Entries Tagged Ubuntu

I’ve been annoyed for months by my laptop selecting my neighbor’s access point over mine. On every startup I’d have to make sure I was using our network. I looked a few times but apparently with the wrong search terms. The answer is to use gconf-editor as described here. One point that momentarily fooled me, you do not want to use sudo for this.

I had tons of problems with Gutsy on my computer at work. Feisty worked great so I expected Gutsy to be even better.

First I upgraded. That resulted in a system that worked but that had annoying bugs. For one, the Gnome tray apps would sometimes fail to start and I’d get a stack of notification dialogs on my desktop, all of which I had to dismiss before I could continue. Sound would quit working for no apparent reason. I wrote all this off to having upgraded so I decided to do a clean install.

I wiped the disk and did a clean install. Then the graphics problems started. I’ve got an older nVidia board with dual video outputs. On reboot I’d get complaints that it couldn’t detect my graphics hardware and wanted to start in low-graphics mode. After making the adjustments, it would appear to forget them on the next reboot. Then I found that gnome-terminal wouldn’t start. It complained about an X11 error that might have something to do with dual screens.

So, I restored by backup of my previous feisty install on another partition and after a bit of fooling with grub and the uuid’s in my fstab, I’m running feisty again.

I think I’ll let gutsy simmer for a while before I try again. At least with my new disk organization it will be easy to switch back and forth between releases.

This D800 has the 1920 by 1280 screen and the touchpad defaults are way too slow. I looked for a tool to adjust it but don’t see one. I edited xorg.conf to look like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.75"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.50"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection

I tried upgrading to Gutsy on my old Dell D800 today, it took about 7 hours to download the packages and then the upgrade failed. It couldn’t get the screen resolution right and didn’t detect my graphics hardware. The CD does it just fine. So I wiped the root partition and did a clean install. That seems to work fine. The wireless configuration was effortless. Now to figure out all the packages I need. I should keep some notes on the changes I make too.

My students all have Office 2007 so they are sending me .docx files. This helpful post on Ubuntu Forums works great.

This page describes the workaround that fixes my scanner. Simply scanbuttond -r 1000000.

Our web pages are in AFS space, which would be great but AFS is a pain. The security policy requires me to login with a password in order to get a token in order to access an ACL protected directory. I decided to see if I could get the emacs package tramp to help me with this. Tramp will use scp to retrieve remote files and to write them on save. How can I get it work with AFS?

Here is one approach. I created a file ~/.ssh/config with these lines:

Host swan
ControlPath /tmp/ssh_swan_gb

I already have an alias that forces ssh to use a password to login instead of my usual keys.

alias sshl='/usr/bin/ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=password'

So I login with sshl swan -M.

Now a later scp will inherit my AFS tokens. So with emacs I can type

^X^F//swan:public_html/foo/foo.cgi

to edit a file on the remote host.

Here is what I had to do to get rdesktop to connect to XP Professional installed on VMware Workstation 6 running on Feisty.

In the guest XP system added a password for my account and turned on Remote Desktop in the System control panel applet on the Remote tab.

I edited /etc/vmware/vmnet8/nat/nat.conf and added the line

3389 = 192.168.72.128:3389

in the [incomingtcp] section.

Then I edited /etc/systl.conf to change the IPv4 forwarding line:

# Uncomment the next line to enable packet forwarding for IPv4
net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1

Then I rebooted.

Now I started VMware and activated the guest XP system. Now the command:

rdesktop localhost

Works as expected.

Lots of pages out there address problems people have getting sound to work with VMware running on Linux hosting Windows but none of those solutions did it for me. VMware Workstation 6 insists on using /dev/dsp which for some strange reason I didn’t have. I noticed I had /dev/dsp1 through /dev/dsp5 but no plain /dev/dsp. A few minutes fooling with Audacity showed me where each of those played, and /dev/dsp3 seems to play through the speakers on my Audigy 2 so I knew that was the one I wanted it to use. I simply did: sudo ln -s /dev/dsp3 /dev/dsp and that seemed to do the trick.

Now I bet there is other magic, probably some that I accidentally invoked, that is making this work. I’m going to attach the .asoundrc files to this post so that if I lose sound later, maybe I can reconstruct the current state.

asoundrc
asoundrc.asoundconf

Update: I notice my symbolic link gets killed on reboot. Either I’ve got to figure out how to make it persistent, or I need to make VMware use /dev/dsp3.

Update 2: This page on writing udev rules taught me that I can get a symbolic link created on bootup just by adding a rule. I made a new file /etc/udev/rules.d/62-gb-symlinks.rules and in it I placed the single line:
KERNEL=="dsp*", DRIVERS=="EMU10K1_Audigy", SYMLINK+="dspAudigy"

This rule says (I think) look for a device with a name that matches /dev/dsp*, and has a Audigy driver, then make a symbolic link to it named /dev/dspAudigy.

Then I simply edited the .vmx file for my VMware virtual machine and changed the sound.fileName line to read
sound.fileName = "/dev/dspAudigy"

Now that always points to the sound channel I want my virtual machines to use.

Wireless actually works except for the campus network. I can connect to the network over at the Inn (by accident I assure you) but our campus network uses WEP and does not broadcast SSID. Something about that kills it. Lots of Googling hasn’t produced an answer. Michael suggests trying ndiswrapper.

Update: the following commands will make it work. Why? If I put them in /etc/networks/interfaces, they don’t seem to work. Ack.

sudo iwconfig ath0 essid OurSSID key XXXX-XXXX-XX mode Managed
sudo iwpriv ath0 authmode 2
Update 31 October 2007: Under Gutsy, I edited /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools and added
/sbin/iwpriv ath0 authmode 2 just after the first fi. That seems to work.