Yellow Bricks » ubuntu

Cool Linux tool: Blueproximity

Duncan Epping — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:21:28 +0000

One of my former colleagues pointed me out to this very cool tool: Blueproximity. In short what it does, automatically lock your screen when a bluetooth device is outside of given boundaries.

Not only can you lock your pc, but you can also unlock it or kick off any script you like. It should be possible to do the following: Lock PC, set Pidgin messenger to away, mute audio… The list is endless. Read the extensive Ubuntu how to here. Thanks Patrick for sharing.

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VMware Workstation, Ubuntu and Unity

Duncan Epping — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:37:06 +0000

I’ve been trying to get Unity working for VMware Workstation on Ubuntu. I had one PC working and one that wasn’t working. Both ran Ubuntu 8.10, but one with 32bits and the other with the 64bits version. So I expected this to be the problem. After a close examination of the VMware Workstation setup I noticed that the one that didn’t work had the following line in /etc/vmware/config:

xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true

This was added manually so I could still use key combo’s like “ctrl-alt-ins”. But on the machine that does have a working Unity mode I implemented the second option described in this blog post.

So I decided to also implement this on my 64bit Ubuntu 8.10 workstation. After restarting VMware workstation this was the result:

Windows Event Viewer running on Ubuntu 8.10 in Unity mode…

"VMware Workstation, Ubuntu and Unity" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

Firefox title bar missing in Ubuntu

Duncan Epping — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:28:33 +0000

Just had a weird problem with the firefox title bar that wasn’t appearing in Ubuntu 8.10. A quick search on google revealed that a “F11″ to enable full screen and a “F11″ again to disable full screen was a workaround. But I don’t want to do 2 x F11 every time I start firefox. So I kept trying. For some weird reason the following combination worked:

2 x F11 to show the title bar again
Resize the browser just a bit smaller than your window
Click on maximize

Problem fixed.

"Firefox title bar missing in Ubuntu" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMware Workstation & Ubuntu ctrl-alt-ins not working?

Duncan Epping — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:01:12 +0000

I just noticed that when running a VM on VMware Workstation 6.5 and Ubuntu 8.10(but this problem probably also occurs on other non-Windows OS’es), you can’t use the arrow keys. But also ctrl-alt-ins isn’t working, which is annoying cause you would have to do it with the mouse. And no arrow keys also means that you can’t browse through your command-line history in Windows or Linux for that matter. Luckily there are two work arounds:

sudo gedit /etc/vmware/config
If that doesn’t work try adding the following:
xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0×138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0×135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0×148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0×150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0×152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0×153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0×147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0×149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0×151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0×46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0×100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Thanks goes out to AlexPX and Johannes for pointing us out to this solution. There’s also a KB article on this one I just noticed.

"VMware Workstation & Ubuntu ctrl-alt-ins not working?" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

VMware Workstation 6.5 and OVF

Duncan Epping — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:47:13 +0000

I was looking into converting the VIMA appliance from OVF to a regular VM. I wanted to run VIMA directly from VMware Workstation. For the windows version of VMware Workstation there’s a conversion tool, and Arne of ICT-Freak wrote a nice howto. (Although it’s in Dutch you will figure it out cause of the large amount of screenshots!)

But I’m using VMware Workstation 6.5 on Ubuntu and it doesn’t contain the conversion features unfortunately. But luckily a beta version of VMware Converter has just been released, 4.0. As of this version VMware Converter is also available for Linux. And you can see where I’m going… You can use VMware Converter for converting .OVF appliances to VMware Workstation:

Download VMware Converter
Install it by unzipping the tar.gz file and running “./vmware-install.pl”
Next, Next, Finish
Start VMware Converter
File, New, Convert Machine
Source Type: Virtual Appliance
And browse to the .OVF file
Destination Type: VMware Workstation
And pick a destination directory
Next, Next Finish!

I think it’s great that more and more tools are available for Linux!

"VMware Workstation 6.5 and OVF" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

Ubuntu 32bit and 4GB of memory

Duncan Epping — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:26:38 +0000

For a 32bit OS you can theoretically address 4GB of memory, but when running a 4GB system with a 32bit OS hit you’ll probably hit a barrier around roughly 3GB. For Windows XP there’s no way of solving this unfortunately as far as I know, which is a shame cause 800MB was not being utilised. For Ubuntu there is, my former colleague Patrick pointed me out to this and it works great, thanks again for me helping me:

sudo apt-get install linux-server linux-headers-server

So what it does is installing the Ubuntu server kernel which includes PAE support. PAE stands for Physical Address Extension and it increases the address size from 32bits to 36bits which means you can address up til 64GB. For more info on PAE read this wiki.

"Ubuntu 32bit and 4GB of memory" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

Windows is “gone”…

Duncan Epping — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:46:23 +0000

As some of you know, I’ve upgraded my home pc to Ubuntu 8.10. It’s doing what it should do, and probably better than it did with Windows Vista. Now I’ve also upgraded my company laptop from Windows XP to Ubuntu. My laptop crashed for the second time in 3 months, some weird registry corruption… I was really sick of it, so I wiped it completely, installed Ubuntu and a whole bunch of cool apps.

At VMware we’ve got a company virtual machine which holds all the company apps one would need so I installed VMware workstation. Added a second disk to the VM for my documents, which also makes it easy to backup my documents every once in a while!

Thanks Ubuntu, and if you’ve never looked into Ubuntu, download the live CD and just try it out. It’s free, and easy to setup… it’s a live CD so you don’t need to wipe your system to actually try it!

"Windows is “gone”…" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

The upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10

Duncan Epping — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:00:28 +0000

I used to be a Windows Administrator and have been using Windows since version 2.0. During my career for some weird reason when teams where formed I was always matched with Unix, Linux or Novell Admins. You can imagine I had a lot of discussions around Microsoft Windows. Some fair, some and probably most were heated. One of my big arguments for the Desktop and Windows in general has always been “user experience” and “simplicity”. Everyone can install a Windows machine.

With Windows you just pop in the CD, install, next-next-finish and everything works out of the box. Yeah I know during the early years Windows wasn’t plug and play but most vendors provided you with driver disks anyway. As of Windows 2000 most plug and play issues were solved and my arguments were rock solid because there wasn’t a Linux desktop or server that could do the same.

Well I had to reinstall my home system because it was saturated again, one of the bad habits of Windows I guess, and I thought what the heck let’s give Ubuntu a try again. So I downloaded the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 and tried the live CD to see if everything would work straight out of the box or not. For 8.04 this wasn’t the case, my wireless wasn’t recognized and my videocard had some weird problems.

Hurray for Ubuntu 8.10 it worked straight out of the box. I installed Ubuntu on my disk and the first thing I noticed that compared to Windows Vista or even Windows XP it boots up fast! So let’s see what do I need to install to have the same capabilities as I had with Windows Vista…

video media player -> VLC
ftd -> openftd
newsleecher -> hellanzb+lottanzb(gui for hellanzb)
audio media player -> rythmbox, which includes last.fm and internet radio
browsing -> firefox
picture editting -> gimp
office suite -> open office
desktop notes -> tomboy
ftp -> filezilla

These are the main applications I used on my home system, well besides VMware Workstation, but I own a license for that one so I just downloaded the Linux bundle. After a couple of weeks I must say that I’m impressed. Updating via “apt-get” or the update manager gui works perfect, same for installing new software. I love Compiz, which gives you an amazing 3D cube for your workspace, and makes switching between applications and desktops really easy.

So Ubuntu just rocks and no negative point so far?
Well, after an upgrade my wireless was toasted, the binary firmware file was gone so I had to recover it from the Ubuntu CD. And Auto-Login just doesn’t work. I tried everything, but still receive some weird error and I can’t fix it so far.

Besides these two little nags I do think Ubuntu 8.10 is definitely worth trying out. So if you’re like me and want to learn a bit more about Linux than this might be the perfect moment. Just 4 days and Ubuntu 8.10 will be released officially.

"The upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)

Installing VMware Workstation 6.5 in Ubuntu…

Duncan Epping — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:16:28 +0000

I just downloaded the .bundle file for my Ubuntu 8.10 Workstation at home. So what to do next? I’ve been using Debian and Ubuntu off and on for a while so I’m used to “apt-get install”. But this is a .bundle file, so no apt-get for this application. Well the answer was really simple just run the bundle file:

sudo sh VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.i386.bundle

So far I really like Ubuntu 8.10! It seems to do everything it needs to do straight out ot the box! By the way, Sven Warren wrote an extensive howto for installing WS6.5 on Ubuntu. It would be nice if VMware would create a debian repository for this download so we can update it with apt-get…

"Installing VMware Workstation 6.5 in Ubuntu…" originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Available now: vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive. (paper | e-book)