Its all handled by dhcp so thats ok, but for some strange network reason the dns lookup was very slow. So I needed to and another DHCP server to my /etc/resolv.conf. But this got overwritten as soon as the dhcp client got information again. So how do you fix that?

Easy!

Edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and add a line (or uncomment the on in there):

prepend domain-name-servers 10.10.10.10;

That will fix it.

I have a customer that we have upgraded the running system and database server for. And we have used mysql replication to be able to do this with a minimum of downtime. So we have a spare server that we set up as a database server. Started replication to it – when it was running as is should we stopped the system totally – ended the replication and made that system the master. All well. Then we upgraded the old server with new os and new server software and did the same thing back.

And by misstake the system was writing some data to the new server while we still where replicating from the “old” or “temporary” datbase servern. And this ofcuase made the database replication to stop whit an error message.

The error you will see (when you run mysql command show slave status;) is

Last_Error: Error 'Duplicate entry '731670' for key 1' on query. Default database: ......

So is there a way to fix this. Well it kind of depends of what the problem is.

I see 2 ways to fix this. If you by misstage onli inserted a few entries into one table you could (if you know what you did insert) remove that and start up the slave again. This will work.

Secondly is to skip in the replication – This is something you can do if you know that that insert is not something you will miss in the slave. And in our case it was just one log entry.

So you tell mysql to skipp one onetry in the replication log by the command:

set global sql_slave_skip_counter = 1;

if you are useing and older version of mysql you can skip the global.

And the you start the slave replication again with the command:

start slave;

And it should be ok – you can check the status by the show slave status command and the seconds behind shoudl cound down to 0.

Now you have the slave replication up and running again.

So I did some search on the networks and after some reading it seems that one of the most used and the one I liked the most was Mediatomb.

I installed it and got it running. Thats verys imple on kubuntu as its in the repositories. Just do a

sudo apt-get install mediatomb

and you are ok.

The fist thing to fix was the networks route. DLNA is a multicast service, so you need to setup that to.

The setup script /etc/default/mediatomb contains information about this but needs to be edited. You have to edit the line with INTERFACE to include the network interface to enable it to add the multicast route. Here is my line:

INTERFACE=”eth0″

Then I could see the media server on my BlueRay player.

Slow navigation and no pause

When I started to use it I found out another anoying feature or bug. When I navigated, and went from one episode to another it took like 2 minutes until the blueray player accepted my second key-press. Some kind of cashing or so was going on. And when plyaing a file I also could not pause and start again. Very annoying.

But fiddling a bit with the config made it working. I had to change the config.xml file in /etc/mediatomb and I added the following lines below the protocolInfo line – and yes you have to change the no to yes on that one to.

    <protocolInfo extend="yes"/><!-- For PS3 support change to "yes" -->
    <extended-runtime-options>
      <ffmpegthumbnailer enabled="no">
      <thumbnail-size>128</thumbnail-size>
        <seek-percentage>5</seek-percentage>
        <filmstrip-overlay>yes</filmstrip-overlay>
        <workaround-bugs>no</workaround-bugs>
      </ffmpegthumbnailer>
      <mark-played-items enabled="no" suppress-cds-updates="yes">
        <string mode="prepend">*</string>
      </mark-played-items>
    </extended-runtime-options>

And now it works like a charm.

The system itself is a dumb system and we should forward everyting to a smart host. But we need to do that over port 587 and authenticated.

So some googeling and reading I came up with the following:

First you need to install the sendmail-cf package

yum install sendmail-cf

And the we need to modify the /etc/mail/sendmail.mc file and add the following (den xxx lines is there so you only have to remove the dnl first on the line:

define(`SMART_HOST',`host.isp.net')dnl
define(`RELAY_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 587')
define(`ESMTP_MAILER_ARGS', `TCP $h 587')
FEATURE(`authinfo',`Hash -o /etc/mail/authinfo.db')dnl

The first line specify the hostname of the smarthost. Line 2 and 3 tells sendmail to use port 587 for submission instead of the normal 25. And the fourth line specify that the authentication information should be from the authinfo.db file.

We now have to make the sendmail.cf file:

make -C /etc/mail

We now have the new sendmail.cf file in /etc/mail that sendmail can use.

We then have to create the file – start bu creating /etc/mail/authinfo:

AuthInfo:ispdomain.net "U:my_username" "P:my_password" "M:PLAIN"
AuthInfo: "U:my_username" "P:my_password" "M:PLAIN"

Where you set the username and password to what you should use.

We then need to make a sendmail map of it:

cd /etc/mail
chmod 600 authinfo
makemap hash authinfo < authinfo

Second line makes it a bit more secure by making it readable for root only. And then we use the makemap to make the authinfo.db file. We can now restart sendmail and all should work.

First I had to move a mysql database from one server to another. And then still running the application on the original server.

First I could not connect to the new server at all – but that was quickly found out to be a litte firewall problem. And easily fixed.

Then I could not get in with the right password. I could connect with another user, but not the database user for the application. And this was due to the fact that there was a entry in the user table with the hostname of the old server without any user. The order that mysql checks the connection is a bit weird (full doc here) but first it checks user/host and then “any user”/host, and then it checks user/”any host” so the fact that the system has a wildcard for any user from the host with another password that I expected throw me off.

Then I could connect from the command line with mysql, I could run my perl application without any problem. But the web-frontend did not work.

And it took me quite some time to figure out that it was all down to SE Linux. It will by default block the http daemon from making network connections. So even if you had php set up right and could do it from the command line (when running a php script there) it would not work from a webpage

So one has to disable this – you can do it with the command (as root):

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect=1

as root and now it all works.

One thing is that it wont ask me to save all the tabs if you close it down (and I thing it when you close it down with the x not the file->exit menu).

And you can get around this by fixing some settings:

1. Type about:config into the location bar and press enter
2. Accept the warning message that appears, you will be taken to a list of preferences
3. Locate the preference browser.tabs.warnOnClose, if its value is set to false, double-click on it to change its value to true
4. Repeat this for these 2 preferences browser.warnOnQuit, browser.warnOnRestart
5. Also do this for browser.showQuitWarning

This fixed it for me and now I get the close warning as I think I should.

App Tabs

There is also a cool new feature called app tabs. App Tabs allow you to always keep your favorite web apps like Facebook, Gmail and Twitter open and just a click away. App Tabs are small, can’t be closed accidentally and open automatically when you start Firefox.

How do I set one up?

Right-click on the tab you want to turn into an App Tab and select Pin as App Tab from the menu.

How are App Tabs different than normal tabs?

• App Tabs are small – only showing the site’s icon, not its title – and they live on the left side of the Tab Strip
• App Tabs don’t have a close button so you can’t accidentally close them.
  • You can still close them by right-clicking on them and selecting Close Tab from the menu.
• App Tabs notify you with a blue highlight when they change.
  • If you have Gmail set as an App Tab, for example, and you are using a different tab when a new email is received, your Gmail tab will glow.
• All of the App Tabs you have set when you close Firefox will open as App Tabs when you start Firefox again.
• Links to other websites open in a new tab so that your App Tab doesn’t change.
  • Many web apps, like Facebook, already do this but an App Tab will make this happen even when the website isn’t set to do it.

But ubuntu and kubuntu 10.10 as I’m using had the old 3.6 version of Firefox and I wanted a bit more newer one. So I found a way to upgrade it thou the ppa that the ubuntu folks are releasing.

Its very easy and will get a new and shiny version of Firefox installed on you system.
In a terminal windows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install firefox ubufox

This will install the new version for you.

In a post in my RSS feed today, there was a problem with digikams plugin that uploaded pictures to facebook.You got the error message “Facebook Call Failed: Invalid API key”. This in itself is perhapes not to bad. If facebook thinks a application is bad they can ban it from uploading. I can fully accept this and think its a god idea for security reasons.

But then the bad things start. Facebook “deleted” all the pictures uploaded by the app also. And as a security person I can kind of understand this. But I am sure people dont know and understand this.

So make sure you make a copy / backup of you photos after uploading them to facebook.

This is a nice GUI frontend to SVN.

It will sho whats changed, what needs updating and diffs and so on.

Nice graphical view in other words.

As a sidenot it will also install kompare – a nice graphical diff that shows you changes between 2 files in a side by side windows.

So if you are tired of running svn ci etc this might be a tool for you.

And yes – it would not connect.

So I read a bit more and found that I needed the latest wine and a patch to thie to make network working – if you dont you will get the error message:

unable to connect to 87.237.38.50 on port 26000

Apparently there has been some changes to the network and wine had a small bug or some flags that it did not support. And the good thing is that someone has already made the patch. You can find it on the forums here.

But unfortunately for me I also need the pulseaudio enabled wine. The page about WinePulse describes very well how to do this and the patches to patch wine to support pulseaudio. But only for 1.3.20 version and not 1.3.22. So I needed to fiddle around abit to get it working. Not to much,

So here is the way to build wine 1.3.22 with pulseaudio support and suport for EVE online. Most information from here.

First get the dependencies for building Wine

sudo apt-get build-dep wine1.3

Then remove the installed wine version

sudo apt-get remove wine1.3

Then install git if you dont have it installed.

sudo apt-get install git

So lets get a got repository to work with

git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git

Go into it and download the patched both for the network changes to get EVE working and the patches for

cd wine

Get the overlapped2.diff file

wget http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=mnx3Uqq5 -O overlapped2.diff

The overlapped2.diff was also a dos file so i converted it to dos and you whant to ass a last newline to it:

fromdos overlapped2.diff

echo -e "\n" >> overlapped2.diff

Or you can get my fixed one here and unzip it.

Then download the Winepulse patched:

wget http://art.ified.ca/downloads/winepulse/winepulse-0.39.patch

wget http://art.ified.ca/downloads/winepulse/winepulse-winecfg-1.3.11.patch

The winepulse patch for configure.ac is not updated for 1.3.22 as of this writing so you can get it winepulse-configure.ac-1.3.22.zip. YOu need to unpack the file with unzip before you can continue.

Time to apply the patch files

git apply overlapped2.diff

And the winepulse patches

git apply winepulse-0.39.patch

git apply winepulse-winecfg-1.3.11.patch

git apply winepulse-configure.ac-1.3.22.patch

Now we can rebuild the configure system

autoreconf

And configure the build

./configure

And now we build the wine system – this take some time so this is a nice place for a cup of coffe

make

And if all is well – install it

sudo make install

Now you shoudl be able to run Incarna – I have tested it with sisi and i have some small graphics glitches but captains quarter works.

So – can you use the iphone if you are running linux as you os. Well I would say YES and NO.

The NO part is that you cant run, sync, well heck – even start it, without a windows (or mac) os and itunes.

The YES part is that there are ways around that.

So how did I get it working.

Well the easy way of answering this is that I did fold and got itunes running in my virtualbox virtual machine, and that is working will. Perhaps a bit of cheating, but I have no inclination to jailbreak the phone and the notes out there telling how you can do it did not work for me. So I took the ease way

Virtualbox

To use the iphone with virtualbox you just have to download and install Virtualbox from the repository.

Start by opening a treminal window

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian $(lsb_release -sc) contrib"

Then add the key

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Do an update

sudo apt-get update

And the install it

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.0

And you are done

Now you can create a vritual machiine, install a windows version and then install itunes in that.

Note.

The only thing that might be worth mentioning is that you have to be a bit aware about os upgrades of the phone. When it does this it will change the use somewhat so the connection to the virtual box  machine will be lost, and you have to connect it again (Menu->Device->USB-Devices-Iphone XXX) and it will continue. I missed this one time and the upgrade was aborted and i had to restore a backup. But as long as you are alert there and reconnect it, it works perfectly.

So I went into the system and did a apt-get install googleearth. That did not work. Did some extra checks and found that I did not have it in the repositories.

So i checked a bit more and found that there is a package called ‘googleearth-package‘. That will help you make a deb file so that you can install it.

Well it was not that easy.

First you need to get the i32-libs if you are on a 64 bits system

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Then you need the lsb-core package to get the standard linux system base

sudo apt-get install lsb-core

And then you probably want the gdebi package to install it with that will install dependencies also.

sudo apt-get install gdebi-core

So now its time to install the google earth build package

sudo apt-get install googleearth-package

And then you can build you google earth package with

sudo make-googleearth-package --force

If you now do a ls in that directory you can see that you have a .deb file. In my case googleearth_6.0.3.2197+0.5.7-1_amd64.deb.

So you can now install that with gdebi

sudo gdebi googleearth_6.0.3.2197+0.5.7-1_amd64.deb

And now you should be able to run google earth.

If you like me had an old installation and want to transfer over that, copy the .googleearth directory before you start google earth

But it failed. So I spend some time with mister google.

When trying to start videochat it tells me “Jasper image conversion program not found. jasper is required to render the Yahoo webcam images.”

So you have to go to http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams/jasper/#download and donload the source code.

Then unzip it.

unzip -x jasper-1.900.1.zip

Go into the directory with the source code

cd jasper-1.900.1/

run the configure script

./configure

then build the program

make

and install it

sudo make install

Now the webcam invire for yahoo should work

Today i found a nice new player, also based on mplayer, but it seems to have some nice features. Its called UMPlayer.

It has some really nice feature.

First of all it can search youtube and play videos from there directly, as well as record them and store them on disk for you. And you can set you preferred quality in the preferences so you don’t have to choose every time.

Then its has a very nice interface, with themes and it handled full screen play better (I think) than mplayer.

So im very happy with it.

To install it, if you like me have 10.10 of Ubuntu/Kubuntu, you do the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install umplayer

If you are running the latest version its in the repository already.

Well in the rss feed today was a story about Skype for Asterisk. I have not used it myself but I did know it was there, and it was a nice feature that we have discussed to include in our pbx, but not come around to do it.

But now it seems that its a no go for that. Yes you can by it and install it before the 26:th of july.

So it might be the first victim of the Microsoft take over.

“TermKit is a re-think of the storied Unix terminal, where human views, input and data pipes are separated. Output viewers render any kind of data usefully. It may not be a new idea, but it’s certainly a new take on it.”

A wounderfull new take on the old terminalwindow – perhapes



But when I have done what I need with the search i what it to go away.

And you can do that, but it took me some manual reading to find it so I thought of chairing that to all.

The command you want to use is nohl (No Highlight). So you press :nohl and it goes away – simpel – when you know it.

Problem was that I did not know in what mail, and not even exactly when. So i was going to search.

But in this new version of thunderbird I could not select Body as a field to search in.

Until i found out that you you have to click in “Run search on Server” in the top of the search windows.

Took some time to found that.

First of all I had a problem with the launcher – sometimes I got the message about invalid certificates. And the download stops until you press OK. Anoying but of the download is quick enough its ok. I can live with this. BUt then the download started to get disconnected from the server, or just hanged. And I could end the download, restart and it would download the same X mb again. Over and Over again. Sometimes it managed to get a bit further on its way, but most of the time it was just doing the same thing over and over again.

I searched the forums, checked and open firewall ports, tested networks to no luck. But today I found out something.

I discovered that I had 127 GB of downloaded temporary internet files in the IE temp directory. I cleaned out this and the patch when like a rocket – hanged a couple of times but manage to download and patch all in a very short time.

In wine the directory you should look at is:
$HOME//.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/$USER/Local Settings/Temporary Internet Files/Content.IE5

I cleaned out that directory and the directories in there (rm -rf * works but be carefull)

Perhaps something simelar helps in windows – but again – im a linux guy and dont have a windows system to test on.

I did some googeling over the past days and there are problems reported with kmix and pulseaudion, and I am a bit confused that they say that kmix and pulseaudio is not an issue as its not supporting pulseaudio. As I remember there was notes in kubuntu about fixes to kmix to handle pulseaudio better.

Well any way. I have now stopped kmix, with kill -9 #, and started up old pavucontrol instead as this seems to solve the cpu problem.

The only problem now is that kmix apparently was the process that took care of talking to my machine and the sound button on-top of the keyboard. But i can live with that.

Update

Had to do a bit more. The kde started up kmix by default any-time I logged in, so you have to go into system setting, “Startup and Shutdown” and then “Session settings” and add kmix as a application to be excluded from sessions and then it wont start up:

Men hur som helst – det var inte detta som jag skulle skriva om idag. Det kommer snart ut ett nytt RTS spel. OilRush och detta är interesant för flera anledningar.

1. Det är ett riktigt cross-platform så det kommer att komma i både Windows och Linux samtidigt.

2. Det ser riktigt snyggt ut.

Dom har just släppt en 12 minuter video och jag kan rekommendera att titta på den.

Gärna i full screen mode

I came across this when reading my rss feed this morning and its from slashdot. What can we do to stop this stupidity. I might not like Apple and their locking to itunes for the iphone and ipad, but its definitely a different thing is one make "windows" a real os and the rest not.

As this means copying over the config files for kwallet, this is one ting that needs to be done before you use kwallet for something else.

So after installing, if you did not get it installed by default, you need to copy over the files.

(cd ../CD/jan_old; tar cf - .kde/share/apps/kopete)|tar xvf -

(cd ../CD/jan_old; tar cf - .kde/share/apps/kwallet)|tar xvf -

(cd ../CD/jan_old; tar cf - .kde/share/config/kopete*)|tar xvf -

And now you can start up kopete and it should connect to your im accounts.

I am pretty sure I did have it when first installing 10.10, but after some time it did go away. And what was happening is that the new Ubuntu fonts, kind of replaced them and to get them back you need to accept the copyright/restriction or something.

So what you need to do is to run (from the command line)

sudo apt-get install --reinstall msttcorefonts

This will popup and acept page that you can say yes to so it will get installed. If you don’t have that installed you might need to run

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

to get it installed.

Some of the old pulseaudio volume control can be done with the kmixer application (like moving sound to different sinks) but to config pulseaudio to use rtp sink (and I’m using that to recored audiobooks) you need the padevchooser program (or specifically the pepref program.

So you need to install some more pulseaudio extra programs.

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

sudo apt-get install paman

This will install the pulseaudio volume controll and paman that will install all the pulseaudio manager programs (like papref and padevchooser).

To install this you do:

sudo apt-get install knotes

And then you have to copy over the config files. The config files are in 2 places, .kde/share/apps/knotes and .kde/share/config/knotesrc so you need to copy both.

(cd ../jan_old; tar cf - .kde/share/apps/knotes .kde/share/config/knotesrc)|tar xvf -

All done!

Installing it is easy, just use install it using apt-get as usual. As im also using enigmail plugin (gpg encryption) I also needed to install kgpg package.

sudo apt-get install thunderbird
sudo apt-get install kgpg

Moving config files over

This was a bit more tricky, when moving from kubuntu 9.10 to 10.10 you also go up from thunderbird 2 to 3 and this means that the config files have moved. In the old system it was in .mozilla-thunderbird and now its in .thunderbird. So it has to be move. I also moved over .gnupg directory:

mv ../CD/jan_old/.gnupg .
(cd ../CD/jan_old; tar cf - .mozilla-thunderbird)|tar xvf -
mv .mozilla-thunderbird .thunderbird

Now you can start Thunderbird.

I had 2 different plugins for Thunderbird, enigmail and lightning and none of my old ones was compatible with my new install so that thunderbird removed them, no problem.

Reinstall of enigmail

Well i then went on to install enigmail plugin. Over to the plugin directory, and then download the plugin. And it did not work. Not compatible with my OS. I’m running 64 bits and apparently for some reason thats not available.

So I went over to the plugin home (http://enigmail.mozdev.org/) page and then to the download page.

There you can download ir for different OS so I selected Linux (x86_64) and Thunderbird 3.1.

Then left clikc on the link and save the link to /tmp.

Open up Tools->Add Ons and Click on the Install button and select the file you just saved. Then you will have enigmail installed.

Reinstall of lightning

The lightning plugin for Thunderbird gives access to calendar functionality and can sync with Google calendar and other calendars. And it has the same problem. Installing the plugin from the add-on list will install the wrong version so you have to download it manually and install it.

Go to http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b2/contrib/linux-x86_64/ and download the lightning.xpi file. If you like me also want to use google calendar integration download the gdata-provider.xpi also.

Now you should have a working mail-system.

There are 2 ways of doing this. You can install and run the gparted graphical program, or you can use the command line.

First thing to do is locating you new disk. if you dont know what name it has you can run the command:

sudo lshw -C disk

This will produce a list of disk in you system and show the names:

*-disk:1 description: ATA Disk
 product: ST9500420AS
 vendor: Seagate
 physical id: 0.0.0
 bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0
 logical name: /dev/sdb
 version: 0006
 serial: 5VJ5CHWC
 size: 465GiB (500GB)
 capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
 configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=1eafd418

The Logical name is what you need for the following parts.

Gparted

if you want to do the work you can use gparted. If you havent installed this you probably need to install it with:

sudo apt-get install gparted

This will install it and some libraries with it.

There is some things to mentione with this. If you start it from the menu system (application->settings->gparted)  it will ask for a password, and it is the root password. By default kubuntu system will not set a usable root password and you will not be able to use it. You can run it from the command line (sudo gparted) or you can set a password for root.

sudo passwd root

But remember – do not ever login as root. just use sudo.

When you then start up gparted you will see:

In the top-right corner of the window, choose your new hard drive from the drop-down list, referring back to the “logical name” from earlier. The window should refresh and show you a representation of the new drive.

if you – like me – have a dos file system on you you probably want to remove it first, by clicking on the bad representing the dos file system, and select delete.

Then you can start and create the new filesystem:

1. Right-click on the white bar and choose “New.”
2. For “New Size” the number should be the maximum allowable, to fill the entire disk.
3. Choose “Primary Partition”
4. Now select a filesystem. Use “ext4″ for kubuntu.
5. Now click Add to compute the partition. The graphical display should update to show a new partition covering the entire disk.
6. To finish, click “Apply,” or Edit > Apply. The disk will then be partitioned and formatted.

You may now close gparted.

Making filesystem from command line.

First use fdisk to delete the old filesystem and create a new partition:

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

...

Command (m for help): d
Selected partition 1
Command (m for help): n
Command action
e   extended
p   primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-60801, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder, +cylinders or +size{K,M,G} (1-60801, default 60801):
Using default value 60801
Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing disks.

Now the partition is created. You now need to use the mkfs command to create the filesystem:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -L /CD/ /dev/sdb1

The /CD/ is where you want to mount the drive

Mount the filesystem

Now we need to make a mountpoint and edit fstab so that the system will mount the drive automatically on boot.

First create the dirctory:

sudo mkdir /CD

The set the ownership to plugdev group, those who are meant to be able to mount removable disks, desktop users.

sudo chgrp plugdev /media/mynewdrive
sudo chmod g+w /media/mynewdrive
sudo chmod +t /media/mynewdrive

Now we need to edit the /etc/fstab file

Fire up your favourite editor:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

And add a line:

/dev/sdb1       /CD     auto    defaults        0       2

and then save it.

You can now test it by using the mount command:

sudo mount -a

And the new drive should be mounted.

But there is a way to remove that.

Go in to System settings -> Window Behaviour (Under Workspace Appearance and Behaviour) -> Screen Edges.

There you have a Click Box with “Maximize windows by dragging them to the top of the screen” and this is clicked in by default. Unclick that and the system works as I want it.

The little applet that sits down at the right side of the task-bar and show the date and time, has a nice pop-up calendar if you click on it. But it showed weeks to start on Sundays, not on Monday as we do it in Sweden. So after some looking i found where the settings where.

Start up System Setting ->    Locale ->  TimeAndDate ->  First day of week and change that to Monday.

Logout and in again and it works as it should.

You start up System Settings -> Additional Drivers -> Enable NVidia.

This will download and install latest version of the driver from NVidia. Then you only need to reboot the system and now you can use all the fancy graphical games and desktop effects and so on.

Install glxgears

A nice tool for testing you graphical card and driver is the program glxgears. This will show a small windows with 3d gears rotating and on the command line you will see a dump of the FPS rate as its running.

Install it with:

sudo apt-get install mesa-utils

And then you can run it with just glxgears.

But when installing on a new system I decided to move up to Kubunto 10.10 from the slightly older 9.10 that I was running now.

I started with installing all and had not any big problem. Actually all worked very nice and all things on the new system (a HP Pavilion dv8) was found. Network, sound, camera, card reader and so on. All worked out of the box. I have not tried the fingerprint reader but that’s about the only thing I haven’t tried.

First of all I did fire up the system, let it boot into windows 7 and made the restore dvd’s. Yes dvd’s. It required 4 dvd’s just to restore a system. Far to much, but now I have them in case I need to.

So I installed Kubuntu 10.10 and wow it was nice. Quick and easy install, just a few questions and on it went with the install.

The only small problem I have had so far is that the Blue-tooth system seems to be, lets say not optimal, so I lost my blue-tooth mouse and is now using a normal USB one. Not a big deal, but a bit annoying. I also have kind of the same problem so I cant pair my phone with my new laptop and send pictures and so on. Well I solve that in due time.

Upgrading applications and settings

One god thing when upgrading a Linux system is that if you know what you are doing there is an easy way of transferring all you settings for applications over. And I mean ALL settings. So for instance, when I moved over firefox, I got my certificates, bookmarks and even history and cashes over.

And one think that my pc friends hates me for – I have run the same installation of EVE since 2007 when i moved over to linux and only upgraded. Most PC users have to reinstall and looses bookmark folders and so on. But with backups and linux you avoid that.

But its not without problems. You have to know where all the configs are, and there are sometimes small changes between versions.

So in the upcoming weeks I will post about the upgrade application by application.

Al of it is based on that I have an full copy of my old home directory in /home/CD/jan_old and my new home dirctory is /home/jan.

And I haven’t managed. I have done some search but not found anything really good telling my why it will not work.

But today i found it.

I was missing some packages.

So after checking the web a bit more I did found ot the following list of packages a re required to get all to work:

sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez bluez-alsa bluez-cups bluez-gstreamer bluez-utils kdebluetooth libbluetooth3
 python-bluez libmulticobex1 libobexftp0 libopenobex1 obex-data-server obexd-client python-obexftp obexfs

And it installed obexd-client obexfs python-bluez python-obexftp. The rest of them was already installed.

And now my sending and reciving of files work as the should.

Only 2 small notes.

If you change the place where the bluetooth system should store file you need to restart the kbluetooth system. Easiest done on my system by just pressing the bluetooth button 2 times as the first one turn off bluetooth and second press starts it up again.

I also found out that I cant have spotify (or wine) running. If you do it seems that the receiving part is not starting.

But the last 2 or 3 weeks I have seen a Auth popup asking for my twitter api key/password. And as I didn’t know what this was I did not fill in any information.

Last week I had some spare time and started to look into this.

First I was a bit worried that I had gotten hacked, or that my Twitter Account was. But after googeling abit about this it seems that twitter has changed the way the it authenticate applications wanting to connect to twitter to post or read tweets. FOr the weeks leeding up to 1/9 2010 they did limit the access to the old way to 5 an hour i think it was and after 1/9 it was totally stop for the old way. You had to start using the new QOAuth way.

So what happened was that choqok was trying to connect more than 5 times and got the reject back and aked me for a new passord.

So I was NOT hacked – hurray. That’s good at-least.

But the bad part was that I now did not have an application that worked. Well I could still connect to the twitter website and post there but that was not what I wanted.

So I started to look for solutions.

First there is a new version of choqok out – not in the repositories so I have to build it from source, but that might work. Download it. Installed cmake as it requires that and then failed on that it did require QOAuth lib and QJson libs that I did not have. OK Skip this for now.

Checked other applications. They did not work, was not available for my ubuntu/kubuntu version or was not able to compile it. Some even crashed for some reason. No luck at all.

So now I have been without a microbloggning client for a while.

But today I came across one that I havent tried before. And that was qTwitter. Its kind of small and does what I want.

I did found it here, and at the bottom of the page you have a link to the ubuntu .deb packages, including the qoath library package.

So now I can do twitter again

Downloading the game

I decided to start the thing by trying the Demo game you can donwload and try.

The Demo allows you to create accounts, play through the tutorial mission and the “Stranded in Space” mission. This gives a nice test of the game and I wanted to see that I could run the game before committing and buying the game. I did found out that you cant go to the bridge, fly into any other star system (I wanted to visit Vulcan) so the demo is quite restricted, but works well for a test.

So lets get going. Go to http://startrekonline.com/demo and clikc on the download/Cryptic to get the download program down.

The downloader is some kind of P2P program and will NOT work under wine. It runs for a while but crashes fairly often. So I did end up running the downloader in Virtualbox and there it run nicely.

Make shure you download the game to a shared drive that you can access from both Virtualbox and from linux. This is because when you have downloaded the complete installer, you wil run that from Wine to do the install.

So when the download is complete, exit the installer and Virtualbox.

Installing the game

To install the game run the download/installer from wine when the download is completed.

You need to install some extra parts for Wine before the system and installer will run rightly. If you haven’t downloaded and installed winetricks there are some instructions here.

Then install ie6 from winetricks:

sh winetricks ie6

Then its time to do the install. I ran it with the command:

env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine" ^Cne explorer /desktop=3,1600x1000 PathToInstaller/STO_Demo_Installer.exe

This will start the installer, Select the path where you downloaded the files from within Virtualbox and let it verify the files. Install and register the demo account with cryptic/startrek online.

When you run the game, website you will get some javascript errors, but just click yes to continue run javascript on this page and you should get there.

Fixing the Icon

The installer will create a desktop icon if you allow it, but I changed the command to run as I wanted the game to run in a virtual desktop and be able to run the game fullscreen in this. So I changed the Application:Command to be:

env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine" wine explorer /desktop=3,1600x1000 "C:\Program Files\Cryptic Studios\Star Trek Online.exe"

There are a couple of things you need to fox to get the game to run well

Fixing the sound problem

Out of the box the sound will not work correctly. At least not for me. So to fox that you need to do the following:

• Startup winecfg
• Click on the “libraries” tab
• Under where it says “New override for library” enter mmdevapi then click add
• Select it on the list, click edit, select disable, and click ok.
• Click on the main OK to save and exit winecfg

This should give you sound in game.

Fixing the rolling problem

The keyboard repeat in X is a problem for the game, so when running the game, turn that off before you run the game with (in a terminal window):

xset r off

And turn in on after the game is run with

xset r on

That will take care of that

Game setting

The only thing left now is to change the graphics options in game to “low” and set the window to run in full screen mode (remember that you are running in a virtual desktop so the size is what you specify in the /desktop part on the command line)

Done!!!!!

You can now test play the game. If you later decides to try out the full game, you only need to get the Download key to convert the install to a full game. No need to reinstall the game.

So here are the instructions:

Start by going onto facebook, login as usuall and go to http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

There you can click on Other Windows/Mac/Linux.

And you will get a popup shoing you the login, and other information you need.

Open up Kopete and Click “Settings” in the top menu and then click “Configure”.

Click on “Accounts”, and then click “Add Account…”

Select “Jaber (XMPP, Jabber, Google talk)” from the list of services. Then click on next.

Use the Jabber ID you got from the chat page, and type it into the Jabber ID field.

Click on Remember Password and type in your normal Facebook password. Then click on next.

Under Connection preferences, leave all three options unchecked.

ANd no clikc on OK and you should be able to connect.

Be warned that you will see all you facebook friends so it might give you a lot of new persons in kopete.

But today i could not edit the tags.

I have done this a number of times before so I was a bit perplexed over why it just now stopped working.

But I found the problem. When upgrading to 9.10 aparently i got the “normal” easytag packages installaed, and to be able to tag m4a you need the easytag-aac packages.

So install it with:

sudo apt-get install easytag-aac

and all works as it should again

So Im down at the summer house, but before I left Stockholm i needed to fix remote access to my home system.

Well I have had access via ssh to my home system regardless where I am but I would prefer so really control my desktop on my home server from anywhere.

So I started looking into how to do this. Preferable secure and safe and all that.

So my home system is a kubuntu 8,04 and yes I know its kind of old but i don’t want to upgrade it yet.

So i first started out trying the built in version krfb. Well regardless of what I tried I could not get it to work. I could connect to the system but as soon as I did that it crashed. So i investigated a bit and found a number of similar post out there so its not unheard of.

So what to do?

Well the solution is to remove that and get x11vnc working instead.

So I installed this with apt-get:

sudo apt-get install x11vnc

Then logout and restart the Xserver just to make sure all things are loaded correctly. Just to be paranoid I setup a password with vncpasswd to be used so that its harder to login.

Then you can login to the system and forward the defalt vnc port (5900) to the remote machine, start x11vnc on that system and it will work.

So on your local system start the ssh:

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 username@10.10.10.10

When youhave logged in to your remote system, fire up x11vnc:

x11vnc -usepw -display :0

And back on you local system in another window start up vncviewer:

vncviewer localhost::5900

and you should get a copy of your remote desktop.

So I fired up Virtualbox and started my itunes in there. Then i decided to check the route to my spekaers and clicked on the pulseaudio applet. But wait its not in the taskbar.

Not to much to worry about. Chose it from the menu and start it. And it won’t start up. What the f..ck.

So I fired up a terminal windows and tried to start it from there. And the error message I got was:

** (padevchooser:9169): WARNING **: pa_browser_new() failed.

OK – Not to obvious. Google to teh rescue. And after reading 2 or 3 pages or different things I found the problem.

Its the avahi-daemon that isn’t started. And what is avahi then. Well its a deamon that helps you discover printer, people tochat with and so on, on the local network. And for some reason it wasn’t started.

So i checked the status of ith with the comand:

sudo service avahi-daemon status

And got back:

avahi-daemon stop/waiting

I then started it with:

sudo service avahi-daemon start

(If you whant to check that its running after that you can do status again and will get avahi-daemon start/running, process 9228 as a result)

And now padevchooser starts as it should.

If you still has a problem starting up avahi-daemon, you could trie to remove the status/lock file with:

sudo rm /var/run/avahi-daemon/disabled-for-unicast-local

That might help. and the do the start again.

When I upgraded to a new veriosn 9.10. I actually got a warning from phpmyadmin.

To fix the logout problem i added the following line to /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php file:

$cfg['LoginCookieValidity'] = 3600 * 4; // 4 hours

This will set the valid time for login to 4 hours – that shoud be ok for me atleast. But that exseeds the max time for a cookie in php so you have to make a change to php.ini also. Change /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini with the command:

sudo vi /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

and add/change the line

session.gc_maxlifetime

to

session.gc_maxlifetime = 14400

This will set it to teh same as the phpmyadmin cookie validity and it will now work.

After googleing something about it i found the solution. First you have to make some changes to thunderbird.

Go into the config editor:

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Config Editor

Then adding two new config strings:

network.protocol-handler.app.http
network.protocol-handler.app.https

and setting them both to the value ‘x-www-browser’.

That will tell thunderbird to use the debian alternative system for what to start when following a link. So when this done it will now open konqurer as the broswer – not really what I wanted.

No we need to fix the alternative system. This is done with the command:

sudo update-alternatives --verbose --config x-www-browser

and select chrome as you default bowser. For me that was number 2. And now thunderbird will open the links in chrome.

So after some googeling I found what was the problem. And its that vim guesses what colour schema you have and it guesses wrong.

Fix this my adding this line to you .vimrc file in you home directory.

set background=light

This will make the syntax highlighting right for viewing on a light background.

In the old system I had pulseaudio to work. I really like that as it handles multiple input and outputs and you can even adjust volumes and individual applications. So its a really god system. In the old system (8.04) it worked very well, but tended to hang some times, and I had to kill the pulseaudion daemon and restart it from time to time.

In 9.10 pulseaudion is the default use and I like that. Its very stable and works well. Unfortunately some applications is not OK with pulseaudio and there is some problems getting them to work.

Things that works well is:

• System sounds
• Skype – latest version 2.1.0.81 has pulseaudio support
• Audacity audion editor works now well with pulse
• Flash via Chrome or Firefox works ok
• Virtualbox works very well

Not working:

• Realaudio player
• IP Telephone – ekiga can work by using the headset without pulseaudio
• VMWare – but im not using sound there
• Wine out of the box

So most is working but I need to get wine working.

I hate the fact that when you go out and surf for a problem with any application and pulseaudion the top 10 things you get is “Oh i solved the problem by uninstalling pulseaudio and now everything is working”. That is not a solution for me. I want pulseaudion to be able to handle multiple streams and so on and going back to an older system is a bit backwards in my opinion. Fix the bugs and get the new things to work instead.

In the old system I had wine working with padsp – the pulseaudion OSS wrapper. And it was working well. But in this new OS its not working well at all.

After googeling and checking I found the Winepulse project. Apparently someone in Canada did make a sound backend for wine that can talk to the pulseaudio server. Unfortunately it will not be included in the normal wine as the wine people are rewriting wine to use OpenAL and that has pulseaudio build in so it will be available when that is in. When that now will happen.

So in the mean time you have to use winepulse patch or download from their archive.

So did it work – YES – perfectly and without any problem.

So what did I do.

• First i removed the old wine installation.
• Then i disabled the winehw archine from the source list
• And added Neil Wilson’s PPA: https://launchpad.net/~neil-aldur/+archive/ppa
• And installed the wine1.2 – 1.1.31.oubuntu+winepulse0.33 package

And now I happily can play my eve. Almost!!!

There is a bug in the ubuntu kernel that apparently locks up eve when you start it up. There are some fixes but I changed the start-up icon to do this instead of  anything else. What is does is change the bitsCancelled=1 to bitsCanccelled=0 in the prefs.ini file before starting up eve. And this works 95% of all cases.

env WINEPREFIX="/home/xxx/.wine" sed -i -e '/bitsCancelled/ s/1/0/'
 "/home/xxx/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/CCP/EVE/cache/prefs.ini"
&& wine explorer /desktop=0,1600x1000 "C:\Program Files\CCP\EVE\eve.exe"  /end /LUA:OFF

It shuld be all on one line. And if you have multiple start-up for different clients you need to change them to. Don’t forget to change the xxx to you home directory.

There are a few times when the startup dont work for me. By doing a wineboot -k command and then start again usually works then.

Now I can play eve as I whant.

When upgrading i lost my accelerated nvidia driver, but that was kind of expected. So how to fix it?

Well I went in to my normal download directory and tried to rebuild the nvidia drover from there. I was running 190 and nvidia is up to 195 so i did not think it was to far out. It worked kind of and I copied the xorg config file back ffrom jy old copy and tried to reboot. No luck.

I got the message that no driver was found – dam. And had go to text mode.

So I started to see if I could find the problem. I did try a number of different version, installing the latest, reverting back to and old one. No luck.

And finally i found it. There where 3 files left in /etc/modprobe.d – probably left since the upgrade but they seems to be blocking modprobe to work and being able to install the new nvidea driver. So here s the solution:

Fix for installing latest nvideadriver

Remove alas-base, blacklist-modem and lrm-video from /etc/modprobe.d:

sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/alas-base /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-modem /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video

Then add the new ubuntu repository from nvidea with the latest driver. Add

ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa

as a new software source (in System->Setting->System Setting->Settings->Software Source), and you should be able to select the new nvidea drive (195) and install that.

This worked for me.

OBS – Do not start the upgrade before you read this part. It might fail totally.

First of all – make a backup. I was going to change my hard drive, so i used the command dd_resuce to clone my harddrive to a new drive. I pluged in my new drive as a USB2 device – yes i have a nice cable for that and issue the command:

sudo dd_rescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdc

OBS!! Make sure you check /var/log/messages so you ARE SURE that /dev/sdc is the right device for you. If you do this to the wrong disk it will overwrite the destination disk without any problem and destroy the content.

After this was done i removed my old boot disk and installed this new one and booted up. No problem. Started the upgrade and that was when things when wrong.

2 packages that I had installed on the old system did make the upgrade fail, or atleast one of them.

The 2 packages that was the problem was flashplugin-nonfree and libgl1-mesa-dev.

So i had to go back and start all over again. The new installatin was so screwed up that you could not remove the flashplugin-nonfree, and you could not fix it so I started over, copied the disk, removed the packages and started over and now it works.

So here are the tips what to do before you start.

Before Upgrading

1. First and formost, make a backup, or several.
2. if you have installed flashplugin-nonfree packages in the old system, please remove that.

sudo apt-get remove nspluginwrapper flashplugin-nonfree

3. If you have installed libgl1-mesa-dev in the old system, please remove that.

sudo apt-get remove libgl1-mesa-dev

Then you can go ahead and start the upgrade. And you should in an hour or so have a new kde4 system up and running.

Things to go over in the following parts (And the status of it):

• Get the bluetooth mouse to work (working).
• Get the sound to work (working).
• Get the nvidia advanced driver to work (working)
• Get virtualbox to work (working)
• Get vmware to work (working)
• Get palm sync to work (working)
• Get ipod sync to work (partly working)

I will now follow up this in more parts in the comming week. Most was easy to get working even of the nvidia driver took 1 days to fix due to some remaning stuff from old installation.

I have no problems with a program that requires a specific version of another package if you have a reason for it. For instance i am using opendnssec for signing and handling keys for dnssec and it requires sqlite version 3.3.9 or newer and the reason for this is that they have found bugs in the older versions. And then I don’t have any problems with that. Its a reason and its documented.

I also had an experience with a web designer for one other of my customers this week. This is the second flavor of version fascist. They had make a new website for my customer and on that page there fas a flash part for just changing images. You can do this in many ways but flash is one way. I think its overkill but its an OK option. But they demanded the latest version (or at least a newer version of flash that i had on my machine). And this for no reason.

Definitely bad. So i hope that people starts paying a bit attention to what they are demanding for websites and for packages.

parently its in beta test face acording ot ubuntu news.

A god project i think.

And I realy love it – except fo one small thing. And its not realy the mouse problem, but the mouse driver in linux.

I use the wheel to scroll quite frequently and I also is very used to use “the third” button as paste in X. And I use left and right click at the same time to emulate the 3:rd button. And that works perfectly except for those times when I managed to click the wheel button while scrolling. This happens some times and the the driver goes

- Oh – he has a third buttong – better stop using the emulation then

And there is no way to get back to the emulation. Except for rebooting, or atleast logout, restart X server and in again.

And today my patience ran out – I did start to read about the config options in xorg.conf to see what I could do.

And i found a quick and easy way:

Emulate a left click with the middle button instead.

So here it is – add the following line to the mouse config part in xorg.conf:

Option         "ButtonMapping" "1 1 3 4 5"

That makes the second button emulate left click and the driver never sees a button 2 and never disable the emulation mode.

Simple – and easy when you know how to do it!