208. Weird things with desktops -- nvidia cockup?

Just in case someone else is having an equally entertaining Friday the 13th (of July 2012).

So, I had a little gnome 3 crash. You know the ones with the frowny screen and a message saying that "yeah, we probably could have let you save everything you're working one but screw you 'cos we're logging you out"? (hmm...don't remember seeing that with gnome 2/metacity -- have we in fact been turned into Metro/Win8 guinea pigs?!)

Well, anyway, I had one of those and rebooted.

I got to gdm3, logged in and...nothing. I mean, I saw the desktop background, but no menus, nothing. Nothing at all. Moving the mouse to the top left corner would give me the typical gnome-shell splash pattern and make the screen a bit darker. I didn't get anything else though (like a list over programs, icons or anything). Oh, and the conky stuff briefly flashed by each time (but in the top left area instead of flush to the right side of the screen)

Given that I played around with testing different desktops recently I figured I might have upset the update-alternatives balance, and played around with --config x-window-manager and --config x-session-manager. I mean, I was hoping that the lack of a menu of some sort was due to having the wrong window manager, in spite of all the signs pointing to me actually using gnome-shell.

That not working I spent another hour playing with installing and uninstalling nvidia. For some reason smxi pulled in the 173 driver, before replacing it with 302. Every time. Finally, I managed to get everything to the point where I could do startx with the nouveau drivers installed.

Not that things were perfect -- in fact my screen was scaled to 1024*768 (supposed to be 1920x1280), and the flicker whenever I moved my mouse was not funny, but at least it kind of worked.

So back to the terminal, sudo rmmod nouveau, sudo smxi, install the nvidia driver again -- but this time selecting nvidia current instead of debian-nvidia, and then startx

Huh. This time I kind of got the icon panel and the bottom panel, and the gnome-shell hot corner worked ok. It's almost like...no way...is it pretending I have two displays???

I then went to System settings/Displays and the bloody thing had set it up so there were two active display (I don't OWN two displays and certainly did not set this willingly).

Here it's been deactivated. But seriously, wtf???

So if you find yourself in a similar situation without panels and stuff: check your settings. Now how the hell did this come about? And who can I blame? Debian? Nvidia? Nvidia has been the cause of most of my more severe problems with debian...I just wish nouveau was a better alternative than it currently is for my setup.

PS I do realise that some of the language in the post above is more fitting for a valley girl, but screw this: I'm a busy person with a tight schedule (semester starts in two weeks and still hammering away on lectures, not to mention research) who lost three valuable Friday afternoon hours on a stupid thing. Not happy.

207. apt-get, apt-cacher-ng and hash sum mismatch

Update: Another day and we're back to the same crap with Hash sum mismatches. It's getting old...however, I'm beginning to suspect it's not the mirror, but my apt-cacher-ng.

I was getting a bit peeved with getting intermittent messages about 'hash sum mismatch' etc. when trying to do sudo apt-get update

Ign http://dl.google.com stable/main Translation-en                                                                                                                                                                                         
Fetched 17.1 MB in 9s (1,736 kB/s)                                                                                                                                                                                                          
W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/192.168.1.1:3142_ftp.iinet.net.au_debian_debian_dists_testing_main_binary-amd64_Packages  Hash Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/192.168.1.1:3142_ftp.iinet.net.au_debian_debian_dists_testing_contrib_binary-amd64_Packages  Hash Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/192.168.1.1:3142_ftp.iinet.net.au_debian_debian_dists_testing_non-free_binary-amd64_Packages  Hash Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/192.168.1.1:3142_ftp.iinet.net.au_debian_debian_dists_testing_contrib_i18n_Translation-en  Hash Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/192.168.1.1:3142_ftp.iinet.net.au_debian_debian_dists_testing_main_i18n_Translation-en  Hash Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/192.168.1.1:3142_ftp.iinet.net.au_debian_debian_dists_testing_non-free_i18n_Translation-en  Hash Sum mismatch

E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

So I took action:

sudo rm -rf /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng/*

But then

sudo apt-get update    
Get:1 http://192.168.1.1 testing InRelease [190 kB]
Err http://192.168.1.1 testing InRelease                                                                                                                        
Ign http://192.168.1.1 stable InRelease                                                                                                                         
Get:2 http://192.168.1.1 stable Release.gpg [1,672 B]                                                                                    
..
Fetched 7,004 kB in 7s (965 kB/s)                                                                                                                                                                                                           
Reading package lists... Done
W: A error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: http://192.168.1.1 testing InRelease: File /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/192.168.1.1:3142_ftp.iinet.net.au_debian_debian_dists_testing_InRelease doesn't start with a clearsigned message

W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/testing/InRelease  

so I

sudo apt-get install debian-keyring

which didn't solve anything

Solution:
Edit you /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all instances of testing with wheezy, e.g.

deb http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ stable main contrib non-free

I don't know if this has to do with the transition towards freezing wheezy, but basically, if you're having problems like that, have a look at what's actually on the mirror you're using. In my case I had a look at ftp://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/ and found no 'testing' directory.

It also took care of these related messages on a different node:

Fetched 7,493 kB in 8s (885 kB/s)
W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/testing/contrib/binary-amd64/PackagesIndex  MD5Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/testing/contrib/i18n/Translation-enIndex  MD5Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/testing/non-free/binary-amd64/PackagesIndex  MD5Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/testing/non-free/i18n/Translation-enIndex  MD5Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/testing/main/i18n/Translation-enIndex  MD5Sum mismatch

W: Failed to fetch http://192.168.1.1:3142/ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/dists/testing/main/binary-amd64/PackagesIndex  MD5Sum mismatch

206. Chrome, cookies and incessant spying

With age and added responsibilities I'm becoming grumpier and grumpier.

I read lxer.com everyday since it provides a good aggregation of linux-related news. On clicking on this link to h-online I was shown a pop-up in the top left corner letting me know that h-online uses cookies, and by clicking close my consent to be tracked is assumed. A link was given to a page where I could opt out, and another link to etracker was provided on that page. Clicking on that and eventually getting past the captcha told me that etracker will no longer track my browser (so I have to do it for chrome, chromium, and iceweasel? And on every one of my six computers?)

I signed up for my first dial-up internet connection in 1996, and as far as I can remember cookies were heavily discussed already back then. However -- and again this is as far as I can remember -- accepting cookies wasn't necessary since not every website + their mum was using them to track you. 

As far as I can see there are a few reasons why websites want to set first or third party cookies:
* Ads. Targeted ads.
* Information. Which is then sold to companies tailoring ads.
* Automatic log-in and customisations
* Because everyone else is doing it


I've cleared my cache, but I saw cookies from the Swedish ministry of foreign affairs, among others. I find it difficult to imagine a legitimate reason for them to set a local cookie on my computer. I don't think there is any evil intent behind it -- instead it's probably a case of 'why not?'.

It's easy enough to set your browser to block all cookies or to automatically delete them on closing your browser. Some browsers allow you to accept cookies on a site/provider basis. This easily leads to you having to click pop-up after pop-up after pop-up...

The ideal case -- from the point of the user -- is one where you block all cookies and add exceptions for sites that YOU deem have legitimate reasons to set cookies and where YOU benefit from having cookies set.

A little experiment. Try disabling cookies completely, and then log-in to your blogger or gmail account. Try adding an exception for google servers only, then log in to blogger -- you get stuck in a nice little loop which only gets broken if you add an exception for blogger.

In fact, I can't even do much on the university network without allowing cookies -- the university wants to set cookies in order to allow me to do just about anything.

Anyway, after that rant, here's how you might want to manage your cookies in google chrome:
Got to settings in google chrome and type in cookies

Click on Content Settings.

Check:

* Block sites from settings any data

* Block third party cookies and site data

Then click on Manage Exceptions 

 Add sites YOU feel should have the right to add cookies.
With google and blogger you have little choice: in order to use those sites you need to enable cookies.
Note that wildcards are added using [*.]

You may also want to clear you cache to get rid of cookies which have already been set.
Continuously add exceptions for sites which you want to grant the ability to set cookies. 

You can also add sites by clicking on the cookie icon to the right of the URL field in your browser:

Take a look at what cookies are set every now and again.

If you find that you have plenty of cookies like these:

it's likely because you have the Google Opt Outs enabled: