Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

SOLVED

“ES File Explorer can’t find Ubuntu Server” — And for that matter, nothing can find the Ubuntu server. Not Windows XP, not Windows Vista, not Windows 7, not Windows 8, not a MAC, not even another Linux Desktop.

Every time I reinstall Ununtu, I have trouble making Samba shares visible to Windows machines — and to ES File Explorer on  my android phone.

You would think that when you install the Ubuntu Desktop, and you right-click a folder in Nautilus and try to share it, it would share. Ah — life is never that easy.

To get the shares working, I did a million and one things, but I think this is what fixed it.

First, get all the updates you should have.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Second, install Samba.

sudo apt-get install samba

Third, (and this is what I always seem to forget) make yourself a samba user with a password.

sudo smbpasswd -a username

Restart Samba.

sudo service smbd restart

That’s it.

It works for me now.

For years we have been using old laptops at church to record the services. About a month ago I updated Ubuntu to the latest version and lost the audio inputs. I absolutely hate Pulse Audio and the new desktop presentation of Ubuntu has to go.

Today I finally got Linux Mint running on an old Dell Inspiron 5100. It seems lighter than Ubuntu and I love the MATE interface. I am pretty well done with the Unity interface. I don’t think anyone tried harder to like it than did I.

I still struggled to get the audio going. Finally, I followed the instructions here, where JaguarNight explains how he solved it.

You have to be a little intuitive. But when you mess with the ideas in JaguarNight’s post, it works.

Recently my Firefox on my Linux box has been running slowly.

Then things became worse when I started it and it gave me a message that it couldn’t complete the install because something was wrong with install.rdf.

“Error message: install.rdf is not well formed or does not exist”

I read somewhere that I should rename my ~/.mozilla folder and run Firefox.

I did more than that.

1. I uninstalled Firefox with Synaptic
2. Then renamed ~/.mozilla to ~/.mozilla_delete_after_02012010.
3. Then I reinstalled Firefox and ran it.

Firefox ran fast and clean.

Reinstalling my plugins, it maintains good speed.

I think the install.rdf file was a corrupt update of noscript.