Entries tagged Linux

Wubi fails to boot after upgrade

Posted on Dec 18, 2010

If Wubi fails to reboot after upgrade, try the following things.

If the system hangs at a grub prompt, then first try to replace the c:\wubildr file with the one in c:\ubuntu\winboot\wubildr (change ‘drive’ if necessary and backup c:\wubildr first as a precaution). It appears that in many cases the upgrade is corrupting the wubildr file.

If the system fails to boot, especially with an error message,
file not found ‘loadfont’
unknown command
, then boot with a live CD, loop mount the wubi root.disk, edit the grub.cfg and remove all lines above the first “menuentry”.

Preventing the grub packages from being updated can be a permanent solution for this problem. Lock the version of the packages, grub-pc and grub-common in Synaptic Package Manager.

How to add MATLAB to the GNOME menu

Posted on Sep 21, 2010

For the installation instruction of MATLAB, refer to the following document.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MATLAB

To add MATLAB to the GNOME menu,

1. Get an icon:

sudo wget http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Matlab_Logo.png -O /usr/share/icons/matlab.png

2. Get the launcher file:

sudo wget 'https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MATLAB?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=matlab-r2010a.desktop' -O /usr/share/applications/matlab.desktop

3. Edit the launcher file:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/matlab.desktop &

The contents of the launcher file (“matlab.desktop”) should be similar to what is written below. Modify ‘Name‘, ‘Exec‘, and ‘Categories‘ fields according to your configuration. Don’t forget to put ‘-desktop‘ at the end of the ‘Exec‘. Otherwise, MATLAB will show the splash screen, but will not start.

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Icon=/usr/share/icons/matlab.png
Name=MATLAB R2010b
Comment=Start MATLAB - The Language of Technical Computing
Exec=/usr/local/MATLAB/R2010b/bin/matlab -desktop
Categories=Development;Programming;

FYI. The ‘-desktop‘ option may not be necessary when MATLAB is executed from the command line.

Remote desktop connection in Linux: NX Server

Posted on Aug 13, 2010

My office computer was just an old Windows box which was getting slow due to the resource-devouring vaccine software. I decided to install Ubuntu (9.10, Karmic Koala) on it in order to use its computing power more efficiently. It was done quite nicely. I could run FireFox, Thunderbird and most of my favorite software as I used them on Windows just with the faster speed. The thing I wanted next was a substitute for Windows terminal service, aka, Remote Desktop Connection, since most of the time I logged on the machine remotely.

There are several implementations of VNC and RDP available for that purpose. I tested a couple of them myself, but the user experience they provided was not very satisfying to me, not to mention their slow speed. Then, I found FreeNX server1 which is a GPL implementation of NoMachine’s NX Server. It worked just like a charm. Fast and neat. It was exactly what I wanted, and I loved it.

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