Chromium 75.0.3770.xx does submit html forms twice

When you have customers which use chromium on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, then you might see duplicate form posts in your applications.

This is a very nasty bug introduced somewhere between the 74.0.3729.169 and 75.0.3770.80 releases.
Here a few references to the problem, which seems to be still "work in progress"

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56488687/duplicate-requests-after-chrome-update-to-version-75-0-3770-80-official-build
   
• https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=977882
   
• https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/8616084?hl=en

 This does not help the customers, since we need a solution now, and not in a few days/weeks.

On ubuntu the simplest is to roll back to the last working version 74.0.3729.169

How to do this:

Login in the console of your system(s) and do this:

cd /tmp
rm chromium-*

wget -q http://launchpadlibrarian.net/424897539/chromium-browser_74.0.3729.169-0ubuntu0.18.04.1_amd64.deb
wget -q http://launchpadlibrarian.net/424897541/chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra_74.0.3729.169-0ubuntu0.18.04.1_amd64.deb
wget -q http://launchpadlibrarian.net/424897535/chromium-browser-l10n_74.0.3729.169-0ubuntu0.18.04.1_all.deb


dpkg -i chromium-*.deb
rm chromium-*
 
apt-mark hold chromium-browser
apt-mark hold chromium-browser-l10n
apt-mark hold chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra


This installs the 74er version and prevents future upgrades to install bad versions.
Of course once a working 75 or 76 release is available, you have to unhold the packages

Install teamviewer 8 under linux for unattended access

Teamviewer is a great software for remote support.
 When your partner has internet access and a GUI available, you can use it to do maintenance work from anywhere in the world and via most of the devices available today. (SMartphones, tables, etc.)

With version 8 they did introduce the unattended access for linux systems too.
Unfortunally the installation routine does not always register the services correctly, so you can't access the remote system.

Fortunally there is a simple fix which works under ubuntu (and most debian based systems)

Just create a service entry yourself and set it to autostart, just as mentioned below:

cd /opt/teamviewer8/tv_bin/script
sudo cp teamviewerd.sysv /etc/init.d/
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/teamviewerd.sysv
sudo update-rc.d teamviewerd.sysv defaults

With this in place you can now access the teamviewer instance on the linux system too.

Starting SQL Anywhere 10.x on Ubuntu 12.04

Yes i know,

SQL Anyhwere 10 is out of the normal support cycle, so we won't get any new EBF for it.

Neverless we still have customers running SQL Anywhere on linux systems.
When you upgrade your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to the 12.04 LTS version, then the database will no longer run.
On startup you will see a message telling you that there is not enough free memory available.

The cause is the switch from kernel 2.6.x to 3.x, which has some other memory handling.

You can find the original thread here in the sql aynwhere forum.

The simplest solution (beside upgrading to a new license of sql anywhere) is to start the database server with the architecture specified as kernel version 2.6.

Fortunally there is a tool which allows us to do this: setarch

So the command to start dbsrv10 looks like this:

setarch $(arch) --uname-2.6 /opt/sqlanywhere10/bin32/dbsrv10 @/opt/sqlanywhere10/databases.list

Changing keyboard layout when netbooting linux mint (And other debian variants)

When you boot the Linux Mint live cd to have a live recovery system (described here), then you have the default english/us keyboard active.
That's inconvinient when your keyboard has a different layout.

You can change it to the one you use by adding this to the APPEND statement in your boot configuration:

 locale=de_CH console-setup/layoutcode=ch

With these two setting, you receive most messages in german and the keyboard is set to swiss german.
The layout is correct in the X-Window system and in the terminals inside X.
On the console (Switch with CTRL+ALT+F1..F6) you will still have the us keyboard, if anyone has a tip...

Upgrading EOL Ubuntu versions

Upgrading older ubuntu versions is straight forward.

Just upgrade all packages

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

and the (after a reboot) do a 

sudo do-release-upgrade

This works fine, as long as the origin version is not EOL.
When your server is having a EOL version installed, then you must dig somewhat deeper:

You have to change the source repositories to old-releases (instead of achives as mentioned in many posts/sites)

So you do change sources.list to:

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-security main restricted universe multiverse 

Then you can do the normal steps as mentioned above.
If the do-release-upgrade command is unknown, then you have to install it:

install update-manager-core

If by change you had the profile "ubuntu-desktop" installed, then first remove that one from your installation.

Modified /usr/lib/
python2.4/site-packages/UpdateManagerCore/DistUpgradeFetcherCore.py

#near line 28, add:
import time
# near the line 101-102, just after "tar.close()", add
    print "----- IT IS TIME NOW !-----"
 time.sleep(60)
# Note that you can adjust the time (60) by the value in seconds of your choice...
Theses lines should be like :
          tar.close()
          # Wait about 1 minute (time to modify update script)
          print "----- IT IS TIME NOW !-----"
          time.sleep(60)
          return True

# Note that you must keep the text idented

Run sudo do-release-upgrade

When the script sleeps, you have just 60 seconds to do the next step:
-- Modified /tmp/tmpXXXXXX/prerequists-sources.list and prerequists-sources.dapper.list and changed them to "old-releases" as well.

Then  wait until the script continues running and asks:

"Do you want to modify the sources list?"

Make sure you don't press enter along the way or it skips that question by assuming a "no".) It will say: "WARNING: Failed to read mirror file."

Go fix /etc/apt/sources.list back to the way it used to be now. With "us.archive" instead of "old-releases" (except for the security lines, that should just be "security.ubuntu.com".

Return to the update and say Yes.
The updater will modify /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all the dapper entries with hardy entries and continue updating using the servers.

Building Thunderbird 3.1.15 for Ubuntu 11.10

If (for whatever reasons) you with to continue to use Thunderbird 3.1.x on Ubuntu 11.10, then you will have to build it yourself.

You can follow this guide, with a few exceptions:

Use the latest thunderbird 3.1.x (For example 3.1.15)
Then, when building it directly you will receive a few errors:

1. Patching os2.cc

--- a/gfx/ots/src/os2.cc

+++ b/gfx/ots/src/os2.cc

@@ -1,12 +1,14 @@

 // Copyright (c) 2009 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved.

 // Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be

 // found in the LICENSE file.

  

+#include

+

 #include "os2.h"

  

 #include "head.h"

  

 // OS/2 - OS/2 and Windows Metrics

 // http://www.microsoft.com/opentype/otspec/os2.htm

  

 namespace ots {

2. Add GC 4.6 backward compatibility option in your mozconf file:
export CXXFLAGS="-fpermissive"

3. Patch the makefile to use correct linking order

+--- a/mail/app/Makefile.in
++++ b/mail/app/Makefile.in
+@@ -127,6 +127,8 @@ APP_XPCOM_LIBS = $(XPCOM_LIBS)
+ endif
+ 
+ LIBS += \
++ $(STATIC_EXTRA_LIBS) \
++ $(MOZ_OTS_LIBS) \
+  $(STATIC_COMPONENTS_LINKER_PATH) \
+  $(MOZ_JS_LIBS) \
+  $(EXTRA_DSO_LIBS) \
+@@ -185,8 +187,6 @@ DEFINES  += $(STATIC_DEFINES)
+ CPPSRCS  += $(STATIC_CPPSRCS)
+ EXTRA_DSO_LIBS += $(STATIC_EXTRA_DSO_LIBS)
+ REQUIRES += $(STATIC_REQUIRES)
+-EXTRA_LIBS += $(STATIC_EXTRA_LIBS)
+-EXTRA_LIBS += $(MOZ_OTS_LIBS)
+ 
+ ifndef MOZILLA_1_9_2_BRANCH
+ 

After these changes you should be able to build thunderbird 3.1.x under Ubuntu 11.10

Printing with FreeNX

In current Ubuntu environments with FreeNX installed, then printing does not work out of the box.
To get it working, we had to change two things:

* Create a symlink for /usr/lib/nx/nxsmb -> /usr/lib/cups/backend
* chmod a+x for /usr/lib/libnxredir.so.0

After this, it's possible to print to the remote printer.
What now is left, is telling gnome/kde to use that local cups server instead of the localhost one.