Ubuntu/ALSA controlling volume from the command line

If you are using ALSA as your audio framework, if you are using a common distribution like Ubuntu you probably are, there is a command line program called alsamixer which provides an elaborate set of options to control your sound settings.

The sound setting I most often tinker with is, of course, raising and lowering the volume. A simple way to do that on the command line is "amixer -c 0 sset Master,0 %", for e.g. amixer -c 0 sset Master,0 60%.

mediawiki blank page after install

If you have freshly installed MediaWiki and are getting a blank page after installing, here is what you are probably doing wrong: the LocalSettings.php needs to have read permissions by everyone as well.

(I am assuming a standard install here)
So if you go to /var/lib/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php it should actually be a softlink to /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php. Try this command:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php

And then restart apache (just to make sure):

sudo /etc/init.d/apache restart

That should be it. Now your http://localhost/mediawiki should be visible :)

VMWare tries network boot although you've specified an ISO file in the device settings

It just happened to me, and I found the solution thanks to my teammate. You have to click on the check-box under CDRom that says "Connect at power on". By default, when you add a new CDRom to the machine, this box is not checked. So, there goes...