Monday, 3 March 2025
Monday, 3 February 2025
Ubuntu 24.04 No Xorg GUI
Just had an issue where I started seeing errors with X applications when using Ubuntu 24.0.4 The error was "libGL error: did not find extension DRI_Mesa version 1".
I saw this error when trying to start the Gridcoinresearch client, but also with some test programs such as glxgears. It seemed to be an issue with a mesa update, but as it's wasn't causing major issues, I thought I'd wait for an update to addresses.
Sometime today, my laptop shutoff for reasons unknown, and when I tried to restart it I was getting a white screen stating "Oh, no! Something has gone wrong. Contact a system administrator.".
I could use Alt+F2 to login to a TTY but couldn't see anything obvious in the logs.
I looked to see what "sudo apt update" showed, and I could see several X\Mesa related updates held back so I manually installed these and a reboot got things working, including gridcoinresearch and glxgears.
I expect a bug slipped out in one of these apt packages, so might be work "sudo apt-get install ..." to manually install them if needed?
The packages I installed to update were:
- libegl-mesa0
- libegl-mesa0:i386
- libgbm1
- libgbm1:i386
- libglapi-mesa
- libglapi-mesa:i386
- libglx-mesa0
- libglx-mesa0:i386
Saturday, 24 September 2022
Ping not working in WSL2 Kali Linux
I found the answer here:
Issues with WSL2 Networking
WSL2 networking continues to be problematic, be it DNS not working or network connectivity being lost with the wider network. I also had an issue where WSL2 seemed to prefer a disconnected WiFi connection over a connected Ethernet one.
Things I have done:
1. Disable the unused WiFi Adaptor, this has prevented WSL2 from trying to use it.
2. Turned off Windows Fast Start - This is accessed from the power butttons options underneath power plan. Apparantly it helps fix issues if you shutdown\startup the machine with WSL2 rather than restart.
3. Configured static DNS for WSL2 machines. I created a /etc/wsl.conf file containing the following (replace the name servers with what you want):
[network]
generateResolvConf = false
nameserver 192.168.1.3
nameserver 192.168.1.4
4. Networking still craps out but I find this network stack reset recommendation from stackOverflow helps:
wsl --shutdown
netsh winsock reset
netsh int ip reset all
netsh winhttp reset proxy
ipconfig /flushdns
Windows Search > Network Reset
Restart Windows
Sunday, 27 March 2022
NALA v0.7 Relased
I've been using NALA for a little while on my Ubuntu distros as it compacts the update process and makes it much more obvious what's going on than if you use APT alone.
Up until now, the "nala fetch" command wasn't working on ARM\Pi as it set some repo's that either had no, or broken arm packages.
With v0.7, "nala fetch" now sets up the repos correctly so ARM\Pi users can make use of features like parallel downloads etc.
Find NALA on GitLab here.
Sunday, 30 January 2022
Unable to upgrade Google Apps Legacy to Google Workspace Starter with UK billing
I had discovered by accident that the old free Google Apps Legacy edition which I've been using since 2013 was being discontinued this year and that I had to upgrade to at least Google Workspace Starter before the end of July this year or potentially lose access to the service.
I have four family members using this, so losing access to email and purchased apps\media would be a big deal, so I had to go through the upgrade process.
The problem was, every time I ran through the upgrade wizard, I was being asked for a US, rather than a UK billing address. I did not have that.
I posted a question on the Google community forums, and having run around in circles for a few days I had my post closed as the duplicate for another question, again with no real answers.
I came back today to thankfully find an answer. It turns out that at the top of the page where you select you Workspace edition there is a country\currency selection drop down. It looks like this is easily missed as the page in the browser can be displayed slightly scrolled down with this option scrolled off the top:
Here's the post with the answer here.
Now, a small rant.
I'm very grateful to Google for providing this service for the 9 years or so, and I certainly have no issues paying a fair price for the service. Not at all. It just doesn't seem very competitive to other options out there, so I get the distinct impression Google want the legacy apps account holders to disappear.
List price for Google Workspace Starter is currently about £4.60 per user, per month. So for my family of four, this is £4.60*4*12=£220.80 per year. Compare this against £79.99 for up to 6 users on Microsoft 365 and that is nearly three times the cost. You also only get 30GB on Workspace starter vs M365 family. I also get the latest MS Office desktop apps on M365 family as well...
The only thing that has stopped me moving for now is:
- Upgrade is free until end of July 2022
- Upgrade is half price until July 2023
- You can't move apps\media purchases to a new account