Windows 8.1 Store App Can’t Open Foo

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Windows continues to kick my behind. Out of the blue the Windows 8.1 installation on my workstation didn’t want to open the store app. Not that I really need or want it. But the same happened for the settings app, which was a little bit of a problem.

I should have taken a screenshot but the error message was something along the lines of “This app can’t open” and “Refreshing your PC might help fix it”.

It seems that I was not the only one with that problem there is even a Microsoft blog post about it. The reason seems to be that the affected apps are not registered anymore with Windows.

So here is how it can be fixed. In a command prompt that runs as administrator I ran the following commands. When you look at the blog post it seems that you don’t need administrative rights but you never know. Now enter the following commands to re-register the system apps:

Store app:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\WinStore\AppxManifest.XML

Camera app:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\camera\AppxManifest.xml

File Manager (One Drive) app:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\FileManager\AppxManifest.xml

Settings app:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\ImmersiveControlPanel\AppxManifest.xml

These execution of these commands, especially for the store app, might take a while.

This would have been easy, but of course a Microsoft products never make things easy on me. So I hit the problem that the a registry key doesn’t have the right owner and I got the error 0x8007064A.

So you have to open the registry editor (Windows + R and then regedit) and navigate to the registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppModel\Repository\Packages

And then change the ownership of this key to SYSTEM:

  1. On the Edit menu, click Permissions.
  2. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
  3. Under Change owner to, click the new owner, and then click OK.

avelsieve Updates…

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I was using SquirrelMail and the Sieve plugin avelsieve for quite a while. And I once made the commitment on the mailing list to do some further development on avelsieve to make it work with newer PHP versions and fix other problems. The result was my own little update and some not yet released stuff that I only used myself.

But things changed and I moved on to Roundcube. And more importantly the spare time that I could spend on this project got less and less. I am really sorry, but I won’t be doing any further development on avelsieve. For anybody who wants to use my patched version, it is still and will be up there for download.

Categorized in: Foo

Outlook Monthly Calendar View Foo

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MS Outlook is in itself already a very annoying and not very pleasant piece of software. But sometimes you have to use it, no matter what. I will live.

But running again and again into the problem that Outlook conveniently forgets the correct calendar view really became a problem. Especially when it happens to everybody and they come to me to fix it.

At least it is easy to fix, but let me describe the problem first. It happens quite frequently that Outlook simply forgets the saved calender view. In our case that was usually the monthly view. It happens when you run a filter on your calendar. Outlook assumes the filtered view to be the new default. Well, that is just wrong.

Depending on the version of Outlook you have to perform one of the following steps.

Outlook 2007
Menu bar > View > Arrange By > Current View > Day/Week/Month

Outlook 2010
Menu bar > View > Change View > Manage Views > Select view name "Calendar" in the list Click "Apply View"

Mac OS Re-Install With New Apple ID Foo

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Re-installing MacOS should be a piece of cake. Just go into recovery mode by pressing Command+R during boot and start recovering. It should be…

But that is only true for the common case. If you perform the internet recovery and you are using a brand new Apple ID, then you are screwed. In that case you will see a message like this:

This Apple ID has not purchased Lion. You must sign in with an Apple ID that was used to purchase OS X Mavericks.

This happened to me, when I purchased a Mac online with a new Apple ID and tried to activate it. Well, it simply doesn’t work out of the box.

But fear not, there is quite simple fix, although it requires an activated Mac.

On that activated Mac log into the Mac App Store with your fresh Apple ID. Then find the MacOS version that you want to install, in this case Mavericks. Click download and it will give you some hard time, because it is already installed. But simply ignore that. Click continue to download the installer. You will see the download process in purchase area. You can go there and pause the download, because you don’t really want to install it. Now you should log out of the Mac App Store, if this is not your machine. And now, as a last step restart the Mac. Of course the one that you want to re-install. You can now use your fresh Apple ID that just “bought” MacOS.

Automatic Ubuntu Kernel Clean Up Foo (Update)

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Cleaning up old kernel images on a Ubuntu machine is a quite annoying task. If you forget it and you have a separate /boot partition, then you will sooner or later run out of disk space. And then of course all your updates will fail.

Doing the clean up manually is, as mentioned, more than annoying and very tedious. But other smart people have spent some time and created a nice little one-liner that will get rid of old kernel versions. This command line will of course make sure that the currently running kernel is not removed. So it is very important to reboot after a kernel upgrade before you run this script!

And without further ado I present….

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs apt-get -y purge

Update:
Not a big deal but a sudo snuck into the xargs call. It is now removed and shouldn’t cause any trouble anymore.

The Apache “Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName” Foo on Ubuntu

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If you are using Apache on Ubuntu, then you most likely ran into the annoying warning about determining the fully qualified domain name of your server. Something like this will show up in your logs, on start of the server or on log rotation:

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 10.10.0.40 for ServerName

Luckily there is an easy fix it. All you have to do is adding the ServerName directive to your Apache configuration and specify a good server name. Usually localhost will do fine, unless you are using the machine without virtual hosts, just as a base server.

A quick and dirty way would be adding the following line to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and restart your Apache service.

ServerName localhost

And then restart your Apache service with the following command:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Or on newer systems with:

service apache2 restart

Now, if you have a name in /etc/hostname, then you can use that instead. But you have to make sure that the name resolves to something real. If it is not in the DNS, then add it to your /etc/hosts and let it resolve to another loopback address. Here is a sample:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 myhostname

But as I said, this is quick and dirty and there are much better ways of doing it. So lets take a look at the preferred method. This one differs depending on the Ubuntu version, because the default Apache version changed from 2.2 to 2.4.

Ubuntu 13.04 and older (Apache 2.2)

Apache 2.2 loads additional configuration files from /etc/apache2/conf.d. Just add a file to that directory and add the above mentioned ServerName directive and restart Apache.

Create the file:
vi /etc/apache2/conf.d/servername

Add the directive:
ServerName localhost

Restart Apache:
service apache2 restart
or
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Ubuntu 13.10 and newer (Apache 2.4)

Apache 2.4 has the additional configuration organized similar to the modules and sites. All configuration files need to be added to the directory /etc/apache2/conf-available and need to have the extension .conf. Each configuration file can be enabled with a2enconf and disabled with a2disconf.

Create the file:
vi /etc/apache2/conf-available/servername.conf

Add the directive:
ServerName localhost

Activate the configuration:
a2enconf servername

Restart Apache:
service apache2 restart

Windows 7 “The Computer Restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error” Foo

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HP’s Windows recovery installation seems to be a little bit broken. Or at least for me it was. While restoring the Windows 7 on an HP Elitebook 8540w I ran into some issues when the drivers installed. The system just stalled and nothing was moving anymore. After a reboot I saw this nice error message:

The Computer Restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error

Well, not nice at all, but there is a way you can continue from here. Here are the steps:

  1. On that very same screen press SHIFT-F10 and a command prompt should appear.
  2. Enter “regedit” (without the quotes) into the command prompt and press enter.
  3. In the registry editor navigate to HKLM/SYSTEM/SETUP/STATUS/ChildCompletion
  4. Double click on the entry setup.exe and change the value from 1 to 3.
  5. Close the registry editor.
  6. Click OK in the error window, which will restart your machine.

After these steps you should be able to continue with your Windows setup. In my case I had some trouble getting all drivers to work, but that is a different story.

Too Many Open Files Foo With Chrome On Ubuntu 13.10

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The last Chrome update and one of the last Thunderbird updates caused some strange crashes of either on of them on my Ubuntu 13.10. All is fine, it runs great and all of a sudden *boom*, browser window gone, or email client gone.

Luckily .xsession-errors exists and there I could find some entries like this:

[3827:4038:0518/230904:ERROR:shared_memory_posix.cc(226)] Creating shared memory in /dev/shm/.com.google.Chrome.12UDei failed: Too many open files

Not good. But there is help. For MyEclipse I had the same issue in the past. But it didn’t seem necessary anymore since 13.10. But I also haven’t used it in a while. Anywhoo, here is what has to be done. And before I forget it, all these changes have to be done as root.

First check the setting for file-max with the following command

cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max

In my case this value seems fine, as it is well beyond the 200,000 that they recommend.

peter@majestix:~$ cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
1627431

If that is below 200,000 you can set by adding the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf

fs.file-max=200000

The next is the ulimit setting for open files. You can check it with the following command

ulimit -n

This one was set to 1024 in my case and that can be a little bit low. At MyEclipse they recommend setting it to 65535 and that’s what I did. Just add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf

* hard nofile 65535
* soft nofile 65535

Afterwards restart your machine and all should be fine. If you only have to change the sysctl.conf setting then you can activate that change with the following command

service procps start

Enable Administrator Account on Windows Vista, 7 & 8

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Most of you might have noticed that ye good ol’ administrator account is not available anymore in newer Windows versions. Actually it is hidden and disabled for all versions since Windows Vista. And under normal circumstances you actually don’t want to use this account anymore. But there are some use cases where you want to have this administrative access.

So, lets take a look at it. As mentioned before, the account exists. That means it just needs to be activated. Now, this can’t be done within the UI. You have to dive into the command prompt that runs as administrator. Kinda confusing to activate the administrator with a command prompt that runs as administrator, isn’t it?

Lets get started. First you need the command prompt with elevated (administrator) rights. On Windows Vista and 7 you can simply search for “command prompt” in the start menu and select “Run as administrator after right-clicking on the menu entry. Or you can use the Ctrl-Shift-Enter shortcut inside the search box.

On Windows 8.x you right-click the start button and choose the menu option “Command Prompt (Admin)”.

Now we have a command prompt and with the following command you activate the administrator account:

net user administrator /active:yes

It is important to know that this user does not have a password set at all. So everybody can log in as administrator! If you don’t want that, and usually nobody wants that, you have to set a password. This can be done with the following command on the already open command prompt:

net user administrator

If you are done with your task or you want to deactivate the administrator in general, you simply use the following command:

net user administrator /active:no

And now happy administrating! Or in other words, creating a lot of Foo.

PS3 Media Server And Ubuntu Foo… Again

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It feels like Groundhog Day all over again. After finding a relatively painless way of installing the PS3 Media Server on Ubuntu (PS3 Media Server And Ubuntu Foo), I found an easy way with a PPA (PS3 Media Server made easy) and I thought all will be good when I do the re-install of my server with Saucy. I couldn’t be more wrong. The latest Ubuntu version that is supported by the PPA is Raring and it seems it stopped at version 1.81.0 of the PS3 Media Server. A quick check of the home page and the current version is 1.90.1.

After some thought, I checked my old blog post and the configuration files from the PPA. So, this is a chimera of all these components and most importantly, it works. I can now feed media to my devices that don’t support the Plex Media Server.

So, lets get started. Oh, before I forget it. All these steps need to be done as root!

Dependencies/Repositories

The good thing is, that nowadays most of the media related packages are already part of Ubuntu. So, we can simply pull most dependencies directly from Ubuntu’s repository and don’t have to add tons of PPA’s.

First and foremost you need Java. I prefer for some unrelated reasons to use the Oracle JDK. I know JDK 8 was just released but 7 will do for the moment. And as far as I know PMS (yes, I use the abbreviation again) works fine with the OpenJDK. So this first step is kinda optional.

add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
apt-get update
apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

And if you want to try OpenJDK, you do the following

apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

Now we need the media related dependencies. All the encoders, decoders, muxers, etc. Most of it is already in Ubuntu and you might not need all of it (like dcraw). But I think it is better to have it installed and ready use, then be surprised when a feature, you never used before, doesn’t work. So here we go.

apt-get install mplayer mencoder mediainfo ffmpeg imagemagick vlc flac dcraw

tsMuxeR is the only one missing in this list. Luckily Robert Tari created a PPA. Lets just add it:

add-apt-repository ppa:robert-tari/main
apt-get update
apt-get install tsmuxer

Get PS3 Media Server

The project switched from Google Code to SourceForge but has its source code at GitHub. Confused? Well, so am I, but they must have their reasons and I don’t question it. Anywhoo, you can download the latest version (currently 1.90.1) from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ps3mediaserver/

Installation

After downloading you can install PMS into /opt or any other directory you think might be useful (/usr/local, etc.). I personally prefer /opt. Here we go:

tar xzvf pms-1.90.1-generic-linux-unix.tar.gz -C /opt/
ln -s /opt/pms-1.90.1/ /opt/pms

Creating the symlink in the second step makes life easier for later updates. All the configuration and start/stop scripts just look for /opt/pms. Updating should be as easy, as extracting the package into /opt and recreating the symlink.

Start Script

I based my scripts on the scripts from the PPA from Happy-Neko. Currently I did just some path corrections but I am planning on moving more configuration options to the configuration in /etc/default/.

Here are the steps to get the Upstart script, service configuration file and set the legacy link.

wget http://www.rfc3092.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ps3mediaserver.conf_.gz
gunzip ps3mediaserver.conf_.gz
mv ps3mediaserver.conf_ /etc/init

wget http://www.rfc3092.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ps3mediaserver.gz
gunzip ps3mediaserver.gz
mv ps3mediaserver /etc/default

cd /etc/init.d/
ln -s /lib/init/upstart-job ps3mediaserver

initctl reload-configuration

The last two steps set the legacy link, so that you can start the service using the old /etc/init.d mechanism. And the second is to tell Upstart, to scan for new services.

Please check /etc/default/ps3mediaserver, if it fits your needs. For instance, not everybody wants to run PMS as root. So take a minute and clean that up.

Configuration

The configuration for PMS with this setup in the configuration area for the user root.

/root/.config/ps3mediaserver

You can change this in /etc/default/ps3mediaserver. Here is how you get a basic configuration going.

wget http://www.rfc3092.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/PMS.conf_.gz
gunzip PMS.conf_.gz
mkdir -p /root/.config/ps3mediaserver
mv PMS.conf_ /root/.config/ps3mediaserver

The configuration file is already updated to reflect the paths for all external tools. It does not contain a UUID for the server, because that is created automatically when you fire up the server for the first time.

You should take a look at the following settings (see also my blog post PS3 Media Server And Ubuntu Foo for tips):

  • folders
  • name
  • network_interface
  • hostname

folders is the only one out of these that you definitely want to set to reflect your setup. The server is running as a service and therefor headless. Just put a comma separated list of directories in there. Something like

folders = /src/videos,/srv/music

name on the other hand is just a cosmetic thing and defines with which name the server shows up on the client.

Yet, the default for network_interfaces can sometimes cause some grieve. You might have to bind the server to a specific interface if some virtual interface seems to be more attractive to PMS.

hostname is similar to network_interfaces. Usually it should not be needed but if you have multiple IP’s on a device you might want to specify which IP it binds itself to.

Service Start

Now that everything is set up you can start the service.

service ps3mediaserver start

The service should fire up without any errors. And if you encounter errors you will find the logs in /var/log/ps3mediaserver/root/.

Happy Streaming!

Final Thoughts

I think it is pretty straight forward to get PMS to work on Ubuntu. If I find some time… did I just write that?! Well, if I find some time, I will create a PPA with the latest version and I will try to keep it up to date.