Installing Wine on Ubuntu Saucy

This is a very short post because it is very simple, if not immediately obvious.

Symptom:

You are trying to install or build Wine from either the official Ubuntu repositories or from the PPA and are constantly receiving dependency errors.

Cause:

Multiarch is supposedly working on Ubuntu now so you should see everything work! You won't.

Solution:

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo install wine

Apt will now pull the FULL dependency list. The same is true for apt-get build-dep.

Resetting the Rhythmbox music database

Months and months and months ago my Rhythmbox decided that it needed to duplicate its database. Every song was repeated. The result being if I put an album on, I got the bloody song played twice.

At the time I searched and searched and searched for a solution, and then I gave up. All I could find was the usual utter bollocks from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Warnings about how removing the music database will leave the whole application in an unusable state. What a load of crap. I gave up because I couldn't be arsed with this chew. Well, it's annoying me again.

Logically: a new user running Rhythmbox doesn't have a music database; it has to be created. Therefore I should be able to remove the database and a new one will be created.

Solution:

 $ mv ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml.old

Easy!!!

Predictably, the new database is half the size of the old one.

Silencing rtkit-daemon in the syslog

If you're running Ubuntu and use applications that call for realtime priority then you have probably noticed your syslog filling up with garbage:

Jan  8 18:26:18 aspire rtkit-daemon[1955]: Supervising 6 threads of 2 processes of 1 users.
Jan  8 18:26:18 aspire rtkit-daemon[1955]: Successfully made thread 31761 of process 31676 (n/a) owned by '1000' RT at priority 2.
Jan  8 18:26:18 aspire rtkit-daemon[1955]: Supervising 6 threads of 2 processes of 1 users.
Jan  8 18:26:18 aspire rtkit-daemon[1955]: Successfully made thread 31761 of process 31676 (n/a) owned by '1000' RT at priority 2.
Jan  8 18:26:18 aspire rtkit-daemon[1955]: Supervising 6 threads of 2 processes of 1 users.
Jan  8 18:26:19 aspire rtkit-daemon[1955]: Successfully made thread 31761 of process 31676 (n/a) owned by '1000' RT at priority 2.

I have, anyway! Thousands of lines obscuring the "interesting" parts of the system log.

Solving this little problem is not immediately obvious and certainly not well documented. It can be solved in three relatively easy steps. You do need root access.

Step 1: Create the configuration file for rsyslog.
Step 2: Reload rsyslogd.
Step 3: Reload rtkit-daemon.

 $ sudo cat > /etc/rsyslog.d/20-rtkit-daemon.conf <<EOF
if \$programname == 'rtkit-daemon' then /var/log/rtkit-daemon.log
& ~
EOF
sudo service rsyslogd restart
sudo rtkitctl -k

Notes:

• Tell rsyslogd to restart, reloading doesn't work.
• rtkitctl -k should kill rtkit-daemon and then allow it to automatically re-spawn. If not you will also need to issue sudo rtkitctl --start.
• See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rtkit/+bug/1267212.
• I used a number before 50-default.conf (i.e. 20-rtkit-daemon.conf) because otherwise the logs are duplicated in both the syslog and rtkit-daemon.log [20 < 50].
• The \$ is needed if you are copying the above exactly into your command shell.