Chris' Blog » Ubuntu

One Down

Chris — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:20:15 +0000

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.

Why do I bother?

Chris — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:52:23 +0000

Updated 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 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

Chris — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:14:04 +0000

It 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

Chris — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:48:45 +0000

X2X 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

Chris — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:02:06 +0000

I’m not sure what I can really say to that, other than n00b!

Blocking SSH Brute Force attempts using iptables

Chris — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:53:33 +0000

After 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

Chris — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:53:47 +0000

You 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

Chris — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 23:02:53 +0000

I 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

Chris — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:53:19 +0000

This 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

Chris — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:37:56 +0000

I 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:
Select mceusb2 and then No, 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

$ 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

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