Monday, May 16, 2011

Revert back to Default look n feel of Ubuntu 11.04

Well guys i am back again.. and this time it is pretty fast :).
I downloaded Ubuntu 11.04 and after installation complete also tried installing desktop effects available (and runs fabulously good) in previous version of Ubuntu. And this time to using synaptic manager the installation was a breeze but the effect was something else :D

In 11.04 there is common menu-bar and then there is vertical side bar looks more like windows 7(but vertically placed) so i don;t know(if i am able to run those eff3cts successfully) how will they react with UI... well that is a future thought.

But the current situation was my fresh install of Ubuntu 11.04 was messed up and now i was not able to view the menu-bar and there is no bar from where i can try to fix it.. run dialog box was also not coming in picture on press of Alt + F2.

And the last resort was to again redo the install(which was expensive in terms of time consumed) so what to do. This is what i did and it worked for me.. hope it works for you too (if you ever get dirty with effects on Ubuntu)

Step 01: Right click on desktop and click on "Create a launcher"(because i was only able to see the desktop.. a blank desktop!!)
Step 02: Provide name as "Terminal" and command as "gnome-terminal" and click on OK.
Step 03: Now double click the newly created launcher to open up a console terminal(with no head bar and no menu bar)
Step 04: Issue following two commands one by one.
gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/compiz-1
gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/compizconfig-1


Wait for some time and you will get native UI back on Ubuntu 11.04 (if not try log-out and log-in back) :)
Well my thoughts stopped working when i lost the panels and menu-bar of 11.04 and this thing came first in my mind and it worked (for me). If there is/are any thing much better than this(which i am obviously unaware of) please provide that too in comment.. it may help somebody.

Till that time chaow!

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

"Error establishing a database connection" from wordpress even when db credentials are correct

Yes i got hit by this just today!!

Let me tell you guys one thing i am not that much into Wordpress for any reason. But one of my blog is on Wordpress and obviously i am not the person who manages it but i do look into technical stuff if it goes out of hand(of my buddy)

Encountered a strange problem where in an existing install of Wordpress(which is about 1 year old) showed a message "Error establishing a database connection" in complete page, all of a sudden. wooohhhh!!!

and then i tried looking out for any changes in wp-config.php(which stores db credentials) but they all were fine. I crossed checked it by manually connecting to the db with credentials provided from console and yes i was able to connect to but Wordpress was telling me that it didn't.

I thought lets take a backup of the existing database and then try to debug it (so that in case i loose some data during this play i am in a position to recover too) but there was something waiting for me.... ufff!!!!

mysqldump -u some_user -psome_password xxxxxxxxx_blog > xxxxxxxxx_blog.dump.sql

and i got this in response
mysqldump: Got error: 145: Table './xxxxxxxxx_blog/xxxxxxxxxblog_options' is marked as crashed and should be repaired when using LOCK TABLES

so due to some activity we have blog's options table all messed up... so what to do!!

Answer is go to /var/lib/mysql/
and run myisamchk on the tables mentioned that should fix it.

something like..
sudo myisamchk -r ./xxxxxxxxx_blog/xxxxxxxxxblog_options

with output:
- recovering (with sort) MyISAM-table './xxxxxxxxx_blog/xxxxxxxxxblog_options'
Data records: 210
- Fixing index 1
- Fixing index 2
Data records: 208

and whola!!! my blog is back :D

Hope this must have helped you in anyway or the other.... will be back soon with more life like post.. these computer tech blogs.. uff uff!!

Honda Civic & A/C problems.

Hello Friends, Got a post again on to Honda Civic (The good old favorite commuter of mine). This car has been doing great except for so...