#linux

Case 1: an older IBM T41 laptop, installed Ubuntu on it with WUBI (Windows UBuntu Installer). The installation went pretty smoothly, until the computer booted to finish up Ubuntu installation.

Then, an unrecoverable error ensued. Luckily, windows would still dual-boot normally. After some pondering, chose the F8 option at Ubuntu installation finish (yes, you can try many times and it doesn't break) and picked the ACPI compatibility mode. Ubuntu install finished with that.

Case 2: an older 1,6 GHz desktop machine. Wubi ran just fine and the install completed. Except the screen resolution remained at 800x600, with no possibility to force it bigger or detect the connected Samsung 21" monitor (VGA). Remains to be tweaked..

Case 3: a faily new HP laptop. Wubi worked again, install completed and resolution was good from the start. The integrated broadcom wlan chip wasn't properly detected and ubuntu cannot currently connect to the wpa-enabled wlan because the wlan device driver is missing. Remains to be tweaked..

Case 4: a 2,8 GHz desktop with Intel D865PERL motherboard inside and a radeon for a display. Installed by booting from the Ubuntu CD and manual partitioning, so that swap partition went to the other sata drive. Display was 800x600 at first, but System/Preferences/Monitors showed that the display was in clone mode and there were 2 screens of which the other was a detected Nokia monitor. Unchecked clone, turned off the other display and upped resolution to a nice 1280x960.

Installed Perfectbuntu on the machine to fix all kinds of settings and set up media playback, now e.g. window close button is back on the right. http://perfectbuntu.category5.tv/

The following posts concern case 4 unless otherwise mentioned.

Checked out a feature called Ubuntu One. After registration and a night's sleep, there was an error "could not connect to localhost:53672". After a bit of searching, solution found from their FAQ:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/FAQ...
1. close the Ubuntu One Preferences application window (if it's already open)
2.

  open your Terminal (located in Applications >> Accessories)

Yay - Qaiku is readily available as a broadcast account in Ubuntu's built-in social platform tool gwibber.

Case 2 got the resolution fixed by creating a proper xorg.conf (since the EDID probing for monitor capabilities failed). The proper xorg.conf for a Samsung Syncmaster 1200NF is this:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
Horizsync 30-121
Vertrefresh 56-185
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
Subsection "Display"
Modes "800x600" "1024x768" "1280x1024" "1600x1200"
EndSubsection
EndSection

Case 5: a 3000+ Athlon desktop with radeon display. Wubi install failed the first time because of some I/O error, but after a chkdsk on the windows side the install completed without problems, and the system worked "straight out of the box". Put perfectbuntu on both case 5 and case 2 machines.

Case 3 wlan seems not supported - the PCI-id 14e4:432b doesn't fall into the "good guys" category here:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Dri...

So, a work in progress and donations could help. The laptop has a wired connection as well, let's see if it can be configured to work.

Some help perhaps here (same model HP 6735s)
http://www.linlap.com/wiki/hp-compaq+...

Case 3 has a Broadcom provided driver, which also showed up when a wired connection was added and Ubuntu offered restricted drivers. Including this Broadcom STA driver:
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.1...

Started working after that just nicely.

Stuff I like so far in Linux and Ubuntu:

• Application installs from a repository. It's like being in a candy store. Applications sorted by various categories, with detailed descriptions. Installing goes by just select & apply, no clicking on install paths, eulas or moving .msi files to permanently available folders.
• Integrated network speed histogram. This one has been tricky to obtain on the windows side, here it's add to panel -> system monitor and pick stuff to follow like cpu use, memory, disk use and network usage. Patience on working with computers is needed and extended when you see that the 'puter is doing something.
• 4 virtual screens, each with it's own taskbar. Nice way to divide tasks into their own contexts and increase screenspace.
• I could access my WinXP-made NTFS partitions just fine, read & write out of the box. Combined data partitions regardless of what OS I use is handy and saves time.

added on-boot mounting of WinXP-made NTFS and FAT32 partitions by editing fstab
(command: sudo nano /etc/fstab )

These lines added to the end did the trick:
#Own common partitions
/dev/sda3 /media/DATA vfat user,umask=000,iocharset=utf8,shortname=mixed,defaults 0 2
/dev/sdb3 /media/Stuff ntfs-3g user,defaults 0 0

Partitions can be seen with sudo fdisk -l
Mount options can be learned from man mount

Case 6: a Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo laptop with 1,6GHz processor and 768MB ram. The bios didn't support booting from the USB ubuntu stick I had with me, so made a Plop boot CD and used it to boot from USB.

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.htm...

The install went fine, used the live-cd installer to setup true dualbooting. The existing winxp partition shrink was effortless. The external 3G stick was supported by just plugging it in a usb port. Stick model is Huawei E160E.

Installed the cube atlantis compiz plugin, as shown here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_C8WJ...

Instructions used:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.ph...
http://www.tips5.com/install-compiz-f...

In short, used System / Administration / Software sources and added these repositories:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/compiz/ppa/u... karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/compiz/ppa/u... karmic main

Then used Synaptic Package Manager in the same menu to install compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported as well as Compizconfig settings manager. It took a few tries and even a reboot to get the plugin working, but now the fish are happily swimming inside the transparent rotating desktop cube.

On my system, the default Ubuntu Ludic Lynx radeon driver does the trick and displays 3D just fine.

One other discovery: handy desktop zoom. Hold the super key (aka. windows key) and roll the mousewheel. Settings available in compizconfig manager.

Also made a dynamic desktop background picture showing Earths surface illumination and semi-realtime cloud cover, as shown in Category5 technology TV:
http://www.category5.tv/

Here's my script that gets run by cron, that was made from the GUI with gnome-schedule:
#!/bin/sh
folder="/home/username/Pictures"
wget -O $folder/Cloudmap-new.jpg http://static.die.net/earth/mercator/...
mv $folder/Cloudmap.jpg $folder/Cloudmap-previous.jpg
mv $folder/Cloudmap-new.jpg $folder/Cloudmap.jpg

Added RSSOwl to my programs for optimal access to RSS and ATOM feeds (automatically fetched website, blog, calendar etc. updates). They have their own repository for linux with install instructions: http://packages.rssowl.org/INSTALL

On Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04, just ran this command from the terminal:
wget -q http://packages.rssowl.org/project/re... -O- | sudo apt-key add -

And then used System/Administration/Software Sources - Other Software to add this line:
deb http://packages.rssowl.org/ubuntu lucid main

Find of the day: ssh-mounting of remote filesystems into the common folder view of Nautilus file browser from Places / connect to server.

Easy and convenient! I've seen software being sold for a price to accomplish the same thing on the windows side. Plus, Places supports other protocols too like ftp, windows (smb/cifs) shares and webdav.

a handy script to check if your system can run compiz window manager, which gives a lot of desktop eyecandy:

http://forlong.blogage.de/entries/pag...

Case 7: a fresh-from-the-store bought Acer Aspire 3811TZ with Win 7 home premium installed. Used a bootable ubuntu USB stick for install, did manual resizing of partitions.

The initial layout had 3 primary partitions:
"Acer storage" "Acer recovery boot" "Win 7"

After shrinking the win 7 partition and creating partitions for ubuntu, swap and common data, the result was like this:
/dev/sda1 Acer storage 12GB hidden
/dev/sda2 Acer recovery boot 100MB ntfs
/dev/sda3 Win 7 80GB ntfs
/dev/sda5 Ubuntu / 50GB ext4
/dev/sda6 swap 8GB
/dev/sda7 Data 130GB ntfs

Grub was installed to /dev/sda in order to boot from a logical partition.

On first boot back to windows 7, it notified of "changed boot settings" with recommendation to fix them. Instead, I chose boot normally. chkdsk ran, found no problems and next time Win7 booted just nicely without asking anything. So did ubuntu.

Added temperature monitoring of CPU, motherboard and HDs to the gnome panel. Instructions here:
http://www.lucidtips.com/2009/06/06/m...

In short, these commands will get you through most of it:
sudo apt-get install lm-sensors hddtemp sensors-applet computertemp
sudo sensors-detect

Thought that the music player selection could be better, so installed Amarok and Audacious to try out.

http://lindesk.com/2008/03/top-10-lin...

My needs: support for tracker formats (.mod, .xm, .dw, .sid), editing of ID3 tags (lyrics, album art, replay gain), shuffled and organized playlists, similar artists, voiceprint visualization.

Encountered a big with Case 2, where the gnome-panel would only fill 3/4 of the screen and not contain any icons. The workaround is to select the panel properties and change it's size.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+so...

Added repository keys that were missing after Perfectbuntu install, and causing some warning messages.

Needed lines:
wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtua... -O- | sudo apt-key add -
wget -q http://apt.last.fm/last.fm.repo.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

http://apt.last.fm/
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_...

Updated Miro to it's latest 3.0.3 version from the ubuntu repository 3.0.1 by adding a new repository:
http://getmiro.com/download/for-ubunt...

Fixed issues include youtube downloading and channel guide usage inside miro.
https://develop.participatoryculture....

Enabled spotify-links clicking in Ubuntu. The repository version of Wine doesn't support pulseaudio yet, so a wrapper prog is needed to translate OSS calls to pulseaudio. Wine configured to play audio in OSS, 44100 Hz, emulated.

Here are the instructions:
http://heratech.net/blog/sham/spotify...

And here's the script in ~/bin/openspotify that Firefox uses to open spotify: -type URLs:

#!/bin/sh
#exec wine "C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe" /uri "$@"
exec padsp env WINEPREFIX="$HOME/.wine" wine "C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe" /uri "$@"

Tried to speed up Amarok startup by switching the default sqlite database to postresql. Instructions:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.ph...

The speedup didn't work. Amarok apparently still scans all the playlists on startup which causes lots of I/O. Works fine after startup though. Audacious has been fast to use, so it's more suited for quick checking of new sound files.

Switched Amarok to using Pulseaudio by default though, so other audio sources work too when playing music with Amarok.

Installed PlayOnLinux from the repository, then updated it to the latest version from their own repository at http://deb.playonlinux.com/

The basic idea is to be a frontend for wine and help with installing and configuring windows games to run on linux. Crayon physics was the first one that caught my eye.

At the same time, updated wine to a pulseaudio-enabled version. Had to update the version as well from the ubuntu-provided 1.2 to 1.3. Repositories and instructions here: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/05/instal...

Case 8: a desktop with only a pci WLAN card for network. The card didn't have a native Linux driver yet, so used the windows NDIS driver with ndiswrapper by these instructions:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.ph...

Specifically, lspci -v and lspci -n identify the card as:
Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless Interface
Subsystem: D-Link System Inc Device 3b04
PCI ID: 104c:9066

I found the appropriate .inf file from windows\inf by searching files for text with the PCI ID. Copied the .inf to a new directory, then read the additional files needed from the .inf, in this case from \windows\system32:
FwRad16.bin
FwRad17.bin
GPLUS.sys

Set up remote ssh access by installing the ssh metapackage containing both client and openssh-server.
sudo apt-get install ssh

Configured rate limiting to iptables to thwart brute force attacks with these instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH...
http://articles.slicehost.com/2010/4/...

Here are some of the required lines:
iptables -N rate-limit
iptables -A rate-limit -p tcp -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -m limit --limit 3/min --limit-burst 3 -j RETURN
iptables -A rate-limit -j DROP
iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 22 -j rate-limit

iptables-save > /etc/network/iptables.up.rules

Another way to get quick remote access is with linux remote desktop from System / Preferences / Remote desktop. You can specify a password there that's required for the connection. The protocol used is VNC, so any VNC client should do (the default one is in Applications / Internet / Remote desktop viewer)

The default port used is tcp 5900, so if you want to do the same rate limiting, it can be done by adding this line after the previous rules:
iptables -I INPUT 2 -p tcp --dport 5900 -j rate-limit

Rate limiting with the above conntrack module has the side-effect of banning everyone from using the hammered services, including yourself. An imporoved, per-IP rule with the recent -module is introduced here:
http://www.debian-administration.org/...

same thing explained with alternative wording:
http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblo...

Here's version 2 to limit the rate of brute force attempts on services like ssh and vnc remote desktop, without DoSsing the actual users out:

First, clear any old rules (as root):
iptables -F
iptables -X

Make the new chain rate-limit, and assign two protocols to be handled by it:
iptables -N rate-limit
iptables -A rate-limit -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m recent --set
iptables -A rate-limit -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 300 --hitcount 4 -j DROP
iptables -A rate-limit -j RETURN
iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 22 -j rate-limit
iptables -I INPUT 2 -p tcp --dport 5900 -j rate-limit

then, save the new rules to a file:
iptables-save > /etc/network/iptables.up.rules

finally, make sure they get taken to use at every boot:
Contents of file /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/iptables:
#!/bin/sh
/sbin/iptables-restore < /etc/network/iptables.up.rules

Ran across a broken Wubi install with Lucid Lynx 10.04. After the windows boot loader, there was a quick flash and computer booted before grub could start.

Fixed with these instructions and an Ubuntu boot CD (or in my case, boot USB stick):
http://tdelphihobbyist.blogspot.com/2...

In short, boot Ubuntu from an external drive, loopmount the c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk and edit the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg to have only menuentry -section without the crap in the beginning.

Here's another link of a possibly more permanent fix, involving changing loop0 /ubuntu/disks/root.disk to loop0 /host/ubuntu/disks/root.disk
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.ph...

I used this workaround myself:
cd /etc/grub.d/
sudo mv 00_header 50_header

Found more native games from the PlayDeb repository, including UFO: Alien Invasion.

Install instructions here:
http://www.playdeb.net/updates/ubuntu...

How to get more interesting views on your screen when you're not doing anything specific - use screensavers!

System - Preferences - Screensaver
Tick on Random, you can choose whether to keep the "Lock display" depending on your computer use and environment.

Either use Applications - Ubuntu Software Center or the terminal to install the following additional packages:
sudo apt-get install electricsheep xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra

Tried to switch default locale to en_DK - to get 24h time and ISO standard date yyyy-mm-dd everywhere.

http://blog.andrewbeacock.com/2007/01...

Specifics:
edit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local and add
en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8

edit /etc/default/locale and change to
LANG="en_DK.UTF-8"

Increased Thunderbird mail/news/rss reader integration in Lucid Gnome desktop indicator applet with these instructions:

https://saz.sh/2010/07/23/add-thunder...

I got a Epson Stylus DX5050 inkjet multifunction printer/scanner to work in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 by using this driver:

http://avasys.jp/eng/linux_driver/dow...

There's a good manual related to the download, but in short:

1. go to your CUPS administration http://localhost:631/ and delete any printer drivers you currently have installed
2. Install Linux Standard Base support from the terminal with the command: sudo apt-get install lsb
3. Download the appropriate installer package from the avasys site. Mine was epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.1.1-1lsb3.2_i386.deb
4. Install the downloaded package
5. Restart your cups server from the command line: sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
6. Plug the printer in to your USB port. The driver DX5000 should install automatically. If not, you can do it from the CUPS browser interface by following the manual provided on the avasys site.