Imaging and a little bit of OSS

For the first time I was able to get VNC to work with Ubuntu with Gnome session instead of a xterm on gray background. The steps involved were exactly the same as I was following earlier, with one exception:  the setup of xstartup in the ~/.vnc folder.

For your xstartup file in ~/.vnc (the “.vnc” folder in
your home directory), you need the following:
—————————–
#!/bin/sh

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:
# unset SESSION_MANAGER
# exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
xterm -geometry 80×24+10+10 -ls -title “$VNCDESKTOP Desktop” &
gnome-session &
# twm &
————————

instead of uncommenting the lines as the script suggests, you change the window manager to gnome-session

make sure restart vnc4server

The line which got Gnome working was “gnome-session &”

========================================

Now for all the steps involved (works in Karmic Koala Alpha 2, Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.30-10)

1. Install ssh server, ssh client, VNC viewer, VNC server, and xinetd

sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client vnc4server xinetd  vncviewer

2. Setup the ssh password for your login

ssh-keygen

3. Test out the ssh server by typing in

ssh localhost  or ssh your_login@your_ip_address

4. Then create a vnc password

sudo vncpasswd ~/.vncpasswd

5. Edit the xstartup file in ~/.vnc directory

For your xstartup file in ~/.vnc (the “.vnc” folder in
your home directory), you need the following:
—————————–
#!/bin/sh

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:
# unset SESSION_MANAGER
# exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
xterm -geometry 80×24+10+10 -ls -title “$VNCDESKTOP Desktop” &
gnome-session &
# twm &
————————

instead of uncommenting the lines as teh script suggests, you change the window manager to gnome-session

6. Create a VNC desktop

vnc4server :1 -geometry 1024×768

7. Then to tunnel into your VNC desktop, first create a SSH tunnel by logging into SSH with the comand:

ssh -L 5901:your_ip_address:5901 your_username@your_ipaddress

8. Finally, load up your VNC desktop

vncviewer localhost:1

And now you are ready to use connect to your machine remotely and use administer the computer remotely.

P.S: If you are using a firewall (hardware or software, you need to get enable port forwarding and unblock ports 22 and 5900-5999 on the Ubuntu machine to allow SSH and VNC to be accessed.

slash_boot Linux and OSS 9.10, karmic koala, Lucid Lynx, ubuntu, Ubuntu 10.04, vnc, vnc server, vncviewer, xstartup

For the first time I was able to get VNC to work with Ubuntu with Gnome session instead of a xterm on gray background. The steps involved were exactly the same as I was following earlier, with one exception:  the setup of xstartup in the ~/.vnc folder.

For your xstartup file in ~/.vnc (the “.vnc” folder in
your home directory), you need the following:
—————————–
#!/bin/sh

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:
# unset SESSION_MANAGER
# exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
xterm -geometry 80×24+10+10 -ls -title “$VNCDESKTOP Desktop” &
gnome-session &
# twm &
————————

instead of uncommenting the lines as the script suggests, you change the window manager to gnome-session

make sure restart vnc4server

The line which got Gnome working was “gnome-session &”

========================================

Now for all the steps involved (works in Karmic Koala Alpha 2, Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.30-10)

1. Install ssh server, ssh client, VNC viewer, VNC server, and xinetd

sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-client vnc4server xinetd  vncviewer

2. Setup the ssh password for your login

ssh-keygen

3. Test out the ssh server by typing in

ssh localhost  or ssh your_login@your_ip_address

4. Then create a vnc password

sudo vncpasswd ~/.vncpasswd

5. Edit the xstartup file in ~/.vnc directory

For your xstartup file in ~/.vnc (the “.vnc” folder in
your home directory), you need the following:
—————————–
#!/bin/sh

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:
# unset SESSION_MANAGER
# exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
xterm -geometry 80×24+10+10 -ls -title “$VNCDESKTOP Desktop” &
gnome-session &
# twm &
————————

instead of uncommenting the lines as teh script suggests, you change the window manager to gnome-session

6. Create a VNC desktop

vnc4server :1 -geometry 1024×768

7. Then to tunnel into your VNC desktop, first create a SSH tunnel by logging into SSH with the comand:

ssh -L 5901:your_ip_address:5901 your_username@your_ipaddress

8. Finally, load up your VNC desktop

vncviewer localhost:1

And now you are ready to use connect to your machine remotely and use t

slash_boot Linux and OSS Linux and OSS, ubuntu, vnc

The upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is in its Alpha 2 stage at the moment. One outcome of having an alpha released installed on your machine is the massive amounts of daily updates – with a major kernel update every once in a while. Things were going pretty smooth with the Karmic Koala until it was on 2.6.30-9 kernel.

Just this morning, there were a bunch of updates listed in the update manager. Among the things that were in line for the upgrade was a brand new kernel, 2.6.30-10. The updating process itself went pretty well. Then when it was time to restart, I picked the newly updated kernel from the Grub expecting nothing unusual.

Booting options after updating to kernel 2.6.30-10

After selecting Kernel 2.6.30-10, all I got was a green screen and the computer refused to do anything past that point. The only alternative was to restart and boot with the 2.6.30-9 kernel which I am currently using to make this post.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala (Kernel 2.6.30-10): Green Screen Of Death

It not something one sees that often with Linux distros. I saw it today!

P.S.: The newer kernel 2.6.30-10 has been fixed. It boots and functions normally now.

admin Linux and OSS green screen of death, gsod, karmic koala, kernel 2.6.30-10, ubuntu

There were unmet dependencies (libx264-59) for vlc and mplayer in the latest release of Jaunty Alpha. A bug report was filed by several users on launchpad.net

One of the users posted this workaround to get both mplayer and VLC working in Ubuntu (9.04) Alpha 4.

To solve the problem, just get libx264 here:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/us/intrepid/i386/libx264-59/download
Just installed it manually (sudo dpkg -i libx264-59_0.svn20080408-0.0ubuntu1_i386.deb)
I then installed mplayer and vlc using medibuntu repos.

Running:

sudo apt-get install mplayer vlc

Gets these packages working!

slash_boot Entertainment, Linux and OSS jaunty, mplayer, ubuntu

The system beep is one of the most distracting and annoying occurrences when you are doing some constructive work. Be it working in a text editor, or a terminal, or a program window – wherever a sound notification is programmed into any module, it emits a fairly audible beep. To disable the beep, we have to disable the PC speaker by adding it to the blacklist.

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Add the following line to the end of that file:

blacklist pcspkr

Save and exit. Then in terminal,

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

This completely turns off the speaker. You won’t hear your system beep, even if there is something truly wrong. If you are doing something critical and need to rely on the beeps, comment out the line from the blacklist and run the modprobe command. Beeping will restart.

slash_boot Linux and OSS beep, jaunty, Linux and OSS, sound, ubuntu

Until today’s kernel update to 2.6.28.6, the Atheros wifi card was not functioning correctly. Since the update to new kernel, the wifi card can now be used with the ath5k module which can be found in linux-backports-modules.

In order to get the Atheros 5007EG card to work, you first need to disable the built-in hardware driver.

System >> Administration  >> Hardware Drivers > Deactivate “Support for Atheros 802.11 cards”

Selection of Hardware Drivers in Januty

Disable the Support for Atheros 802.11 cards

After the card has been deactivated, open the terminal and install the backports modules for Jaunty.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty

Install Jaunty backports modules

This adds the ath5k module which supports the Atheros 5007EG card.

The computer needs to be Shutdown and powered back on. Somehow Restarting doesn’t work at times. The card has to be completely powered down for a few seconds and then started during power up.

You should be able to see the available wireless network list by clicking on the network manager icon. Thereon, you all know what to do

slash_boot Linux and OSS, non-OSS 5007eg, ath5k, atheros, backports, jaunty, Linux and OSS, ubuntu, wifi

The Alpha-3 version of Jaunty became available two days past the scheduled release date. It included the kernel 2.6.28.4. It’s the first (alpha) release to include a kernel that supports EXT4 filesystem. The EXT4 became officially available in Dec 2008, and in less than a month it was incorporated into the 2.6.28 kernel.

There are several sites which post the performance benchmarks for EXT4 compared with other filesystems.

1 2

EXt4 is supposed to be much faster than existing filesystems. Several people have reported a booting time between 21 and 25 seconds, which is the time taken from bootloader selection till the login screen appears.

But beyond fast loading the alpha leaves a lot of room for improvement. Its integration with the /home/user partition is pretty buggy. One of the least stable module appears to be the alsamixer. The interface of volume applet has been changed significantly and is actually a lot less intuitive and quite inefficient.

Screenshot of volume control applet

As you see, the controller has a horizontal slider instead of the conventional vertical slider. More interestingly, double clicking on the volume control icon doesn’t open up the mixer like it used to. I’ve yet to figure out the workings of this applet.

Perhaps I might have figured out its usage, but I can’t vouch for the accuracy. One way to do it is:

Volume control applet (right click) >> Preferences >> HDA xxxx (Alsa Mixer) >> Select the device you want to control >> Close

Screenshot of volume control prefernces

I was able to change the line-in volume for use with a TV tuner card by the procedure I described above.

However the alsa module is very unstable in its present state. It causes one or more applications to crash at random. Most crashes were encountered when playing some form of flash media. Skype fails to load altogether. As soon as the login information is entered, the program coredumps with the following errors:

user@user-computer:~$ skype
ALSA lib ../../src/conf.c:2700:(snd_config_hooks_call) Cannot open shared library libasound_module_conf_pulse.so
ALSA lib ../../../src/control/control.c:909:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:0
Aborted (core dumped)
user@user-computerf:~$

The video drivers for nvidia cards have yet to be released. Searching for Hardware Drivers yields a blank window. The drivers nvidia-glx-17x and nvidia-glx-96 are present in the repositories but the installation messes up the X and gdm loading. The only way to get back to X, is to remove the nvidia drivers and install ubuntu-desktop along with xorg. Once its done, typing

startx

gets you back into GDM.

On wireless side, ath5k is not included in the default distribution and it is still quite a bit of hassle to obtain it from backports and blacklisting the ath_pci modules *.

All in all, there is a lot that needs to be done w.r.t. Ubuntu 9.04 before it is released as a beta and then finally as an official release in April. It would be nice to try out a fresh install including a brand new /home directory.

ETA: * The Alpha 4 release of Ubuntu and Kubuntu contained ath5k, even in the LiveCD, thus the part about Ubuntu (jaunty) not having support for Atheros cards out of the box is no longer valid. I haven’t heard other testers say anything since Alpha 4 came out, so I guess it must be working for quite a number of folks. Still no support for the ATI graphics card though.

slash_boot Linux and OSS alsa, ath5k, jaunty, Linux and OSS, ubuntu