Why Not Make It A Little Easier

My Firsr Androi App

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:28:00 +0000

Please check out my Android app, PocketEKG - Basic.

It teaches you how to read EKGs with lots of sample dysrhythmias. Its also has a quiz to test your knowledge.

Search for EKG or ECG in the market place and you will see it. If you use appbrain which is a great site btw, you can use this link Pocket EKG - Basic for Android on AppBrain

I would love some feedback, I just found out that the images werent loading on Droid X and I have release a fix for it with version 1.1.

Getting An Upgraded Windows 7 to play nice with Ubuntu & Grub 2

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:55:00 +0000

I had Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu on my office desktop, both playing nice with Grub 2. When Windows 7 came out, I upgraded my Vista instead of a fresh install. I develop in Ubuntu and boot into windows only when needed. But for some reason, which I still haven't figured out why, after the windows 7 upgrade I couldn't get Grub to boot windows. When I tried to boot windows, I would get the

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for winload.exe.

Disabling signature verification from windows boot menu (F8) did not work, I even used bcdedit to set the options to disable integrity checks.

I was getting into windows by using the restore options from the Windows 7 CD and then once done, I would restore Grub to get back into Ubuntu.

Well, I have finally figured it out. Its more like a hack than a fix. But it works for me and I am happy that I don't have to do the restore thing anymore.

Heres what you do before you go into windows. What we are going to do is use a combination of EasyBCD and Grub. EasyBCD will relinquish control to Grub to boot linux.

- Find out where your root linux partition is. Look for something like this "/dev/sda7 on / type ext3". the "/" after the denotes the root partition.

sudo mount -l

- Now, write grub to the root partition instead of MBR.

sudo grub

In the grub prompt, my root partition was sda7 so, that translates to hd0,6 (0->a, 6->7)

root (hd0,6)
setup (hd0,6)

- Now reboot using the Windows CD/DVD, use "restore windows" option to overwrite the MBR and boot into windows.
- Download and Install EasyBCD from here.
- Launch the EasyBcd and navigate to Add/Remove Entries
- Add a Linux entry setting the type as Grub, give a name you like and the partition to where your root partition resides. This might not be same number as linux partition number like sda7 for example. In my case it was partition 4. I found mine using the partition size. Dont check the "Grub isn't installed in boot sector". Click "Add Entry".
- Exit out of the application and restart the computer. Now when you choose to boot linux, it will launch Grub.

No Sound in Real Player 11 in Ubuntu 9.10

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:27:00 +0000

I was occasionally getting sound when I use realplayer 11 in Ubuntu 9.10. I was getting

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1008:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

Heres what fixed it for me:

Install alsa-oss:

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

Then change /usr/bin/realplay:

The line $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin "$@" should be changed to

aoss $HELIX_LIBS/realplay.bin "$@"

Now start realplayer and then click tools->preferences and navigate to Hardware. Select "oss" for Audio driver. You should have sound now.

Cisco VPN client installation error : Invalid module format

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:24:00 +0000

I had been successfully running vpnclient along with gvpndialer to connect to my office until yesterday when after a long time when I tried to start the service /etc/init.d/vpnclient_init I got the error

/lib/modules/<kernel-version>/CiscoVPN/cisco_ipsec.ko: -1 Invalid module format

I tried un-installing and reinstalling, but kept getting the same error. Eventually after fumbling around and with the help of google, I realized that my linux-headers were not installed. The way to do it is simple.

Find out your current kernel version by running the command

uname -a

Then run

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-<the output from output previous command>

Now run the installer again, it should run fine

Update: If you are running Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.10 then follow this tutorial, to patch the client.

Howto forward X through a third server

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:15:00 +0000

This will work across all Linux/Unix machines.

Its pretty simple actually. Lets say you want to forward X from C to A via B. In my case, A and C were running Ubuntu 9.04 and B was running Solaris 10.

Use this command to forward port 22 from B to

Machine A: ssh -L 9999:C:22 @B

Then in a seperate terminal connect to C from A using this command

Machine A: ssh -X -p 9999 @localhost

Now you can run any command on C from the second terminal.

Setting up Apache with ssl on Ubuntu 9.04 server

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:03:00 +0000

I know there are a bunch of howtos out there, but none of them was complete enough to work for me.

I started with the Ubuntu's guide for setting up Apache found here. It was clear for me though and along with making mistakes following it, it missed some details too.

I was running a PHP website, so I installed apache2 and php. apache2-common includes ssl module but it is not enabled. Run this command to enable it

sudo a2enmod ssl

Now generate the keys and certificates by running the following commands.

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

(To remove the password if you dont need it, run
openssl rsa -in server.key -out server.key.insecure
Otherwise you have to enter the password everytme you restart the server.)

openssl req -new -key -out server.csr

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey
-out server.crt

Now copy the .crt and <.key/.key.insecure> files

sudo cp /etc/ssl/private/server.key
sudo cp server.crt /etc/ssl/certs/

Modify /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl and modify the following directives to look like this

SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/server.key

Restart apache2

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The Ubuntu website has all the above information. After this I had to do it differently. I got ssl_error_rx_record_too_long error in Firefox which went away after I did the following.

sudo ufw allow 443
sudo a2ensite default-ssl

The first command allows 443 in firewall and second sets the default site to ssl.

Kopete, Dbus daemon and lancelot hogging CPU in KDE 4.3.00

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:28:00 +0000

I recently upgraded to KDE 4.3.00 on my Jaunty system using this link.

Problems like invoking "do" using super + space freezing the desktop went away. The desktop looks a lot more polished and the network management widget has gotten better. But it did bring in some new problems. My desktop is slower, much less responsive.

One thing that I did notice was kopete, dbus-daemon and lancelot were constantly hogging the cpu. It apparently is a bug and will be fixed in 4.3.1. Ivan Čukić suggests that until 4.3.1 is released you can temporarily work around by opening <your home folder>/.kde/share/config/lancelotrc and add the following

[Main]
imPlugins=disabled

You are done. Log off and log back in.

My system is still not as responsive as I want it to be with the desktop effects turned on(it works fine in Gnome). I am hoping that will change with 4.3.1.

How to Make a SpinRite Startup USB disk

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:41:00 +0000

SpinRite is a crash recovery utility which you can purchase from grc website. Its a lifesaver when you need it.

SpinRite has an option to create a bootable disk but requires a FAT 16 partition for it to work. I found this out after many unsuccessful attempts at creating a bootable USB disk. To create a FAT16 partition you can use gParted to format it or if you are running windows then right click on the drive letter, click format and select FAT as the partition type. You can also use HP USB format tool which you can download from here.

I still havent successfully completed a SpinRite run since it keeps freezing a few minutes after startup, but I was able to recover almost all data except some songs by using an bootable Ubuntu USB installation.

I have almost all of data except for most recent ones backed up in the cloud. I use Amazon's Jungledisk. Its very easy to setup and pretty cheap considering. I have set it up for my friends who are happy with it. It automatically backs up data based on its schedule. It backs up incrementally and keeps versions of the changes too. I highly recommend checking it out. This is one area where procrastination should take the back seat.

Fix: Picasa not opening as default photo manager

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:13:00 +0000

If Picasa is not opening as your default photo/camera manager here's what you can do.

Run the fillowing command

/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/gnomehalintegration.sh

Another thing you might want to do if the above command doesnt solve the problem is to open gconf-editor (press alt+F2 and type it in). Navigate to

/desktop/gnome/volume_manager/

Look for autophoto_command. If the key doesnt exist then create it(right click, new key) and set it to: (your picasa installation directory might be different)

/opt/google/picasa/3.0/bin/gnomehal.sh %h

That should do it.

Solve Caller ID problem

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:40:00 +0000

If you bought a cordless phone in US and began using it in India you will notice that caller ID is no longer working even if your provider has enabled the service. The reason is that Indian telecoms use FSK technology and American telecoms use DTMF.

what you need is a FSK to DTMF converter. You can get one at any local electronics store for about Rs. 140. It would probably say ADSL splitter on it.

Let me tell you, it works like a charm, my mom is a happy camper now.

P.S: theres a website http://www.fixya.com/ which comes in handy when you have these kinda questions/problems.

How to rotate videos taken with digital cameras

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:17:00 +0000

After a little bit of searching around, I finally figured it out. Once you know what to do its pretty easy.

The cameras for some reason record in .mov format which is Apples proprietary video format. It is a poor choice I must say.

I had been trying since saturday, with mencoder I was able to rotate it but I wasn't getting audio in the output file. I even tried to do it with Windows Movie Maker which ended up being even more difficult (It wouldnt even play the file even after I installed the divx codec) and in the end gave up on Windows all together.

I found the solution in the end. The trick is to convert the file to avi first using ffmpeg¹ and then use mencoder² to rotate the file. Run the following from the terminal(Applications->Accessories)

ffmpeg -i file-name.mov -g 60 -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 file-name.avi

This also reduces the file size not without loss of quality. I found this command from this site.

Now with the .avi file just run this command which I modified from what I found here and you will now have a rotated video

mencoder -vf rotate=1 -o rotated-file.avi -oac lavc -fafmttag 1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg file-name.avi

The parameter -vf rotate=1 rotates it 90 degrees clockwise. Heres excerpt from the man page

rotate[=<0-7>]
              Rotates the image by 90 degrees and optionally flips it. For values between 4-7 rotation is only done if the movie geometry is portrait and not landscape.

                 0    Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise and flip (default).

                 1    Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise.

                 2    Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise.

                 3    Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip.

For more info run man mencoder or man ffmpeg. Just be ready to see a lot of confusing options.

¹ To install open synaptic(System->Administration), and search for ffmpeg.
² To install open synaptic(System->Administration), and search for mencoder.

Command line magic

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:45:00 +0000

I have fail2ban running on my server and out of curiosity I wanted to check if theres has been any suspicious activity. The problem is that old log files are compressed which meant I had to extract each one of them and check.

I am not a command line expert but lately I have been following this website which has taught me some new commands.

This is what I used to print the output. Of course, I realise that I can "awk" the output further to view just the details instead of full contents of each file, but I haven't come that far yet.

The directory had fail2ban.log,fail2ban.log.1 and a bunch of fail2ban.log.*.gz files.

zcat fail2ban.log.*.gz | cat - fail2ban.log fail2banl.log.1 | less

Heres what I learned from this menagerie of commands.

"|" symbol redirects the output, its clever way of using the output of one program as the input of another.

zcat is short for gunzip -c which by itself means dont extract just print the contents to the stdout(command line).

"cat - " says display from stdin instead of a file. So, "cat - fail2ban.log fail2banl.log.1" concatenates the output from zcat command, the contents of fail2ban.log and fail2ban.log.1.

"less" lets you scroll through the final output.

Setting Up Canon PIXMA MX850 on Ubuntu 8.10

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 04:40:00 +0000

I am very happy to say that setting up printers in Ubuntu is a breeze, at least for the printers where drivers are available.

Well, in this case its not quite, but it was still a lot easier than I thought it would be. Moreover, the reason why I had to go through some extra steps is because Canon has not release drivers for Linux. From my experience almost all major manufacturers do these days, Canon really has no excuse.

I found this link which pretty much made it work for me. What I am writing is basically a formatted version of what Tim Azzopardi mentions in that link.

First you install libcups2-dev from Synaptic package manager (System->Administration). Then you download cups-bjnp from here.

You extract the file by typing tar -xzvf < downloaded-file.tar.gz >. cd into that directory cups-bjnp-xx. Then type the following commands.

./configure

make

sudo make install

Turn on your printer and connect it to the network. You dont need to know the IP of the printer, Ubuntu will look it up for you. Now, thats cool.

Now open Printing (System->Administration), click New. You should see the Canon MX850 printer listed on the left hand side. Select that and click next. Select Canon PIXMA iP5300 as the driver and close the window.

To set it as the default printer, right click the Canon printer you just added and click "Set as Default".

Thats it, you are done.

Question regarding Remote Desktop a.k.a VNC/Vino

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:52:00 +0000

I frequently use Remote Desktop to help people out when they have questions/problems. Almost all of them run Ubuntu 8.10.

My question is this. I have read that VNC does encrypt the initial password required to access the computer, but lets say I open synaptic, if I type the password required for root access, does it get encrypted and then transmitted?

I have used VNC via ssh tunnels but it is not as responsive which is why I gave up on that idea. Right now, whenever I have to enter the password I ask the person to enter it, just to be on the safe side.

Musings: How to read and keep track of blogs, news, the web in general

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:35:00 +0000

I wrote a not-so-short tutorial on my other blog. I posted it there since I felt most people who read this blog wont need it. You can check it out if you are interested.

Here's the link:
Musings: How to read and keep track of blogs, news, the web in general

Change the default application to open with in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:46:00 +0000

It differs in the way I used to in windows so it took a little bit to figure out. But that said, this is more intuitive.

Right on the file you want changed, click properties, then select open with and choose your application. If you don't see you favourite application listed, click Add from below and add it to the list.

That's it.

bash auto completion for apt

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:08:00 +0000

The auto completion feature for apt-get which was working on a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 wasnt working on my upgrade.

Just to be clear, the auto completion works like this, you type in

sudo apt-get install py<tab><tab>

and it gives you a list of all the packages that match the expression.

I found out from this post that uncommenting the following three lines from your /etc/bash.bashrc will do the trick

# enable bash completion in interactive shells
if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
  . /etc/bash_completion
fi

Of course,you have to close and reopen or open a new bash shell after making these changes.

Raaga.com works on Ubuntu 8.10

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:46:00 +0000

Finally!! www.raaga.com, a website where you can listen to Indian music is playable on my Ubuntu 8.10 desktop. I went there out of curiosity to check if anythings changed and was pleasantly surprised. The next, previous buttons dont work but if let be, it plays through the playlist.

Thanks for listening to us(pun intended) www.raaga.com, even though it took you a pretty long time.

I also used to listen to www.dhingana.com which in my opinion is the best option out there since it uses flash. Unfortunately, they removed their Tamil section recently, so I stopped using their service.

www.musicindiaonline.com works but needs a little cajoling. Once you click play selection or play all, the player window pops up, asks a bunch of questions. Choose the real player option and continue. You will get a message saying 'methods missing'. Click ok and then right click->This Frame(In Firefox)->view source. Look for a line with a link which ends with .smil. Copy that link and paste it to your Totem or Real player.

Fixing MS Word 2007's office open xml error opening a file

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:06:00 +0000

My colleague had a problem today wherein she couldnt open the document she had just saved. The file had a docx extension which means it is in office open xml format. The error it gave was "there was a problem with the contents: Unspecified Error in file /word/document.xml" with the line and column number.

I renamed the docx file to zip(thats what it is), extracted the files, and tried to see if there was a problem with the xml. The xml seemed valid when I checked it under Netbeans.

According to this post, one of the guys said he imported it to a doc format using Word 2003 and was able to recover their document. So I downloaded the compatibility pack for office 2003 from here and sure enough, it imported successfully and I saved it as a word document(doc) and sent it to her.

Thanks for helping me get a packet of my favorite Cheetos, Microsoft.

Fixing green screen for skype video on Ubuntu 8.10

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:37:00 +0000

After my upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10, my webcam stopped working. Googling around I came across several posts

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=997807

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cheese/+bug/282473

http://kaeru.my/articles/technical/ubuntu-linux/fixing-green-skype-video-for-logitech-quickcam-pro-for-notebooks

Those posts are a good read and I recommend it. I have logitech quickcam pro and individually the links didnt make my webcam work, but I put them together and voilà.

Heres what I did:

1. Added

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/lool/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/lool/ubuntu intrepid main

to my sources (/etc/apt/sources.list)

1.5 Update: To import the key, do the following

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys CA5D96E9AB82B686 && gpg --export --armor CA5D96E9AB82B686 | sudo apt-key add -

2. Did sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. You should see libv4l-0 get upgraded.

3. Edited my ~/.Skype/<username>/config.xml to add the Video element. Mine did not have a <Video> element, I put it under <Lib> (found it by another round of googling)

...
<Lib>
     ...
     <Video>
      <CaptureHeight>480</CaptureHeight>
      <CaptureWidth>640</CaptureWidth>
      <RecvPolicy>callpolicy</RecvPolicy>

</Video>
...
</Lib>
...

4. sudo mv /usr/bin/skype /usr/bin/skype.real
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/skype.real

5. sudo vi /usr/bin/skype and put the following inside

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype.real

If you use 64 bit then replace with

#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype.real

6. sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/skype

7. Test your skype video. It should work now. In case it is showing B&W and you are using a Phillips model webcam or a webcam that uses the phillips driver then do the following

8. sudo apt-get install setpwc

9. setpwc -x and you are now set

Yet Another Ubuntu Setup

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 03:18:00 +0000

You must have seen a army of posts arguing whether Linux is ready for the desktop. Let me say this, I am not here to do to the same thing. They have pretty much covered all that needs to be said.

I rent out the lower level of a house in Bethesda. The lady who owns the house lives upstairs. She first had a 7 year old desktop running XP, which, for some reason decided her copy wasn't legitimate and would bring up these annoying prompts, wouldn't let her install updates. When I first moved in, I saw her plight and setup Ubuntu on her system. She had been using that machine for about 7 months running Ubuntu almost all the time, going into XP for her address book which I couldnt import to Thunderbird for some reason. Her computer died during a thunderstorm and instead of fixing it, I recommended a HP tx2000 tablet which came with Vista.

From my personal experience, Vista has gotten a lot better over these 2 years, but still is too bloated and slow for my preference. Moreover, I think its doing better now because they made the PC manufacturers offer more RAM. Thats why you see 4Gigs being offered as part of the standard configuration. Thats frigging ridiculous, because this is not a solution but a work around, which to me is always what MS has been doing.

Anyway, the software she uses are Open Office, Thunderbird and Picasa for the most part. Nothing fancy and when the tablet first came, I configured those on Vista and Installed Ubuntu 8.04 which was the latest at that time. Almost everything except the tablet aspect worked out of the box in Ubuntu, but she isnt very keen about using it as a tablet.

This is how I set it up for her which is exactly what I have at work and home. I divided the HDD into logical partitions. One for Windows, a Common partition for Data and 3 Linux partition(swap, root and home). I put the Thunderbird profile folder, the pictures and her documents in the common partition.

Ubuntu:
I setup the thunderbird profiles.ini file to point to the one in the common folder.

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=Common
IsRelative=0
Path=/home/karen/common/.mozilla-thunderbird/fvicp4xp.default
Default=1

the folder /home/karen/common is mounted using /etc/fstab entry

# /dev/sda3
UUID=C268537B68536CE3 /home/karen/common ntfs defaults,umask=007,gid=1000,uid=1000 0 1

I kept the common partition as ntfs for usability reasons.

I deleted the Pictures and Documents folder and created symlinks to /home/karen/common/Pictures and /home/karen/common/Documents. I have to mention this here, symlink is one of my favourite features on Linux. It makes the filesystem so extensible.

For backup I am using sbackup, which is exactly what I needed. I set it up to make a full backup run every other month, and incremental backups every week. It backs up to her external hard drive which I have shared over my Server over Samba. It backs up her home and the common partition.
I have her /etc/fstab setup to mount my samba share using smbfs[apt-get install smbfs]. the line looks like

//192.168.9.250/KAREN_DATA /home/karen/REMOTE_DATA smbfs rw,username=her_username,password=her_password,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=770 0 0

I have setup compiz for the desktop effects, which she loves by the way, gnome-do for launching applications, which I was surprised how easily she got accustomed to. Its one of my favourite apps and wouldnt live without it. I have yet to see her use the gnome menu. I also setup Avant Window Navigator, she loves the weather applet and the cool spin effects. Nothing fancy, I wanted to make sure its in her comfort level.

Windows:
I setup thunderbirds profile.ini such

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=J:\.mozilla-thunderbird\fvicp4xp.default

Unfortunately, I couldnt find any symlink applications which work well. I created shortcuts for her Documents and Pictures folder on her desktop and setup Picasa to use the "common's" Picture folder as the destination.

She got the laptop in June and until a month ago she had been switching between Vista and Ubuntu. The reason being, she loved the search feature in Vista and she felt that there wasnt any such thing in Ubuntu. I finally sat down with her computer a month ago and fine tuned tracker to ignore certain files extensions. She has been using Ubuntu 8.10(I upgraded once it came out) since then(though she still feels the tracker is not as good as the one in Vista, but feels will do for now), and is happy with it.

Any suggestion to make it even easier?

P.S: I will try to write one for my setup on my Mom's computer back in India.

KDE unlocking problem

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:11:00 +0000

If you cannot unlock you KDE screen with your password, most likely the permissions on your kcheckpass is incorrect as was the case on my machine.

I am running KDE 4.2 nightly so my kcheckpass was in /opt/kde-nightly/lib/kde4/libexec/. You can find yours by running

sudo find / -name kcheckpass.

It should be

-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 13772 2008-12-09 21:35 /opt/kde-nightly/lib/kde4/libexec/kcheckpass

If yours reads

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13772 2008-12-09 21:35 /opt/kde-nightly/lib/kde4/libexec/kcheckpass

You can change it by running

sudo chmod u+s /opt/kde-nightly/lib/kde4/libexec/kcheckpass

A bug has been filed in this regard.

Tip: In case you run into the problem again and your screen is locked(you do a system update, which replaces the kcheckpass and the permissions get screwed up again), press ctrl+alt+F1, login and run the chmod command again. Now press ctrl+alt+F7 and you should be able to unlock your screen.

Mounting windows/samba shares in Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:28:00 +0000

I have my media files shared on my server so I can access them from different platforms like my laptop and my mythtv setup.

If you have an iPhone, then check out SimplifyMedia

This is what my /etc/fstab looks like on my laptop.

//192.168.9.250/ /home/arun/Server/ smbfs rw,username=<username>,password=<password>,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=770 0 0

//192.168.9.250/ /home/arun/Server/ smbfs rw,username=<username>,password=<password>,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=770 0 0

My samba server is set not to let public access for obvious reasons, so password is necessary. This setup will work from within my home network and will automatically mount my shares when I start my laptop. I havent had any problems when I use the laptop outside, never seemed to stall at any point of time during boot.

If you use ubuntu, I am not sure about others, you need to perform this additional step so that you computer doesnt hang for 15-30 seconds on shutdown.

fail2ban ubuntu 8.04 server (Hardy)

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:02:00 +0000

I had to run a FTP server for my family to download some stuff that they wanted from my computer. Since I started proftpd about 2 days ago, I have been noticing numerous unwanted login attempts on my server, coming mostly from a handful of IP's. So I started looking around to block these addresses and came across fail2ban. You can check them out here.

I run ubuntu 8.04 server and you can install fail2ban by

sudo apt-get install fail2ban

Fail2ban monitors many applications like ssh, ftp and mail for example.Once installed, the folder /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/ has many sample files for different applications.

First, copy the file /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf to /etc/fail2ban/jail.local. This is as per the developers suggestion so that upgrades do not affect our customized configuration. I wanted to set it up for both ssh and ftp(for which I use proftp). My ssh runs on 2 ports 9999 and 443(I need this to be able to get to my machine from behind a proxy) and ftp runs on 21. Go to the respective sections and set the enable to true and change the port to what your servers running on. For example my jail.local will have the following sections changed to look like this.

[ssh]

enabled = true
port    = 9999,443
filter = sshd
logpath = /var/log/auth.log
banaction = iptables-allports
maxretry = 3

[proftpd]

enabled = true
port     = ftp,ftp-data,ftps,ftps-data
filter   = proftpd
logpath = /var/log/proftpd/proftpd.log
banaction = iptables-allports
maxretry = 3

I added the banaction option so that, once blocked, those hosts cannot access any port on my machine. By default it will block them for 10 minutes which is ok. If you have other applications you can modify other sections to match your needs.

Once I had this done, I restarted fail2ban

sudo /etc/init.d/fail2ban restart

At first when I ran some tests with proftp, it didnt seem to work, but some digging lead to the fact the regular expression for proftp.conf was wrong. The default configuration files are under .conf under /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/. fail2ban has provided with an utility called fail2ban-regex which tests the regular expression against a log and a configuration file. I tested mine with

sudo fail2ban-regex /var/log/proftpd/proftpd.log /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/proftpd.conf

At first none of the authentication failures were being caught, but after I changed my regular expression in /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/proftpd.conf to look like

failregex = $\S+\[\]$[: ]+ USER \S+: no such user found from \S+ \[[a-f0-9.:]+\] to \S+:\S+$
            $\S+\[\]$[: ]+ USER \S+ $Login failed$: Incorrect password\.$
            $\S+\[\]$[: ]+ SECURITY VIOLATION: \S+ login attempted\.$
            $\S+\[\]$[: ]+ Maximum login attempts $\d+$ exceeded\, connection refused$

it caught every one of them.

I also changed the symbolic link for sh from dash to bash. I am not sure if that helped but its a good thing to change it anyway.

sudo ln -sf /bin/bash /bin/sh

I feel a little more safe now.

How to enable Chinese Input in Ubuntu Hardy/Linux Mint 5

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Mallikarjunan) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:25:00 +0000

I got this working on my Co-workers desktop by following two posts. I thought I will put those two together.

SCIM - Smart Common Input Method is a program which according to their website "provides not only a user friendly, full featured input method user interface for POSIX-style operating systems (including Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix), but also a development platform to make input method development easier.". In simpler words, you can also use it as the language bar in windows.

To enable that in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 or Linux Mint 5, do the following

From your package manager install scim, scim-chinese, scim-gtk2-immodule, scim-tables-zh, scim-bridge-agent, scim-bridge-client-gtk, scim-bridge-client-qt, scim-bridge-client-qt4, xfonts-intl-chinese, xfonts-intl-chinese-big, ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp, ttf-arphic-gkai00mp, ttf-arphic-bkai00mp, ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp
In your System -> Preferences -> Sessions, add "scim -d" in the command and "scim" for name.
Save all your work, close all windows, then press ctrl+alt+backspace. this restarts the graphical user interface. Login again and you should see a keyboard icon in the system tray. The default key to invoke the chinese keyboard is ctrl+space, but you can change it if you want to. Right-click on the keyboard icon and go into SCIM Setup to change them.
Initially the post said that is all I needed to do, but they didnt work. So I also did the following which solved the problem.

open the SCIM config file by opening a terminal(Applications->accessories->terminal) and typing sudo gedit /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim.
change the following lines

GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
QT_IM_MODULE=xim

GTK_IM_MODULE="scim-bridge"
QT_IM_MODULE="scim-bridge"

close the editor. Open up the editor(Applications->accessories->text editor) and paste the following.

scim -d
export XMODIFIERS=@im=scim
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
gnome-session

Save the file as .xsession in your home folder.
Restart your Graphical user interface like you did before.

Credits for the post goes the authors of the 2 links

DuKefeng - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=124214
Ubuntu Geek - http://www.ubuntugeek.com/fix-for-scim-errors-in-ubuntu-gutsy-and-hardy.html