Category Archives: computer

HTC SHIFT – It’s mine!

Here I am writing on the train which goes from Trieste to Udine. It has been a long time since my last post. In September 2007 I started commuting daily and I did not have many occasions to write a quick post. I had time, as the time it takes to cover my home-office distance is about 2 hours/journey. I did not have the opportunity, though. We may see it as a lack of technology. But yesterday I got my brand new HTC Shift (x9500) and now I’m enjoying some decent-to-almost-fast typing on the go. I will make a full review in a week or two. For the time being I can tell you that this nice piece of equipment is value for the money (especially if you bought it very cheap in eBay like I did!).

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon: how to set an application (e.g. gDesklets) to run at startup

I’ve been trying to run gDesklets at startup for months. Everybody used to say that it was just a matter of creating a new item under “Sessions”. Well, it was not working for me.
It was not a critical issue, so I let it go. But from time to time I went back googling around for a solution. Finally I found it in a post 10-month old from Ubuntuforums.org. The problem was not in the application but in the permission settings of the folder /home/[your user name]/.config/autostart. I did not have any write permission on that folder, therefore there was not way to set and save new items under “Sessions”.
If you have the same problem, click on the following link.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=359686&highlight=startup+chown+permissions

A quick update: how to remove a .deb package

Some time ago a wrote a post concerning the installation of Google Desktop .deb on a x64 system using the -force architecture command.

Let’s say want now to get rid of it. How do you do that? You won’t find that package listed in Synaptic, so you will have to do it using the terminal, as you did for the installation. The tricky thing is that the dpkg -r command asks for the package name, not the file name used during the installation. So here is what you have to type in:

sudo dpkg -r google-desktop-linux