Category: Linux

Converting to Nextcloud Contacts and Calendars

I recently bought a Syncloud Cloud server, primarily so that I, my girlfriend and my band could all have large dropboxes and shared dropboxes without each having to pay large regular fees to a cloud company. The dropbox facilities the Nextcloud server on it provides are similar to those of Dropbox, but Nextcloud also has a wide range of apps that can be installed to provide more cloud facilities.

Among them are Contacts and Calendar apps, which I decided to install and convert to in order to reduce the amount of information that Google can trawl about me. To consider them working I needed to get both to operate in the Nextcloud web interface, Thunderbird (on Windows, but that is probably not relevant) and Android phone and tablets.

Continue reading “Converting to Nextcloud Contacts and Calendars”

Linux and Xamarin socket problems

One of the requirements I set myself for my Socket library was that it should be as robust as possible about knowing that the other end of a connection had gone away. The .net socket objects are pretty bad for this, and the only way to be certain that the connection is up is to attempt to read or write its data stream. Continue reading “Linux and Xamarin socket problems”

Suspending the Vaio with Ubuntu

The other serious problem I had with Hardy Heron was getting Suspend and Resume to work with my newer laptop (a Sony Vaio VGN-CR19VN). It works OK on the old laptop, but the new one didn’t want to know. Whenever I tried it it would just clear the screen, go to text mode, and leave a cursor at the top left.

Eventually, after a lot of searching on the forums, I found a fix for it. It took a long time to find because it was in the middle of a thread about fixing the problem on an HP laptop. It actually turned out to be remarkably easy to do.

All I had to do was modify the first entry in /etc/pm/config.d/defaults to read

SUSPEND_MODULES="uvcvideo"

and it now suspends and restores correctly. I think it hibernates as well, but I haven’t tested that as thoroughly.

Hardy Heron – Got it working eventually

When Ubuntu 8.04, otherwise known as Hardy Heron, was first released I tried installing it on both my laptops. My older laptop (a Sony Vaio PCG-Z600HEK) had the previous release, Gutsy Gibbon, on it. That had worked with no problems at all, so I wasn’t anticipating any with the new version. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of  problems that made it pretty much unusable until I was finally able to track down fixes for them. Continue reading “Hardy Heron – Got it working eventually”