sudo chmod -x /usr/lib/notification-daemon/notification-daemon

I really like kpdf, but it cannot rotate pages. It seems that it is no longer actively developed, and that instead okular is kpdf’s successor. However, in Gutsy, if you try installing okular via aptitude, you get a dependency problem that aptitude cannot resovle for you (something about missing the virtual package libpoppler1).

You can work around this by adding the following repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main

then:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

This installs quite a few kde things and may reinstall kde apps you might already have installed, such as amarok. It did for me. My guess is the problem is that okular is a kde4 app, and you need some kde4 stuff for it. I haven’t checked whether this breaks any of the other kde apps on your system! (Personally, I don’t care — I do have amarok installed but I’m hardly using it; I’ve grown fond of quodlibet instead).

Then, you can do:

sudo aptitude install okular

This will install a lot of dependencies.

You won’t be able to start okular by just using the command okular in a terminal, but you can find it in the Xfce menu under the “Graphics” applications. However, a

ps -ef | grep okular

while okular is running reveals that it sits at /usr/lib/kde4/bin/okular, so you can add

alias okular="/usr/lib/kde4/bin/okular"

to your ~/.bashrc (or, maybe add /usr/lib/kde4/bin to your PATH).

I formatted this with gparted, first to ext3, then to ext2 (I wanted something that would preserve permissions), but after backup up some files to it (using rsync and rdiff-backup) I ended up with lots of input/output errors and bad superblocks and whatnot.

I then used gparted to make it ReiserFS, and that worked. One other thing that I did differently was that after formatting the SD card to ReiserFS, I removed the card, then shut down the machine and rebooted before reinserting the card and actually putting any data on it. I hadn’t done this for the ext* FS, no clue if it could have made a difference.

The filesystem works nicely and it seems quite a bit faster than both ext3 and ext2 (I have mostly small text files, and a few pdfs).

However, letting the card be automounted (by HAL, I assume?) resulted in occasional total freezes when mounting/ unmounting.

So I put a line into /etc/fstab

/dev/mmcblk0p1  /media/kate                 auto    auto,user,rw,exec 0 0

and now I can just leave the card in.

However, the laptop then failed to suspend and resume properly. That was solved by putting a script each into /etc/acpi/suspend.d and resume.d to unmount and remount the card:

audrey:~$ cat /etc/acpi/suspend.d/01-umount-kate.sh
#!/bin/sh

/bin/umount /media/kate

and …

audrey:~$ cat /etc/acpi/resume.d/91-mount-kate.sh
#!/bin/sh

/bin/mount /media/kate && /bin/chown mpromber:mpromber /media/kate

Suspend worked out of the box, but closing the lid didn’t do anything but blank the screen. First, I installed gnome-power-manager and fiddled with gnome-power-preferences. I was able to get it to suspend on lid close, but now suspend didn’t work reliably anymore — about every fifth time the laptop would fail to suspend. So I uninstalled gnome-power-manager.

Turns out, all I had to do was edit /etc/acpi/events/lidbtn and change one line:
From:

action=/etc/acpi/lid.sh

To:

action=/etc/acpi/sleep.sh

Works.

This will give you a graphical interface and guide you through each step to get the basic setup.

mpromber@audrey:/dev$ ls -l video0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 81, 0 2008-04-14 16:48 video0

Turns out I didn’t have a group video so I had to create it and add my user (via Xfce Menu → System → Users and Groups). Log out and back in; works.

Because of this, I had to create a symlink in that user-based Firefox’s plugin directory:

cd /home/user/firefox/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so

(I don’t recall installing Java. sudo aptitude search java shows I have following installed:)

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

For me, using Xfce on Xubuntu Gutsy, running mutt in a xfce4-terminal, 256 color support didn’t work out of the box. Putting any colorN into the ~/.muttrc yielded a “colour not supported by term” hiccup during mutt startup, and mutt just displayed the relevant item in white (the default fg color). It is also possible to find out how many colors a terminal supports with tput colors, and for me, this showed “8″.

To solve the problem:

sudo aptitude install ncurses-term

Additionally, I had to change the xfce4-terminal preferences. In the “Advanced” tab, in the field for “$TERM setting:”, change the name to xterm-256color

Voila:

$ tput colors
256

And mutt now supports lines such as

color   index       color214  default   ~O

in the ~/.muttrc.

BTW, default as the background color makes mutt use the transparent terminal background, if you have one.

Addendum

If you want to set up mutt to use some of those pretty 256 colors, you probably want to see a palette relating the numbers to the colors. At least I did, and I didn’t see a very easy way to do this at first, but I found one here. Specifically, download this perl script and execute it in your terminal to show a palette of colors relating each to its number. Pick the numbers you like and translate their number N to colorN in your ~/.muttrc where you normally would use one of the named colors.

Addendum 2

Changing the $TERM setting to “xterm-256color” caused two problems, both of which you can work around:

• When I ssh into some remote servers, some apps have problems and say something about “xterm-256color not defined.”. I’ve put in an alias into my .bashrc for these servers to do export TERM=xterm && ssh SERVERNAME.
• Mutt did not recognize the backspace key anymore in the index and pager (I had set a “bind” and a “macro”. Thanks to Kyle on the mutt-users mailing list, I learned to find the information with

  $ infocmp -1 -L xterm-256color | grep key_backspace
                 key_backspace=^H,
  $ infocmp -1 -L xterm | grep key_backspace
                 key_backspace=\177,

  … and then I just changed <backspace> to \177 in the .muttrc, and now it works.

I had to add my user to the group lpadmin. In the Xfce Menu, go to System → Users and Groups. Click on “Manage Groups”. Select lpadmin and click on “Properties”. Check the members you want to add.

Problem sorted. To quickly cancel all jobs, I just have to open a terminal window and type:

cancel -a

This will install a few dependencies as well. Then, there’s an item “Bluetooth File Sharing” the system menu under “Accessories”.