ubuntu unity launcher hiding behind windows (solved)

OK an annoying but that happened a few times now is the launcher and tab-switcher like to hide behind any other window so i cant see them...this is a bug and not the set up behaviour..

so how to solve this without fucking everything your doing up? easy

open a terminal and write

unity&disown

then hit enter and a few screen flicks later - your back in business with nothing lost - AWESOME!!

ubuntu 11.10 upgrade black screen, cant login, wifi button blinking (all solved!)

So today was full of fail for the new ubuntu 11.10 upgrade....

first snort failed to upgrade and because it was doign an upgrade i had no wifi to send the report which killed the upgrade.....cunts - that was just hte start of problems.

Eventually I got the thing upgraded and was presented with the five dots screen, then a black screen.....nothing...no matter what i did helped.

(solution)
ctrl+alt+1
login
sudo -i
mkdir -p /run /run/lock
rm -rf /var/run /var/lock
ln -s /run /var
ln -s /run/lock /var
reboot

so that fixed the black screen error.....but now i couldnt log in under gui except as guest which to be honest fucking sucked donkey cock!

(solution)
ctrl+alt+1
login
sudo rm ~/.Xauthority
go back to your gui (ctrl+alt+7) and login

so now ive fixed that....next problem!!

I have a HP elitebook 8440p which has an intel wifi, it has a nice touch button/indicator above the keyboard to turn the wifi on and off and also as an indicator (orange off/blue on) but since the upgrade it now blinks when wifi data is sent (all the time...and so its fucking annoying) so how to fix this new feature?

(solution)
echo 'options iwlagn led_mode=1' >> /etc/modprobe.d/wlan.conf
modprobe -r iwlagn && modprobe iwlagn

now im all sorted :)

Installing and getting CUDA to work under ubuntu 11.04 x64 bit

So I want to play with CUDA in the coming months, getting it to work under ubuntu 11.04 was a challenge in itself specially running x64bit!

so here is how I got it working..

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:aaron-haviland/cuda-4.0
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

64-bit :
sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-gdb nvidia-cuda-toolkit nvidia-compute-profiler libnpp4 nvidia-cuda-doc libcudart4 libcublas4 libcufft4 libcusparse4 libcurand4 nvidia-current nvidia-opencl-dev nvidia-current-dev nvidia-cuda-dev opencl-headers

32-bit :
sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-gdb nvidia-cuda-toolkit nvidia-compute-profiler lib32npp4 nvidia-cuda-doc lib32cudart4 lib32cublas4 lib32cufft4 lib32cusparse4 lib32curand4 nvidia-current nvidia-opencl-dev nvidia-current-dev nvidia-cuda-dev opencl-headers

this is really important, if you didnt have nvida drivers already installed, you have to run this
sudo nvidia-xconfig

the next thing to do even if you skipped the last line is to REBOOT - you MUST do this!!

CUDA should now be working :)

-- to get compiling working is another ball ache!
in somewhere like your home folder do the following

mkdir gcc44
cd gcc4
ln -s /usr/bin/cpp-4.4 cpp
ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.4 gcc
ln -s /usr/bin/g++-4.4 g++


edit /etc/nvcc.profile to look in the gcc44 directory (give it the full path)

compiler-bindir =/home/xxx/gcc44

now your ready to compile stuff - here is an example
nvcc -c yourprog.cu

that should give you a .o file then run the next
g++-4.4 -lcudart yourprog.o

that should give you a a.out file - just run it as ./a.out

How to get Citrix ICA to work on Ubuntu 11.04 x64bit

So thought I should write this up so I have a note of it somewhere.


goto http://www.citrix.com/download
select the "receiver" and download the x64 bit version
open a terminal and cd to the download location

sudo dpkg -i icaclient_12.0.0_amd64.deb

open firefox and goto
edit > preferences > applications > Citrix ICA settings file
change this to "use wifca" rather than "use citrix receiver for linux (in firefox)

should work now :)