#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. Thanks to Yaniv for debugging the instructions.

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.

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:

1. Close Pidgin (make sure the process is really down)
2. Run “apt-get install msn-pecan”
3. Start pidgin
4. Change your MSN account type from MSN to WLM
5. 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).

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. Really annoying. A quick search in the Ubuntu forums led to this post saying I should upgrade to the latest BIOS version (A13 – at least at the time of writing this post).

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.

/tmp usually contains temporary data for applications while they run. It sometimes may reach a point where it 100% full (might have happened to me while I upgraded to Hardy Heron 8.04).