A confusing problem

I do not know what I did wrong, but my copy of Firefox 3.5 is still branded with its codename “Shiretoko”, so some websites didn’t think it was a real web browser and told me to switch to Firefox (or Internet Explorer, but there’s more chance of hell freezing over). Temporarily you can use the user agent switcher extension which will temporarily sort out the problem, but it’s hardly an elegant solution and you have to remember to change it every time you want to visit whatever sites hate you. I have, however found the answer! Visit about:config and change the value of general.useragent.extra.firefox to Firefox/3.5.1 (the whole point is to switch Shiretoko with Firefox, the version number is relatively unimportant, but probably won’t auto update if they push an update via apt). Problem solved!

32-bit Skype on 64-bit Ubuntu

“It’s not possible”, they cry! Well, get off your soap boxes dear heretics, it is in fact entirely possible. (If you don’t have problems with pulseaudio, that is)

So, step one. Download the official Skype client for linux to your desktop from their website, you want the .deb for Ubuntu (ignore the version numbers, it’s fine).

Step two.  Install libqt4-gui and libqt4-core, either through synaptic or in a terminal.

sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui libqt4-core

Step three. Let’s play dressing up, we have to convince the package manager to install Skype against its will. That happens to be quite easy. Open a terminal window, and run this command:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture ~/Desktop/skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

What it does is talks directly to the package manager and asks to install the file we downloaded, but doesn’t check the type of system it’s supposed to run on against the type of system you have.

Easy peasy!

Gnome DO Quick Tip

Press Shift-Return to launch the action you’ve just described and keep Gnome DO visible. The Escape key will clear your last text entry and start again.

Thumbnail woe

Point 1: The new exam timetable system looks pretty, but doesn’t seem to be a marked improvement on what we had last year. When you download your exam timetable it erroneously tells the computer it’s HTML not a PDF, so you need to change the extension to make it work properly. I have reported this to them, I doubt anything will happen or that they will give me a response, I’m still waiting for a reply to the email I sent almost a year ago.

Point 2: Because my computer read the PDF as HTML the pretty thumbnail was garbled text, the question is how do you fix the thumbnail. Thumbnails are saved in ~/.thumbnails/normal with really helpful names (they look like md5 hashes perhaps?). The answer lies in the tracker-thumbnailer tool.
$ tracker-thumbnailer /path/to/garbled/thumbnail/file
will give you the location of the thumbnail image which you can rm then run
$ tracker-thumbnailer /path/to/garbled/thumbnail/file mimetype normal
which will recreate the thumbnail. You need to change the mimetype to reflect the type of file, such as application/pdf or image/png (there’s a little more help on the man page).

Point 3: There must be an easier way to do this

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…because you are dirty. You know that is what they are thinking – you just know it. Still, slightly annoying.