Kev’s Blog – Page 174 – Kev's Development Toolbox

February 10, 2016

Linux Mint Cinnamon upgrade 17.1 to 17.3 – Cinnamon crash with nvidia-304

I’ve been using Mint Cinnamon 17.1 as my main desktop OS, of all the Linux distros I’ve played with in the past couple of years, this is my favorite by far (in terms of simplicity of the Desktop Environment).

17.3 Rosa came out recently, so I hadn’t upgraded for a while, so updated via the menu link in the software package manager.

I realized from installing and configuring 17.1 before that I needed to use the older nvidia-304 graphics – I have an older HP mobo with nvidia 6150SE graphics on the motherboard, and the best driver seems to be nvidia-304.

The upgrade itself was without issue, but after rebooting and logging on, within a few sessions I got the message “Cinnamon just crashed. You are currently running in Fallback Mode” and various parts of the screen started not refreshing. At one point when I pressed Yes on the dialog, but that resulted in more corruption to the point where individual characters became scrambled and not readable.

Seems like others are having the same issue too:

From feedback from others, it seems 17.2 was the last stable version for them, so I reinstalled 17.2 from a dvd, completely wiping my / partition. Luckily my docs and everything else I needed to keep was on a separate /home partition, so this worked out for me.

Usually any issues with a distro are on the initial install. This is the first time I can think of that doing an upgrade had significant issues, so hopefully they can get it sorted.

February 8, 2016

Running AROS / Icaros Desktop on VirtualBox

I love to install and check out different operating systems. Installing on something like VirtualBox means you can install as a guest, play with it, and either continue to use it or delete the disk image, with no impact to your host OS. So here’s an unusual one to check out:

AROS is an open source implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 apis, that runs on Intel and PowerPC cpus (Amigas were originally Motorola 68k based). It seems there’s a couple of different variations, the one I installed was Icaros Desktop, which comes with a live CD, which you can also install from.

One installed, it boots from a GRUB menu, and wow, does it boot quick, within a couple of seconds (running under VirtualBox on my i7 MacBook Pro). It boots so fast I might be tempted to install this as a bare metal install on an old PC and play around with it for a while. It also looks very pretty 🙂

February 8, 2016

Industries that build their own tools

Here’s an interesting observation, and maybe something you haven’t thought of before. If you work in IT, particular in software development, the tools that you use as a developer were built by other developers.

Think about that for a minute. Can you imagine if chefs built their own ovens, or doctors made their own medicines?

Is there any other industry that builds it’s own tools?

January 18, 2016

Installing an SSL certificate on OpenShift Online

SSL certificates are relative inexpensive, but there’s a number of organizations that are starting to offer certs for free – Let’s Encrypt is one. Their approach requires a script to renew your cert every 90 days. In some hosted environments however it might not be possible to run such a script.

For OpenShift hosted apps, you can both assign your own domain name to an application, and also import an SSL cert. See instructions here. Since it’s currently not possible to run a script like what Let’s Encrypt uses (see SO post here), certs from other organizations are more easily imported. StartCom is offering free SSL certs for 1 year, after which presumably you renew for another year.

Depending on what you are hosting, you may need to find and replace any hardcoded references to content loaded via http instead of https (to avoid ‘mixed content’ warnings in your browser). Once you’ve done this though, you get a shiny new green SSL padlock on your site!