Showing post in category: Ubuntu
At work I was assigned to package some software to make it easier to distribute and update. One of those software packages was php-gtk which with one patch to the build/configure files now cleanly builds on Ubuntu. You will be able to find the package on my Ubuntu PPA. You will be able to find builds for both 32bit and 64bit platforms.
I’m also in the process of uploading packages for FriFinans which is an Open Source economy / accounting application. This should be easier… lets see how it goes 
At work I had to setup the network on Ubuntu Server (Hardy) so it was able to scan several networks with nmap as if they where local networks (and thus able to get MAC addresses). Until now the networks was scanned through a router which means the MAC addresses was lost. The reason for the importance of the MAC addresses was to identify whether a machine was likely a virtual machine or a physical machine.
The machine scanning is a virtual machine in VMware. Seven networks needed the ability to scan MAC adresses. VMware has a limitation of only 6 hardware devices (at least in ESX 3.5) which meant that having two harddisks it was only able to scan four out of the seven networks giving the machine a virtual NIC in each network.
The ESX server separated the networks with VLAN tags so to work around this we created a virtual trunk NIC.
Notice: The VLAN ID is optional but an empty VLAN ID means it cannot see VLAN tags. If you want a VMware NIC. To see all VLAN tags the VLAN ID must be 4095 (this might be VMware specific). This gave me and a colleague quite a headache before we figured it out.
To create trunked NIC in VMware:
- Click on the ESX server you want to create it on.
- Click on the “Configuration” tab to the right.
- Find the virtual switch in which the trunked NIC should reside in and click on “Properties…”.
- Click on the “Add…” button at the bottom to start the wizard.
- For “Connection Types:” select “Virtual Machine” and press “Next”.
- Give the NIC a name ie. “Trunk” and set the “VLAN ID (Optional):” to 4095 and press “Next”.
- Now just press “Finish” and notice the right information pane now indicating VLAN ID is set to “All”.
For Ubuntu Server (Hardy) to play nice with this new trunked NIC I found some help on the Ubuntu forums on how to setup VLAN.
First you have to install the vlan package:
sudo aptitude install vlan
Now enable the module:
sudo modprobe 8021q
And make sure it gets automatically loaded the next time the machine starts up:
sudo sh -c 'grep -q 8021q /etc/modules || echo 8021q >> /etc/modules'
Now configure your NIC in the following file:
/etc/network/interfaces
The following example sets up the ip 192.168.1.100 with 8 as a VLAN tag on eth0:
auto eth0.8
iface eth0.8 inet static
address 192.168.1.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
Now bring up the interface with:
sudo ifup eth0.8
Tags: nmap, vlan, vmware
I like my desktop to look good (cool effects not needed) and I’m a heavy Gnome-Do user so it has been annoying me for quite some time that when starting Pidgin it looks like this:
So I started searching Launchpad for a bugreport and actually found 2:
Thos bugs led me to a bug report in Pidgins own trac about the same issue. Which led me to download the source code and an usable svg file which I manually copied to my system:
sudo cp ./pidgin-2.5.5/pidgin/pixmaps/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/scalable/pidgin.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/
Long story short… now launching Piding from Gnome-Do looks like this:
YAY 
Tags: bug, gnome-do
A lot has happened since the last time I blogged… I must admit the main reason for not blogging has been World of Warcraft
Anyways back in December my girlfriend and I bought ourselves a new LCD TV capable of displaying HD 1920×1200. To start out with we used our aged Playstation 2 as a DVD player but the low DVD playback quality really shows on the new TV. A few months later I went out and bought a Mac Mini on which I installed Ubuntu.
So far we’ve mainly used it for the slimserver backed for the Squeezebox and occasionally DVD playback in the VLC media player. I’m looking a the different media centers for Linux but haven’t really decided yet. Being a Gnome guy I’m gonna give the next release of Elisa (0.5) a spin when it comes out in july. The earlier releases of Elisa was beautiful and clean but lacking a lot of functionality. So far VLC and a mouse has worked just fine. What I’m really hoping for is some BlueRay playback support in Linux.
Anyways I’m really happy with the Mac Mini as a “Media Center”. I wont be needing any TV Tuners. Its small, good looking, use fairly little power (I think) xD
I’m hoping to replace the DVD drive with a BlueRay drive when Linux support picks up at some point.
Today I got dual screen in Ubuntu working… I have been fiddling around with it a few times before but nothing seriously. Never got it working the way I wanted. Earlier I edited the xorg.conf by hand while following guides from the internet and yesterday I stumbled upon a graphical Nvidia X configuration tool by accident… the solution was a bit of both.
The tool is called nvidia-settings and looks something like the image below.
As far as I know there are 2 ways of doing dual screen in Linux. Either you can use Xinerama or the Nvidia built-in feature called TwinView (I might be wrong here :D). Anyways I chose TviewView because that was the default in the Nvidia config tool. After making X aware of my second monitor with the Nvidia tool I saved the X configuration and restarted the X server with the new (Nvidia generated) configuration. The Nvidia generated configuration had 2 problems:
- It removed my danish keyboard
- It made my old monitor and the VGA outled the default monitor.
I want my new monitor on the DVI outled to be the default.
By hand I added the danish keyboard configuration which I copy-pasted from the old xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "dk"
EndSection
To force the DVI to be the primary monitor I used the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600]"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 6600"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP, CRT"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
Option "MetaModes" "DFP: 1600x1200, CRT: 1280x1024"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "NVIDIA Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600]"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection
First I don’t want to see the Nvidia Logo when X is started… it is a nice logo though TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder is the important part because this makes sure that the DVI is the default monitor. You can read more about all the possible options for the Nvidia driver on Nvidias homepage.
My only “problem” is that the background image is streched out on both monitors, but I guess I have to make a custom background image for my dual screen setup. Now I can play World of Warcraft in a dual screen setup in Linux as well which was one of the only things that kept me booting into Windows. To bad performance drops a bit in Linux 
But I have a strong feeling that we are to blame Nvidia for that rather than Wine… but its just a gut feeling.
Last week I attended a Xen course on SLES10 (SP1 RC5). We used virt-manager.
I looked for it in Ubuntu but wasn’t able to find it. Instead I found this request for packaging virt-manager for Ubuntu.
I have been trying to do it myself but it isn’t as easy as I thought… I have never really tried packaging anything before (apart from my wallpapers which doesn’t really have any dependencies or make files).
Virtual Machine Manager has the following dependancies (taken from virt-manager homepage):
python >= 2.4
pygtk2 >= 1.99.12-6
gnome-python2-gconf >= 1.99.11-7
libvirt-python >= 0.2.1
dbus-python >= 0.61
gnome-python-desktop >= 2.15.4
libxml2-python >= 2.6.23
vte >= 0.12.2
virtinst >= 0.103.0
Identified corespondent packages in Ubuntu:
python Version: 2.5.1-0ubuntu3
python-gtk2 Version: 2.10.4-0ubuntu3
python-gconf Version: 2.18.0-0ubuntu1
python-libvirt Version: 0.1.8-0ubuntu2
python-dbus Version: 0.80.2-1ubuntu2
python-gnome2-desktop Version: 2.18.0-0ubuntu3
python-libxml2 Version: 2.6.27.dfsg-1ubuntu3
libvte9 Version: 1:0.16.1-0ubuntu1
virtinst (downloadable from `virt-manager`'s homepage)
I guess virtinst would need packaging as well… download virtinst.
The version of phyton-libvirt isn’t new enough either.
I have been looking at a Ubuntu packaging guide but have already run into trouble (even before getting to phyton-libvirt):
...
checking for PYGTK2... configure: error: Package requirements (pygtk-2.0 >= 1.99.11) were not met:
No package 'pygtk-2.0' found
Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.
Alternatively, you may set the environment variables PYGTK2_CFLAGS
and PYGTK2_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
make: *** [config.status] Error 1
I think its kinda hidden. You might have wondered why vmware-server kernel modules was available from the repositories but no vmware-server? The answer is: It is available!
Just like Real Player, Opera and other commercial software you can install VMware-server from the following repository, which you add to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and Third-Party Software:
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main
After that you run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vmware-server
A colleague pointed me a page about adding Adding Canonical Commercial Repositories in Ubuntu, which is actually referenced from the page about Installtion VMware Server in Ubuntu
In the lastest version of Ubuntu (version 7.04 – Feisty Fawn) kernel modules for VMware Server is available in the package vmware-server-kernel-modules from Ubuntus package repository.
The VMware Server itself is at the moment not. You still need to install VMware Server from the tar.gz download from www.vmware.com.
I found documentation on how to make the VMware server kernel modules package work together with the VMware Server installed from tar.gz in the Ubuntu Documentation. I also found the reference to this documentation on the Ubuntu Forums.
The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to run vmware-config.pl every time you update your kernel.
If you upgraded to 7.04 from a previous version of Ubuntu you might run into a problem where you can’t get the vmware console to start. The output on the console will look something like this:
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
I solved it by removing the following packages:
sudo apt-get --purge remove libdbus-1-2 libnautilus-burn3
Don’t worry new packages have taken their spots as far as I know:
libdbus-1-3
libnautilus-burn4
I found a thread on the VMware forums but my solution seemed easier
Today I used my Ubuntu Linux workstation at home for several hours. I usually only use it for playing World of Warcraft (which until now have been on Windows). When even I need to do some Linux stuff I usually just fire up my trusty IBM x40 laptop, which only takes a few seconds since I always suspend to RAM.
Well while I was playing around with some different things (including getting “World of Warcraft – The Burning Crusade” to run with wine), I got the crazy idea to try use the wireless net instead of the wired. My workstation is a Shuttle and I bought the “special” Shuttle wireless (USB) card, which doesn’t take up the precious single free PCI slot.
The module the card is using is:
zd1211rw
When set up from the commandline WPA is working just nicely… but together with Network Manager I can only connect to WEP encryptet networks… this is a know bug
Yesterday I updated my kernel on my laptop after a record uptime (for me on my laptop anyways ;)):
16:26:58 up 42 days, 7:21, 3 users, load average: 1.12, 1.46, 1.04
42 days without an update to the kernel in Ubuntu… I dunno if thats good or bad. But one thing that is really cool is that in all this time I used my suspend to ram function, and the laptop haven’t died on me once. It occasionally did in all the previous versions of Ubuntu. So I just wanna send a kudos to the developers.
Whenever the update manager notifies me about upgrades I usually just install it, though with a kernel update I try to push it to avoid rebooting. But this time I was excited because I noticed that the kernel apparently had a fix for the bug reading large SD cards I mentioned in an earlier post.
I can confirm that this is now fixed… YAY!
Anyways… im now gonna put an encrypted file system on the SD card for my gpg key, ssh key, VPN keys etc. I hope I can give it another label as well.
