Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

After installing Ubuntu 14.04, my second drive would not mount until I clicked on it. This was a problem for Dropbox and Copy, two applications that needed to access that drive on startup.

Initially, I typed these lines:

sudo mkdir /media/wd1tb
sudo chown username:username /media/wd1tb

And I edited my fstab with this code.

UUID=xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx /media/wd1tb ext4 defaults 0 0

That didn’t work. I don’t know why, but it didn’t.

Finally, I received some advice to use the UUID of the drive instead of my own name for the mount folder. The advice also instructed me to insert my username in the path to the mount point.

So I typed this.

sudo mkdir /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx
sudo chown username:username /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx

Naturally, the username is my username and the xxx in the example are the real numbers of the drive.

Then I added the following to the end of my fstab file.

UUID=xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx ext4 defaults 0 0

I don’t know why, but that fixed it. I no longer need to click the drive to get it to mount.

It appears that the Broadcom BCM4311 wireless chipset is incorrectly identified in Ubuntu and its variations, including Linux Mint. This applies to the Dell Latitude D420/D820 and higher series along with my Inspiron 6400.

Even Linux Mint 16 Petra was failing to activate the WI-FI on the install.

To install the correct driver, do the following:

sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer b43-fwcutter

reboot

Doing so turned on the wifi light and allowed the machine to connect flawlessly.

Thanks to Tim Shields for finding this for me.

Can’t turn on the Party Mode on a Google+ Event? No checkbox?

If you have a checkbox, the answer is supplied by Google here:
https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2618640?hl=en

If that doesn’t work, come back here and read the following.

If you have more than one Google account on your device, that may be the problem.

I had my own account, syncing everything on my Android device. But I also had my wife’s Google account on the device — to let her get email when she wanted to. Somehow, when I tried to go into party mode, Google thought I was her. My phone was set to AutoUpload my pictures via my Google account.  Not hers.

That’s why there was no checkbox evident. Solving this required I switch from being her to being me.

To switch users on Google+:

1. Select the Menu icon
2. Select the small down-arrow (down carrot) next to the name of the active user
3. Select the new user

Google+ should then allow you to enter the Party Mode on your Google+ Event.