Solutions

Sometimes you have to fight (computer) problems for which there appears to be no solutions available on the web. When you finally solve them, in turn, nobody else gets to know this. This is want I want to change here. On this page, I present problems that apparently I was the first to encounter. Probably you have come here by using a search engine.

Visual Studio 2005 installer does not find certain files.

Keywords: Visual Studio 2005, installer, file not found, virtual drives, multiple CDs

Problem: Indeed, the files are not contained on the CD.

Explanation: Did you give in to the tempatation and used multiple optical drives (even virtual ones) to avoid changing the CDs in the middle of the installation? Apparently, the installer does not handle this correctly. It does detect the other CDs, but tries to grab the files from the first CD anyway.

Solution: Put the CD in question into the drive your started the installation from, or mount the corresponding image on this drive letter.

Complex data file does not work as expected with Gnuplot.

Gnuplot shows unexpected and erratic behavior on a data file with multiple blocks.

Keywords: Gnuplot, blocks, every, using

Explanation: Gnuplot's definition of a block is quite unconventional.

Solution: From my experience, there should be only exactly one empty line between two blocks. Everything else leads to disaster.

Accidentally pressed shortcut kills X-server.

Keywords: X-server, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, kill

Explanation: Particularly, the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-K to switch the keyboard layout is dangerous. The difference to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is not big.

Solution: The ability to kill the X-server by a shortcut can be switched off. You must insert the following option into xorg.conf's section ServerFlags:
Option "DontZap"

Adding a hard disk or a hard disk controller confuses the Linux system completely, it does not boot any more.

Keywords: new/additional hard disk/controller, Linux, boot, problem

Explanation: The BIOS and thus the boot manager orders the controllers differently than the subsequently loaded Linux kernel. (This can be triggered by attaching a drive to a controller that was unused so far.) The partitions have inconsistent names, the system gets confused and cannot mount certain partitions any longer. Hence, it does not boot correctly.

Solution: Change the order in which the controller kernel modules are loaded, to match the order of the BIOS. For example, for SUSE Linux, this can be done by editing the variable INITRD_MODULES in /etc/sysconfig/kernel, also configurable via YaST.

cgmlib does not compile with the latest compilers.

Keywords: cgmlib 0.9.5.Beta, GCC 4

Explanation: Some code details unfortunately do not comply with the current C++ standard.

Solution: Some changes to the source code are necessary, e. g. by applying this patch to version 0.9.5.Beta.

Some computers cannot find the WLAN, but others can.

Keywords: WLAN, not found, channel 12, channel 13

Explanation: Some WLAN adaptors seem to have problems to detect WLANs on the uppermost channels 12 and 13.

Solution: Configure the access point/router to use one of the lower 11 channels.

Installed Thunderbird dictionary does not appear in language selection (on Linux).

Keywords: Thunderbird 2, dictionary, Linux, does not appear, does not work

Explanation: There seems to be a lot of confusion about dictionaries for different Thunderbird versions. Search engine results lead to dictionaries for outdated Thunderbird versions, and fail as described. Files named like spell-en-US.xpi are outdated. Even though looking strange, e. g. united_states_english_dictionary-3.0.3-fx+tb+sm.xpi is a much better choice in this case.

Solution: Download the dictionaries from here and install.