I have just reinstalled my full system of Linux Mint 13 MATE/Cinnamon and all is working well bar one fault – I tried to play a YouTube video and it played back at at least twice the speed. Naturally audio was non-existent too.
My first suspect was the browser, so I tried running a local MP4 file in Gnome Movie Player and ran into the same problem which eliminated the browser or any plugins.
The culprit, as I discovered is Pulse Audio.
I have Pulse Audio Volume Control installed and found the solution straight off – I went into the Configuration tab and set my soundcard configuration to "off".
For many months now I have been using Linux Mint 13 MATE edition.
While I had no major complaints about MATE, there were a few features of Cinnamon I thought I might like. I decided to change.
I backed up my /home partition just in case, and then installed Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon, formatting the root partition but leaving the /home partition as it was. All went smoothly.
I played around with Cinnamon for a couple of days and decided that yes, my decision to switch was a good one, apart from the fact that the system seemed to be a bit slower.
Being a bit of an experimenter, I decided to update Cinnamon to the Nightly version to see what lay in the future. This was a mistake. I immediately ran into problems with my ATI video and some of the minor features of Cinnamon failed to work, such as the ability to customise it.
For a couple more days, I worked with my new setup but the more I worked with it, the slower it seemed to become. It reached the stage where the disadvantages heavily outweighed the advantages and I decided to cut my losses and return to MATE.
Once again, I took the lazy way out and left my /home partition alone while reinstalling Linux Min 13 MATE.
Very soon I was back to where I started with my original setup and configuration. I reinstalled all my applications and all went well.
The problem now was that I missed the features of Cinnamon. I decided in a fit of madness to install Cinnamon Desktop on top of MATE, so at least I would have a choice if I got too frustrated with one desktop or the other.
To my surprise, Cinnamon works very well on top of MATE. Naturally, all the settings from my previous install of Cinnamon were intact so it worked straight away just as I wanted it. It appears to be a lot faster that the standalone Cinnamon version, and I have been using it all this week with no problems whatsoever.
A major bonus that resulted from all this messing around is my new choice of Desktops –
I not only have a choice of MATE or Cinnamon, I also can run Gnome Classic, or even Ubuntu. As a bonus, I can run XBMC as my desktop. This is my preferred Media Platform which I installed as a programme.
I am very happy with this setup. It is running very smoothly and the only thing I can’t do is upgrade Cinnamon to the Nightly version. That was a hard lesson.
I just hope they integrate Remote Desktop properly on this release.
I wrote some time ago about the difficulties I had with enabling Remote Desktop on 13. That page has become the most popular page on this site by a factor of about ten.
This is a sample of keywords used to reach here –
Let’s hope they don’t make the same mistake with 14?
I run VirtualBox on Linux Mint and have a copy of Windows 7 running on a virtual machine. I use it to run those very few programmes that don’t have a Linux equivalent.
For various reasons I decided to install a new copy of 7 and delete the old one.
The installation ran without a hitch and everything worked perfectly except for one thing – I couldn’t access the Internet.
I was able to browse my local network all right and to connect to and browse the other devices. However I could not access any web sites. I was able to ping external sites but that’s all.
I tried searching the Net for a solution and found loads of suggestions about changing the network configuration of VirtualBox, mostly suggesting I attach to Bridged Adaptor instead of NAT. I tried all the suggestions without success, so I had to rely on my own efforts.
The solution was simple and quite obvious.
The installation of the guest software [Windows 7] had configured the Network to default values. The IP4 was set to “Obtain an IP address automatically” and the DNS to “Obtain DNS server address automatically”. The solution is to simply manually enter the DNS server IP addresses (I used the addresses supplied by my ISP, though any DNS servers should do). The main IP address should be left as is, to obtain automatically.
The only thing that baffles me now is how I got the original guest Windows to work!
For some unknown reason, Head Rambles is frequently targeted by hackers trying to crack the admin password.
I should point out that most will have a very hard time, as the user “admin” doesn’t exist.
I have two plugins in place – Limit Login Attempts and No Soup. While the first automatically locks hackers out after the first few attempts, the second is a more permanent fix, whereby any IP address I get from Limit Login Attempts can be entered and thereby permanently redirected to another site.
I decided to introduce a little bit of extra security however. What I wanted was to block access to the wp-admin directory and also to the wp-login.php file.
In fact this is extremely easy BUT there is one proviso – this will only work if you have a static IP supplied by your ISP. If you have a dynamic IP then do not try these.
All I did was to create a little .htaccess file for my wp-admin directory –
AuthUserFile /dev/null AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName "Access Control" AuthType Basic order deny,allow deny from all #IP address to Whitelist allow from 123.123.123.123
Obviously 123.123.123.123 should be replaced with your own IP address.
In theory, this is all that is required, as even if the password is hacked then entry is forbidden into the Admin directory. I decided to go one step further, just to stop all those warnings about attempted logins and to protect the wp-login.php file. Again this was simple. All I had to do was to add a few lines to my root .htaccess file –
<Files "wp-login.php"> Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 123.123.123.123 </Files>
With those two in place, hacking will be be considerably more difficult.
One advantage of this method is that you can update WordPress without destroying your protection.
One disadvantage is that the site can only be updated from the one location, so if you are accessing the site from some different location [for example, on holidays] then you will be locked out. In that event either you forgo updates until you are back at base, or you FTP into the site and rejig the .htaccess file.