HowTo: Fix MythTV’s Frontend not going full-screen in Ubuntu Jaunty.
The next version of Ubuntu is here – 9.04 aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Along with a wealth of new features comes a wealth of new minor bugs to fix. Not enough to be show-stoppers, but enough to annoy the heck out of you, and here’s a doozy.
If, like most people, you have Compiz enabled and you start the MythTV Frontend, you will notice that rather than go full-screen, Myth will start as a window, essentially, even if your settings within Myth say to go full-screen.
In a single-screen scenario, the MythTV window will start just underneath the upper Gnome panel and the lower Gnome panel will sit over the top of the Myth window, obscuring part of the display. Proof that it’s a window can be found by holding down the ALT key and then dragging the MythTV display around with your mouse.
If you’re like me and use two displays with Myth being run on the second screen, you will see a gap at the top of the screen that is the same height as the upper Gnome panel and you will see your wallpaper showing through there, as shown in the illustration below.
Click for full size (520K)
Here’s how to fix this problem.
EDIT June 2010: This problem still plagues Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04, and this fix will work for those releases as well.
HowTo: Reclaim reserved disk space on non-system drives taken by the Ext3 filesystem.
I made a rather alarming discovery today, quite by accident.
Like most people, I use an external hard-drive to backup data to, or to shift things around if I’m low on space on my PC’s internal drive. Well, today that external drive reported that it was full. Damn.
So I fire up Ubuntu’s Disk Usage Analyser, aka Boabab, to find out what’s consuming the most space. I use a 1TB external drive and it’s formatted total is about 916GB, which is about right, however Boabab reported that the total consumption of data on the drive only added up to about 860GB – wtf? Even Nautilus’s Volume Properties window was reporting that the drive still had 50GB-odd free, so why is the system telling me it’s full?
I use Ext3 on my drives and, being a journalled filesystem, some space on the drive is reserved to record these journals among other functions which is expected, but 50GB worth? I did some research and found out that the Ext3 filesystem reserves 5% of disk space by default for itself! In this day and age of large drives, that’s a huge chunk of lost space!!
Thankfully there is a way to tell Linux not to reserve so much space. Read on…
HowTo: Prevent other sites hot-linking to images on your own Apache website on your Ubuntu Server.
Personal websites, blog pages, etc. You can spend a lot of time, effort, and sometimes money setting them up and maintaining them. The pay-off is when you see lots of people visit your site, take an interest and even provide feedback. The annoyance comes when you notice in your logs that a select handful of images are being downloaded a helluva lot more than every other image on your server, and further scruitiny shows that it wasn’t even your own website requesting them – it was someone elses.
So you go and have a look at the referring site. Worse-case scenario was that they had blatantly plagerised your site – copied everything as their own. Not so bad is that someone has found an interesting pic on your site and linked directly to it on another site to tell people about it, but not necessarily atrributed your site to it.
Hot-linking files between sites is considered bad nettiqette if you have not got permission from the site owner. Image copyright issues aside, it is preferred that if you have an interest in an image that you download a copy and host it yourself, or that you link to the hosting website itself so that people can see proper attribution.
This has already happened to me a few times with the most notable being some Korean blogger’s site blatantly copying word for word one of my articles, but he decided to leave all the images in it hot-linking to my server. I couldn’t believe it, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone did that. I dropped a politely worded, but firm, message on his blog where everyone could see it, and he has since deleted the plagerised entry from his blog.
So, how do we go about preventing your Apache web server from serving up images to invalid referrers? Read on…
