Configuring a Printer With CUPS Web Admin

I couldn't get the printer admin applet in Mint to add a new printer. It just kept saying "Failed to add printer" every time.

Then I discovered that CUPS has a web admin page:

http://localhost:631

When it ask for a username & password just enter any user with sudo privileges and you are in.

FIX: Black screen at login for LMDE/Cinnamon

So, I installed a fresh copy of LMDE on a machine. Obviously, that will include doing an apt-get dist-upgrade to ensure every thing is all up to date.

After doing that, I restarted the box and got the Mint login screen, entered my password and got . . . . . a black screen with a mouse pointer and nothing else.

I couldn't find an answer on the Internet so eventually I took a punt and entered:

apt-get install cinnamon

and what would you know, Cinnamon wasn't installed at all. For some, the distribution upgrade had decided to remove Cinnamon altogether. After the install finished I rebooted and all was good again.

"Permission denied" using libvirt and kvm on CentOS

If you are trying to create a VM using virt-manager on a KVM/QEMU host and you are getting "permission denied" then you need to either disable selinux or configure it to allow access.

To disable it edit /etc/selinux/config and change it from "enforcing" to "disabled" and then use  this command to make it take effect without rebooting.

setenforce 0

Install KVM on CentOS

Installing KVM on CentOS is pretty simple.

yum install kvm libvirt python-virtinst qemu-kvm

You probably want it to start automatically too:

chkconfig libvirtd on
service libvirtd start

You probably also should configure bridged networking.

And finally, if you would like to use virt-manager to administer your VM's from your Linux desktop you will probably want to setup passwordless key access.

I Sure Do Hate Closed Source Software

So, I am required to do some stupid online training module for work and it requires that I connect to their "online lab" using some sort of Citrix client. So I check the Citrix website and was pleased to find packages available there in a variety of formats including as a deb package. Cool! Unfortunately, given that we are talking Shitrix here, I should have been a bit more circumspect in my enthusiasm, because you see, it appears that the numbskulls at Shitrix HQ have seen fit to build their packages (as recently as Nov '13) using long obsoleted ia32 compatibility architecture, even though the package is supposedly built for the AMD64 platform. Yes, you read that right, you download the 64 bit version of the Citrix Receiver 13.0 built in Nov 2013 and it has ia32 dependencies that were removed from most Linux distribution 2 years ago. Retards. Google is awash with people who are unable to install this crapware on everything from slackware to debian because of the idiocy of whoever is in charge of the Linux ports of their craptastic products. Avoid at all costs if possible. As for me I'm going to be forced to use a Windows VM to do this stupid training junk. Thanks Shitrix!

squid-deb-proxy crashing

I had a problem with squid-deb-proxy crashing. I could see this in the system log:

avahi-daemon[830]: Service group file /services/squid-deb-proxy.service vanished, removing services This happened after I had a "disk full" incident on the server it was running on. I couldn't find that error anywhere on Google so I figured that maybe the cache had been corrupted. So with squid-deb-proxy stopped I deleted everything from inside /var/cache/squid-deb-proxy and started the service again. It hasn't crashed since.

Using apt-get through a proxy.

The network nazi's have blocked your access to the Internet and are forcing everything through a proxy. What to do?  

Well, you can do this. 

Edit or create /etc/apt/apt.conf. Add the following lines; 

Acquire::http::proxy "http://username:password@proxyserver:port/";
Acquire::https::proxy "https://username:password@proxyserver:port/";
Acquire::socks::proxy "socks://username:password@proxyserver:port/";