Rudkin On Linux, Mac and Tech

I recent versions of Ubuntu a handy little utility call apt-add-repository was created to make it easier and more friendly to add Launchpad PPAs to your Ubuntu installation. I recently discovered that this utility is not installed by default on the Ubuntu Server Edition (certainly this is the case for Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS).

To add this useful utility, just run the following command from the command line or your server:-

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Once installed you will be able to add the Launchpad PPA of your choice as follows:-

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nameofppa

You can add a PPA manually, but I find this a lot easier to remember!

I cannot believe I have not written a blog post for well over a year, so now I will make an effort to further document my life with tech.

About 6 months ago now I decided I needed to buy a new laptop as my Dell was a little worse for wear. Having succumbed to the draw of the iPhone and iPad I decided that I would invest in a nice 15″ MacBook Pro so I could continue life in the Apple ecosystem, something that the online community seems to despise but for me I am finding it a slick environment to wake up to.

Many of you may see this as turning my back on Linux, but that is not strictly the case. Having used my Mac for the last 6 months I have found the desktop experience rather polished and find that I’m more productive than I was using the Ubuntu desktop. So even though my day to day computing is now on OS X, I still maintain numerous servers that are all running various flavours of Ubuntu Linux so my future posts will probably have a server slant.

So lets get this started……

Taken from http://gpodder.org/news:

The second gPodder release in this month brings updated translations, lots of bug fixes and some UI clean-ups to your open source podcast aggregator. Here are some highlights of this release:

• “All episodes” in “View” menu and enabled by default
• Episodes are passed to the media player in chronological order
• Try to use mimetype-based file icons (using GIO) for episodes
• Make sure the podcast list is correctly updated all the time
• Disable feed_update_skipping by default (+expose in UI on Maemo)
• Default cover art for podcasts with no cover art
• Re-designed preferences dialog for Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• gPodder rotates to landscape on Maemo 5 when the keyboard is open
• Better button captions in shownotes window (“Cancel download”)
• Remove podcast.de search option (this was broken for some weeks)
• Hide “Download folder” preferences option (see User Manual)
• Flush gPodder database after MP3 player sync has finished
• Updated translations (Galician, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Polish and German)
• New translations: Romanian (by Gherhardt Mathisz)

The source package is now available from the downloads page and packages for Ubuntu, Maemo and Windows should be available soon.

I first must apologise for not blogging for ages, I have no excuse other than laziness!

I recently created a new server at home and install Ubuntu 9.10 Server on it.   As a consequence all the SSH keys I used to access my old server were lost and I needed to add them back again….one at a time from each machine I use to access it.

Although this does not seem a big deal, the method I was using previously was as follows:-

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh <user>@<host>
'dd of=.ssh/authorized_keys oflag=append conv=notrunc'

Although this worked fine, I was catching up on my Linux reading and in Linux Journal #184 (August 2009) another reader Mark K. Zanfardino wrote in withe following more simplified command which works great on Ubuntu:-

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<host>

This is not only easier to remember, it also checks that the key being added doesn’t already exist on the server! Brilliant!

For the last couple of weeks I have been running the 64bit beta version of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope which will be released on 23rd April.

The computer I am using is a Dell 1525n which has an Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller. After my initial install of Jaunty Jackalope beta all was well, the graphics card was detected and Compiz enabled. This however was short lived as some days later I applied some updates and Compiz could no longer be enabled.

On investigation I discovered that Compiz had ‘blacklisted’ my video card. I have yet to find out why because Compiz has worked without complaint on every version of Ubuntu since Gutsy Gibbon.

I was initially gutted and planned to downgrade to Intrepid, but not to be defeated I did some searching and found out that you can force Compiz to skip the black list checks. To do this you need to create the following file:-

~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

and add the following line:-

SKIP_CHECKS=yes

After this I was then able to enable Compiz and continue working as I have done for the last year or so. So far I have not seen any issues, so it is still a mystery as to why the GM965/GL960 was blacklisted.

I hope this helps somebody!

I wanted to upgrade OpenOffice on my Ubuntu 8.10 installation. Surfing the web I found numerous PPA that could be used, but the easiest method seemed to be below.

1. Download the debs from the OpenOffice.org site
2. Tar -xvzf them
3. cd to the directory containing the debs
4. sudo dpkg -i o*.deb
5. sudo dpkg -i desktop_integration/o*.deb

A big thanks to this article at The Open Sourcerer blog

Having recently acquired a DroboShare I have been experimenting with the various applications that are currently available and install. What I felt was missing from the collection was Gerd Knorr’s webfsd. This is a simple and very lightweight http server for serving static content. This would provide me with web access to the contents of my Drobo from any web browser, including Safari on my iPhone.

The question I had was how on earth do I go about doing this? Although Drobo provide an SDK with the information on how to do this, what I needed was a step by step guide to give me a push in the right direction. Fortunately I came across this blog post which takes you through the steps of compiling MediaTomb. This was exactly what I needed. I am familiar with compiling applications for my Ubuntu system, what I wasn’t familiar with was cross compiling – I didn’t know where to start!

I was a little nervous about doing all of this on my main system, so I created a virtual machine of Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 using VirtualBox. I followed the instructions to the letter up until the compilation of the libraries, I then substituted the webfsd compilation, and the result is now available for download at the DroboSpace Developer Community

For the last year I have been using Synergy at work to enable me to use my Ubuntu laptop using the keyboard and mouse connected to my Windows desktop.   All worked well until I tried to type the ‘@’ symbol on my laptop, instead I would get a ‘Ω’.  Considering the ‘@’ symbol is important in our modern life, this was a real pain.

Searching the web I could find other people with the same problem, but sadly no solution.  Until today!

I stumbled across this blog entry on Synergy Problems and Workarounds and I now have the ‘@’ symbol back on my laptop when using Synergy!

The solution is very simple, in a terminal window type the following:-

echo keycode 24 = q Q at at at at | xmodmap -

Brilliant, thanks to Delta Nova!

Well I am not sure if this bug is general accross the Ubuntu 8.04 family, but I have a Xen based VPS running Virtualmin and recently stumbled accross an issue with the quota calculations.   You can follow the thread posted in the Virtualmin bug tracker but the basic problem was that I got the following errors:-

root@ycits01:/# quotacheck -u -g -f -m /
quotacheck: Cannot create new quotafile //aquota.user.new: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot initialise IO on new quotafile: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot create new quotafile //aquota.group.new: File exists
quotacheck: Cannot initialise IO on new quotafile: File exists

The solution was to run the following:-

mv /aquota.user.new /aquota.user.broken
mv /aquota.group.new /aquota.group.broken
quotacheck -u -g -f -m /

So I hope this is of use to somebody, now all I need to do is find out where I should report the bug!

I just thought I should create an entry to let everybody know that my previos post Compiling Firefly Media Server under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) also applies to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).