The solution in 4 simple steps:
– Open System -> Preferences -> Keyboard
– Click on the Mouse Keys tab
– Deselect "Pointer can be controlled using the keypad"
– And, finally, just click on Close

The thing is that right now I am developing an application using Google App Engine (GAE for friends), and for not having problems when deploying the next version, it is recommended to use Python 2.5 when developing.

As you might have guessed in the title, Canonical have removed the Python2.5 package from the latest Ubuntu Lucid release, so I cannot run the local  Google App Engine web server.

Lucky me, after searching for a while on launchpad.net I’ve found a solution. There is a person that has created  python2.4 and python2.5 packages for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.

The only think you should do is add the following two lines at the end of your  /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/fkrull/deadsnakes/ubuntu lucid main

And finally run:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python2.5

And that’s it, you can now run GoogleAppEngine.

Interesting links:

• Old Python versions in Launchpad (you can check on this website the packages and how to install them)
• Python 2.5.5 release page
• Google App Engine

From my point of view, the big problem I found on this release (which I just installed 5 minutes ago) is that they changed the window buttons from the right to the left side of the window. I think 95% of the users are used to the buttons on the right side, and I don’t see the point on moving them to the left.

Anyway, I don’t like it, so I searched around, and I’ve found a quick and easy solution.

Press Alt+F2, then type gconf-editor and press enter. That’s for opening the configuration editor.

Once on this editor, in the item tree at the left, you have to look for this path  app -> metacity -> general and you doubleclick on the field named  button_layout.

Then, you have only to change the value field and put this:

menu:minimize,maximize,close

You save the changes, and voila!! all the windows reconfigured again!

Now all the windows show the minimize, maximize and close buttons on the right again

As you might expect, I’ve downloaded and installed this brand new version of Chrome for Linux and I installed on my Ubuntu 64-bit laptop.

The truth is that it caused me a great impression, when I launched google-chrome command, the browser just appeared in a fraction of a second. I though Opera was quite amazing at rendering the browser, but now I think Chrome is even faster.

The next thing I tried is the typing test of ARTypist, and it worked amazingly well. I know it uses internally a lot of javascript, and it all works great.  Even the CSS displays properly well, and since several months ago I haven’t tried to run ARTypist on Chrome

Finally, after visiting another couple of web sites I realized flash worked as well without me having to install any plugin. I don’t know if it has detected the flash plugin was already installed (probably), but it’s great having it working on all pages. At the first sight, it seems the browser seems it’s working well

Right now I’m not planning to change Firefox by Chrome, but at least I can test my webs on Chrome without having to open a virtual machine with Windows.

Anyway, what matters is that I’ve migrated a couple of virtual machines from VMWare Server 2 to qemu-kvm.

One of the virtual machines ignored me completely when I pressed the “Shutdown” and “Reboot” buttons in the Virtual Manager. The virtualized/guest machine was a Ubuntu Server.

After searching in Google for a while I found a solution! Fortunately it was an easy solution, although I had to search for a while. The package acpid was missing.

The problem was solved after installling acpid package.

$ sudo apt-get install acpid

After installing this, the ’shutdown’ and ‘reboot’ buttons worked perfectly!

Just in case you have the same problem when virtualizing a Windows machine (yes, I had the same problem), the problem is in the configuration of the virtual machine. The solution I’ve found is to edit the configuration and between <feature> and </feature> add <acpi/> and <apic/>. After doing this you will probably have to reinstall windows, or repair it using the installation CD or iso (I think there is another way of doing this without reinstalling, but you will have to use Google this time).

Finally, I just want to mention that the Virtual Manager in linux surprised me, it’s simple but quite functional. It’s not as functional  as virsh command for editing virtual machine configurations, but you can do the basic, and install new virtual machines from the Virtual Manager GUI which is always a good thing.

Nowadays the configuration for mounting disk partitions on linux (the file /etc/fstab) uses the UUID instead of the device name (/dev/hda1, /dev/sda1 …).

If you need to know which is the UUID of a particular device you can run the blkid command. E.g:

$ sudo blkid /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: UUID="8b6ec31c-1f41-49f3-82da-d2ab0f0fa312" TYPE="ext3"

If you don’t like this command, or you think you cannot remember it, there is another way of knowing the UUID. If you have udev in your system (I think is udev the one that updates the list), you can go to  /dev/disks/by-uuid/ folder and run a list command (ls). E.g:

$ ls -l /dev/disks/by-uuid/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-19 07:56 8b6ec31c-1f41-49f3-82da-d2ab0f0fa312 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-19 07:56 626adc53-3478-4eb1-9f68-dc0b6f9308e7 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2009-11-19 07:56 9cfc5c6d-f343-411e-ac59-31eee6b12a9b -> ../../sda3

The advantage of this command is that we don’t need administrator privileges, and it’s easier to remember

the…

wait for it….

wait for it….

wait for it….

GOTO

It’s amazing how PHP team is including in the same release high-level features, as well as a low-level feature like that (BTW most of the people will consider this feature harmful). They should have felt a great pressure from people or something, because I cannot find any reasonable reason for them to include it…

In the PHP goto documentation you will see that at least, they are funny about it:

In order to install Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu (before Canonical update the official repositories) is as follows:

• First you should add following line in /etc/apt/sources.list (in order to edit this file you will need admin privileges, aka run as root):

  deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

• Then, we should run following command to validate previous repository and make apt-get to work:

  sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0C713DA6

• Finally we install Firefox-3.5 by running following command:

  sudo apt-get install firefox-3.5

• Addicionally you can change the symbolic link at /usr/bin/firefox to refer to /usr/bin/firefox-3.5

That’s it!! Enjoy!

The thing is that when I tried to install the printer in Ubuntu 64-bit, there were no available drivers, and althought there were several threads explaining what to do, I never got it working (I swear I spent quite amount of time trying to install the printer, but there was no way).

Yesterday I updated ubuntu, and I saw some printing-related packages updated, so I thought: “let’s try again”. Now my printer works!!

As I said before, the Canon drivers for PIXMA iP2600 are only available for 32-bits, and I’m using a 64-bit ubuntu installation, so a small trick should be done for installing those drivers  (a trick that did not work 3 months ago).

So, if you have a Canon PIXMA iP2600 or similar, here is what I did to get it working:

• Go to  Linux Printing and look for your printer (in my case PIXMA iP2600)
  • I found this page for the drivers of Canon PIXMA iP2600
• I download the drivers for 32-bits operating systems  (there are no 64-bit versions of these drivers):
  • cnijfilter-common_2.90-1_i386.deb at http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/contents/ASIA/EN/0100118902.html
  • cnijfilter-ip2600series_2.90-1_i386.deb at http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/contents/ASIA/EN/0100119102.html
• I forced the installation of both packages using dpkg:

  • sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture cnijfilter-common_2.90-1_i386.deb

  • sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture cnijfilter-ip2600series_2.90-1_i386.deb

• And finally I connected the printer USB to my laptop, I opened the Printer Manager (System -> Administration -> Printing), and I clicked on New Printer button, and after clicking next next a couple of time I clicked on Finish (without changing anything). The printer manager added the new printer and asked me to print a test page and…
• voila!  The page has been magically printed!