just make sure you already have a Smart call sim (for reloading) and a good Smart 3G signal in the area that you plan to use it.

Invalid Update Control CTF File Error on AVG 8 Free Edition

My AVG 8 Free Edition virus update has not been working since yesterday. After connecting to the update server, an “Invalid Control CTF File” error always pops out. At first I though there must be some errors in the update files in AVG’s server. This afternoon, I was able to update my notebook’s AVG without encountering this error. And tonight I tried updating AVG again and I still got last night’s error. Convinced that the error is not cause by the files in AVG server, I Googled about the problem and thanks to this blog, I was able to solve the problem.

To summarize the things I did,

1. You need to make sure that you can view hidden files. To do this, open My Computer and click on Tools then Folder Options. Click on the View tab and select the “Show hidden files and folders” option.
2. Go to the AVG download folder which is usually located in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\avg8\update\download.
3. Delete all .ctf files.
4. Update your AVG again and the update should be successful!!!

Ubuntu frustrations

This blog writes about 10 sticking points for Ubuntu users. I agree with most of mentioned points notably:

1. Screen setup – Yah, but Ubuntu has improved a lot with 8.04. After installing Ubuntu in several machines in the computer laboratory, only a few machines encountered this problem. After changing xorg.conf to the proper setting, there are still problems displaying the higher resolutions. I would assume that there is a problem in the detection of video card or the use in incorrect driver by Ubuntu that is causing this problem.
2. Bootmanager – In the lab, only Ubuntu is installed so we don’t have much problem with this.
3. Mounting – The mounting feature has improved this time. Even with LDAP/NFS, we are able to allow users to mount flash disk. This thing is not working properly with earlier versions of Ubuntu. I have to do around of making all LDAP users have a default group of HAL just to be able to let them mount flash disks.
4. Installation – By default, Ubuntu always connect to the Internet to get updates. I think they should give the user a warning about this and allow the user to cancel this. In the lab, we need to unplug the network cable just to do away with the automatic update downloading. If I forget to unplug the network cable, since the PCs are located in a subnet that needs proxy server to access the internet, then installation takes a very long time! Even when you are connected to the net with reasonable speed, downloading updates still take much time. I think updating should come after installation and not a prerequisite to complete installation.
5. Sound configuration – We don’t use speakers in the lab so this is not a problem to us, =)
6. Networking – networking of Ubuntu is working fine with us. There’s no problem even with IPv6 enabled and our network is still using IPv4.

We don’t have any problems with the other things mentioned.

As of now, Ubuntu machines in the laboratory with LDAP/NFS is working fine except for the problem with some PC where the response was slow. However, the problem is not present with local accounts. I haven’t figure out the problem yet as to what is causing this and why is it affecting a few machines.

As of now, I’m contemplating on doing a fat thinclient installation of Ubuntu in the laboratory to make machine management much easier.

Yahoo Messenger Offline Installation

I remember during the earlier version of Yahoo Messenger, they allowed offline installation. With YM 8 and 9 (beta), they no longer allow offline installation. I was trying to install YMv8 in a PC but I find it weird why the download status bar goes to 100% immediately from 19% and back to 0% and the cycle repeats. I don’t know if it’s because I chose to install the bare minimum which means why don’t install Yahoo services and Yahoo toolbar, set my default search engine to Yahoo, etc… that contributed to this problem.

Fortunately, I found this blog entry that contains the full offline installation file for Yahoo Messenger 8! I wish Yahoo would return the offline installation version in their site. Providing only online installation version is not that “usable”.

New DPSM Website

The Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics (DPSM), of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of the Philippines Manila has a new website. It’s at http://dpsm.cas.upm.edu.ph.  The new site is running under Joomla 1.5.2 with template provided by JoomlaShack.

Flash Disk Suddenly Failed

I was transferring the ISO image file of Ubuntu 8.06 to my 1GB flash disk when suddenly, an error message came out and told me that the flash disk is already full. I checked again and the flash disk should had enough space. Worse, the flash disk didn’t contain any trace of any copy of the ISO file but it seems that 400MB is used up. Faced with this problem, I decided to just format the flash disk with my Windows laptop. Unfortunately, formatting failed and the flash disk was left useless!!! I tried formatting it with another Windows machine and it failed again!!!

Fortunately, when I got home, I found this site on how to format a flash disk under Linux. Under an Ubuntu Linux machine, I inserted the flash disk, then type

fdisk /dev/hda

I was asked to enter an option, and I typed n in order to create a new partition on the flash disk and x to write the partition and exit. I then typed

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

to format the newly created partition for FAT32 file format and IT WORKS!!! I can now use the flash disk on Windows and Linux.

Agila and Berdugo Back

IMS guys came this morning and fixed the connection at Gusaling Andres Bonifacio (GAB) and both buildings of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) are now back online! The servers agila and berdugo are also back online. Although network access is still jittery, probably due to the fact that communication medium is radio linking CAS to the main UPM server at PGH. Radio links are prone to external interference, but overall, the network speed is acceptable.

Network Restoration for CAS

At last, network connectivity has been restored in Rizal Hall of the College of Arts and Sciences! Network connection for GAB has not yet been restored but probably it’s going to be online by tomorrow. IMS guys were unable to fix it because the library where the main switch is located, is closed today due to the class suspension.

For now, CAS is connected to the main UPM network via a wireless radio link. Fiber optic cable is supposed to be repair by Maynilad and will be back online probably in a month time. Yahoo!!!

Network Disruption in CAS

Thanks to Maynilad’s water pipe repair along Padre Faura St! They successfully destroyed the fiber optic link that connects the Faura buildings of UP Manila (CAS, CAMP, OUR, LRC, SWF, ILC, OSA) from the central node of the UPM network which is at the University Library. The CAS doesn’t have internet for one month already. Most of the people here are calling the life we have as “jurassic” era. It might even take a year before internet is restored at CAS. For the meantime, the CAS IT office is already applying for DLS connection for Rizal Hall and Gusaling Andres Bonifacio, but unfortunately, connections can’t be make yet. For two reasons,

1. no payment has been made yet to BayanTel
2. because the conduit and the tube where the wires will run has not been setup yet and it might even take eternity to ask the CPDMO to have them in place. So much bureaucratic steps.