Category: Ubuntu

Fonts For Wine in Ubuntu Mate

I’m using some older Windows programs – abandonware stuff by this point – on Ubuntu Mate via Wine.  I needed to install some custom fonts for these programs to use and had a bit of a time finding straightforward instructions on doing so.  Turns out it’s easy.  The fonts I needed are TrueType, so that’s all I’ve tested with.

Navigate to home/YOURUSERHOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts

You will have to enable hidden files in order to see the .wine directory, and if you haven’t done so already you’ll need to open the fonts directory as administrator (from the windows directory right click the fonts directory and choose Open as Administrator).  Dump your font(s) into that directory.  Then open a prompt and enter:

sudo fc-cache -fv

This will rebuild the font information caches for fontconfig system.  Then you should be good to go.

some index files failed to download – Linux

“Some index files failed to download.”  That’s the error I got upon running apt-get update, after having Ubuntu Mate notify me that some of my updates are, er, out of date.  The indexes that failed to download were related to Flux, which I really liked having on my Windows machines.  Turns out that, as of this writing, the repository of Vivid Vervet (Ubuntu 15) for Flux ain’t there.  Take a look for yourself and see.  I suppose I could install an older version, but since I wasn’t interested in getting into any compatibility issues I decided to bail on Flux for now.

But I couldn’t uninstall Flux.  It isn’t installed.  I need to get rid of the repository information.  You’d think that would be as simple as remove-apt-repository blah blah, since adding it is a simple add-apt-repository, but nope.  There’s no remove-apt-repository.  Ultimately I opened the path /etc/apt/sources.list.d as admin, and removed the associated list and save files.  Reran apt-get update and voila – both the errors and the nag referring to out of date updates disappeared.

Ubuntu Linux The cache has no package named “wine1.7-i386”

That’s the error that seemingly randomly popped up on my screen.

The cache has no package named “wine1.7-i386”

I’m using Wine because there are some Windows specific things I need to be able to run.   It seems that the updater may just not like Wine too much, because when I manually ran updates with a simple sudo apt-get update it upgraded without a problem and the error disappeared.

Virtualbox and Ubuntu (MATE)

I might be bailing from Windows, but I still need it for work.  Luckily I’ve been using Virtualbox for my work machine (for a variety of reasons I won’t get into here).  However, I installed Vbox 5.02 on my Ubuntu MATE laptop, imported my virtual machine, and upon first run was greeted with:

Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)

The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Please reinstall the kernel module by executing

‘/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup’

as root. Users of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mandriva should install the DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes and recompiles the vboxdrv kernel module if necessary.

I tried what the error said, but no dice.  It could not recompile the vboxdrv kernel module.  After a bit of searching around I found the following solution:

Removing AVG from Ubuntu

I’m using Ubuntu Mate 1.8.2 and for some unknown reason installed, or tried to install, the AVG deb package (avg2013flx).  Well, the install failed. I did some research to attempt to rectify this and instead came to the conclusion that I didn’t need AVG in the first place.  So I tried uninstalling it… and that failed:

Selection_001
Turns out part of the install failure involved the installers inability to fire up the AVG service, avgd.service, and that’s where the uninstaller was choking – trying to turn off that service that wasn’t on in the first place.  What a stupid ass uninstallation script.  Thankfully the fix was pretty easy:

  1. Open an elevated (sudo) text editor of your choosing and navigate to /var/lib/dpkg/info and open the file avg2013flx.prerm
  2.  Locate all instances of the following lines (my prerm had two sets) and comment them out by placing a pound sign (or a number sign or hashtag depending on your age, geographic location or level of nerdiness) at the beginning of each line.
    Selection_002
  3. Save the file, and then attempt to uninstall the app again:

If you were having the same problem I was, that should do the trick.