Category archives: Tuxedo

So with the move to 20.04 I've now run into my first package (rocketchat-desktop) that has given up on debian packages and only provides a snap package... and... well... it just doesn't run. It installs, it pretends to run and exits without any obvious error or message, but nothing happens.

Luckily this particular package is ...

There is something magical about asking Ubuntu to upgrade your desktop while you're running it. "Hey, Ubuntu, let's try focal" and it heads off to churn through downloading 6GB of stuff and unpacking/installing it. You head off to work in the meantime.

But it gets stuck because you have postgresql and it doesn't make it ...

Figured I'd try to update the old Dell 15" XPS with the broken keyboard as a machine for the kids to use as a desktop (for at-home schooling, etc) and do a bit of testing on the new release while I'm at it. The machine has been on 18.04, was updated and rebooted right before ...

So it has been a long time since I forced myself to boot into Windows to get support/development work done for the platform. Other than one hard-freeze where the machine updated its drivers, rebooted, and just stopped recognising the keyboard or trackpad, it pretty much just worked (turning it off and on again did, as ...

So I was given an old Celeron M laptop (XP era, 500MB RAM) and decided to try Debian Stretch out on it. The default Debian netinst installer does NOT include proprietary wireless firmware packages... seriously? Practicality needs to beat purity there. The machine can't boot from USB, and my very last CD-R was used up ...

So the laptop (XPS 15 Kubuntu 18.04) has an nvidia 900 series mobile GPU. When I went to run the unit tests for PyOpenGL... almost entirely red. Because the X display had no GLX extension. To be clear, X was running, KDE Plasma (which normally uses GLX for rendering) was apparently using XRender silently, basically ...

So one of the things I've been working on recently is creating a docker-based container to host a complex application for video processing that requires a lot of OS-level setup. I, of course, work on a number of Ubuntu 17.04 machines for development, and docker there has proven to be exactly what you expect. You ...

The use case here is capturing a network input source (mpeg ts stream) and then using that capture for playback later. If you just use a filesrc your playback will run as fast as the machine can process it unless you've got an element in the pipeline that will limit the speed (such as a ...

Update: The battery in this machine started swelling/exploding at 1.25 years, do not order one!

So I finally got a replacement for the old laptop, which works, but is winding up out-of-RAM basically all the time. This time, instead of going for the cheap inspirons I decided to plunk for a higher-end machine that ...

Update: the battery in this machine started swelling/exploding at 1.25 years Strongly recommend not buying one!

So I've now had a Dell XPS 15 9550 as my primary driver for approximately 9 months. I covered the (painful) setup process a bit when I first got it, so I won't repeat most of that here. Suffice ...