Ubuntu

WTF are you doing to your keyboard?

Posted Tue, 05/19/2009 - 16:42 by Justin Ellison

So, I have yet to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu Jaunty, but I saw this article on how to re-enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace in Jaunty come through my feed reader. A little more research dug up this Ubuntu Wiki entry proclaiming: a number of users have complained about accidentally restarting their X-Server

Now, maybe I'm getting old, but I can't tell you how many times I've been saved a reboot by that handy Ctrl+Alt+Backspace shortcut. My rant? What in the hell are you trying to do that you "accidentally kill X" by happening upon hitting that key combination? Was it really so many people that you had to kill the shortcut for everyone? There is a line that can be crossed when listening to your users, and I think Ubuntu has just crossed it. What are your thoughts?

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List installed packages in Ubuntu

Posted Tue, 01/06/2009 - 23:51 by Justin Ellison

I found this over at the Ubuntu Forums, but since it took me forever to find, I'm dropping notes here.

In RPM-based distros, you can do 'rpm -qa > somefile.txt'. In Debian/Ubuntu, do this:

dpkg --get-selections > machineA.txt

In true apt fashion, if you then want to have machine B have all the software machine A has, do this:

dpkg --set-selections < machineA.txt && dselect

Enjoy!

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Use NetworkManager to launch scripts based on Network Location

Posted Thu, 12/18/2008 - 17:21 by Justin Ellison

NetworkManager is fast becoming the de facto network provider in desktop Linux distributions. The reason it's so popular is that it "does the right thing" 99% of the time. However, there's not many examples out there that extend that functionality. NetworkManager provides hooks in which you can have scripts launch when network settings change. In today's post, I will show you how to launch the Synergy client whenever you plug into your corporate network.

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Use LVM on an installation of Ubuntu

Posted Tue, 12/16/2008 - 17:13 by Justin Ellison

RHEL/CentOS has had support for LVM in setup for quite some time now, but for whatever reason, Ubuntu has been slow at adopting support for LVM at installation. Usually, I just grumble and move on with ext3 -- not today. Convinced that I couldn't be the only person wanting LVM support, I set out to do just that. Luckily, it wasn't hard at all!

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Disable SNMP Printer Scanning in Ubuntu Intrepid

Posted Wed, 11/05/2008 - 10:35 by Justin Ellison

After installing Ubuntu Intrepid on my laptop, I got a nastygram from IT saying that my laptop was tripping alerts from their NIDS.  They could tell me that it was an outbound SNMP request, but they couldn't supply the OID or anything.  Setting aside the fact that the NIDS should be configured to disregard SNMP requests for this particular OID, I set forth to try and figure out what the heck was causing the traffic.

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VirtualBox 2.0 Quick Impressions

Posted Wed, 09/10/2008 - 22:03 by Justin Ellison

I'm not new to the virtualization scene, but I'm no expert either -- I've been using VMWare Workstation since 1.0, VMWare Server since 1.0, and Xen since around 2.0. Well, I needed a Windows XP install on my laptop, and decided it would be a good time to see how VirtualBox compared. VirtualBox 2.0 was just released (changelog), so I went with the bleeding edge. Read on for my quick review of Virtualbox 2.0.

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Set it and forget it: Tether your Windows Mobile 6 Phone to Linux

Posted Sat, 09/06/2008 - 22:15 by Justin Ellison

I have a love/hate relationship with my phone - an HTC PPC6800. I can't live without it - I can check my work email from anywhere, and surf the web. While I've tried many PDA's through the years, none of them have stuck, because I got tired of lugging them around. I always have my phone with me, so therefore my smartphone has made me much more organized. My wife loves it because I can remember all the upcoming appointments. Yet, I hate it. It's UI is horrible. It locks up and needs rebooted, and I feel dirty using a M$ product.

Well, I found one more reason to like it. I can tether my Ubuntu laptop to my phone and get Internet access from just about anywhere. This howto is for Ubuntu, but it should work for any distro that uses bluez-utils. Note that I briefly tried to get my laptop tethered via USB, but I found several comments that it wouldn't work without a custom kernel module. Bluetooth is easier, works out of the box, and is much cooler besides ;-)

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Quick & Painless Ubuntu Speed Tweaks

Posted Sun, 08/31/2008 - 21:16 by Justin Ellison

As far as performance, Ubuntu 8.04 isn't bad out of the box. However, the developers had to make some performance sacrifices in order to remain compatible with older machines. If you have a newer machine with at least 512MB RAM, enabling these tweaks will significantly speed up your Ubuntu experience.

There's a lot of copy and paste blog posts out there on Feisty, and a lot of so-called tweaks that I feel are unnecessary.  Where I aim to differentiate this post is to specialize on tweaks relevant to 8.04, and to cover only the 80/20 rule of performance -- 20% of the work done tweaking will net you 80% of the speed boost. There's a lot more that you can tweak, but it really won't net you that much gain. Here's what I use on all my desktop Ubuntu installs.

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User-level configuration of CPU speed in Gnome under Ubuntu

Posted Sat, 08/09/2008 - 14:08 by Justin Ellison

When I ran Fedora on my laptop, I loved how I could manually set the CPU speed in Gnome using the "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" applet.  I noticed that I could not do this under Ubuntu (you can monitor speed, but you can't change it).

It's actually a feature, not a bug.  In order to change CPU frequency, the binary needs to be SUID, which Ubuntu doesn't enable by default.  In order to change this behavior, run the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets
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