pycurl does not like bad certificates

I keep on hitting this once in a blue moon (maybe after dist-upgrading), pushing to a smart server over https I get the following:

bzr: ERROR: Connection error: curl connection error (server certificate verification failed. CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt CRLfile: none)        
on https://mycompany/bzr/aprojectrepo/mybranch/.bzr/smart

And every time it takes me some time to figure out how to fix it, so I'm noting it here for future reference:
* remove python-pycurl
* or use "http+urllib://"

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/365874

I suppose I should help fix this, but I don't see myself getting round to that any time soon.

happy karmic day

My upgrade from jaunty to karmic was not quite rosy.
My man two problems were that my sound and touchpad stopped working.
Thankfully its all sorted out now (I hope).

My touchpad wasn't working because of using the wrong kernel - after upgrading to karmic, it didn't boot using the karmic kernel by default, I had to use grub editor to change that.
But then I could not boot. I had to go fix up my grub menu:
sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
I had

title Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.31-14-generic (recovery mode)
root

in stead of

title Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.31-14-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,0)

(it was complaining that it could not find a kernel image at the specified location or something)

the sound was also related to using the wrong kernel, but also due to some pulsaudio issues see HOWTO: PulseAudio Fixes & System-Wide Equalizer Support - Ubuntu Forums


[update]
mmm... the first kernel update broke it again :(
I finally heeded Robert's advice to do:

sudo update-grub

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub/+bug/470265
My menu.lst looks fine now, but still need to reboot and test it.

Kalternatives

I found this cool package today:

sudo apt-get install kalternatives

From the package info:

Kalternatives offers a GUI to configure the alternative systems (a
system that allows you to select one alternative file for many in the
filesystem).
Kalternatives is available as KDE configuration module, integrated by default
into KDE's System Settings.

This is an advanced GUI of the update-alternatives program shipped with dpkg.

Some of the options I wanted to customise:

desktop-splash
usplash-artwork (usplash-theme)
x-terminal-emulator
x-window-manager
x-www-browser