Synergy disappeared from Ubuntu desktop

If you’re using Synergy for mouse and keyboard sharing, you may find that it suddenly disappears from Ubuntu. It will show up as installed in the Software Centre, but you won’t be able to remove or reinstall it, and there will be no icon on the unity bar.

If you try running it from the command line using the following command.

synergys

You may get an error similar to the following.

no configuration file found

The easiest way to solve this is to download the .deb package from the Synergy website, then open up a terminal and install it from there.

cd /home/your-name/Downloads
sudo dpkg -i synergy-1.4.10-Linux-x86_64.deb

This will then reinstall it and you should then be able to find the programme listed in the dash home.

ImageMagick, Apache and Debian

Following on from my previous post about installing ImageMagick from source, to get it working with Apache you need to do the following. First, we need to install something from Pecl. So make sure you have the pecl command at hand – if not, install it.

apt-get install pear

Then run the following.

apt-get install php5-dev
pecl install imagick

Finally, add the extension to your php.ini.

extension=imagick.so

Installing PNG support for Debian

Following on from my recent post about adding JPEG support, I also needed to add PNG support. I couldn’t get the RPM’s to work, so I had to do this manually as well.

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/libpng/00-libpng-stable/1.2.39/libpng-1.2.39.tar.gz?use_mirror=kent
tar -zxvf libpng-1.2.39
cd libpng-1.2.39/scripts
cp makefile.linux ../makefile
cd ../
make
make install