As the convener for the Adelaide community of The Things Network, I am frequently setting up Multitech Conduit Gateways. Depending on your PC or notebook hardware you might have some problems with the Exar USB-UART driver on Linux.
Here are the steps to getting this unit setup from an Ubuntu (should work for any other Linux distro) machine.
lsusb
Should show something like this:
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 04e2:1410 Exar Corp. XR21V1410 USB-UART IC
Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM’s completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be.
From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM’s for testing purposes). Main reasons:
Having just wasted a few hours on getting this Java software running on Linux I am documenting this for future reference and hopefully saving other LoRa / TTN folks some time.
Prerequisites
Install a Java JDK + JavaFX. This should work with the default OpenJDK 8 or 9 which comes as part of the Ubuntu repositories. I ended up installing Oracle JDK 8 as well as I thought the error might be related to OpenJDK.
Past the following<br></br>[Unit]<br></br>Description=XScreenSaver<br></br>[Service]<br></br>ExecStart=/usr/bin/xscreensaver -nosplash<br></br>[Install]<br></br>WantedBy=default.target
If you are using the GUI (Raspian full download) and want to connect your RPi Zero to a keyboard and monitor there are probably easier ways to do this. These notes are for people that want to use a headless (no monitor and GUI) setup ready to connect to your RPi after first boot via SSH from another terminal.
EDIT [2018-06-05]: I have updated the code with the Firmware 1.18.+ releases. The code is available at our Growing Data Foundation Github.
These notes are to assist Australian IoT enthusiasts to get started in connecting a LoPy to The Things Network as it is unfortunately (not yet) straight forward to make them work with the current AU-915 TTN Channel plans. As the initiator of the local Adelaide Community of The Things Network I have been experimenting with a number of devices to connect sensors to #TTNADL. One of my personal favourites is the Pycom LoPy as a nice middle-ground between capabilities and technical complexity.
Since Synology (despite requests) still has not added DNS Made Easy as a listed provider (despite listing some really obscure services – go figure!) here is the steps to add a custom provider.
DNS Made Easy Setup
Create a new A-Record
Set the name
Set the IP (initial – any valid IP)
Tick the “Dynamic DNS” tickbox
Enter your chosen Dynamic DNS Password
Save the new record
When saving the record you will see a “Dynamic DNS ID” – note down this number. This will become the hostname on the Synology setup.
Since the version of SANE in the Ubuntu 16.04LTS repos is not working for this scanner you either need to install from sources (see this blog) or from this PPA. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git<br></br>sudo apt update<br></br>sudo apt install sane-backends tesseract-ocr gscan2pdf
Security
Add yourself to the ‘scanner’ group to be able to use the scanner.
sudo usermod -a -G scanner USERNAME
Checking SANE
Check for the libsane version (needs to be at least libsane.so.1.0.26 not libsane.so.1.0.25 which is in the Ubuntu repos)
Since there is now a supported Raspbian version without GUI and other unneeded add-ons available as Raspbian Lite the need to use other installers (with sometimes some downsides) is now not a necessity anymore. Below is a list of steps I like to perform before using them for any purpose as my Standard Operating Environment.
Whilst there is a .DEB installer to download from the GoHugo sites I get all matter of warnings that the package is of bad quality and I am not comfortable to run these kinds of installers.
I rather install from sources in this case which is very straight forward since the main dependencies (largely GO) are in the Ubuntu main repositories.
As a long-term Ubuntu user I am extremely interested in what Canonical and the Ubuntu community are doing on the mobile front. Their convergence strategy (I am testing Snappy Core on IoT devices as well) seems very well thought through and once the the Meizu MX4 phone was released I got myself an invite and ordered a unit. It took a while to ship and then also had to make it’s way down under as Meizu only ship to Europe (and Asia I believe).
One of the things that is not implemented in the Secure Shell Chrome extension is the ability to remove know_host fingerprints which alert you if the fingerprint for a specific IP address has changed.
However there are times when you upgrade a systems and this need to be done.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is
d6:be:12:7e:22:23:c3:e1:56:30:d6:cd:65:b7:ab:42.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending ECDSA key in /.ssh/known_hosts:7
ECDSA host key for xxxxxxxxxxxxx.yyy.au has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
NaCl plugin exited with status code 255.
(R)econnect, (C)hoose another connection, or E(x)it?
Unfortunately it is still much harder than necessary to find notebook hardware to use with Ubuntu (or other Linux variants). This blog is full of past experiences (some of them quite time-consuming) on finding notebook hardware that will work without too much fiddling. This short note is to document my recent research on that front to help others who want to do the same (as there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good current info around).
Since this will be a purely headless install designed to sit in a corner behind the scanner I am using a Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) install (I personally like the clean minimal install via https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst the best).
There are plenty of sites out there that give advise on this topic, unfortunately most of them are highly ad-infested to the point of being unreadable as well as only containing single bit rather that an overall picture. This is a collection of useful links to source materials as well as steps necessary to install.
On remote systems sometimes a web-based tool can be very handy. Webmin is such a tool that has been well maintained for decades. To install quickly on a Ubuntu Server without having to manage dependencies and keeping it updated as part of normal OS update operations installing from a PPA Repo is handy.
Since I have found some issues with my previous LXQT setup in real-life work I decided to fall back to standard Lubuntu for my cloud desktop. As part of this I also switched to TightVNC which seems a lot easier to configure.
One of the main reasons for setting up a cloud desktop is that I tend to use a lot of different devices some of which are not very powerful.
One of my favorite devices of late has been a HP 11 Chromebook. I originally bought it for a new employee and wanted to check myself how this thing stacks up to do day-to-day computing tasks more efficiently than a standard laptop without all the headaches of running Windows (viruses, endless driver installs, bloatware, malware, …). We already have several people at work working exclusively from Chromebooks and they absolutely love them. Long story short – I ended up keeping the Chromebook for myself as it’s an absolutely great secondary device for me. I can carry it with me everywhere (doesn’t weigh much more than a tablet, roughly the same size as a tablet & has a keyboard and is so much more useful than a tablet).
The APN provisioned by default when the Voda SIM card is inserted (vfinternet.au) does not work for the LTE Data Network. It works with GPRS & WCDMA, but fails to connect when the phone is set to prefer LTE (4G) Networks and they are actually available. It means that the handset will loose mobile data connectivity altogether. There are various APN Settings floating around on the interwebs, but any I tried previously did not fix the issue.
Contrary to my normal inclinations not to buy anything but Stock Android phones I ended up with a Sony Xperia Z2 in a hurry over the weekend (it’s a long story…). It appears to be quite a decent handset (with a pretty good camera actually) and one of the main reason to choose this over the other options was that is was one of the few high-end devices which already had a CM snapshot rather than just nightly releases. However similar to their colleagues at Samsung the Sony people also opted to stuff all sorts of crap-ware bloat onto the Android base OS. It appears not to be as bad as the Samsung (who are the kings of crap) mods, but for somebody used to the clean Android experience it’s just very annoying. So I opted to flash it straight to CyanogenMod.
This ‘feature’ has been annoying me for a while and after this has caused some confusion with some of my clients I decided to go and look where to disable this. Why this has been made a system wide default is beyond me.
Rather than in the users Calendar Settings this is actually in the Google Apps Admin Console (https://admin.google.com/)
Console –> Google Apps –> Settings for Calendar –> Sharing Settings
Since I am a bit of a sucker for German “Krimis” as well as some their excellent documentaries I like to watch ARD Mediathek IPTV. However there are several problems with this when you live at the opposite side of the world. ARD has a block for any films that are 15+ years outside of 20.00h-6.00h GMT+1. Which makes it pretty much impossible to watch at a reasonable time in Australia. I also like to watch these things on the plane which requires download of the media files.
Using Amazon EC2’s free usage tier to host your own cloud desktop is a very economical way to to have a desktop at hand anytime you can not be near one. Since I quite often use Chromebooks these days when on the road this is a particular handy way should I need a full desktop for certain tasks.
Since Ubuntu 14.05 is my default desktop on my normal hardware I obviously want to have my cloud desktop running the same underlying OS. However I don’t think running Unity as the desktop interface would be appropriate via a low-bandwidth remote desktop connection. For this reason I chose LXQT. If you need total stability you probably should go for the more mature LXDE instead, but I have already tried LXQT on an old EEE PC and was very impressed by the speed and low resource usage.
The Nokia X seems to be a nice piece of hardware for just around $125 AUD. Nothing spectacular in terms of computing power, but much better build quality than your average cheap Chinese Android clone. I have always been a fan of Nokia hardware until they decided to commit suicide by firstly adding CEO Stephen Elop and ditching all of their software for Windows Mobile.
The problem with the device out of the box is that is has a horribly butchered version of Android. And by horribly I mean way worse than the usual bloat and crapware that poor Samsung, HTC or Sony users are normally subjected to. Hopefully this is only Nokia’s first step to a more open platform, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
Trying to install Google Earth on Ubuntu. You could just download the .deb file and run dpkg command, however I prefer to use it via a repo to make sure upgrades are installed as part of the system upgrades.
My old Asus EEE PC 900 is the oldest piece of hardware I own. With an old Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM it’s never was the fastest kid on the block (in fact I never considered the Windows XP version of the same unit usable as it was very sluggish). However after owning it for nearly 7 years I am very surprised I can still use it. Granted I only use it occasionally when I am at home, but thanks to LXDE it was still usable. I recently learned that LXDE is merging with the Razor-Qt project (great idea!) to create the combined LXQT – an ultra-low resource window manager.
Connecting securely to your home network has always been a bit of a challenge since common home ADSL routers not normally contain any VPN Servers (those which do contain such are generally PPTP servers which I would hardly call secure these days). Which is probably a good thing as they would be horribly out of date considering the firmware release policies of retail router manufacturers. You could run/maintain your own dedicated server, but for most home networks that is overkill and out of the technical depth of most hobbyists. However NAS Appliances are becoming more useful in home networks for storage and other common tasks. I have had good experiences with Synology NAS devices over a number of years and the latest iteration also has a very useful VPN Server package available based on OpenVPN (as most Synology Apps are common Open Source components).
Excellent coincidence that the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) fell into the Easter holidays. This gives me the time to install earlier than I normally have time for.
This realease being a LTS (long-term support) release means it is a fairly conservative release. There are some nice enhancements and most importantly for me the 3.13 Kernel means finally Wacom Touch devices are supported without kernel mods.
Unfortunately the mess that is UEFI Secure Boot still causes issues on some hardware. In my case it’s a Toshiba Z930 Ultrabook. I have documented the procedure to get it working here.
However it turns out that there is no ‘Trusty’ release for the boot-repair utility. The fix is relatively easy.
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list<br></br>#change the following line from 'trusty' to 'saucy'<br></br>sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yannubuntu-boot-repair-trusty.list
You can then just finish with sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && (boot-repair &)
Apache Cordova has very nice documentation, however as so many projects it is focused on the Windows/MacOS duopolies only. Fortunately it’s not too hard to work out the differences.
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make ant openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk
Installing Android SDK
Please note: one of the problems I found was that I had some Android tools from the Ubuntu repos that were conflicting with the SDK install. It’s probably a good idea to remove them first. That might save you from a lot of headaches down the line (and time to troubleshoot).
Finally found some time playing with a RaspberryPi and an attached PiFace Interface board to control some garden pumps and potentially an Aquaponics setup in the near future.
Requirements
Raspberry Pi (Model B in my case, but any will do)
As with most hardware manufacturers of hardware Foscam utility software is Windows or Mac only. The actual unit tested with the below is a FI9805E Outdoor POE camera.
Installation
The installation is relatively painless as the unit is set up to get the IP assignment via DHCP (check your routers DHCP assignment list).
https://IP.ADDRESS.OF.CAM
should get you to the web-admin interface. The default user is ‘admin’ with no (empty) password.
I have switched most of my Social Media postings to Google+ over the last year. Despite popular opinion being that Google+ is some ‘ghost town’, I find G+ the most useful environment for my particular needs & interests (specially since the introduction of groups). It has in my experience a vastly better signal-to-noise than other social media in particular Facebook.
However I would still like to feed postings through to my Twitter stream. Unfortunately Google has (stupidly / purposely / nastily) not included RSS support to make this possible without much work. There are a few publicly accessibly services out there, but they generally are either not updated or tend to fail very frequently as they hit the API Access limits as soon as they get a few users on their services.
That is it really ! This is how a OS change on a mobile should work !
Issues
Ubuntu touch can not yet handle the radio firmware past Android 4.3 devices. So if your N4 was upgraded to Android 4.4 (KitKat) you need to flash the radio to the Android 4.3 (up to Version 2.0.1700.84) else WIFI will not work.
In my never ending quest to find the ideal text editor here is another installment. Since I have been using VIM as my default command line editor for years I thought I give it a try for basic GUI editing as well.
I just had one of my old hand-me-down phones returned by my offspring in a great condition (junior is very careful with his equipment – well done young man !). This doesn’t happen all too often shows that the Nexus S is a decently built phone. This is also a good example of breaking the built-in obsolescence of modern phones. This particular unit has served me well for nearly 2 years (my average is one year) and served 2 kids after that.
I am currently looking into the use of Django for one of my extra-curricular projects and needed to set up a development environment on Ubuntu. This is the log for future reference and hopefully useful for anybody needing to do the same.
For my purposes I need a few more additional modules sudo apt-get install python-networkx python-imaging python-pythonmagick python-markdown python-textile python-docutils python-pymongo
There are several reasons why you might want to run different Apache Virtual Hosts as separate users from the Apache user account. My most frequent usage is on my development machine to allow running from my home directory.
The most commonly recommended option for this purpose is MPM-ITK (a quick hack would be to add yourself to the www-data group using “sudo usermod -a -G www-data USERNAME”)
One of the annoying things with Synology NAS servers is the fact that a video file moved to the filesystem does not automatically appear on the DNLA share on client devices. It needs a re-index of the media files.
You can log into the HTML Admin Console and start a re-index, however this will be a full re-index and most likely take ages to complete. A quicker way is to connect to the SSH Console and issue the following command:
With the demise of the Medibuntu repository and libdvdcss not being hosted in the main Ubuntu repos due to licensing issues a new repository is needed from 13.10 upwards. Thanks to the good folks at VideoLAN (makers of the awsome VLC Video Player) there is a ready and updated source available.
Since paper and myself have never gotten on well I have always been dreaming of a paperless office. A while ago I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 scanner for the office. I did this after doing some research on which Automatic Document Feed (ADF) multipage & duplex scanners were both affordable as well as supported on Linux.
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/terryfreedman/8510145300/)
[](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/) by [ ](http://www.flickr.com/people/terryfreedman/)[Terry Freedman](http://www.flickr.com/people/terryfreedman/)
It took a while for me to get around to set all of this up, but the result now is that this scanner is connected to a headless Ubuntu VM and the press of the scanner button will:
scan the document
perform OCR to convert to text
combine the text with PDF to create a searchable PDF
OPTIONAL – send the resulting document into Alfresco Document Management Server via FTP
Install dependencies
NOTE: PPA is only required for support of Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 sudo apt-add-repository ppa:rolfbensch/sane-git<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils imagemagick tesseract-ocr pdftk libtiff-tools libsane-extras exactimage wput
Or as an alternative title “Liberating your Galaxy S4 Hardware from Samsung Bloatware”.
Unfortunately there is lots of (ad-infested) blogs and forums with dodgy pieces of information on this topic and I found it pretty hard to get descent concise information. So hopefully this might help some poor Linux User liberate their phone. Whilst this has been tested on a Samsung GT-I9505 S4 International LTE device (JFLTEXX series) it should be applicable to other similar Samsung phones that are not fastboot capable (ie. all but the Galaxy Nexus range).
I have been planning to set up a SMS Gateway for sending and receiving SMS messages via a headless utility unit (Raspberry Pi) for a while. Since I had a leftover Sierra Wireless AirCard 880U from Telstra in Australia I wanted to re-purpose this unit with a spare SIM card. Unfortunately it was very hard to find any good setup manual for this particular combination and took some time to fiddle & debug. This is the working setup for future reference and hopefully it helps somebody.
Now that Twitter has totally killed their V1 API there is no official way to get Twitter feeds via RSS. Which is a real shame as RSS is a well accepted Open Standard for this type of information :-(
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurgenappelo/7749072764/)
[](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) by [ ](http://www.flickr.com/people/jurgenappelo/)[Jurgen Appelo](http://www.flickr.com/people/jurgenappelo/)[ ](http://www.imagecodr.org/)
` The Twitter REST API v1 is no longer active. Please migrate to API v1.1. https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/overview.
One of the most annoying features in Ubuntu from 12.10 onwards are the pesky notifications popping up asking if you want webapps support everytime you visit a supported webpage?
Whilst you can disable this in Firefox’s browser options: Firefox > Preferences > General: Uncheck “Prompt integration options for any website”.
However I prefer to remove the browser extensions entirely.
Since I always had trouble with the Eclipse version that is avaialable via the Ubuntu repositories I often need to install Elcipse on new machinery. Hence I am documenting the process for myself and hopefully it might help others as well.
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/jahdakinebrah/1259008793/)
[](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/) by [ ](http://www.flickr.com/people/jahdakinebrah/)[jah~](http://www.flickr.com/people/jahdakinebrah/)[ ](http://www.imagecodr.org/)
Since I have been really happy with the performance and mobility on the Toshiba Ultrabooks (see previous blog entries) I have now chosen to stay with a tried brand and uprgrade to the Z930 i7 model.
Unfortunately this now comes with added hurdles by our good friends at Microsoft in the form of UEFI and the pre-installed disaster that is Windows 8. Instead of totally wiping the system as I did with the Z830 model I decided to install next to Windows 8 as lots of people have reported problems with the UEFI bootloader and the BIOS if you start messing with the pre-installed partitions (specially the EFI partition).
I have been watching progress on FreedomBox ever since watching a video of Eben Moglen a few years ago.
Turns out that that they recently announced the availability of their 0.1 preview release. As part of this there is one component that is extremely useful for RaspberryPi users (funnily the co-founder of RasperryPi is also called Eblen by first name – go figure) out there concerned about increasing snooping of private information by governments and corporations for a variety of reasons.
By default OpenVPN only routes traffic to and from the OpenVPN Server. If you need all traffic from a client through the OpenVPN tunnel there are several options listed in the OpenVPN docs (http://openvpn.net/index.php/open-source/documentation/howto.html#redirect). Since I don’t have any control over the server in some cases I needed a client side solution. As I already have ufw running with Ubuntu I wanted to use the existing software.
Here is how to configure ufw to enable routing all traffic from your client machines through the OpenVPN Server.
The ability to connect Android 4.+ devices to Ubuntu using the USB Mass Storage interface has always been a pain. With Ubuntu 13.04 a new MTP back-end (gvfs-mtp) is going to be introduced, but I have had some issues with the 13.04 Beta so I found this backport PPA to Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10
Turns out that the Broadcom BCM2708 chip on the RPi has a hardware watchdog. This can be very useful if your RPi is located remotely and locks up. However, this would not the preferred method of restarting the unit and in extreme cases this can result in file-system damage that could prevent the RPi from booting. If this occurs regularly you better find the root cause of the problem rather than fight the symptoms.
Testing the RPi for some remote sensing application I needed to use a wireless connection as it would have been a pain to reach with an Ethernet cable.
sudo lsusb
This should show output similar to this (depending on your USB adapter) Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek SemicondRTL8188CUSuctor Corp. 802.11n WL:AN Adapter
My normal combination on the big-server side would be Apache + MySQL (or PostgreSQL), but on the RPi this seems to be absolute overkill. For data-logging operations I would not use the local system anyway (looking at MQTT as well as Remote MongoDB datastore via REST Webservices).
After some poking around and reading up on the options I decided to go for the following combo: LightHTTPD + SQLite. Both are lightweight replacement of their fully-featured big-server counterparts (Apache HTTP & MySQL) and have very familiar configurations. There would be other options that have even less resource usage, but I really don’t have the time to start from scratch somewhere.
Just got myself (actually it’s for our Office Manager back in OZ) one of these Chromebooks while in Europe (since Google Australia with their absolutely hopeless hardware strategy do not seem to be able to ship any devices – Nexus 4 anyone ?) .
Since the first days turned out to be a bit of a frustrating experience, I thought I share some of the findings as I had a hard time finding much useful info on troubleshooting ChromeOS.
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/10gen.list<br></br>#add the following line:<br></br>deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen<br></br>
To connect 1-wire serial devices to the RPi I am using a DS9490R USB 1-wire adapter (rather than wiring I2C 1-Wire master components to GPIO I2C – which I might look at sometime down the track)
Install packages
sudo apt-get install owfs ow-shell
Edit config file
vim /etc/owfs.conf
! server: server = localhost:4304<br></br># USB device: DS9490<br></br>server: usb = all<br></br>######################### OWFS ##########################<br></br>mountpoint = /mnt/1wire<br></br>allow_other<br></br>####################### OWHTTPD #########################<br></br>http: port = 2121<br></br>####################### OWFTPD ##########################<br></br>ftp: port = 2120<br></br>####################### OWSERVER ########################<br></br>server: port = localhost:4304
Since I didn’t have any luck playing videos on the RPi using mplayer I found omxplayer after some search. It has the ability to use the RPi’s GPU thus taking some load of the CPU.
UPDATE 2013-04-01: omxplayer is now included in the Raspbian (Debian Wheezy) repositories and can be simply installed by one line.
Just a quick note on Speech Synthesis a Raspberry Pi project. I had to research some of the options on the Raspberry Pi while looking into a project where I need some audio announcements.
One of the more common uses of Twitter for me is to monitor “back-channels” at events (often events I can attend, but more often these days events I am unable to attend).
Unfortunately Twitter’s search capabilities cease to be useful after a little while and so it is very handy to be able to create an archive for the events ‘hashtag’. There used to be a number of tools in the early days, but mainly because of Twitter’s changes to policies and very unfortunate morphing into a closed ‘media-publishing’ platform, the developers of such tools were forced to discontinue their services.
I sometimes have time to read RSS feeds when I have no Internet connection. Granted this is happening less often these days with wireless connectivity pretty much ubiquitous, but I frequently have that need. Most often it’s in an air-plane when you want to catch up on non-essential news and don’t have any connectivity.
This is where Lightread comes in handy. It synchronizes your Google Reader Account with excellent integration into the Ubuntu UI (desktop notification of new items …).
Installing CoffeeScript on Ubuntu 12.04 is a complete no-brainer by the looks of it (since both node.js Core as well as Node Package Manager are in the Ubuntu repos).
I recently had a need to install a VPN service in a OpenVZ container. Since I normally only use Hardware emulating VM’s I ran into quite a few issues in terms of low-level networking support on this Container Virtualisation System. Turns out that you are stuck with a TUN/TAP solution as most services won’t enable PPP services on their infrastructure. Also Ethernet bridging is not available (at least on the service I used) so you’re stuck with NAT IP masquerading. Considering the options I thought best served with using OpenVPN server.
For roaming mobile clients PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is still the quickest way to get VPN connections to tunnel traffic over a secure link.
Installation
I always prefer installation via a yum repository as this will ensure patches are applied during regular system updates
To keep my desktop (notebook) machine light and responsive I don’t want unnecessary services starting on boot-time. Turns out Ubuntu is surprisingly cumbersome to configure in this area (compared to RedHat / Fedora).
Two services I need on my notebook, but don’t want them to start unless I require them running are MySQL and Apache. But it looks like some services are started using upstart init daemon and it appears there is no management tool for this. Services can pe prevented from auto-starting either by renaming the config file or commenting out the start line in the config file
As a Galaxy Nexus Owner I have been waiting for months for an OTA (over the air) upgrade to the factory installed Firmware (4.0.2). I am finally sick of waiting and complaining to Google (an absolute lost cause).
After some research it turns out that (contrary to popular opinion) not every unlocked Google Nexus actually has the ‘official’ Google Firmware. Some of them have a Samsung variant (WTF !?) of the firmware. Now I really don’t want to get off the technical topic, but I personally think that this means Google is misleading their most loyal customer base. The reason I chose a Nexus device over the (from a hardware perspective) superior HTC One X was the fact that they were supposed to have the official Google Firmware and I did not have to wait forever for bugfixes from the manufacturers.
Since I am tired to constantly recite this list whenever one of these designer-type people tells me that they need Adobe’s Whatever Suite to do some basic task here is a summary that I can point them to.
Debugging things on the Android Emulator (incluced in the SDK) can be a very slow and cumbersome process. Thanks to the Android-x86 Project it’s quite easy to run Android in VirtualBox. This is highly useful when you need to test mobile apps and websites from the Android Browser (as well as Chrome Mobile).
Download an Ethernet enabled ISO from Tablets x86wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75945873/android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent<br></br>transmission android-x86-4.0-eth0-generic_x86-20120426.iso.torrent
Create new ViratualBox VM
Important Settings (see screenshots)
OS: Linux, Version: Linux 2.6
Enable VTx/AMD-V
Use Bridged Network Adapter (if you want to allow direct Internet Access)
Mount the ISO file downloaded previosly and start the VM
Create the Root Filesystem (ext3) on the VBox .vdi created with the new VM, mark as bootable
Write the Filesystem changes to disk (VDI) and format the disk
Install GRUB Boatloader
Copy files from ISO to VDI
Unmount the ISO image and reboot
Note: You need to disable the mouse pointer integration (if you have installed VirtualBox Client Add-ons) in the menu of Virtualbox (‘Machine’ –> ‘Disable Mouse Integration’) when you start the VM (see screenshot). I have not found a way to disable this by default on Virtualbox on Ubuntu (If anybody has managed this I would love to know how !)
Since the latest version of GIMP has not been included in the main 12.04 repositories because it was not ready at release time you have to use a PPA at current.
After upgrading my Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook to 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I noticed that the ability to control the screen back-light was not working using the Toshiba Fn F6/F7 keys.
This will open the grub configuration file. (Grub is the initial boot selection software)
To be able to dim the screen brightness, You’ve got to modify the line:
As a follow-up on a very old post I thought it’s worth providing an update. Despite it’s age (& only costing $350 at the time) my little Asus EEE PC 900 it is still a useful device. It has turned out as one of the better IT investments in my lifetime. However it’s not (and was never) the fastest kid on the block and recent OS upgrades have become increasingly resource hungry.
UPDATE: [01-May-2012] It appears that this PPA repo is currently broken (does not allow to get GPG key and has unmet dependencies on x84_64). It appears that the install on i386 systems does work anyway if you ignore the GPG key error, but I wouldn’t install in that case as PPA installs are security risk enough without GPG errors.
UPDATE: [11-May-2012] The reason the PPA does not work is that it has been disabled by Ubuntu due to a licensing issue with (not hard to guess) Oracle. Flexion.org have however created a script (hosted on Github) to allow the automated update of Java 6 for those who still require it as a dependency.
Whilst I am by no means a photographer I do end up taking quite a few photos (these days pretty much exclusively on my phone) and the management of these photos can be a pain. So far I have never found an program worth the pain over plain old file management.
But having stumbled across Darktable (http://darktable.org/) I think I might have found a worthwile package.
When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver.
On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories. sudo apt-get install unoconv
Combined with the -exec option of the Unix find command this makes conversion of whole directory structures a breeze. #find all Word Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.doc*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;<br></br>#find all Powerpoint Documents and convert to PDF<br></br>find . -name "*.ppt*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \;
To show all the possible conversion formats you can use: unoconv --show
The following list of document formats are currently available:
Connecting to IPSec VPN gateways has always been one of the more painful things to do. Unfortunately Cisco is not helping by being extremely sluggish on making their utilities available on most recent OS revisions (you can’t even get their QuickVPN client to work properly on 64bit Win7 yet). Operating System support outside of Windows seems to be pretty much non-existent (see https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2040595).
One of the features I missed since the good old Android 1.5 days was the ability to take screen-shots on the device. Prior to Android 4 (ICS) the only workable way to create screen-shots was to connect via USB cable and use the Android SDK to make remote screen-shots.
On Android 4.0 all you have to do is press Volume Down Key + Power Key down at the same time and hold. You should hear the camera click (if audio is on) and Android will show a notification that the screenshot was saved on your device and you can now upload or transfer to your favourite service.
With the release of the final VLC 2.0 player you need to add a back-port (the next version 12.04 will have it included in the main repositories) PPA to Oneiric Ocelot (11.10)
One of the most important utilities on any computer is a decent text editing tool. Since there are as literally hundreds of text-editors out there you would think it is an easy task to find a similar one for each platform.
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/93821899/)
[](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/) by [ Thomas Hawk](http://www.flickr.com/people/thomashawk/)[ ](http://www.imagecodr.org/)
After years of trialing on various Windows platforms I have found [Notepad++](http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ "Notepad++") to be the most useful of them all (closely followed by EMEditor which I used for years before Notepad++). Since I have now switched to [Ubuntu](/2011/09/running-your-business-mostly-on-open-source-software/ "Running your business (mostly) on Open Source Software") completely it was necessary to find a permanent alternative on that platform since Notepad++ is only available on Windows.
Since I will have to do a fair amount of traveling in the next year I was in need of upgrading my trusted workhorse of Toshiba Qosmio F60 to a more portable option that will be easier on the shoulders during long travels. After doing some research into which of the major manufacturers offer the best support for a Linux based Operating System it came down to a final two: the Intel i7 variants of Samsung Series 9 and the Toshiba Z830.
If you need to check websites for mobile compliance on a regular basis you know that having a device to constantly check is painful and slows down your work during debugging and phases of constant change.
Thanks to Olivier Berten for providing this package via his PPA Repo ! sudo add-apt-repository ppa:olivier-berten/misc<br></br>sudo apt-get update<br></br>sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench-gpl
EDIT: this has been confirmed to work on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) as well).
Like it or not (personally I am in the second category) Blackboard Collaborate or Elluminate (as it is still more commonly referred to) is something you have a hard time avoiding if you work in online education.
I discovered that I have audio issues on some Ubuntu Linux machines and found the following to fix the issues.
1) Install alsa-aoss
apt-get install alsa-oss
2) Save the Elluminate Java Webstard (.JNLP) file to a local folder – DO NOT OPEN IN BROWSER
3) Launch Elluminate using this command (in the folder you saved the JNLP)
With every new release of Ubuntu I am becoming more resigned to the fact that the effort to revert back to the Ubuntu Classic (Gnome 2) interface is getting harder and sooner or later I will have to bite the bullet and learn to live with the ugly and more cumbersome Unity interface (specially since Gnome 3 seems to be even worse). One of the first issues I found is that there seems to be no easy way to manually add programs to the “Launcher” (as well as to the applications list).
Since sun-java6-jdk has been removed from the default Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) repositories you need to add a PPA repository (unless you want to install by hand)
After the recent takeover of Delicious from Yahoo Inc by Avos and the subsequent total screw-up of what was a workable system I have been struggling to export bookmarks from Delicious in XML format (since the API is badly broken). The API export of all bookmarks limits the export to 1000 bookmark entries. Which is fine if you have less than 1000 bookmarks stored. But it makes it impossible (since there is no paging functionality exposed by the API) to export the rest should you have more (and many people would have much more than that).
Just a quick note on how to configure backups of Google Apps email to a local machine.
Install getmail
apt-get install getmail4
create config directory
Create a subdirectory in users home folder (and change permissions)
mkdir .getmail
touch .getmail
create config file
Create a file such as .getmail/username.gmail
[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = username@domain.tld
password = password
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)
[destination]
type = Maildir
path = /path/to/storage/directory/
[options]
# print messages about each action (verbose = 2)
# Other options:
# 0 prints only warnings and errors
# 1 prints messages about retrieving and deleting messages only
verbose = 1
message_log = ~/.getmail/gmail.log
create data directories for storage
Create 3 sub-directories in your designated data directory
After recently researching the available software for e-book creation for some of our clients (in the education sector) I came across quite a number of options. However after some further look into the option and trying some I was able narrowed the field down to 2 options that seem to be reasonably user-friendly and matured. The two are using a very different approach and will suit different types of users. One is a native e-book writer which will give better low-level control for the more technical types. The other is a plugin to the popular OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) Office Suites.
One of my oldest pieces of hardware is a trusty Nokia SU-8W Bluetooth Keyboard. I have tried to revive it on an Android 1.6 & 2.0 device with not much luck. However I got it working successfully on a Gingerbread (2.3.4) Google Nexus S.
As one of those who grabbed a HP Touchpad at the recent firesale (after announcing the killing of the product line) I did it as in full knowledge that this device in it’s current form is of limited use and (highly) unlikely to have lots of additional applications created for it.
After casually using it for a few nights of use I am personally not surprised that HP decided to ditch this product. Compared to the current Tablet leaders the Touchpad is miles behind both Android and iOS and HP would have had to spend serious money to even get close to the current functionality of the competition. And you can take a bet that both of these will not remain static. I was actually hoping that WebOS can be a serious competitor to the current duopoly, but after using this thing I have to say that it is not even close.
This is an interesting info-graphic comparing the 3 most popular OpenSource Content Management Systems.
While I don’t really agree with some of the metrics (such as the web-service stats) it is never the less a very good visual overview. As a long-term user of WordPress and Drupal there are some good points to give a quick overview.
Since some older hardware (Toshiba Satellite A300 for example) has issues with the current version of Grub as well as the newer Kernel I still need to run 10.04 on some machines.
However since the 10.04 Repository still uses Firefox 3.6 you need to add a PPA repo to upgrade to Firefox 4.
Either go to Ubuntu Software Center > Software Sources and click the ‘Other Software’ tab. Press ‘Add’ and enter ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
Note: this has been verified to work on 11.04 (Natty), 11.10 (Oneiric) & 12.04 (Precise)
To convert a DVD and make it viewable on your mobile device Handbrake seems to be the most useful tool I have discovered so far. Since it is not part of the default Ubuntu Repositories here is the installation process. The first step is to insure libdvdcss2 is installed
After upgrading to Ubuntu 11 (Natty) I did some further research on VoIP clients (SIP) for Ubuntu Linux as XLite seems horribly out of date now.
I came across QuteCom (formerly WengoPhone) and from first testing it seems to work quite well. The install is easy as it’s part of the Ubuntu Community Software (Universe) and that means it can be installed via apt-get, Software Center or Synaptic.
EDIT: As of Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) this is now much easier as KeePass 2 has finally made it into the repositories
apt-get install keepass2
————————————————————————————————————-
If you need to read KeepPass 2 data files (.kdbx) on Ubuntu (as well as from other platforms such as Windows or Android) you need to run the Portable Version under Mono (.NET Runtime). Make sure you download the Portable Version 2.x from http://keepass.info/download.html
The default Mono Distribution on Ubuntu (V11 Natty) is missing a few dependencies required for KeePassX
I sometimes need to link to a specific Twitter status update and since the recent upgrade (or as I personally see it downgrade) of the Twitter UI it is quite annoying to find the Status ID, as it can not be copied from the interface (without some Javascript debugging tools at least).
This will show the users timeline in XML format revealing the Status ID in the XML result. The following URL can be used to then construct the permalink to the specific status update:
Having used IP Telephony for a number of years I need a workable SIP client for all of the devices I use. I have found a very capable client for my Android phones (SipDroid) and on Windows/MacOSX I generally use X-Lite (as well as it’s paid version EyePhone) from Counterpath.
Having tried several different Linux SIP clients (Ekiga, Twinkle, …) but all discarded them because of weird UI’s and/or problems with stability I noticed that there is a Linux version of XLite available. Unfortunately on current versions of Ubuntu (10.04) it needs a deprecated version of a library.
Since I have switched my 3G data network from Hutchinson Three to Vodafone AU recently I also upgraded the USB modem from a Huwaei E220 (which used to work fine on recent Ubuntu NBR releases on my trusty old ASUS EEE 900)
Unfortunately the new Huawei K3765 would not be recognised as a valid modem by the network manager. After a fair bit of searching it turns out that you only need to install one additional package (usb-modeswitch) to make this modem work (be recognised) on the current stable 10.04 release:
Since Ubuntu 9.10 NetbookRemix has been released I am again finding myself using my trusty old ASUS EEE when on the road. And finally it seems I have found a vanilla Linux distribution that is reasonably responsive and works ‘out of the box’.
One thing I don’t need on the road (as a matter of fact on none of my equipment) is having to install & maintain some client/server mail client. Here is a workable solution to have your browser default ‘mailto:’ links to Google Apps.
This one nearly escaped my attention yesterday. Google has just announced the ability to edit Google Docs on your mobile device via their Google Mobile Blog.
Just point your mobile browser to m.google.com/docs and start editing.
Along with the use of 2D barcodes this will open a few interesting m-learning possiblities for educators that would previously have required custom coding to achieve. I can see this being very useful in situations where you have students being in the field and allowing them to enter data gathered using a standard mobile phone. The barcodes could point students to the location of the spreadsheet (avoiding the need to type the information)
Getting excited about a new text editor of all things is not something I like to admit to easily, but in my line of work (although less and less is actually doing hands on coding) text editing is an important part.
That’s why I checked out the BESPIN project as soon as I heard of it. The prospect of being able to edit your files from anywhere is very appealing to me since I spend a lot of time away from the desk and on devices that not always have good text editor (let alone all the files necessary). The thought of being able to edit files from a netbook while on the run is coming to mind straight away.
One of the nicest ways to get photos straight from your mobile to Flickr (without having to use e-mails) on Nokia devices is the Flickr Plugin for the Nokia Share Online application. Since a lot of my clients in the educational sector are starting to use Flickr as part of their online teaching I decided to create a short HOWTO.
The application itself comes with the phone on most recent Nokia S60 devices (with recent Firmware – check Nokia Software Updater for new firmware). To check if your particular phone is capable you can check the Nokia Share Online Support site.
This is Part 3 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for NodePhone (Internode – Australia). It has been hard to find this information (particularily the Registrar Server settings). NOTE: The Realm setting in the Registrar Server are CASE-SENSITIVE. For some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry.
This is Part 2 of the Nokia SIP settings. This time for sipgate.at
(Austria), but it should also work for other SIPGate domains. It has
been hard to get this information from the providers themselves. For
some screenshots check the ENGIN Australia setup entry.
General
Profile name: sipgate
Service profile: IETF
Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point}
Public user name: sip:{SIPGate UserID}@sipgate.at
User compression: No
Registration: When needed
Use security: No
Since I had to look all over�for the correct settings and there was a
lot of trial and error involved (specially for the Realm). Thanks to Engin Support that finally provided this info after logging a support request.
The screenshots are from a Nokia E65, but should be applicable for similar Nokia phones.
Profile name: engin
Service profile: IETF
Default access point: {Your WLAN Access Point}
Public user name: sip:{phone number}@voice.mibroadband.com.au
User compression: No
Registration: When needed
Use security: No
read more
](https://www.flickr.com/photos/leogaggl/16898140083 “ubuntu phone by Leo Gaggl, on Flickr”)
On Android 4.0 all you have to do is press Volume Down Key + Power Key down at the same time and hold. You should hear the camera click (if audio is on) and Android will show a notification that the screenshot was saved on your device and you can now upload or transfer to your favourite service.
](http://www.flickr.com/photos/leogaggl/6821823795/ “ultrabook by leogaggl, on Flickr”)
by adactio 
