#Ubuntu

Below are the steps necessary to connect your iPhone / iPad or any other computer via a PPTP VPN. Why would I want to do this? For various reasons such as allow you to access information and servers that are behind a firewall, or maybe you just need to route traffic through different servers. I’ve tested this on a 256mb Rackspace Cloud instance running Ubuntu 10.04 and with an iPhone and an iPad. [Read More]

Installing ies4linux on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala by just running “./ies4linux” might show some warnings such as: IEs4Linux 2 is developed to be used with recent Wine versions (0.9.x). It seems that you are using an old version. It’s recommended that you update your wine to the latest version (Go to: winehq.com). In my case it showed the above text, which seems to be a warning, and run the UI but then got stuck and didn’t complete anything. [Read More]

If you are getting the error “”issubclass() arg 1 must be a class”” with Google App Engine SDK for Python on Linux its probably because you are running Python 2.6 (and will probably happen to you when you run Ubuntu 9.04 – 2.6 is the default there).

Just run the dev server under python 2.5 (i.e. python2.5 dev_appserver.py)

Today I got the following error on Pidgin (I’m running version 2.5.2 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex) while it tried to connect to MSN: “Unable to retrieve MSN Address Book” After searching a bit I found this post by Gijs Nelissen which said to use a different MSN plugin for Pidgin called msn-pecan. I’ll reiterate the instructions for those with Ubuntu / Debian: Close Pidgin (make sure the process is really down) Run “apt-get install msn-pecan” Start pidgin Change your MSN account type from MSN to WLM Reconnect I don’t know if this error affects other libpurple based multi-headed IMs (such as Adium) (UPDATE: It appears this IS a libpurple issue – so Adium IS affected), however, the msn-pecan project has a Windows binary release as well as source release (if you care/need/want to compile it for Mac OS X or other Linux distributions). [Read More]

On the day of Ubunut 8.10 I’ve upgraded my work laptop (Dell D630) to Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve previously ran my home desktop on the release candidates and saw that all is well so I didn’t expect any specific issues with the upgrade. After finishing the upgrade successfully I’ve encountered 2 problems. The first was with the computer fan. It was workin on and off in full steam in 4 seconds cycles. [Read More]

If you get the following error while running Synaptic: **Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic Unable to copy the user’s Xauthorisation file.** Make sure to that you have enough space in your /tmp directory. To check if that is indeed the problem run the following command in your terminal: df -h This command will show you each mounted volumes you may have including the one mounted to /tmp. [Read More]

If you are using Skype on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon) on a Dell D630 and have the “famous” internal microphone problems due to the HD-Intel chipset, I’ve found a simple solution, sort of. I recently bought a Plantronics .Audio 470 headset at Best Buy for $50. Its a nice headset with good sound quality and a good mic that is also fold-able for good portability. That headset also comes with a USB adapter which allows you to basically get a USB based sound card so you can use that headset with machines without a sound card (or a problematic sound card/chipset…). [Read More]

I’ve decided that I have enough data I want/need to store and backing it up with removable drives and/or burning DVDs is getting less useful each passing day. I also like to have everything available all the time instead of going through backup DVDs searching for the right one and extract the information from it. I have a friend who takes too many pictures in RAW format and have greater storage needs than I do but have little time or nerves to mess with installing and configuring something so he got a Thermaltake Muse NAS-RAID. [Read More]

2 days after my previous post about installing VmWare Server 1.0.3 from Canonical’s repository, VmWare released version 1.0.4. I tried using its built-in install script on a vanilla Ubuntu Server 7.04 (a.k.a Feisty Fawn) and it worked flawlessly. Aside from certain libraries which it needs to compile the vmmon and vmnet kernel modules (the installation script will tell you which ones are missing and you can get them from the repositories using apt-get), you’ll also need to install xinetd. [Read More]

Whenever a new version of Ubuntu comes out I download the CD, run it in LiveCD mode and see if my Laptop (Thinkpad T43) works with everything included (video card – ATI, sound, Wireless card the Intel a/b/g wireless thingy) and succeeds in connecting to my home wireless network (using WPA2 encryption). Previous versions usually missed either in the wireless card or the WPA (or it was really cumbersome to configure WPA). [Read More]