Virtio-9p Failed to initialize fs-driver with id:fsdev0 and export path:/tmp/share

While installing a virtual machine with the virtio drivers using the instructions given on Linux-KVM:

• Manually, using qemu-kvm command line,

you may encounter an error such as this:

Virtio-9p Failed to initialize fs-driver with id:fsdev0 and export path:/tmp/share

To solve this error, just create a folder in your /tmp folder using this:

mkdir /tmp/share

How to highlight PDF's in Ubuntu?

This post is the sequel to the earlier article on How to annotate PDF's in Ubuntu?. In this article, we will install Adobe Reader XI in Ubuntu 12.04, though you should be able to install it on higher versions too, without any changes.

Lets begin rightaway. We will install the Adobe Reader XI developed for Windows, since Adobe Reader 8 available for Linux-based OS's does not support highlighting PDF's.

To install and run this Windows-based version, we need to install wine on Ubuntu. To install wine, open Ubuntu Software Center and install "Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (meta-package)" and "Wine Windows Program Loader" packages.

It will take some time to install, in the mean time, download Adobe Reader by clicking the button below.

Unzip the contents either by right-clicking on the file and clicking on "Extract" or using the following command:

unzip AdbeRdr11000_mui_Std.zip

Now right-click on Setup.exe and open with "Wine Windows Program Loader"

After this, wine will start the Adobe Reader installer.

Adobe Reader installer dialog box should pop-up. In this, there may be a tick on "Make Adobe Reader my default PDF viewer", you can ignore this, since it may not be able to become the default PDF reader for compatibility issues. Click on "Next".

Now, in the next dialog box, I prefer "Manually check for and install updates (not recommended)", you may click on "Install updates automatically (recommended)" but I am not sure if it will be able to automatically download.

It will start extracting and copying files to appropriate locations(in .wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/ folder of your Home folder).

Unable to add ppa behind proxy

While trying to add softwares from sources other than the central debian repository, we may have to add a PPA (Personal Package Archive), so that the software(apt or aptitude) which installs other softwares fetches packages for us from the new location.

The default or normal method to add a PPA via command line is as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:something

However, if you are behind a proxy, you may not be able to add this way and when you try to do something like this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

you may get an error like this:

Cannot access PPA (https://launchpad.net/api/1.0/~gnome3-team/+archive/gnome3) to get PPA information, please check your internet connection.

This may happen even if you have added your proxy using System Settings -> Network -> Network proxy or in /etc/apt/apt.conf or even in /home/$USER/.bashrc. This is because the sudo user is not aware of the proxy set in the places above. This tutorial explains how to make this work to add a PPA the terminal way.

So lets get started. Please note that all commands and text hereon are case-senstive, take care not to make any typos hereon, to avoid messing up your system):

• Open a terminal using Ctrl + Alt + t
• Type
  export http_proxy="http://username:password@your proxy":"port"
export https_proxy="https://username:password@your proxy":"port"
  Remember to replace "username" by your username and "password" by your password, if applicable, "your proxy" by your proxy address like 10.1.101.150 or proxy.college and "port" by something like 3128.
• Now we have two methods to export these parameter to "sudo" user:

Method 1:

• Type sudo visudo
• Add Defaults env_keep="https_proxy" to the end of the file. (Note that Defaults has a capital "d")
• Type Ctrl + x and y to save and exit.

Method 2:

• Whenever you use sudo command, export the environment variables of the user you are currently using. To do this, when you use sudo, use sudo -E

You are now ready to add PPA using the terminal. Please let me know, via comments, if you face any issues while doing this.
Source: The bug filed regarding this at launchpad.