Well one of my gripes with Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ has been cured at least, Firebug 1.5 now works after upgrades to Firefox 3.5.8.
Shame that I’ve found out my bash completion is broken. 
Archive for the ‘Ubuntu’ Category
One Down
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Why do I bother?
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Updated my desktop from Ubuntu ‘Jaunty’ 9.04 to Ubuntu ‘Karmic’ 9.10, the upgrade process worked flawlessly. Sadly the number of regressions has kind of taken the shine of the various improvements to the distribution.
The big kicker for me is the breaking of VLC and/or Gnome Screensaver, now VLC fails to suppress the screensaver in full screen which is kind of useless when you want to watching anything over 5 minutes long. To workaround this I use gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit to prevent the screensaver from activating, and set a command to kill that after 2 hours. The next problem I’ve observed is that even when the suppression and the film have both ended, the screensaver still doesn’t want to activate for ages; leaving my desktop burning the image into the screen until I lock the screen myself. Not a problem but I often hit the hay with a film on and usually fall asleep midway through, got up yesterday morning to find my desktop sat there still being projected from my display. LP #428884.
My second gripe is Flash player under a x86-64 installation using nspluginwrapper and the x86 Flash player provided in the repositories works, what’s so bad about that? Well you can’t actually click on any controls on the Flash object, which kind of rules out embedded YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc. roll on <video> with Ogg Theora. I resolved this by purging the packaged Flash and nspluginwrapper, and then installing the native 64 bit alpha version from Adobe.
Finally Firebug 1.5 doesn’t support 64 bit builds of Firefox, which to be fair Mozilla don’t support so I don’t really have a problem with this. You need to get an older release from the 1.4 branch, I’ve heard that the 1.6 alphas work again.
Good grumbling done for the morning!
Vacuum Firefox on Ubuntu
Thursday, October 15th, 2009It was suggested to me to use vacuum places to improve my Firefox awesome bar performance, as I’m still using Firefox 3.0 which is packaged with Jaunty; I do have 3.5 installed I just use it for testing sites at the moment. However realising that I didn’t need an addon a single line of bash will probably do what I want I headed to Google and found an explaining it all and a suitable one-liner to optimise all my Firefox SQLite DBs.
You will need the sqlite3 package installed and you should close Firefox prior to running the command.
for i in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do echo "VACUUM;" | sqlite3 $i ; done
X2X
Monday, November 17th, 2008X2X is this awesome little utility I found which allows you to control an X session on a remote computer with the keyboard and mouse on your local computer, by remote computer I for example mean the laptop sat beside you as it relies on you being able to see the output of the remote computers monitor. The Ubuntu Community Documentation has a quick how to on using this handy tool.
Ubuntu Game
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
I’m not sure what I can really say to that, other than n00b!
Blocking SSH Brute Force attempts using iptables
Saturday, January 12th, 2008After my recent break in I have looked into ways of protecting SSH and my server resources. I employ fail2ban on my main server, it has the resources to run such a programme – my Linksys NSLU2’s however do not. The solution is to use iptables to limit the number of connections any host can make in a given time frame. I wrote up a quick how to on this over at my wiki. Enjoy.
Broadcast Ping
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007You can tell Linux to respond to broadcast pings by running this snippet from the console.
$ echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts
Edit /etc/sysctl.conf to set the option permanently.
Packages
Sunday, July 15th, 2007I have been playing with packaging for Ubuntu and Debian for a while now and I have one fairly useful package called rsnapshot-scripts which contains a bunch of scripts for use with rsnapshot. It allows you to backup other data sources like MySQL, DPKG and Subversion.
Grub Scripted Configuration
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007This is a really ugly sed one liner that configures grub how I like it.
$ sudo sed --in-place 's/#\(hiddenmenu\)/\1/;s/^\(timeout[ \t]*\)[0-9]*/\12/;s/^\(# lock.*=\)false$/\1true/' /boot/grub/menu.lst $ _GPASSWD=$(read -s -p "Enter Grub Password (note type carefully): " _GPASSWD; echo $_GPASSWD | mkpasswd --hash=md5 --stdin); echo; sudo sed --in-place "s/# password topsecret/password --md5 $_GPASSWD/" /boot/grub/menu.lst; unset _GPASSWD $ sudo update-grub
Ubuntu lirc Configuration
Monday, June 11th, 2007I keep meaning to document this, the installation procedure for my MCEUSB2 remote control with lirc under Ubuntu, so here we go.
-
$ sudo aptitude install lirc lirc-modules-source module-assistant debconf-utils
-
$ 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:
Selectmceusb2
and thenNo
, and chooseInstall the package maintainer’s version
if the option appears. -
$ sudo sed 's/MODULES=""/MODULES="lirc_mceusb2"/' /etc/lirc/hardware.conf --in-place
-
$ 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
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$ wget "https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Install_Lirc_Feisty?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=lircd.conf.mceusb" -O- | sudo tee /etc/lirc/lircd.conf
-
$ sudo modprobe lirc_mceusb2 $ sudo /etc/init.d/lirc start
Sources:
