Journal of Tormod Haugen

I needed to install a Java plugin for Firefox under Ubuntu 9.04 (beta). This didn’t happen by itself when I installed sun-java6-plugin, but a quick search showed me what Eirik Hoem found out a year ago.

Or, as Karl Trygve said in a comment; messing about in /usr is usually not a good idea - the link could be made in /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/plugins, and the plugin would then be available for all users on the computer.

Linking the java plugin to Firefox (paths might vary a bit, depending on Java versions):

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/.default/plugins
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

I didn’t have Icedtea installed, but I do use OpenJDK for development. Works now, at least.

Or something like that. For once someone told me to look it up on Google. It was a Linux query, and since I’m not that knowledgeable on Linux, I deferred it to my brother. He asked me if he should shuffle me away from the computer, or if I would look it up on Google myself.

My error message was something in the neighbourhood of this (source):

* Starting System Tools Backends system-tools-backends invoke-rc.d: initscript system-tools-backends, action “start” failed.
dpkg: error processing system-tools-backends (–configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
system-tools-backends
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

and the fix is (source):

***TEMPORARY WORKAROUND***
After the upgrade has failed, you will get an error every time you run dpkg or apt-get saying that system-tools-backends is not configured. “sudo dpkg –configure -a” will not fix this. To recover, please perform the following 2 steps:

1) sudo invoke-rc.d system-tools-backends stop
2) sudo dpkg –configure -a

It seems like the problem is with installing while switching users. Now fixed. Yay!

I’ve been doing something that I should have been doing a long time ago. As I haven’t been using my desktop much since my last hard disk crash, it has sported only a Windows XP install. Yesterday I set down to install Ubuntu on it; completing another backup, clearing space and getting the actual iso image written to a CD. Everything went a-OK up to and including the install.

Now, getting on teh intrawebz was a bit harder. After setting the wireless up nicely in the graphical network manager and then turning it on a few times, I suddenly noticed that there was no wireless card installed. Which kind of explained why I didn’t connect to my router. Selecting troubleshooting from the Help prompted me to install ndisgtk from the Synaptic Package Manager. Where I couldn’t find it. Which was fixed by inserting the Ubuntu CD again, and adding it to the package repositories from within the package manager.

Now the troubles began. I was prompted to install a Windows driver ( a *.inf file ) for the card. Checking up what was installed in Windows I found an oem driver - which didn’t work under Ubuntu, probably because it was filled with different values and references to packaged files residing elsewhere and on Windows CD’s. Next I went to the manufacturer’s webpage and downloaded what turned out to be the wrong driver. Which installed, but didn’t find the hardware. Now I dug into Howto documents and man pages. They pointed me in direction of the NDISwrapper compatibility list. Which doesn’t exist any more, and when I dug up a more or less recent version on archive.org it didn’t contain my card.

The fix was easy. I just had to get the correct driver from the manufacturer - or rather from the people who branded the hardware. My card is a Jensen Wireless High Speed USB dongle. Running lsusb yielded:

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1435:0210 Wistron NeWeb

for my card. This card can be used through ndiswrapper with the driver downloadable from Jensen Scandinavia.