Jun 29, 2008
It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally got my machine at work set up using Ubuntu 8.04 rather than Windows XP. I’ve been using Ubuntu at home almost exclusively for nearly a year now, so it’s good to be able to maintain my workflow from home to work. One of the problems I had was mounting my home directory on a server.
On windows, this works fine: you specify a username, a password, and the share you want to connect to and it just works. The same is almost true with linux: you specify the username, password and share (either on the command line or in /etc/fstab). However, chances are your local UID will differ from the UID used on the server, so although the mount will succeed, permissions may be a bit iffy.
The solution was to use CIFS rather than the outdate smbfs, and to use the extra uid option:
$ sudo mount -t cifs -o username=user,password=pass,uid=1000 //server/share /local/mount/point
This makes sure that the share you mount is owned by the local user.
Jun 11, 2008
I’ve spoken before on this site about Songbird, a viable Linux alternative to iTunes. Since my original post, I haven’t really kept up with Songbird; perhaps I should have; perhaps I will. However, in the meantime I have had Banshee 1.0 brought to my attention.
I originally used Banshee as it’s UI is similar to iTunes. I have also spoken before that although I am right at home with Ubuntu and Linux in general, I do miss a good media manager; iTunes ticks all the boxes for me and is indispensable since I use an iPod. Banshee has pulled out the stops with the recent release of it’s first major release, version 1.0
Banshee 1.0 is a massive improvement on the older version that I had initially dismissed as being too clunky; so much so that I’m going to use it instead of Rhythmbox. Although not compatible with the most recent iPod software, it is fully compatible if you reinitialise your library and use an older version of the software on your iPod. Since I don’t really use video or images on my iPod that’s fine by me.
The interface is much cleaner and it is clear that a lot of time has been spent polishing it. Last.FM is built in, as is a ‘favourites’ and ‘recently added’ play list. These last features were missing from Rhythmbox and I really liked them in iTunes. In addition, there is an “Unheard” playlist - now I can make a point of listening to the tracks that I forgot I even had!
In summary - a big thumbs up from me to the Banshee development team. Banshee 1.0 is a more mature and usable piece of software that it’s predecessor and I look forward to seeing it develop further. Having said that, I will take another look at Songbird…
Jun 2, 2008
I’m not one of the many ardent Microsoft haters that use Linux, and as such I’m quite open to taking full advantage of whatever software I can to get the job done, whether I’m in Linux or Windows. I really quite like Paint.Net which I’ve used on Windows as an alternative to Photoshop and the GIMP. You can now get Paint.Net on Linux courtesy of the Mono framework:
$ sudo apt-get install mono-common libmono* mono-gmcs
$ svn co http://paint-mono.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src paint-mono
$ cd paint-mono
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ paintdotnet
Apr 26, 2008
As I mentioned in my last post, I have had issues getting Firebug working in Firefox 3.0b5. Unfortunately at the moment Firebug isn’t compatible with the beta release of Firefox 3. To be honest, I’m quite happy with Firefox 2.x. From what I’ve read, Firefox 3 is more stable and less memory-hungry that its predecessor, and it does look nice (especially so according to Mac users). Unfortunately, these benefits are outweighed by my love of the Firebug extension. It is, in my opinion, the best debug tool for web developers bar none. To that end, I’ve chosen to remove Firefox 3 (and all the bits and bobs that come with it) and install Firefox 2.
A few apt-gets later, I had got rid of Firefox-3 and related packages, and installed Firefox-2, symlinked to /usr/bin/firefox. However, Firefox-2 still used the profile created by Firefox-3 in my home directory. I started Firefox from the terminal, with the ‘-ProfileManager’ switch. I created a new profile, renamed default, and renamed my new profile to default. I then copied my bookmarks and related data from the old profile directory to the new one. Once this was done, I started Firefox with my new default profile, installed my favourite plugins and all was good - Firebug now works like a dream!
Apr 26, 2008
The latest stable release of Ubuntu linux (Hardy Heron) was released this week, and having eagerly awaited its release I decided to upgrade my desktop and laptop from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. I’m going to keep my server on 7.10 for the time being however.
The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly. It was just a matter of ’sudo apt-get update’, ’sudo apt-get upgrade’ and ’sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’. After an hour or so, the installation was complete and I rebooted.
I had a few issues with both my laptop and desktop, but these were resolved fairly easily. The Realtek sound on my laptop was supported via linux-backports-modules-generic. This didn’t seem to be available in Hardy, and neither the old ALSA, nor the new Pulse Audio Server seemed to support my Realtek onboard audio. A bit of searching on the Realtek website revealed linux drivers, which I promptly downloaded, unzipped and installed. Success!
When my desktop came back up after the reboot, the keyboard seemed to have a delay of a number of seconds, and would intermittently behave as if a key had held down. Also, Gnome didn’t come up properly, with the desktop being black. I rebooted again and everthing seemed fine… for now.
Firefox 3.0b5 comed preinstalled with Hardy. Unfortunately, the brilliant Firebug web developer extension isn’t compatible with this version of Firefox. I hope that the final release of Firefox will fix this compatibility issue. For the time being, I will have to install Firefox 2.x to allow me to use Firebug.
In summary, I’m very impressed with how easy and smoothly the upgrade went. Aside from a few small issues everything worked fine after the upgrade, it’s just a shame about including a prerelease web browser in a LTS release of Ubuntu. Perhaps they should have stuck with Firefox 2.x until Mozilla officially released version 3 of their excellent browser.
Apr 18, 2008
I would expect that the Ctrl+Backspace key combination would behave in Firefox as it does in other GTK applications, and indeed Firefox under Win32. The expected behavior is that Ctrl+Backspace will delete one word backwards from the cursor (more specifically it will delete backwards until a punctuation character). However, when I use this combination in the Firefox address bar under Gutsy, the whole URL is deleted. After some digging I came up with a solution: add the following to the bottom of /etc/firefox/pref/firefox.js:
// Make Ctrl+Backspace behave as expected.
pref("layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation", true);
Hope this helps.
Feb 12, 2008
If you don’t want the trouble of configuring NFS or Samba, then sshfs is a good option. sshfs (ssh File System) makes use of Fuse (File System in Userspace) to allow you to locally mount a directory that you have remote access to using ssh. To install sshfs in Ubuntu use:
sudo apt-get install sshfs
Once this is done, you will need to add yourself to the new group (fuse) that has been created:
sudo adduser <user> fuse
Create a local directory in which to mount your remote directory and make sure it is owned by you:
mkdir [-p] /path/to/directory
chown <user>.<group> /path/to/directory
Now you can mount your remote directory as follows:
sshfs <user>@<remote_host>:/path/to/directory/ /path/to/directory
Jan 18, 2008
Another aide memoire, but again may be useful to some. I’d like the ability to work from home on some web development projects I’m doing at work. Getting the code locally is not a problem thanks to Subversion over ssh However viewing the results can be tricky when you consider that the development server is behind the work network. The answer is SSH tunneling.
Let’s say you can access SERVER_A directly over ssh The service you want to access is on SERVER_B which you can’t access directly via SSH from your local machine. However, you can access SERVER_B from SERVER_A. I’ll assume that you want to access the service locally on port 12345, and that the remove port is port 80. The following command will allow you to access a service on SERVER_B from your local machine.
ssh -Nf -L 12345:SERVER_B:80 username@SERVER_A
The ‘-Nf’ switch says don’t execute a command with this ssh session, and run this ssh process in the background. The first port is the port you want to use locally; the first server is the usually inaccessible remote server you want access to; and the third port is the remote port you want to use. The final argument gives the login to the remotely accessible server you have ssh access to directly.
One caveat to this is if you are trying to access a web site that is defined using Apache virtual hosts. With this command alone, requesting localhost:12345 in Firefox would only direct you to the site that is listening remotely for requests that match ‘localhost’. If you would ordinarily access this site using mysite.server_b, then you need to use that as the address in Firefox on your local machine. Therefore, this needs to be added in /etc/hosts. With that done, you should be able to request mysite.server_b:12345 in Firefox and be directed to the remote “virtual host” site.
Jan 12, 2008
This post is really an aide-memoire for me should I need to rebuild my laptop in the future, but it may prove useful to others. My Toshiba U300 laptop seems to have problems with Realtek HD Audio. After some searching and trial-and-error, I found that the following gets things working.
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic
Dec 30, 2007
As I continue my journey toward migrating to Linux for full time desktop use there are a few applications that I miss, and I can’t always find suitable open source alternatives. One of those applications is iTunes. From reading forum posts and other articles on the web the consensus tends toward either Rhythmbox or Banshee. [Read more]
