Installing Boxee turns your computer into an incredable HTPC but the installation process is not as straight forward as they would have you believe for the 64-bit 9.10 karmic release. At the time of this post Boxee is only available for 32-bit Jaunty 9.10 release but it can be successfully installed with the following steps.

Update:
Boxee has recently made the latest version of their software available for Karmic 64 and 32-bit. You can simply download the deb package off their website directly and install it. You can disregard the instructions below.

Start by downloading the repository off the website. Since the 32-bit repository is the only one available simply adding it to your sources.list will not work.

$ wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/jaunty/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz

Find the latest version of Boxee in the repository.

$ zcat Packages.gz | grep Filename

Filename: ./dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.6.4578.intrepid.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.7.4826.intrepid.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.11.5777.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.12.6570.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.13.6684.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.14.6795.deb
Filename: ./dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb

Download the latest version.

$ wget http://apt.boxee.tv/dists/intrepid/test/binary-i386/boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb

Install the package, since your system is 64-bit and you are installing a 32-bit package you will see that your system is missing some required libraries.

$ sudo dpkg -i --force-all boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb

dpkg: warning: overriding problem because --force enabled:
 package architecture (i386) does not match system (amd64)
Selecting previously deselected package boxee.
(Reading database ... 144498 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking boxee (from boxee-0.9.14.6992.deb) ...
dpkg: boxee: dependency problems, but configuring anyway as you requested:
 boxee depends on liblzo1; however:
  Package liblzo1 is not installed.
 boxee depends on libfaad-dev; however:
  Package libfaad-dev is not installed.
 boxee depends on libxmlrpc-c3; however:
  Package libxmlrpc-c3 is not installed.
 boxee depends on libdirectfb-1.0-0; however:
  Package libdirectfb-1.0-0 is not installed.
 boxee depends on libkrb53; however:
  Package libkrb53 is not installed.
 boxee depends on xsel; however:
  Package xsel is not installed.
Setting up boxee (0.9.14.6992)

To fix these dependency problems download the getlibs package and install it.

$ wget http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/getlibs-all.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb

Now resolve those missing libraries.

$ getlibs /opt/boxee/Boxee

libfaac.so.0: libfaac0
libhal-storage.so.1: libhal-storage1
libjasper.so.1: libjasper1
libenca.so.0: libenca0
No match for liblzo.so.1
libmysqlclient.so.15: libmysqlclient15off
libfribidi.so.0: libfribidi0
libGLEW.so.1.5: libglew1.5
The following i386 packages will be installed:
libenca0
libfaac0
libfribidi0
libglew1.5
libhal-storage1
libjasper1
libmysqlclient15off
Continue [Y/n]? y
Downloading ...
Installing libraries ...

Install the lib32nss-mdns library.

$ sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

You also need to manually install the liblzo library which is no longer available in the 9.10 release.

$ wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/l/lzo/liblzo1_1.08-3_i386.deb
$ getlibs -i liblzo1_1.08-3_i386.deb

You should now be able to launch Boxee normally, enjoy!

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The Dell Inspiron Zino HD is the perfect machine if you are looking to build an Ubuntu Linux based HTPC. At the time of this post the Zino can be purchased with either Windows 7 or Ubuntu linux 9.04. I decided to go with Windows 7 and install Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit karmic on my own in a dual boot configuration. This article will cover all the steps necessary to get Ubuntu up and running.

The easiest way to setup a dual boot configuration is to reinstall Windows 7 first with the included OS DVD and then Ubuntu second. When installing Windows 7 make sure to leave space for your Ubuntu installation. Repartition the drive so that Windows 7 only uses a small chuck and leave the rest of the space unallocated. The good thing about reinstalling Windows is that it gets rid of all the extra 3rd party junk that comes preinstalled.

You can install Ubuntu through the HDMI but on some TVs the HDMI port may display incorrectly until the ATI drivers are correctly installed. If this occurs to you switch over the the VGA port until you have completed the installation.

The only other pitfall of this installation is that the default Ubuntu installation doesn’t recognize the wireless card (in my build it was the Broadcom wireless b/g card). All this means is that you need to have the wired ethernet connection until you update the system and download the appropriate wireless driver.

Once you have completed the initial installation and made sure you have a working network connection you should update your system.

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Next you need to find and install your hardware drivers. Go here:
System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers

It should find the Broadcom STA wireless driver for your wireless, and the FGLRX ATI/AMD driver for your video card. Download and activate both of them. You should now be able to connect with wireless and use the HDMI port if you experienced display issues with it during the installation.

If your display resolution if incorrect. Go here:
System -> Administration -> Display

Configure your sound to work over HDMI. Go here:
System -> Administration -> Sound

In the Output tab select HDMI. You can go to the Sound Effects tab and select a sound to test that it works.

You should now a fully functional system up and running with Ubuntu, but you may want to install some packages that will make your make your life easier. Here are my suggestions:

ubuntu-restricted-formats
ssh
nfs-common
sshfs
vim

mythtv
boxee
xbmc

Enjoy your new Zino HTPC!

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AndroidNexus.com will be a site geared towards the Google Android operating system based on the Linux kernel.  I plan on covering topics including the Android Open Source Project as well as application development with the Android SDK. For good measure there should be plenty of information about specific applications and phones as well.

Keep an eye out for future updates!

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By default Ubuntu doesn’t install the manual pages used for Linux software development which is an invaluable reference for any system developer. These man pages describe the Linux programming interface including Linux system calls as well as system library calls.

To install these man pages simply install the manpages-dev package.

$ sudo apt-get install manpages-dev

You can also install the POSIX specific interfaces by installing the manpages-posix-dev package.

$ sudo apt-get install manpages-posix-dev

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The PS3 Sixaxis and DualShock3 bluetooth controllers are a great for gaming on your PS3 but will work just as well under Linux. With this guide you will be able to configure them to work on your Ubuntu Linux 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) PC in USB as well as wireless bluetooth mode.

There are a variety of solutions out there but they are either overly complex, or because of the ever changing state of Linux bluetooth support, they are somewhat outdated. The advantage of this solution is that it is simple, and requires only slight modification to the default versions of the bluez-utils packages (bluez-4.12). This minimizes possible conflicts and eliminates unneeded configuration.

This guide specifically covers Ubuntu Linux 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) but I’m sure similar steps can be taken for other distributions.

Installation

Install the hidd daemon located in the bluez-compat package.

$ sudo apt-get bluez-compat joystick

The hidd daemon in the bluez-compat package has been deprecated but it provides the only way to connect with the PS3 controller. It will not interfere with the current bluetooth service.

From this point you can take one of two roads.

1. If you are on 32bit (i386) or 64bit (amd64) versions of Ubuntu I have precompiled all the binaries you will need. Simply download the corresponding tarball for your architecture and follow a couple simple steps to complete the setup.
2. The other option is to manually patch and compile the binaries yourself. This is a bit more time consuming but not anymore difficult as I have documented the exact steps for this method as well. This option is necessary if you are on some other architecture (PowerPC, etc.) or if you experience any problems with the precompiled binaries I provided.

Option 1: Download Precompiled Binaries

You can test which architecture you are using by running uname.

$ uname -a

Linux xps 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Tue Nov 4 19:33:06 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Download the tarball of binaries which corresponds to your architecture.
bluez-compat_ps3_amd64.tgz
bluez-compat_ps3_i386.tgz

Untar the files.

$ tar xzvf bluez-compat_ps3_<arch>.tgz

bluez-compat_4.12-0ubuntu5_amd64.deb
sixpair

Skip down to the Install the Updated Package section.

Option 2: Patch and Compile Binaries

Download the hidd daemon patch:
patch-hidd-3.19-pabr3

Install the dpkg-dev and fakeroot which will allow you to compile the blues-utils package.

$ sudo apt-get dpkg-dev fakeroot

Install the blues-utils package, apply the patch, and build the package.

$ sudo apt-get source bluez-utils
$ sudo apt-get build-dep bluez-utils
$ patch bluez-4.12/compat/hidd.c patch-hidd-3.19-pabr3
$ cd bluez-4.12
$ sudo dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
$ cd ../

This will build all the bluez related packages, the only one we are interested in is bluez-compat.

Download the sixpair.c source code:
sixpair.c

Install the libusb-dev and libusb-0.1-4 which will allow you to compile the sixpair utility.

$ sudo apt-get libusb-dev libusb-0.1-4

Build the sixpair utility.

$ gcc -o sixpair sixpair.c -lusb

Install the Updated Package

At this point you should have either downloaded or compiled the bluez-compat package.

Install the patched bluez-compat package.

$ sudo dpkg -i bluez-compat_4.12-0ubuntu5_<arch>.deb

Optional: if you will dist-upgrade your system, the process will overwrite your modified package with newer versions. You can either choose to redo the above steps every time a new version of bluez-utils is packaged, or “hold” the package. This should work with both apt and aptitude.

$ sudo echo bluez-compat hold | sudo dpkg --set-selections

Bluetooth Pairing

With the updated package in place, you can now follow steps will get the PS3 controller paired with your Ubuntu system. This step only needs to be performed once as it will remain successfully paired with Ubuntu between uses. If you reconnect/re-pair the controller with the PS3 however, you will have to repeat this step.

If you want to setup multiple controllers, repeat this step for each one individually.

Run the following command to view the system log messages as they are generated.

$ watch -n 1 "tail /var/log/messages"

Plug in PS3 controller with USB cable. You should see output similar to the following system log in the terminal.

Apr  4 11:06:40 xps kernel: [ 9666.789711] input: Sony PLAYSTATION(R)3 Controller as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.0/input/input23
Apr  4 11:06:40 xps kernel: [ 9666.834506] input,hiddev96,hidraw3: USB HID v1.11 Joystick [Sony PLAYSTATION(R)3 Controller] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2

The lights will blink indicating that the controller is communicating with the system.

Press the PS button (clear button in the center of the gamepad). This will acknowledge the controller connection sequence and the controller will become activated.

Check that the /dev/input/js0 device exists at this point.

$ls /dev/input/js*

/dev/input/js0

You can test the controller by running either of the following commands. jscalibrator opens a GUI window and allows you you calibrate your buttons. jstest shows the raw output from the buttons themselves. Make sure you have pressed the PS button on the controller if you aren’t getting any response.

$ jscalibrator -d /dev/input/js0

or

$ jstest /dev/input/js0

The lights will continue to blink indefinitely as long as the controller is connected, this is normal. There is no way at this point to disable them but the controller will operate correctly over USB.

Execute the sixpair utility. This will tell the PS3 controller to look for your Ubuntu bluetooth master device and not the PS3 itself when it attempts to connect over bluetooth.

$ sudo ./sixpair

Current Bluetooth master: 00:1f:e1:e3:48:YY
Setting master bd_addr to 00:1f:e1:e3:48:YY

You should now disconnect the controller from the USB cable. It will remain paired with the Ubuntu system from this point forward.

Initiate Connection

By now you should have installed the updated package and successfully paired the PS3 controller with your Ubuntu system. Until you reconnect/re-pair the controller to the PS3 you can simply repeat this step each time you want to use your controller.

For the controller to successfully connect with your Ubuntu system you will have to temporarily disable the default bluetooth service and start the hidd daemon instead.

Stop the bluetooth service.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop

Run the hidd daemon. The ‘-n‘ will stop it from running in the background and you can see its output in the terminal.

$ sudo hidd --server --nocheck -n

hidd[14407]: Bluetooth HID daemon

In a separate terminal run the hcidump command below. It will show you the current bluetooth traffic as it happens.

$ sudo hcidump -t -V -x

Press the PS button (clear button in the center of the gamepad). This will cause the controller to begin its connection sequence. You should see the hidd daemon accept the connection and print something similar to the output below. Pay attention to the bold text below. This is your bluetooth PS3 controller address which you will need later to ultimately disconnect the controller.

hidd[13149]: New HID device 00:16:FE:D7:8C:XX (Sony Computer Entertainment Wireless Controller)

The system log should also show the following.

Apr  4 11:09:52 xps kernel: [ 6258.750437] input: Sony Computer Entertainment Wireless Controller as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.2/usb7/7-2/7-2.1/7-2.1:1./bluetooth/hci0/hci0:11/input22

hcidump should start reporting a large amount of bluetooth traffic from the PS3 controller. Here’s a snippet of the sample output below.

2009-04-04 11:10:04.745725 > ACL data: handle 11 flags 0x02 dlen 54
    L2CAP(d): cid 0x0041 len 50 [psm 19]
      HIDP: Data: Input report
      01 00 00 00 00 00 86 88 78 79 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
      00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 05 14 FF C8 00 00 23 5E 77 01
      81 01 FE 01 E8 01 8F 00 02
2009-04-04 11:10:04.757745 > ACL data: handle 11 flags 0x02 dlen 54
    L2CAP(d): cid 0x0041 len 50 [psm 19]
      HIDP: Data: Input report
      01 00 00 00 00 00 86 88 78 79 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
      00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 05 14 FF C8 00 00 23 5E 77 01
      81 01 FE 01 E7 01 8F 00 02

Check that the /dev/input/js0 device exists once again.

$ls /dev/input/js*

/dev/input/js0

You can verify the controller is correctly working over bluetooth by once again running either jscalibrator or jstest.

$ jscalibrator -d /dev/input/js0

or

$ jstest /dev/input/js0

Congratulations! You have successfully connected your PS3 controller. As before, the lights will continue to blink as long as the controller is connected. You can operate the controller and map its buttons just like any other joystick or gamepad.

If you are wanting to connect multiple controllers that were successfully paired in the previous step, press the PS button for each one. You should see that a device (/dev/input/js*) is created for each one.

Kill the hidd daemon by pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal window. You no longer need this as the the PS3 controller is now connected.

You can now restart the bluetooth service to resume the normal operation of bluetooth devices on your system. The controller will continue to operate normally.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

Terminate Connection

The PS3 controller doesn’t hibernate and power off like it does when paired with the PS3. To conserve your battery, once you are done with it you need to “unplug” the controller from the system with the following command. Use the bluetooth address you saved from initiating the connection.

$ sudo hidd --unplug 00:16:FE:D7:8C:XX

The lights on the controller will go dark once it has been successfully unplugged.

If you want to reconnect/re-pair the controller to your PS3, simply reattach the controller to the PS3 with the USB cable and press the PS button.

Summary

Once you have successfully installed the package and are comfortable with the pairing and connection process you can eliminate all the debugging steps.

Here is a quick reference for the pairing and connection process.

Bluetooth Paring (only if you need to re-pair with Ubuntu)

(connect controller with USB cable)
$ sudo ./sixpair
(disconnect controller from USB cable)

Initiate Connection

$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth stop
$ sudo hidd --server --nocheck -n
(press the PS button on controller to connect)
(terminate hidd Ctrl+C)
$ sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start

Terminate Connection

$ sudo hidd --unplug 00:16:FE:D7:8C:XX

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You may already be familiar with NFS and Samba for sharing files over a network. While these are both great distributed filesystem solutions, they require extra configuration and setup overhead in order to get them to work. If you want quick and easy access to a remote filesystem then SSHFS may be your best shot.

SSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem) is a file system for Linux capable of operating on files on a remote computer using just a secure shell login. It is based on sftp (SSH File Transfer Protocol). Setup is easy on the server side, since most servers support SSH out of the box there is nothing to do. On the client side, mounting the filesystem is as easy as logging in with SSH. The end user can seamlessly and securely interact with remote files as if they were local to your machine.

Advantages of SSHFS over NFS/Samba:

• Utilizes SSH and is therefore very secure.
• Allows secure access to remote filesystems outside of your local network.
• Requires no special configuration on the server side.

Disadvantages:

• Slightly slower, although the difference is fairly small.
• Does not show filesystem usage statistics.
• Requires a user account on the server side.
• Not a true distributed file system, single point to point sharing.

Setup

The first step is to install SSHFS.

In Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install sshfs

or in Gentoo:

$ sudo emerge -av sshfs-fuse

Create the mount point on your local machine. This is where you are going to access the remote filesystem.

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/share

Your user must have permission to access this mountpoint.

$ sudo chown ryan /mnt/share

Start Sharing

Now use the sshfs command to mount the remote filesystem. If the username is different on the server you are connecting, use the “username@host:” format, otherwise you can simply specify “host:”.

$ sshfs ryan@fileserver:/remote/share /mnt/share

If you are not using keys with SSH you will be prompted for a password.

ryan@fileserver's password:

Once you are finished you can easily unmount the filesystem.

as regular user:

$ fusermount -u /mnt/share

or as root:

$ sudo umount /mnt/share

Configuration

You can add an entry for this share to /etc/fstab to make the mounting process more seamless.

sshfs#ryan@fileserver:/remote/share /mnt/share fuse user,noauto 0 0

user - allow any user to mount this share.
noauto - stop the shared directory from being automatically mounted at startup.

If you want it automatically mounted, ensure that your SSH configuration uses keys and not passwords so it doesn’t ask for a password at startup. Once keys are in use you can safely remove the noauto option.

With fstab updated you can now mount the share as a normal user with this simple mount command. Again, if ssh is configured to use passwords you will still be prompted for one.

$ mount /mnt/share

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Setting up a NFS server on Gentoo doesn’t have to be difficult. Here I will explain how to setup a basic NFS server in just a few steps.

The fist step is to become root.

$ su -

Your Gentoo kernel must be compiled with support for both NFS server and client. You can check for this in a couple ways.

If you manually built your kernel you can do the following to check for support.

# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

The following options should be enabled in the kernel.

File Systems —>
Network File Systems —>
<*> NFS file system support
[*] Provide NFSv3 client support
<*> NFS server support
[*] Provide NFSv3 server support

It should look similar to this.

Alternatively you may be able to check your configuration settings in /proc/config.gz.

# zcat /proc/config.gz | grep NFS

Here are the important lines to look for.

...
#
# Network File Systems
#
CONFIG_NFS_FS=y
CONFIG_NFS_V3=y
# CONFIG_NFS_V4 is not set
# CONFIG_NFS_DIRECTIO is not set
CONFIG_NFSD=y
CONFIG_NFSD_V3=y
# CONFIG_NFSD_V4 is not set
# CONFIG_NFSD_TCP is not set
...

If your configuration lacks these options you will need to rebuild your kernel.

Once you verified your kernel has NFS support go ahead and emerge the nfs-utils package. This package contains all the user-space programs to setup NFS.

# emerge nfs-utils

You should now edit /etc/exports which tells NFS which filesystems should be shared.

# vim /etc/exports

Here is a basic entry example. Here the /mnt/storage directory will be shared to all computers on 192.168.1.* network. The share options will allow for secure read and write access to the NFS volume.

/mnt/storage 192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

Now start the NFS service.

# /etc/init.d/nfs start

Congratulations you should now have a working NFS server, but there are still a couple things to do.

Add this service to your default run level. This will automatically start the service every time the system boots.

# rc-update add nfs default

The showmount command can be used to check which NFS volumes are exported.

# showmount -e [host]

If you make any changes to the /etc/exports file you need to reload the NFS service for these changes to take effect.

# /etc/init.d/nfs reload

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A strange issue has been identified in Ubuntu where video takes on a blue colored tint. Other descriptions of the problem include inverted colors, blue skin tones, or distorted video hues. The problems have been reproduced with Totem (Gstreamer), Totem (Xine), Mplayer, as well as VLC and other players.

The common theme with this bug seems to be the use of the Nvidia closed source drivers.

Here is an example showing the blue tint problem.

Here are the specific steps to fix the issue for the Totem (Gstreamer) player. There may be similar methods for other players.

The first thing you need to do is make a change to gstreamer-properties.

Open gstreamer-properties from within a terminal.

$ gstreamer-properties

Now click on the Video tab. From the Plugin dropdown box select Custom. Finally add the following line to the Pipeline box.

videobalance hue=-1 ! autovideosink

The window should look like this.

Restart Totem for these changes to take effect.

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An ISO image is an archive file (disk image) of an optical disc using a conventional ISO (International Organization for Standardization) format. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .ISO.

Many times is convenient to mount an ISO file directly instead of burning it to a CD first. Not only does this save on wasted CDs/DVDs, but allows much faster access to the ISO since it is on the hard disk itself.

Create the directory or mount point for the ISO.

$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disk

Use the mount command to mount the ISO

$ sudo mount -o loop disk_image.iso /mnt/disk

A loop device is a pseudo-device that makes a file accessible as a block device. You can now access the files within the ISO as you would a normal disk at the mount point ‘/mnt/disk’.

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Screen may be the most useful Linux applications when it comes to getting things done through the terminal. This custom screenrc configuration file will provide you with a permanent caption line at the bottom of each window. This caption line will enable you to easily keep track of each terminal window and provide other helpful information such as host and current time.

When screen is invoked, it executes initialization commands from the files “/etc/screenrc” and “.screenrc” in the user’s home directory.

Simply create a file in your home directory with vim or some other editor.

$ vim ~/.screenrc

And place the following line in the file.

caption always "%{Wb} %H %{Bk}| %{Ck}%-w%50>%{Cb} %n %t %{-}%+w%<%{- Wk}%{Bk} | %=%{Wb} %C "

Now launch a new screen session for it to take effect.

Here is an example of what it will look like.

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As you may have noticed, WiredRevolution.com has a new look. The majority of the work is now complete but you may see a few more changes in the future. The majority of these changes revolve around browser compatibility, and wrapping up the last design issues.

These design changes have been developed into a new Wordpress theme which I will eventually release to the public. If this is something you might be interested in using, or you have any questions/suggestions, feel free to leave me a comment.

Keep an eye on this site for the latest.

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At various times it is necessary to restrict the users which can access a certain host. If your network relies on SSH it is as simple as changing an option in the sshd_config configuration file. You will of course need root access to make the necessary changes to this file and eventually reset the SSH daemon.

This configuration file is usually located here.
/etc/ssh/sshd_config

Open the file as root in order to make changes.

$ sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

You need to set the AllowUsers keyword followed by the users you want to have access to the machine.

AllowUsers	ryan joe

If you want to do something more complex here is the output from the man page:

AllowUsers
This keyword can be followed by a list of user name patterns, separated by spaces. If specified, login is allowed only for user names that match one of the patterns. ‘*’ and ‘?’ can be used as wildcards in the patterns. Only user names are valid; a numerical user ID is not recognized. By default, login is allowed for all users. If the pattern takes the form USER@HOST then USER and HOST are separately checked, restricting logins to particular users from particular hosts.

Another helpful to set the PermitRootLogin to ‘no’ so that the root account is inaccessible.

PermitRootLogin  no

When these settings have been changed go ahead and restart the SSH daemon.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/sshd restart

There are of course ways around this if other users have access to sudo or the root account. But for the most part it is a good way to restrict user access.

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Hardware support in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) for the Dell XPS M1530 and M1330 is very impressive. However in certain cases the process is not as straight forward as it could be, and it takes a bit of tinkering in order to get it to work. In this article I will go through how to enable audio and video through the HDMI output.

The first step is making sure that the HDMI cable is connected between the computer and external monitor, HDTV, etc.

Video Support

To enable the video you need to go to your NVIDIA X Server Settings manager. This of course assumes you are using the NVIDIA driver on your system.

System -> Administration -> NVIDIA X Server Settings

Select the X Server Display Configuration. Click the Detect Displays button and you external monitor should be displayed. Click on the external screen so that it becomes selected and click the Configure button and select the TwinView option.

Once this monitor is enabled a Position dropdown box should appear. It is best in most cases to select Clones.The screen output will be duplicated on both devices.

Select the Apply button for these changes to take effect.

If your external monitor has a lower resolution than your laptop screen it may help to disable the laptop screen so that maximized video won’t go beyond the borders of your external monitor. To do this click the laptop screen so that it becomes selected, click the Configure button, and select Disabled.

Audio Support

Open the Volume Control manager, usually ou can click on the volume applet on the top GNOME panel.

Make sure your device is set to HDA Intel (Alsa Mixer).

Select the Switches tab and put a check mark next to IEC958. Selecting this enables audio output over the HDMI connection.

If you want to disable audio output through your laptop speakers you can disable them. Go back to the Playback tab and mute the Front channel.

Bugs

1) Enabling the laptop screen as well an external monitor through HDMI can cause X to freeze with certain Compiz-Fusion effects such as desktop switching. Disabling Compiz-Fusion or disabling the laptop screen while operating in this mode fixes this issue.

2) Disabling the laptop monitor will not correctly resize the GNOME desktop to match the resolution of the external monitor over HDMI. However video playback will still be correctly maximized.

3) Audio output over HDMI connection may not work for a specific program even if everything has been configured correctly. Restarting this program usually fixes this issue.

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When you run the find command on the root directory of a system you may want to exclude all network filesystems and confine your search to only your local machine. The benefits of this are obvious as it will save you a great amount of time especially if the mounted filesystem is very large.

Luckily the find command provides this ability with the ‘-xdev‘ or ‘-mount‘ options.

For example:

$ find / -xdev -name myfile.txt

This command will recursively search for myfile.txt starting in your root directory and skip all externally mounted filesystems.

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Many distributions have syntax highlighting in vim enabled with their default installation. In Ubuntu as well as other Debian based distributions, this is not the case. By default Ubuntu installs the vim-tiny package which does not support syntax highlighting or many other advanced features.

You can see by following the chain of symlinks that in the default installation vim calls vim.tiny.

$ which vim

/usr/bin/vim

/usr/bin/vim -> /etc/alternatives/vim -> /usr/bin/vim.tiny

If you want additional features including syntax highlighting you need to install the vim package.

$ sudo apt-get install vim

Now vim uses vim.basic which is what we want. This version supports all the advanced features.
/usr/bin/vim -> /etc/alternatives/vim -> /usr/bin/vim.basic

The last step is to actually enable syntax highlighting.

To enable it for a single session go into command mode and enter this command:

:syn on

Make these changes permanent for every vim session by opening or creating the .vimrc configuration file in your home directory.
/home/username/.vimrc

Insert the following lines.

if has ("syntax")
        syntax on
endif

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This is a bug in Firefox 3 where it launches into full screen mode and completely covers the top and bottom GNOME panels as well as its own title bar. While in this buggy mode Firefox cannot be resized, and can only be closed from within the menu.

File -> Quit

A temporary fix involves pressing F11 which switches you into full screen browser mode and pressing it once again to switch back. Once you close Firefox and restart it however it will continue to have the same issue.

To fix this bug permanently, delete the file localstore.rdf from your Mozilla-Firefox profile which is stored in your home directory. Firefox must be closed in order for this to work correctly.

In your home directory run the following command:

$ find . -name localstore.rdf

./.mozilla/firefox/9m0erq4m.default/extensions.rdf

Close Firefox.

Remove the file that was output by the previous command.

$ rm ./.mozilla/firefox/9m0erq4m.default/extensions.rdf

Restart Firefox.

After restarting Firefox will rebuild this file and your browser should work correctly once again.

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When a file is saved in Windows and then moved to a Linux system the formatting differences can cause a variety of problems. To effectively use these files you will need to change the format from Windows/DOS to Unix. This conversion occurs by simply removing the Windows carriage return characters.

I have explained how to use the tr command remove these windows carriage returns, but when you have a large amount of files to convert this can become tedious. As a solution to this I have written a BASH script to convert all text files within a directory.

#!/bin/bash

for file in /directory/to/convert/*
do
  if [[ -f $file && `file $file | grep text` ]]
  then
    tr -d '\r' < $file > "$file"_clear
    mv "$file"_clear $file
  fi
done

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At certain times while using Gentoo you are going to have to perform a large emerge, for example when you do an update world. It can be challenging to keep track of the status of this emerge with all the output flying by on the screen. It can also become a problem if you want to check on the status from another machine that did not initiate the emerge.

Thankfully you can check the /var/log/emerge.log and get the current status.

Run this command to see the last 10 lines of the log.

$ sudo tail /var/log/emerge.log

You can combine this command with watch and get real-time updates. This command will automatically update every second.

$ watch -n 1 "sudo tail /var/log/emerge.log"

Likewise you can use the ‘-f‘ tail option to get updates.

$ sudo tail -f /var/log/emerge.log

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The ability to remotely SSH into a machine running an Ubuntu LiveCD can come in handy in many situations. The LiveCD supports a large variety of hardware and can be used to troubleshoot system problems on a machine where you have limited or no access. A user with limited skills can easily setup remote access and allow a trusted friend to troubleshoot the system from another location.

The first thing to start the process is to open a terminal. Follow these menus:

Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

In the terminal install the ssh server on your LiveCD system.

$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server

The server is started automatically after installing.

To login remotely, you’ll need to set the password for the default ubuntu user.

$ sudo passwd ubuntu
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

You should now be able to login to the system running the LiveCD. But first you need to find the IP address of the machine so you can connect to it.

The ifconfig command will list your network interfaces and along with it your IP address.

$ ifconfig

eth0      ...
          inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          ...

The inet addr entry is your IP address which you need to log into the LiveCD system. As you an see above the IP address begins with “192.168” which indicates that the IP address is only valid on the local network. It was an address assigned to the machine by the router. This is fine if you plan on logging in from another machine on this local network.

If you need to access the machine from outside your local network you have a couple of options. The first is to remove any router between you and the Internet. This should give you a valid IP address which is accessible from outside your local network. You may also be able to access your router’s administration panel and tell it to pass SSH traffic to the IP address of the LiveCD system. You will then use the router’s IP address instead for the next step.

If your IP address already begins with something other than “192.168” then you are safe as well. You should be able to access the LiveCD system from any location, local or not.

Using the IP address from the previous step you can now log into the LiveCD system as the ubuntu user. Use the password you created earler.

$ ssh ubuntu@<IP Address>

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The process environment consists of all the individual environment variables which are passed on to the program by the shell when the program is launched. This environment can be read and changed by the program during its execution, and can affect how a program is linked or how it executes. For all these reasons it may be important at times to see exactly what the environment contains. The proc filesystem provides the interface to make this happen.

The proc pseudo-file system is used as an interface to kernel data structures. It is commonly mounted at /proc and most of the files inside are read-only. Within proc there exists a subdirectory for every running process on the system identified by its process ID (PID).

Inside each process directory is an environ file which contains the current environment for that process.

/proc/<PID>/environ

This file is limited at this point in time to 4096 characters. Therefore if you have a process with an unusually large environment the data beyond this limit will be truncated.

The environment variable entries are separated by null characters ‘\0‘, which makes it difficult to view the file. The best way to get around this is with the tr command which will replace the the null characters with newline characters ‘\n‘.

$ cat /proc/12345/environ | tr "\000" "\n"

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