Chris’ Blog

I keep meaning to document this, the installation procedure for my MCEUSB2 remote control with lirc under Ubuntu, so here we go.

1. $ sudo aptitude install lirc lirc-modules-source module-assistant debconf-utils

2. $ wget http://static.cs278.org/conf/debconf/ubuntu-704_lirc-modules-source -O- | sudo debconf-set-selections
   $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

   This was needed before but is now automated:
   Select mceusb2 and then No, and chooseInstall the package maintainer’s version if the option appears.

3. $ sudo sed 's/MODULES=""/MODULES="lirc_mceusb2"/' /etc/lirc/hardware.conf --in-place

4. $ sudo m-a update,prepare
   $ sudo rm /usr/src/lirc*deb
   $ sudo m-a clean lirc
   $ sudo m-a a-i lirc
   $ sudo depmod -a

5. $ wget "https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=lircd.conf.mceusb" -O- | sudo tee /etc/lirc/lircd.conf

6. $ sudo modprobe lirc_mceusb2
   $ sudo /etc/init.d/lirc start

Sources:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_LIRC
• http://wiki.videolan.org/How_to_Use_Lirc

So, at home currently rather than at university, this poses a problem when trying to connect to some resources, such as internal machines and private resources. I know Network Manager in Ubuntu has VPN support but I had never tried it out, so, I gave it a go. Issue the following command to install the required package, provides Microsoft VPN support to Network Manager.

$ sudo aptitude install network-manager-pptp

Now you can load my configuration by downloading the configuration file and click on the network manager applet, find the VPN Connections sub menu and hit Configure VPN…. Hit Forward, from the list choose PPTP tunnel, press Forward again and now press Import Saved Configuration…. Find the configuration file I told you to download and select it, now press Forward and then click Apply. Bingo!

I am in the process of writing a guide detailing how it is possible to install Ubuntu 7.04 (yet to be released) on to a hard disc for a laptop or another computer without the use of any CDs or temporary partitions to hold to root partition while you encrypt what will be the root partition which most other guides demonstrate, this is fine if you want to keep the partition say for /home or something but my laptops hard drive is not big enough for that sort of segregation. I use debootstrap to install Ubuntu on the laptop hard disc mounted on another Ubuntu machine. My method has huge advantages, you don’t need to burn any CDs, its far quicker because it is more direct.

I will be tidying this up and possibly turning it into a automated script. I must admit this has not been easy no one guide has got it going it has taken multiple HOWTOs to inch every step of the way, but now I have it done I am happy, the gotchas were rather frustrating at time due to the difficulty of easily debugging the initial ram image when the machine is booting.

I decided to experiment with the cutting edge development version of Ubuntu, feisty fawn by installing it on my laptop. It didn’t go to well at all! The updater bottomed out in style so I tried to use sudo to gain root privileges and it segfaulted. Oh noes with no way to gain root and all my applications segfaulting I rebooted, surprise surprise it refused to boot. Oh well… at least I have that USB IDE 2.5″ enclosure so I can backup the few bits of data I need. But now I got to apply all the tweaks I applied, sigh.

I have made some adjustments to the configuration of my Thinkpad, I now only see one error in Xorg.0.log, far better than the 20 or so each startup.

In X I removed touchscreen and touchpad support as my thinkpad has neither of them, and they were willing the logs with errors. Next was to disable hardware 3d acceleration rather than allowing X to attempt it, my thinkpad doesn’t have enough graphics memory to use DRI. I also fixed some S3 standby issues with regards to power consumption in the X config and my adding radeonfb to /etc/modules

I also prevented some irrelevant kernel modules from loading things like ACPI drivers for laptops made by other manufacturers, etc.

Sources:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/walter/geek/linux-t40.html
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_get_special_keys_to_work