Entries by Alex

Zen is a buddhist practice of meditation to acheive enlightenment.
I have no idea why creative chose this name for their mp3 players but today I feel creative labs could use some enlightenment and lightening of there greed.
I bought a 4gb zen 5 months ago. It seemed a bit flaky from the start. I had to reformat the device a few times to get it back from the dead. Now just 5 months later, it wont even power up. Thinking the device was less than 1 year old I went to creative's web site to see about returning the device. Yes it is still under hardware warranty. Thats good but Creative wants $25 for labor and won't guarantee that they will fix it without asking for yet more money. Hey creative, your device sells for less than $90. I can buy a competitors product for much less and you want me to fork over $25 with no guarantee you can fix it for that? Hmm, I guess this is an expensive lesson to me to never buy creative products again. Creative Labs this isn't the first time you have treated me, your customer like a "mark" but I can guarantee it will be the last time.

I have a laptop with a belkin wifi adapter using the broadcom 4306 chipset.
Today I installed Hardy Heron and the adapter isn't enabled out of the box. I looked over the Ubuntu forums and saw lots of how-tos to install ndiswrapper or to compile b43-fwcutter from source in order to be able to install the broadcom firmware. After trying everything I saw and failing, I finally found this is actually dead easy in hardy. Just enable multiverse and universe repositories. Then install the package b43-fwcutter, when it prompts about downloading the firmware files tell it yes and when you reboot you are ready to setup your wifi. No blacklisting bcm43xx anymore. No compiling fwcutter and manually extracting the firmware and no installing ndiswrapper.

It happens all the time... Microsoft borrows an idea from Mac or Linux and occasionally Mac or Linux borrows an idea from Microsoft.
The Gnome window manager has a feature called places. It is pretty synonymous with the my computer concept in windows and is pretty handy once you start using it. However I expected to right click and add a location to the places menu but that doesn't work. Instead you open the nautilus file manager, navigate to a place you want to add. Click bookmarks, add bookmark. Now you have a new place. To me that wasn't intuitive at all. Who knew a nautilus bookmark was equivalent to a gnome place? I had to google for that info. It is also pretty plain looking. For example the folder name is not capitalized and the icon is your default folder icon. If that folder happens to be a mounted drive then it would be nice to have a drive icon instead. You can fix the capitalization problem by going back to bookmarks and clicking edit bookmarks, There you can give it a name different to the actual folder name. That still doesn't fix the icon problem.
The file where all of these bookmarks or "places" are being stored is in your home folder and it is called .gtk-bookmarks. The file will look something like this.

file:///home/afleak/Documents
file:///home/afleak/Music
file:///home/afleak/Pictures
file:///home/afleak/Videos
file:///mnt/haven Haven

The location Haven is what I added to the places menu.

Now if we could just change that icon...

Problem:
You have a family member or friend(s) who has a linux box that you administer for them. They are on a dynamic ip service from their isp. Therefore their ip address changes regularly preventing you from easily ssh'ing into their box.

Solution:
You could use a free dynamic ip updating service such as no-ip.com, dyndns.com or dtdns.com. The problem is those services will require updating. meaning you must install some client software on their machines and they must have their P.C turned on on a regular basis.
Can the client software be trusted not to do something nefarious? Also with my friends, they weren't keeping their PC on enough and the dynamic dns service eventually expired their account for inactivity.
Fortunately there is another alternative if you have a linux server connected to the net.
My server has apache and postfix running so it was pretty simple to hack together a couple of scripts to solve the issue.

On the friends PC make sure wget is installed. (it is usually installed by default on most distro's) Make a cronjob with the following command...
crontab -e
This edits the users crontab using the editor you or your distro specified. In ubuntu it is nano, on other distros it may be vi.
add a line like this.

00 8,20 * * * wget http://yourserver/friends-ip.html

save and exit the editor
now make sure the changes are saved by displaying the users crontab with the command...
crontab -l
This will fetch the file at 8 am and 8pm. Change the time to one suitable for your friend's hours.
You may also want to add the wget command to a local startup script if they have their PC on very little.
The name of the file to wget can be anything just remember what it is and make it different for every user.

Now on your server make a script file named ipreport.sh like this one. I keep mine in /root but put yours wherever is convenient for you.

#!/bin/bash
cat /var/log/apache2/access.log |grep friends-ip.html >> /root/ipreport.txt
cat /root/ipreport.txt |mail -s "Fiendsname's IP" your email address
rm /root/ipreport.txt

Make the saved file executable with chmod o+x ipreport.sh

Now create a cronjob on the server. You can do this several ways but since I use vixiecron which isn't picky I just edit /etc/crontab and add this line

10 8 * * * root /root/ipreport.sh

Finally make the file that wget is looking for in your apache DocumentRoot. On my machine that is /var/www/

sudo touch /var/www/friends-ip.html

If you like you can edit this file and put an explanation in it to help you remember what it is.
The file also needs to be readable by your webserver.
For me using ubuntu...
sudo chgroup www-data
sudo chmod 740 friends-ip.html


Now I should be emailed daily me with the last ip address of my friend. Note I have it set to happen at 8:10 am giving their computer a little extra time to connect in case their time is off.
The email will have the subject "Friend's IP"
and the body of the message will look something like this
IP Address - - Access Date and Time "GET /friends-ip.html HTTP/1.0" 200 30 "-" "Wget/1.10.2"

Whenever you want to ssh into their box simply look at the email from today and ssh to the listed IP.

I have been using gkrellm as a system monitor/mail checker for a long time. When there is new mail I have it set to notify me with an animation and a short sound. Recently all my mail accounts have gone to using ssl. First Google did this and now AT&T is. Unfortunately, gkrell did not support SSL enabled pop servers until the version 2.2.10 . It has been out since october 2006 and so far there is no package in the repositories and I don't see one in a Google search. So I have rolled my own. For dependencies they seem to be pretty much the same as previous versions except I had to go get libgtk2.0 and libgtk2.0-dev to make the deb. For more info on dependancies check out the gkrellm home page at http://www.gkrellm.net/

Here is the .deb, no warranty as to fitness or usability.

I picked up an HP Photosmart 2575 All in One; Printer-Scanner-Copier the other day. HP's linux support is impressive. I was scanning and printing in no time. Next step was to get scanning and printing working on every computer on the network. Now the 2575 has a built in ethernet port but I decided to use the ubuntu deskop PC for sharing the printer and scanner instead . It is a bit tricky setting scanner sharing up in ubuntu and I could not find a concise how-to anywhere so in the spirit of linux I decided to share what I learned. This info should be applicable to most modern distro's although some of it is debian specific.
This how-to assumes you have the printer and scanner working properly from the local machine. The how-to also assumes you will be using the groupid saned for scanning tasks.
You will need to apt-get the following software for your ubuntu box.
sane
sane-utils "this package has the saned daemon".
xinetd "needed to start the saned daemon"

I also grabbed xsane and any desired gimp plugins.

OK software is installed, now we need to edit a few files.

Add a line to /etc/inetd.conf like this.
sane-port stream tcp nowait saned.saned /usr/sbin/saned saned

Now add the following lines to the end of /etc/xinetd.conf

service sane-port
{
socket_type = stream
server = /usr/sbin/saned
protocol = tcp
user = saned
group = saned
wait = no
disable = no
}
xinet.d should have been added to the services startup on ubuntu when you installed the package So no further xinet.d configuration was necessary. Make sure to add it to startup if your distro doesn't do it for you.
My scanner was setup by udev as /dev/sg0 with ownership of root and group root. To make saned work I needed to change the group to saned.
First make sure saned exists in /etc/group then add any users to the saned group that you want to have scanner access.
The line in my /etc/group looks like this
saned:x:113:username1,username2

Now to make the ownership of /dev/sg0 correct edit /etc/udev/libsane-extras.rules
(is this a debian specific file?)
The line you need to add must be between the lines titled "SUBSYSTEM" and "LABEL"

Now you may have some lines there already. if one of them matches your scanner then you are in luck. There wasn't one for mine so after reading the lines there I figured out it was using the id strings that you see for the scanner when you type lsusb. For my 2575 All in One, lsbusb stated the following.
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 03f0:4e11 Hewlett-Packard
So I created 2 lines. The first is just a comment telling what scanner this is for. The second line is the actual magic that reads the id strings and assigns the scanner to groupid saned.

# Hewlet-Packard 2575 All In One
SYSFS{idVendor}=="03f0", SYSFS{idProduct}=="4e11", MODE="664", GROUP="saned", RUN+="/etc/hotplug.d/usb/libsane.hotplug"

My blog may be truncating the second line. The line should begin with SYSFS and end with libsane.hotplug. There is 1 space between saned", and RUN+

Also make sure /etc/services has a line similar to this. Ubuntu already had this.
sane-port 6566/tcp sane saned # SANE network scanner daemon

Now reboot your computer to make the changes take effect.
On the clients you want to scan from you need to install sane, the sane-utils, and Xsane if you want a gui. Then edit /etc/sane.d/net.conf and add the ip address of the saned server. For example;
192.168.1.199



That is it, You should be good to go. Security wise don't run the sane.d service on a computer directly visible to the net as it may be a security hole. Either use a firewall to block port 6566 or if using a router send 6566 incoming to a non existing internal IP in your port forwarding tables.

UPDATE:
Upgraded to ubuntu 7.10 gutsy gibbon and there are some changes to setting this up.
There is no longer a file /etc/udev/libsane-extras.rule I instead edited /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libsane.rules
Also /etc/inetd.conf no longer exists. I created the file and inserted the line mentioned above but I am not sure if that is any longer necessary.
The big problem seems to be that saned refuses to work if run as user saned. if you edit /etc/xinetd.conf as above and set the saned user and group to root it will work but that is a terrible idea if your computer is exposed to the internet. I am looking for a fix which doesn't involve running the daemon as root but have not found it yet.

Further UPDATE:

With 8.04 hardy heron the udev rule file has changed yet again. Now edit /etc/udev/rules.d/025_libsane-extras.rules
instead of 45=libsane-rules.

I had several smallish partitions on a ubuntu system leftover from a previous gentoo install. I wanted to combine them into a larger partition for storing my precious stuff on. I could have moved some partitions around but I decided to do it with LVM instead. LVM takes numerous small partitions and turns them in to 1 or more large virtual partitions. I looked around for some ubuntu specific howto's on doing this and didn't really find much. I did find several generic lvm howto's but some of the command syntax had changed and led me to dead ends. Here is step by step how I setup lvm on Ubuntu Dapper Drake.

First you want to make sure lvm2 is installed. So look for it using your favorite method ( I use adept on kubuntu or synaptic on ubuntu.) Also make sure the dm-mod is loaded so open a terninal and do

lsmod |grep dm-mod

If it isn't listed do

sudo modprobe dm-mod

Next remove anything off the partitions we are about to use. As we will be changing the partitions types and making a new file system on them. Write down the partitions you will want to use at this time.
Now use cfdisk to modify the partitions.

sudo cfdisk /dev/hda

Arrow down to the partition you want to use. Set the partition type to 8E which is for LVM.
Do this for all prartioions you want to use on both /dev/hda and /dev/hdb. Don't do this for your / partition. That takes even more mojo to do.
At this point to have the best experience you should reboot
Once you are rebooted you are ready to create your volume.
First for every partition we set to type 8E we need to create a physiclal volume. This howto assumes we will be using /dev/hda2 and /dev/hdb2. use the proper device entries for your system.

pvcreate /dev/hda2

pvcreate /dev/hdb2

Now that we have our partitions turned into physical volumes we need to create a volumegroup. At this point I ran into a roadblock as the howto's I had found all said to do "vgcreate my_volume_group /dev/hda2 /dev/hdb2". But I would get an error everytime I did this. Eventually I stumbled on to the fact that when pvcreate was being used on /dev/hda1 it was creating a device at /dev/evms/hda1 So then i tried the command below and it worked.

vgcreate data /dev/evms/hda2 /dev/evms/hdb2

This creates a volume group called data from those 2 partitions. If you decide later you want to add another partition you can use the vgextend command.

Now we have 2 phisycal volumes in a group called data. The command

vgdisplay -v data

will list the properties for this group. Of importance to us is VG Size. This is the maximum size available to us. We now need to create a logical volume. I used the full amount of space available which was 65 gigs so the command to do that is

lvcreate -L 65G -n databin data

databin is the name of my logical volume and data was the name for the previously created volume group.

Lastly we need to make a filesystem on this logical volume. I prefer ext3 so here is the command for that.

mke2fs -j /dev/data/databin

Now that we have a file system. we need to get it to mount at boot, so add this line to /etc/fstab

/dev/data/databin /mnt/databin ext3 defaults 0 0

Make a directory /mnt/databin and you are ready to mount it and use it.

There is a service called lvm that needs to run at start but that should do so without further tweaking. If for some reason it does not just add it using the gui or in the command line using update-rc.d .
That's it, Have Fun.

The default settings for the terminal program that come with most linux distro's is pretty plain. For most it is a white screen with ugly black lettering. Some people like this retro look and eschew so called "eyecandy" but one of the first things I do after installing linux is to customize the terminal to look the way I want it. How you do this can vary a bit depending on which terminal program you are using. in KDE's konsole the settings you modify are known as schema. In Gnome terminal you edit profiles. I will give you a step by step on modifying the gnome terminal.

First lets get rid of that nasty 2 color terminal that looks like a throwback to computing circa 1972.
On the terminal program menu click Edit then Profiles. From the Profiles list you most likely will only have the one named Default. Click on it then click Edit. A new window pops up, Across the top of that window are tabs, click on the one that says Effects. Here are 3 options for background settings. None, Background Image, or Transparent background. Click on Transparent background. You will notice a slider. This controls the amount of transparency. Don't bother adjusting it just yet. Since gnome has a default color scheme of black letters on white background. The color you are mixing with transparency is now white. This looks terrible. So click on the Colors tab. If "use colors from system theme" is checked then uncheck it. Now click on the button next to Text color:. It will bring up a color wheel and the little selector circle is on the darkest end of the color spectrum. Click on the corner of the triangle that is the whitest. It may take a little practice but eventually you will click the very end of that triangle and get pure white. Click ok and now click on the button labeled Background color:. We want to set that color to black. You could set it to another color that is pretty dark but you will run into troubles with transparency at some point if you do. Say if you pick dark blue, on a green wallpaper it will look fine but change the wallpaper to something mostly red or yellow and you will get a totally unintended look. So for now stay with black. Go back to the effects tab now and crank the transparency slider right and left until you geta a bit of your wallpaper showing through but not so much that you can't read the text in the terminal.

What else can you customize? Under scrolling you can change the size of the scrollback buffer. By default it is set to 500 lines. I like mine a bit bigger and usually change this to 1000. Under general you can choose to turn off the terminal bell. Do this if you are using the computer late at night and don't want to disturb others. Also under general is the font selection. I like this set to bitstream vera sans or sans mono at size 12-14. Play with this until you get the font and size you like. Also under colors, one change the color palette used by terminal programs. This makes a big difference to ncurses programs. You can finally tweak that nasty bright red on dark blue background that so many of them use.

Now that we have tweaked the terminals colors, fonts and transparency we need to add the finishing touch by modifying the behavior of bash itself. Bash is the shell environment that you interact with when typing on the terminal. It is analogous to the command prompt in MS Windows. Learning all the tricks to modify the bash prompt is a bit much to take on here so look below for links to more info but I will show you a few basics.

The first thing I like to modify is the way the command prompt appears. If no modification is done it will appear as just Bash$. That seems pretty uninformative to me. I prefer to have a little more info such as my login name, machine name and current directory. I also like to have this colorized a bit to match my terminal colors. we can do both things at once. Settings for this are stored in a hidden file in your home directory called .bashrc so if you open that file in your favorite text editor look for a line that starts out export PS1= put a # in front of it to keep it from being used and add a new line like this.
export PS1="\[\e[36;1m\]\u\[\e[32;1m\]@\[\e[32;1m\]\h\[\e[33;1m\]:\W> \[\e[0m\]"
Save your file, close and reopen your terminal. Now it should look like the image below.



If you want to know more about customizing the bash prompt try this howto article

My new laptop running ubuntu has no builtin media reader like the last one and I wanted some way to put pics on the machine without hooking the camera up via usb. I hate doing that.

There are usb pen drives that use sd cards but I found a cheaper solution. A 6 in 1 media reader in a pcmcia card. I picked one up for $7 plus shipping on ebay. The card works fine except for one minor problem. Ubuntu fails to automount this card reader like it does USB devices since it is detected as a non removeable ide drive. I could manually mount/unmount it but I really like ubuntu's (gnomes) automounting feature so I started looking into the reason it wasn't getting automounted.

Ubuntu uses several seperate peices of software to auto mount devices so it is neccesary to know which one is failing to get things fixed. After posting a message on All Things Unix I was lucky to find someone who had an idea for me. His idea was that I needed to setup a policy for hal to enable automounting of the device. The command lshal shows that hal thinks the reader is not a removeable device so we must tell hal differently. At his suggestion I made a file called /etc/hal/fdi/policy/21-flash-reader.fdi . In that file is a recipe for telling hal this is a removeable drive.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of information on the web about hal policy but after doing a bit more searching to get the syntax right I created the 21-flash-reader.fdi file. Right click the file name to save it.

BTW, The match statements must match what is listed by lshal in order for hal to take the changes.
After restarting the hal daemon, lshal now listed the device as removeable but It still wouldn't automount. Back to the forums for some more help.
Finally I was told to edit /etc/pmount.allow and add a line with the device name for the device. In this case that is /dev/hde1. After I did this the reader is automounting just fine. Hopefully this will help someone else in the same situation.
Thanks to salahx and shrtckt for the help.

As I moved to using Ubuntu I also started using Gnome more as I felt it was better integrated into Ubuntu than KDE was in Kubuntu. (Based on my experience using breezy badger.)

But one thing I sort of missed was KDE's extensive interface customization features.
At first Gnome and the Metacity window manager seemed to have pretty sparse theming. However, this evening I discovered gnome art. It is not installed by default in Ubuntu but is easy to install using synaptic. Gnome art automatically downloads and installs Gnome wallpapers, themes, icons, splash screens and more. Once the additional artwork is installed you can edit your theme settings using the System > Theme preferences menu.
At first I only saw the various premade themes to choose from but then I discovered the Theme Details button which actually lets you modify the themes attributes. Later you can save your modified themes so you can cycle between them without losing your work.
With a little tweaking I soon had my gnome looking much different. check out the screenshot below to see a screenshot of my system.


Now give it a try yourself.