Monthly Archives: June 2010

Ubuntuzilla thunderbird 3.1 problem fixed

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Ubuntuzilla is a great way of having your cake and eating it. You can have the robustness of the Ubuntu repository system without foregoing the very best of Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird (see Getting latest Firefox and Thunderbird on Ubuntu). But I did experience a big problem upgrading to Thunderbird 3.1. Clicking on the Thunderbird icon resulted in … nothing. The reason was that the Lightning extension was now incompatible. Solution?

  1. ubuntuzilla.py -a remove -p thunderbird
  2. sudo apt-get update
  3. ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p thunderbird
  4. Download addon for lightning that is compatible with 3.1 e.g. Lightning 1.0b2
  5. thunderbird -safe-mode
  6. Install new add-on – probably you downloaded it to your desktop
  7. Restart Thunderbird

Xdebug restored on Lucid for Netbeans

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[Update for Ubuntu 14.10 and Netbeans 7.4

php.ini was in /etc/php5/mods-available/

Needed the following:

zend_extension = "/usr/lib/php5/20121212+lfs/xdebug.so"
xdebug.remote_autostart=on
xdebug.remote_enable=on
xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"
xdebug.remote_host=localhost
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_mode=req
xdebug.idekey="netbeans-xdebug"

]

When I upgraded from Netbeans 6.7 to 6.8 I lost the ability to debug line by line. Later, I upgraded to 6.9 in the hope that this would fix it. It didn’t but the Netbeans error message for xdebug gave me a better steer towards useful resources. My system is Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) so I looked at http://wiki.netbeans.org/HowToConfigureXDebug#How_to_on_Linux. The answer for me was to edit a line in an xdebug file (I had previously added recommended lines * to php.ini to no avail – at least, not in isolation).

cd /etc/php5/conf.d

sudo gedit xdebug.ini

The first line of xdebug.ini was _almost_ correct 😉

Because I was using PHP 5.3 the key was zend_extension rather than zend_extension_ts. That part was right. But the path was not quite correct. Instead of:


zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/2006 ... +lfs/xdebug.so

it needed to be (in my case):

zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/xdebug.so

[Update – now /usr/lib/php5/20121212+lfs/xdebug.so]

Make sure the path actually exists and hasn’t become orphaned during an upgrade.

I then stopped and started apache and restarted Netbeans to be safe.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

—–

* Here are the lines you will probably already have added:

xdebug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp
xdebug.remote_mode=req
xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1
xdebug.remote_port=9000

Restored Audigy Sound on Lucid

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All sound suddenly stopped about 6 weeks after I upgraded to Lucid. Everything seemed right but still no sound. On the volume control, I could even see the sound bar pulsing in sync with the music:

Volume Control

Volume Control

Another computer in the house has identical hardware and also runs Lucid but I couldn’t find any differences. Even swapped the sound cards as a test but still no luck. Here is what worked in my case:

1) sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

2) Now open GNOME ALSA Mixer from Applications>Sound & Video>GNOME ALSA Mixer

3) Untick IEC958

Unticking IEC958

Unticking IEC958

4) Enjoy music again!

UPDATE: To get the microphone working e.g. for Skype, need to enable Analog Source.