As I wrote here, I recently got a NAS server and wanted to mount its shared folders permanently. After going through some forum threads, reading tutorials, asking around and trying stuff like installing packages that might not be necessary (like nfs-common, it didn’t change anything afterwards), I managed to mount my Seagate BlackArmor NAS shares permanently.

So, here’s what I did:

I found my user and group id by typing “id” into a terminal, as I needed them later for adding them to fstab. Most of the tutorials or help manuals suggested using the name of the server from your local network. It didn’t work this way. So I had an idea: to use the IP instead of the server name. It came after seeing this forum thread, which I found after looking for the CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22 error on the web. I could see the most recent system errors by typing into a terminal

dmesg | tail

The next step was to modify /etc/fstab. I did it by using gedit as root, using sudo gedit /etc/fstab.

I added the following line to /etc/fstab:

//192.168.0.65/privatefolder /media/servfolder cifs username=xxxxx,password=yyyyyy,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

The final step was to type:

sudo mount -a

and I had the shares mounted permanently. I gave up on using another file for storing the credentials, as I am the only user of this computer and I don’t think I’m going to face any hacking threats soon.

I recently got a NAS server and tried to map a network drive in Ubuntu. I was very happy about it and wanted to automate the mounting of the network shares. As there’s no GUI for doing this – or even a simple way as Windows has, the “map network drive” command – I had to go to the console.

So I asked for help through the almighty Google. I found this wiki page, this forum thread and this help page. The help page is the hardest to understand. It looks like it was written by geeks for geeks. It seems that the open source community hasn’t yet learned a valuable lesson: not everyone has your experience when it comes to configuring servers, writing bash scripts or whatever.

A few months have passed since the last time I used Ubuntu and started using Windows XP. Sounds like a confession, right? Why I did that? Because imediately after I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 I got myself a brand new version of the popular distribution and as a bonus I got a low resolution, of 800×600, which really loves to be here, on my computer. It can’t be changed. I went through all the known methods and it’s still there. I manually edited xorg.conf, ran the already famous “sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg” command and still got nothing.

I admit it, I’m not as good as many other Linuxists but this thing made me use XP for a few months because I didn’t want to change my resolution from the NVidia Xserver Settings application every time I logged in. I asked on Ubuntuforums.org but I got the usual answers. And the problem is that this thing is happening to some other persons too.

If you have any idea on how to fix this, please leave a comment. I really need to get back on Ubuntu.

Two days after the official launch of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, I took the decision to upgrade my 8.04 to 8.10. Everything went fine until it gave a message telling me something like there’s no supported driver for my video card. I stopped the upgrade because the last time I got a message like that I had a hard time editing files from the command line.

Although Ubuntu 8.04 is an LTS distribution, sites and software developers that provide .deb packages are slowly stopping the offering of packages for Hardy Heron. I don’t think this is a clever move, because there are still many users who preffer Hardy Heron and will not upgrade to 8.10 Intrepid Ibex pretty soon. By doing this, the users who want to have the latest versions of their favorite apps will have to compile them from source which might create some problems in time if the process doesn’t go the right way.

These are my 2 cents on the “forced” upgrade issue. Keep in mind that this is just my opinion, maybe I’m paranoid, maybe I’m right… You decide:).

I was looking for some nice GTK2 themes on gnome-look.org, and during a couple of weeks I noticed the fact that originality is starting to make place to plagiarism and building upon others’ work. I admit the fact that I made a theme in June or July, using some elements from other themes, but at this moment the number of low quality wallpapers/GTK themes/icon themes is drastically increasing.

From my point of view, Kim Kahns is one of the best theme designers. I was always waiting for him to bring some new theme, with all the great details he put into his work. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have too much time anymore for this kind of thing. So, my dear Linuxists… where’s the art and where’s the creativity? I would like to see more persons like Kim, persons who can inspire and can create beautiful works. Things that are original. Things that don’t copy Vista or Mac (although I like its style:D) and can bring a new meaning to the looks of Linux distributions and especially to Ubuntu.

I am going to start creating a new theme pretty soon, hopefully something from scratch. Will you do the same thing?