After installing an update to WordPress I received the error:

“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

I was unsure if this was down to my hosts servers being temporarily down, going down during the update or if WordPress had simply failed to update whatever it was updating. Turns out it was the latter and it’s really easy to fix, first log on to your ftp, file manager or whatever for your hosting and browse to your wordpress install, in the root of this there should be a .maintenance file, just delete this and everything should be back to normal. Once back in the WordPress dashboard you may be asked to reinstall whatever failed however sometimes it will have completed the install and just not managed to delete this file.

:~$ gimp
gimp: fatal error: Failed to register GObject with DBusConnection

(script-fu:3100): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: script-fu: gimp_wire_read(): error

I fixed this error by removing opening Synaptic Package Manager and searching for appmenu-gtk, right click and mark for removal, once this has been done it should begin to work again.

The new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten, is awesome but one thing that annoys me about it was the fact it’s single column template isn’t full width but instead just removing the sidebar and centering the content. It’s really easy to change that though so here’s how I did it:

1. Under Appearance click Editor to open the theme editor
2. If it isn’t already click on “Stylesheet (style.css)” on the right hand side (somewhere near the bottom)
3. Now look for the following section of code (Ctrl+F will come in helpful here to find it) and change the width here from 640px to 900px then hit the Update File button:

Now when you view pages which use the one column template they should fill the same amount of space that both the content and sidebar usually do.

There is a pretty quick fix for not being able to click flash on websites such as YouTube, just simply add the line below into the following file and restart your web browser and all should be fine:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer

Add in the line (above the last line):

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

The file ‘/path/file.exe’ is not marked as executable.  If this was downloaded or copied form an untrusted source, it may be dangerous to run.  For more details, read about the executable bit.

While re-installing Spotify on my Desktop I came across an unusual error while trying to run the .exe through wine (shown above) and here’s a really simple way of fixing it:

1. Right click the .exe
2. Properties
3. Under the Permssions tab make sure “Allow executing file as program” is checked
4. Click Close and you should be able to now run it through wine..

Quite a few times I have encountered this problem, which I think is caused when the soundcard was recently used by another program and might still be busy but it means Spotify can’t play music, so a quick fix for this is to load winecfg and test your sound card which seems to force wine into tacking control of the it.

1. Close Spotify
2. In terminal type winecfg
3. Click on the Audio tab (should be in the top middle)
4. Click “Test Audio” and if you hear a sound this should work..
5. Re-open Spotify and check a track, if it’s playing it’s worked otherwise you may have a different issue..

An error occurred while mounting /dev/bus/usb (and/or)
An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb

Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

If you are seeing this error on boot an easy way to get rid:

1. sudo gedit /etc/fstab
2. Fine the following line (or lines if you are having both errors)

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults,devmode=0666 0 0
none /dev/bus/usb usbfs defaults,devmode=0666 0 0

3. Add a # infront of them to comment it out
4. Save & Exit.

As far as I am aware everything is still working fine and it might just be something left in from Karmic which isn’t needed any longer but just to make sure comment out these lines rarther than removing them.

The sound in Spotify was jumping or skipping much like a scratched disk would. After a little investigation I found a couple of ways to fix it with people saying one worked but the other didn’t for them. (Solution 2 worked for me).

Solution 1:

Open terminal and type:

winecfg

Click on the Audio tab along the top and remove ALSA and try OSS as your sound drivers

Solution 2:

gedit ~/.asoundrc

add the following line to the file:
pcm.pulse { type pulse } ctl.pulse { type pulse } pcm.!default { type pulse } ctl.!default { type pulse }

gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

change the following to lines as shown below

default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 5

While installing opencv on an older version of debian for work I kept getting an error while loading shared libraries which turned out to be a pretty easy fix, just finding the libraries and adding them to the dynamic linker.

The libraries I was having trouble with below:
./blobtrack: error while loading shared libraries: libcxcore.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

ffmpeg
ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libavdevice.so.52: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I used the ‘locate’ command to find where the libraries were eg:
locate libcxcore.so.1
This outputted a few locations of where the library was, I decided to use the /usr/local/lib version as both libraries I needed were in there and did the following command to add them to ld.so.conf and reload the dynamic linker:
sh -c 'echo "/usr/local/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf && ldconfig'