I use google chrome to get at bits of the web that certain corporate proxies don’t allow. I use an ssh tunnel to a tinyproxy instance running on my home machine and then connect to the forwarded port on my local machine.

Something that has annoyed me for some time is that if you change google’s proxy settings, it affects the system proxy settings. It’s like Internet Explorer all over again, and it doesn’t tell you it’s doing it.

There are bugs:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=43990

but the windows equivalent was closed “WONTFIX” for spurious reasons (IMHO, of course).

There is a way around it, though:

google-chrome --proxy-server:localhost:8888

Flock only provides 32-bit (i686) binaries so if you’re running 64-bit (x86_64) Fedora Linux, you probably don’t have the right dependencies.

First step, download the archive file from flock.com

Then, uncompress it. I choose to do this straight to /usr/local

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xf /path/to/flock-*.linux-i686.tar.bz2

Create a symlink in /usr/local/bin so it is in your path:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/flock/flock-browser /usr/local/bin

If you run flock-browser now, you’ll get an error:

error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

If you satisfy this, you’ll get some more, so here are the packages you need to install with yum (which will pull down lots more). Don’t try to satisfy them yourself, it will only cause you pain. Just use yum.

sudo yum install gtk2.i686 libXt.i686 PackageKit-gtk-module.i686 libcanberra-gtk2.i686

You might still get some errors about a gtk theme, but I ignored them as they appear to be fairly harmless (at least I don’t care about them):

(flock-bin:19147): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "clearlooks",

The templates seem pretty good, much better than the old way. That is all

I have problems installing Ubuntu on my laptop as it does not provide debian style floppy-based installation media. My CDROM drive is totally shot, so all I have is a floppy drive or network card as my installation options.

I found my way around this with a combination of a post on a forum (which I was unable to find second time around) and some figuring out of my own. Nothing particularly ground-breaking about anything I’ve done, but it might be of use…

The method I aimed to use was to get hold of appropriate kernel image and initrd from the netinstall CDROM and then get GRUB to load them.

Tracking down the images wasn’t too bad, and working out the appropriate appends came down to mounting the iso loopback and having a ferret around.

Download vmlinuz and initrd.gz.

The way I did this method was to do this from an existing installation of Linux. I think it would be possible to do it with only Windows (or other OS) installed and a GRUB boot disk. I may explore that possibility later and write that up, too.

I copied the vmlinuz and initrd.gz to my /boot partition, adding a “-warty-netinstall” suffix for clarity, and then added the following to my menu.lst for grub.

==# For installing Ubuntu Linux== title Install Ubuntu root (hd0,0) # partition that the vmlinuz and initrd.gz are on kernel /vmlinuz-warty-netinstall vga=normal ramdisksize=11057 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw -- initrd /initrd-warty-netinstall.gz The equivalent Lilo entry is: label "Install Ubuntu" kernel vmlinuz-warty-netinstall append vga=normal initrd=initrd-warty-netinstall.gz ramdisksize=11057 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw --

Then, just reboot (first running `lilo’, if using it) and select “Install Ubuntu” from the menu. That’s all there was to it for me.

Hope it helps someone, even if that’s only me in a few months time.

Fortunately, I’d backed up stuff so I could restore it fairly trivially.