Tag Archives: ubuntu

Today’s Links

Regularly drinking coffee may help prevent or reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7326839.stm

And binge drinking can affect memory recall (at least in young drinkers):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7328863.stm

Ubuntu Linux to be certifiied on some of Sun’s hardware:

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0236534620080402

A lot of Linux enthusiasts have taken to Ubuntu, and all of its versions are freely available. I think that this can only help them squeeze into the Enterprise space, as it’s helped them gain mindshare.

Red Hat, for example, is separated into their commerical offering, RHEL, which wasn’t cheap the last time I looked at their prices, and the freely available Fedora.

Fedora is free and open source like Ubuntu and is used by Red Hat as a testing ground for new features and technologies, but isn’t exactly the same as the “for fee” versions. I think this could hurt Red Hat in the long term; the enthusiasts helped bring Red Hat to where they are, but if they can’t easily (or cheaply or freely) get the enterprise products they won’t be using them nor introducing them into companies, instead they’ll be using Ubuntu or even Novell which offers a near complete version of their product for free.

And I’m surprised that VMWare’s market value has dropped by $30 billion, yes that’s billion dollars in six months supposedly due to competition that will arise products that Microsoft has in beta:

http://www.marketwatch.com

The market already seems to have voted. VMware’s stock, which debuted at $29 a share in August, soared past the $125 mark by late October. The shares then sharply reversed — no doubt helped by a general downturn in technology stocks — and have since sunk back below the $50 mark. The stock closed at $51 on the day of its IPO.

But, man I wish I’d gotten some of those share at $29 or $30 and sold and 125 bucks! However, work doesn’t allow us to invest in IPO’s. US financial companies have rules in place to prevent conflict of interests, and there are also Federal Laws in effect. However, it’s not like most of us Techies get any knowledge that would help us in the markets anyway, but I guess they pay us fairly well to make up for this.

OK, back to the point, maybe I should really be surprised that VMWare’s stock price increased so much, from $30 to $125 is a 400% increase. With all the other competitors in the market it would only be a matter of time before any market share they would gain, or gained, would be infringed on.

And with free offering, such as Xen on the server side, and Qemu for virtualisation on the Desktop, and a multitude of other competitors on the desktop side, it’d be hard to take and keep market share.

However, the VMWare folk are a smart bunch of lads and I’d expect some innovations from them in the future.

Adobe Air for Linux?

A friend forwarded the e-mail below to me. It looks like there is a beta or prerelease of the Linux version of Adobe Air available. However, poking around Adobe’s site I can’t any references to this release and Googling hasn’t turned up anything useful (except for doc from last year saying Air for Linux will be here in the 1.2 release). And the first Q/A in the e-mail say there isn’t a public announcement, yet. If anyone knows what procedure there is get access to a version, please leave a comment.

Wouldn’t you think they’d include a few links in the e-mail! I’m guessing that it’s somewhere on http://labs.adobe.com, maybe all I have to do is register? Nor is there anything on the Air Forums?

The announcement is below, the only changes I’ve made is masking any e-mail addresses (to help prevent unnecessary spam), and some minor formatting to improve the legibility. BTW Adobe, good job on working on providing Linux support. However, I’d suggest that if you provide support for Ubuntu, that you also consider providing packages for Debian which is what Ubuntu is based on.

Update: See Ashutosh‘s comment below.

Also, see Arstechnica’s Air Review.

Continue reading Adobe Air for Linux?

Dell BIOS updates using Linux

Dell provides Ubuntu support for updating the BIOS of Dell systems:

http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/12/05/37446.aspx

… be sure the Universe section is enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list, then run as root:

wget -q -O – http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bootstrap.cgi | bash
aptitude install firmware-addon-dell
aptitude install $(bootstrap_firmware -a)
update_firmware

Thanks Dell!

Gnome theme problems.

Wow, major problems with Gnome and trying to change themes. Ended up the issue was some weird conflict with the gtk-qt-engine package. A simple:

apt-get remove –purge gtk-qt-engine

solved the problem. Of course it took a fews days of googling to find the answer, which was on Ubuntu’s bug tracker (don’t have the link handy sorry). The issue I had was that if I tried to change the theme or any part of the appearance of Gnome, the whole theming application would go blank. If you expierence this too, remove gtk-qt-engine .

Gnome-screensaver is a bit of a pain in it simplicity

One of Gnome’s main philosphy is simplicity but in this endeavour, some things are a pain! For instance, Gnome’s pictures screensaver doesn’t let you specify what directory to look for pictures or photo’s to display (nor has the neat zooming and paning features of Xscreensaver’s Glslideshow). It expects all your pictures to be in a directory named Pictures in your home directory and this isn’t an easily configurable option, and it seems to not look for pictures in any sub-directories of the Pictures directory (all the pics need to be in one directory).

But you can use the xscreensaver’s screensaver with gnome-screensaver:

http://philcrissman.com/2006/07/25/howto-add-your-xscreensavers-to-gnome-screensaver/

So once again I can use the Glslideshow screensaver without having to disable Gnome’s screensaver and configuring xscreensaver to auto start when I login. The only problem with this is I need to use the xscreensaver-demo command to configure xscreensaver’s screensaver. If you do this make sure you don’t start the xscreensaver daemon.

Mac4Lin

Make your Linux Gnome Desktop look like a Mac:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin

Instructions here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/mac4lin_make_linux_look_like_a_mac

This is what my desktop like before:

Desktop Theme Before Mac4Lin

And I got this far and gave up:

Mac4Lin

I’m all praise to the folk who put all the work into this. But, having a Apple logos on my Gnome desktop just seems odd. If you want to get a desktop that looks like a Mac go for it, but at least for me I don’t see the point in making my Linux desktop look just like a Mac. If I want a Mac I’ll get a Mac (and probably run Linux on it).

Ubuntu Linux, T-Mobile, & Nokia N73 as a Bluetooth Modem.

If bluetooth works on your computer, then getting your system to talk to your N73 isn’t hard and I’m not going to cover it here. See this posting for what packages I needed to install to get bluetooth working in my Dell 700M laptop running Ubuntu Linux:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/2007/10/09/ubuntu-bluetooth-sd-card/

If you have T-Mobile T-Zones Internet service for your phone in the US you should be able to use the following procedure to surf the web on your computer using your N73.

First find your Phone’s bluetooth device address (or ID), by typing

*#2820#

into your phone.

You should see a sequence of numbers and letters that look something like this on the screen:

000ABC22BC33

Write it down in this format, (with a colon after every 2nd character):

00:0A:BC:22:BC:33

Next make a backup copy of this file

/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

For example:

sudo cp  /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf.org

I’m going to presume you’ve never edited this file before, and you can change it to look like this (using the bluetooth device number you discovered):

#
# RFCOMM configuration file.
#
rfcomm0 {
 #      # Automatically bind the device at startup
 	bind yes;
 #
 #      # Bluetooth address of the device
 	device 00:0A:BC:22:BC:33;
 #
 #      # RFCOMM channel for the connection
	channel 2;
 #
 #      # Description of the connection
	comment "Nokia N73";
 }

If you have edited this file before and are already using rfcomm0, then create a new entry named rcomm1 and replace rcomm1 with any other references I make to rcomm0. Also, make sure you get all the semi-colons after each entry in the file.

Next copy the gprs-connect-chat and the gprs-disconnect-chat files from:

http://davesource.com/Solutions/20070520.T-Mobile-Nokia-E65-Ubuntu-Linux.html#networking

In the gprs-connect-chat replace line 47:

OK              'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet2.voicestream.com","",0,0'

With this:

OK              'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","wap.voicestream.com","",0,0'

Move the 2 files to /etc/ppp/peers:

sudo mv  gprs-connect-chat /etc/ppp/peers
sudo mv  gprs-disconnect-chat  /etc/ppp/peers

Next create a new file in /etc/peers named gprs and copy’n’paste the following (the gprs script that davesource.com uses didn’t work for me):

# GPRS for T-Mobile USA
/dev/rfcomm0 # device bound to T610 phone
230400 # speed
defaultroute # use the network for the default route
usepeerdns # use the DNS servers from the remote network
nodetach # keep pppd in the foreground
crtscts # hardware flow control
lock # lock the serial port
noauth # don’t expect modem to authenticate itself
local # don’t use Carrier Detect or Data Terminal Ready
debug
connect /etc/ppp/peers/gprs-connect-chat
disconnect /etc/ppp/peers/gprs-disconnect-chat

Now your ready to test the connection. First stop networking:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking stop

Next, turn on bluetooth on your phone and connect to it. Once your connect issue the following commands:

rfcomm bind all
 pppd call gprs

When your done, control-c will stop the ppp connection, then run this command:

 rfcomm release all

If you’ve more than one entry defined in your rfcomm.conf file, try using:

frcomm bind rfcomm0

And replace rfcomm0 with rfcomm1 or rfcomm2 …

To web-surf you will need to set your browser to use the following proxy:

216.155.165.50:8080

But, ssh & VPN won’t work, just web-browsing at dial-up speed! However, it might be possible to tunnel ssh and other services.

The following links were a lot of help in aiding me in getting this to work:

http://www.yepthatsme.com/2004/11/09/ppp-chat-scripts-for-t-mobile-sony-ericsson-t610-gprs-via-bluetooth-with-debian/

http://digitalife.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/using-your-mobile-phone-as-a-gprs-modem-with-ubuntu-linux-via-dku-2-usb-cable/

I used the scripts from here to get the laptop to connect (with minor changes):

http://davesource.com/Solutions/20070520.T-Mobile-Nokia-E65-Ubuntu-Linux.html#bluetooth

I need to clean-up/rewrite this posting, and put in proper references to sites that helped me get this working.

Copies of the configuration files are here:

rfcomm.conf

gprs, gprs-connect-chat, gprs-disconnect-chat

Gnome Fonts too big in Ubuntu Gutsy?

I upgraded my Dell 700m laptop from Ubuntu Feisty to Ubuntu Gutsy. Gutsy is the current developemnt (beta) release of Ubuntu Linux and is planned to be released in October of 2007. After upgrading to Gutsy and restarting my laptop many of the fonts were too big.

To correct this you may need to set the DPI to 96. To see why read this:

http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2007-01.html

And this:

http://scanline.ca/dpi/

To change the DPI go to the Font settings applet; click on System, then Preferences, then Appearance:

Menu

On the Window that opens click on the Fonts tab, and then click on the Details button on the lower right:

Gnome Font Selector

Note: Your fonts may be different than what I have set.

On the Details window the dots per inch in the upper left may be set to something other than 96. Change this to 96 and you should see your fonts change:

Gnome Details Settings

You may need to logout and back in again for fonts to change for all of your running applications.

Also, if you don’t have a LCD display you will not want to have “Subpixel (LCDs)” enabled like I do.

If you want to change what fonts you use read this for tips for which fonts are better for legibility:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/6/11739/5249

Enlightement e17 on Ubuntu Screenshots

E17 Darkness Theme on Ubuntu:

E17 Darkness Theme on Ubuntu with the menu highlighted:

E17 Darkness theme with a wallpaper from vladstudio.com:

Themes are available from get-e.org. The packages for Ubuntu come with Darkness and other themes, the Debian package appears to only come with the default theme.

Look for my latest posting on E17 as this information could be out-of-date:

http://timony.com/mickzblog/category/e17/