Living Ubuntu

This is the card I have:

Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

But since early stages of Jaunty I have not been able to use Compiz or any of the extra effects I was used to in Ubuntu 8.10

A bug (if you want some extra information) has been filed in Launchapd with number: 259385

But the bug above states a problem when installing. If you already have this installed you only need to comment out two lines in /usr/bin/compiz:

#T="$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12"  # intel 965
#T="$T 8086:2a02 " # Intel GM965

After this you should immediately be able to enable extra effects.

 

Let me rant once before anything else: "Network Manager SUCKS!"

After thinking that I may be having problem with my network speeds, or maybe a faulty wireless card, I tried WICD.

It absolutely ROCKS.

Before you needed to edit your sources.list to add a line for a repository but not anymore with Ubuntu 9.04. Just do:

sudo apt-get install wicd

And you are set.

But beware!: This will remove network-manager and restart your network connection.

You will find an entry in Applications => Internet => WICD T start configuring your connections.

Works like a charm, hope you find it as good as I do.

I have just finished creating a command line tool to find duplicates in your file system and generate a report to list the files or enter an interactive session to select what files to delete.

It uses the powerful sha-224 to create checksums of the files and then groups the same files together so you can choose what to delete and what to keep.

This is probably not Ubuntu specific but since I use it with my Ubuntu Desktops and servers, I thought it was a good idea to post it here.

To download the latest version, and get the documentation go to Google Code:

LITEN 2

In the first few releases of Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) Amarok has had issues trying load correctly with MySQL. This since has been resolved and if you are running the latest releases for 9.04 you should be fine.

However, if you have any MP3 files you will not be able to play them and Amarok will not tell you why except for a:

"Playback stopped"

or

"Could not build filelist"

That will come up only if you Amarok via command line.

The issue?

MP3 support of course.

At the command line:

sudo apt-get install libxine1-ffmpeg

Restart Amarok and you are good to go.

Every now and then I go to a public place and connect to the network to start my browsing.

This was ok until I found a way to encrypt my connection via SSH and Firefox.

Open a terminal and type the command:

ssh -D 9999 localhost

This basically creates a SOCKS Proxy that you will use with firefox to browse safely.

On Firefox, go to:

Edit => Preferences => Advanced => Network (tab) => Settings

Select the "Manual Proxy configuration" and fill the "SOCKS Host" with these values:

localhost          9999

Click OK and test. If you can't see any websites then you are probably missing a step. Remember to keep that terminal window open while you use the SOCKS Proxy. The connection will be lost if you close the terminal window.

Happy safe browsing!

It seems a little rough now, but we are now running on App Engine.

All the posts and comments where imported but without line breaks...

Oh Well..

Small price to pay to get away from PHP based hosting.

 

A lot of times I don't get the exact name of the package I want to install right away. So one solution, via the command line to be able to know the correct name is, code: sudo apt-cache search package If that yields too many options I filter it via grep: sudo apt-cache search package | grep "type" Ths is extremely inefficient. The bast way to go is to add a line to ".bashrc" to have autocomplete for bash and apt-get: echo "source /etc/bash_completion" >> ~/.bashrc I think I am getting a lot of customizing around, so I am going to start building a script that will run whenever I upgrade or change machines to have all of my custom settings ready.

A lot of times, when you have a web server, you need to prevent Indexes to be shown. I ran into that problem the other day and although some Virtual Hosts accepted the following for not showing indexes, others wouldn't: <Directory /path/to/web> Options -Indexes </Directory> This approach would remove the ability to have Indexes shown accross all your Virtual Hosts, with code: sudo a2dismod autoindex sudo apache2ctl graceful The first command just disables the module and the second restarts Apache in a graceful mode (will keep connections alive).

A while ago I tried to set Zenoss to monitor several diferent servers (Windows included) and found everything went great with CentOS and Windows but not quite right with Ubuntu. I decided to give it a try one more time and found that although I was doing everything correctly, Ubuntu has a "/etc/default/snmp" file that has some configuration properties that needed to be changed as well. I created a small script (you can download it from here) to automate a little bit the process. If you don't want to run the script, here is a list of things you need to do to have a "Read Only" SNMP configuration in Ubuntu: Install SNMP: sudo apt-get install snmp snmpd Backup the default config: sudo mv /etc/snmp/snmp.conf /etc/snmp/old.snmp.conf Create the new config: sudo echo "rocommunity public" > /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf Modify the line in /etc/default/snmpd: sed -i 's/127.0.0.1//g' /etc/default/snmpd Restart SNMP agent: sudo /etc/init.d/snmpd restart If you want to test the configuration works, try this command: snmpwalk localhost -v1 -c public system

Introduction: Python for Unix and Linux System Administrators is a book written by Noah Gift and Jeremy Jones that comes with a complimentary Virtual Machine. The idea is to be able to run the Virtual Machine with NO EXTRA CONFIGURATION and have everything needed running and working. If you are running VMWare Server 1.0.5 or later you *should* have no problems running the VM once this is decompressed. VMWare Image Specifications:

• Ubuntu 7.10 Server Version (no X or GUI installed)
• Compressed in tar.gz format is 548 MB total (4GB decompressed).
• Created with VMWare version 1.0.5
• 2 x 2gb hard drives.
• 512MB of RAM
• 1st hard drive mounted in "/"
• 2nd hard drive mounted in "/usr"
• VMWare tools installed

Main packages and configurations:

• Trac and Subversion integrated together and served via Apache including all the code.
• Fully working SAMBA and LDAP configuration as a Primary Domain Controller.
• Apache authenticates user(s) to LDAP.

Instructions:

1. Download the latest version of the VM by doing: wget http://examples.oreilly.com/9780596515829/vm/
2. Untar the file: tar xzvf py4sa.tar.gz
3. You need VMWare Server installed (version 1.0.5 or higher). Open it and go to File -> Open
4. Browse where the uncompressed image is and select the "py4sa.vmx" file.
5. Select the image in the main screen and hit the PLAY button. IMPORTANT! Hit "keep" or "I have copied this image" when prompted the first time you run the image.
6. Check the "Important Notes" for a couple of bugs related to the login prompt.
7. All login/password credentials are: user: py4sa password: py4sa
8. The image will load Apache2, SAMBA, LDAP, Subversion and Trac by default, so you should have everything running from the get-go.
9. Run "ifconfig" to see the IP address the image has and type the same IP into your browser to see "Python For SysAdmins" as a listed project for Trac.

Important Notes:

• This Ubuntu Server Version seems to have a bug where it will show you the login prompt before finishing the complete loading of all the services.
• It will hang at the line where it tries to run the rc.local scripts. You need to hit "enter" to get the login prompt again.
• There is a changelog in "/root/changelog" that has some information on the work done to the VM.

Some links:

• Book URL
• Book Table of Contents
• Book Source Code
• Book Virtual Machine
• Book Google Code Project
• Downloadable Zip of All Code