nVidia screen flicker

So a couple of days ago I started to get a very annoying screen flicker in kubuntu. Every 30 seconds or go the screen would flash black and occasionally there would be a white line in between flashes or flashes of the screen. It could be stopped by alt-tabbing a couple of times. I gathered the problemw as with nVidia (I have a GT220) or something, so I went to nvidia-settings and turned PowerMizer to "Prefer Maximum Performance" from "Adaptive performance". I have the 260.19.06 drivers.

I haven't had a problem since.

UQ soefile access

So this post is mac-related. So I have a several year old mac at home (PPC! running 10.4.11) and even with my University's VPN I still couldn't access myFiles using the network address that usually works locally on linux and windows on campus.
Normally the addresses are (works for both staff and students with a substitution of s1234567 with your my.UQ username):

All Campuses except Ipswich students - \\soefile\s1234567
Ipswich Campus students - \\uqistudent\s1234567
Gatton campus students - \\UQGfile\s1234567$

But that wouldn't work in the Go->Connect to Server Dialog. What does work (at least for St. Lucia, I'm not an Ipswich or Gatton student so I can't confirm it for those campuses) is:
smb://soefile.uq.edu.au/uqxxxxx or smb://soefile.uq.edu.au/s1234567

But you can't browse the "local" network that you are VPNed into for some peculiar reason. Also, you can then save that connection as a shortcut to your desktop by dragging the network icon and name from the top of the finder window to the desktop (or any folder for that matter), but for some reason not to the sidebar.

Flash-plugin

Finally updated to the new Chrome (10.0.648.204) a couple of days ago. KPackageKit had been trying for a while, but apparently not succeeding (not that there were any errors, just that every time I logged in it would say it still needed to update) which I assume is due to me having chrome being open at the time.

So the other day I update chrome and today I try to go to something with Flash. Uh-oh! Broken!
I tried to use reKonq, but that too is broken (I have all the konqueror plugins installed via kpackagekit)?

This indicates that probably something went wrong with flash and not Chrome and I just didn't notice.
I did this:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure flashplugin-installer

ta-da! works in everything now! I run 64-bit kubuntu, if it matters.

LateX, glossaries, first use and figures

If you use LateX like I do, then you might have tried the glossaries package. It's a bit of a bitch to set up, but once it is it's no more trouble than a bibliography and it'll save you a lot of time with standardising your acronyms. But I just spent the last 2 days pulling out my hair because it was behaving rather peculiarly.

The normal behaviour is thus:

You refer to an item in your glossary list

\newglossaryentry{LOL}{name={LOL},description={Laugh out loud.},first={Laugh Out Loud (LOL)}, firstplural= {Laugh Out Loud (LOLs)},text{LOL}}

and then reference it in text:

When I saw my mistake I did many \glspl{LOL}. People heard my \gls{LOL}.

which would turn out to be:

"When I saw my mistake I did many Laugh Out Loud (LOLs). People heard my LOL."

You run makeglossaries and voila you have a glossary and all of your terms are defined in text and expanded for their first use.

But instead I would get:

"When I saw my mistake I did many LOLs. People heard my LOL."

So, my first reference was never correct and was simply the acronym. First use never worked for any of the acronyms in any part of the document, but everything else was fine. Massive fail for glossaries, that's kind of what it needs to do. I made a minimal example and that worked fine, I tried copying in all of my document after this example and it worked find. But when I replaced my minimal example with my text and compiled, it never worked properly. I tried \glsresetall and resetting specific acronyms, nothing worked.

So what was it? My first acronym was in a figure caption - shift the figure to after another term was defined in-text and voila, problem solved.

thunderbird problems

So I had to give KOrganiser the boot :( because even with davmail it still would not sync calendars (contacts would work intermittently). And akonadi would never start properly, and even then it was broken and won't load google calendars. Which pretty much makes it fail at the Organiser part of KOrganiser. Evolution also fails because of kde and its inability to open attachments properly.
So that's how I came to be using thunderbird. It took a while to get 3.1 installed (only 3.05 is in the repositories right now) and there's no 64bit .deb. Somehow I found a tar.bz2 for the 64 bit version, but for the life of me I cannot remember where. And the weirdest thing was was that it was just the directory that needed to be directly copied into wherever you wanted (no compiling, weird). So I copied that into lib or whatever, and then created a start menu item. So now it is installed, and is 64 bit!
I installed the lightning extension (there was a link when I opened mozilla in the what's new tab and that worked fine, thankfully) and a couple of other extensions and all was tops until I opened it this morning and got "unable to open the summary file for inbox thunderbird" etc. The internets told me to just delete the inbox.msf files where ever they are stored, but that didn't work. What I had to do was delete all my mailboxes, delete all the folders containing the msf files and do them all again.
But it doesn't stop there! Then I got these crazy errors when I attempted to delete items "The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: [TRYCREATE] The requested item could not be found." on my IMAP account. Turns out it attempts to move it to a "Trash" Folder which does not exist on some IMAP accounts. So a manual workaround is here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/IMAP_Trash_folder
And guess what! It actually worked. Though why it would have been so difficult to put a "name your own trash folder" in the account prefs is beyond me [EDIT: turns out that they do. It's a drop-down menu, selecting the right folder works and then unsubscribing to trash, but it appears to be a bit temperamental moving things on the server]. And you should also go through your settings and change all the folders "sent" to "sent items" etc. if required, otherwise you'll get errors on syncing. Kontact had no problem with auto-detecting what should be what so I don't know what thunderbird's problem is.

But of course I still can't get LDAP to work.

share-mime-info segfaulting?

So today I started getting errors from share-mime-info any time I tried to run apt-get, kpackagekit, dpkg etc. Not sure if it had to do with a recent update or when I tried to install google-gadgets yesterday. Either way, it boiled down to share-mime-info throwing segmentation faults and other various things. I tried a multitude of fixes - deleting various files, but none of that worked. I attempted to reinstall over my distro from the live disc, but that didn't work. In the end I went down the long hard road of attempting to reinstall share-mime-info, and in short - don't. I purged it only to have it uninstall pretty much everything with put me in dependency hell. Eventually I booted into my live disc and:

sudo mkdir /mnt/repair
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/repair (sda1 being my main partition)
sudo chroot /mnt/repair su
sudo rm /mnt/repair/usr
I then installed 10.04 from the live disc and then (just to be safe!):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo aptitude upgrade
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get upgrade

I then logged back into kubuntu as per usual, and voila, fixed. Now I just have to reinstall everything, though if you're reading this, then you could probably just delete the usr folders relating to share-mime-info and maybe gtk (since apparently it may be related to conflicting gtk versions)...