Big Trev

After seeming all too easy, I have hit a snag with Karmic. Although I like that it seemed to setup OK by default, the sound quality is awful - it’s like a sort of metallic tinny sound, like a tiny pimple speaker being over-driven.

Found a similar problem reported here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1295266

Looks like there’s a few people around with similar issues. For starters, I’m installing the gnome-alsamixer, which enables a bit more things to tinker with. I’ve had a look at this, and it wasn’t much use.

Found this page here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting

aplay -l
turned up about what you’d expect, so it looks like it’s detecting the sound card OK.

And after reading a bunch of stuff, turns out all I needed to do was pull some of the sliders down from 100%! Go through and for all the PCM sliders, put them at about 80%.

Never a dull moment with this Linux stuff….

Following on from my earlier post here, rather than doing 4 upgrades (8.04>8.10>9.04>9.10) I’m doing a clean install of Karmic. And in much the same way, and going from my previous post, I’m going through what I do to get this sucker setup. From what I’ve been reading, this is a bit more user friendly for a GUI/Windows refugee such as myself, so I’m interested to see what’s different! I’m also going to try and do everything through the GUI, as an exercise (I know some stuff is easier through the shell, but I want to see how much you can get done).

So here goes:

1. Install from CD - I’ll assume you know how to do this!
2. System > Administration > Software Sources. Change “Download From” to iiNet (my ISP)
3. Click on the Restricted Drivers pop-up that comes up near the clock. Enable the NVIDIA driver. Restart when done. I installed the recommended one, v185.
4. Set to 5.1 sound. The sound settings have changed, and now longer defaults to digital even though I have analog speakers - Niiice.
5. Setup a printer. System, Administration, Printing.
Click New, it searches for my network printer, found it, and installs the driver. I still like this bit in Ubuntu!
6. Updates. Go System, Administration, Update Manager, and Check and Install updates. This still takes a little while, although since I’m pulling it off iiNet’s servers, I get 600-700Kb/s.
7. For this, I’m not going to install the ms-core fonts, at least not yet. I want to see how I go without them.
8. I’m going to change to a static IP through the GUI this time:
System, Preferences, Network Connections
Changed to static IP, with local DNS server etc.
9. Looks like there’s no way still to do a permanent mapping to a windows share without editing files and stuff, so the way I do this is:
First off, make sure you can browse to the Windows share and connect to it (Places, Connect to Server)
And I’m putting this into /media, so it shows in Places.
apt-get install smbfs

mkdir /media/fileshare

Add to /etc/fstab
//server/share /media/fileshare cifs exec,credentials=/etc/cifspw 0 0

create a file /etc/cifspw, and enter the following (and save it)
username=bigtrev
password=YouGottaBeKidding

Then run:
chmod 600 /etc/cifspw

and then
mount -a

10. I still need winbind enabled, so still do this bit as well (it’s probably something to do with how my network is setup, or not setup as the case may be!)
Add WINS support:
edit /etc/nsswitch.conf
change the line that says
hosts: files dns (and maybe some other stuff)
to have wins in the line as well.
Then apt-get install winbind

11. Install OpenSSH
apt-get install openssh-server

12. Now I’m interested in seeing how Flash runs on this new install. Basically, I browsed to a webpage that needs Flash installed (out of interest, after reading this post, it was http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/). I selected to install the Adobe version from the 3 available, and let’s see how it goes on Youtube (which was always it’s nemesis, at least for me). AND IT WORKS BEAUTIFULLY! Flash video was always the biggest problem I had with this as a desktop OS!

All in all, I’ve been impressed with Karmic - It’s easier to install than ever, and all sort of pretty-like too!

Given my recent Flash woes, I’ve come across this: http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

It’s been around for a while, and I’ve heard of it before, but haven’t got around to installing it until now. You can just add it through the Addins dialog in Firefox, and instead of your browser displaying all the crappy Flash content on every page (which is usually just ads anyway), it replaces it with an icon that you can click to selectively open.

In a completely unscientific test with Youtube, I’ve found it’s at least improved my experience. Maybe not quite 100%, but a LOT better.

I’ve had someone send me an email with an encrypted ZIP file in it, which has got snagged in the Zimbra mail filter. Nice, just release it, right?

Not so easy.

I had a look through the admin console, and there’s no way of doing it through that. I’ve found this thread, which has a couple of methods to try it, and we’ll see which one works!

1. connect to the file system of your server (SSH or whatever)
2. browse to /opt/zimbra/data/amavisd/quarantine
3. The email should be there. When it was quarantined, you would have got an email containing: The message has been quarantined as: virus-DFSjhdshwkhed. That’s the name of the file
4. Copy the file somewhere different
5. Open the file in a text editor. It’ll show the email up the top, with the attachment below. Make sure you do actually want to open it!
6. Install uudeview if you don’t already have it:
apt-get install uudeview
7. run uudeview virus-DFSjhdshwkhed in the folder you copied it to before
8. Open ZIP file. Rejoice!

You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find the answer to this (or maybe I was just asking the wrong question!).

I’ve been looking for software to join a bunch of MP3’s together - basically for mix CDs which end up with a bunch of separate mp3’s, and when played on a player end up with an annoying little gap between the tracks.

Hence, I’ve discovered mp3wrap. It’s available in the repos, and it’s as easy as doing the following in a folder full of the mp3’s you want to join:

mp3wrap -v myalbum.mp3 *mp3
(the -v lets you see what it’s doing)

It seems to stuff the time information (ie. the mp3 goes for over an hour but the progress bar says 3 min something). I’ll have to try it on an iPod and see how it goes.

(update) - looks like it doesn’t work that well - my mp3 stopped playing at the end of the first original track (in Totem). It still thinks it’s 3:30 long… Back to the drawing board…

I’ve got a need to put a bunch of jpegs I’ve scanned into a PDF. Found this forum post: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-808596.html

The thing I need is ImageMagick, which I’m installing from the packages.

Once installed, it’s as easy as running the following from a terminal (in the folder with the jpgs of course):
convert *.jpg MyNewPDF.pdf

I’m struggling to get 5.1 sound in Ubuntu, so I’ve found this site: http://ubuntulinuxhelp.com/enable-51-surround-sound-on-linux-ubuntu-804-hardy/

I’ve made the change to daemon.conf, about to restart and try it.

And it worked!

Just change this line in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

; default-sample-channels = 2

to this:

default-sample-channels = 6

There’s a nice little app I’ve been using for a few years called Keypass. It’s an open source thing, which you can use to encrypt and store all of your usernames and passwords. I started using it when I was still doing my midrange Windows engineer stuff, as I had passwords all over the place, and storing them on post-its and in excel spreadsheets wasn’t cutting it!

The page for the software is http://keepass.info/. It has versions for pretty much all operating systems, including PDAs and stuff (I mainly run it on my Windows Mobile device).

The theory behind it is that it’s easier to remember one really strong password, than a bunch of smaller more incecure passwords.

There’s also a plugin for Firefox apparently, which I’m going to have a play with! I also need to see if I can get it synching nicely between my phone and at home, but we’ll see how that goes.

(update) - the Linux port is available here: http://www.keepassx.org/. It’s even in the software repositories - keepassx.

I just plugged my Sandisk thumbdrive in, and it wouldn’t mount - light wasn’t coming on, no prompts onscreen, nothin’.

Did a bit of a search, and found a command which, when run from the terminal, made it come straight up. I don’t know what it does, or why it works, or if it will work for you, so your mileage may vary. But, here it is:

modprobe -r ehci-hcd

OK. I need to get it so that I can get email/contacts/calendar on my WM6 device (an HTC jigger). I’ve got Zimbra setup, and from what I can see, Funambol is the way to go for a cross-platform mail gateway thingy.

This here looks like the go: http://zimbrafunambol.wiki.sourceforge.net/installation-guide. Funambol Zimbra Connector Installation Guide - how can I go wrong?

I’m installing on 8.04LTS Desktop, as I think this needs some stuff that’s not available by the console.

Have downloaded the Server software v 7.1 from https://www.forge.funambol.org/download/

Download the latest Funambol Zimbra connector version from this link: https://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=219645. Download the .s4j version, not the .zip (not sure why, just following the instructions!)

One thing I’ve found is not quite correct -
cd /bin
./install-modules.sh

Should actually be
cd /bin
sh install-modules

Also, once you install Funambol you need to do the following to make it start automatically (from the installtion guide)
- Open a terminal
- copy the startup script into init.d
cp /opt/Funambol/bin/funambol /etc/init.d/funambol
- Open the script in a text editor
pico /etc/init.d/funambol
change this: FUNAMBOL_HOME=`(cd .. ; pwd)`
to this: FUNAMBOL_HOME=`(cd /opt/Funambol ; pwd)`
- enter this:
ln -s /etc/init.d/funambol /etc/rc3.d/s30funambol

Open the Admin console:
cd /opt/Funambol
admin/bin/funamboladmin

Now, I’ve followed through the other instructions setting it up.

One thing I’ve found is a bit sketchy is how to setup the user accounts. Apparently (and I’ve seen it work) you setup the Funambol client on your PPC, put in the server setting (forwarding the port to your Funambol box of course), and putting in your desired username/password. It this enrols you and the device, but from what I can see, it still doesn’t know which mail to pickup from Zimbra.

Also, one thing I found which might be useful for someone out there is when you hit http:///funambol/ds, you get this

Funambol Data Synchronization Server v.7.1.0

Man=Funambol
Mod=DS Server
SwV=7.1.0
HwV=-
FwV=-
OEM=-
DevID=funambol
DevTyp=server
VerDTD=1.2
UTC=true
SupportLargeObjs=true
SupportNumberOfChanges=true
Ext=X-funambol-smartslow

And that seems to work…

some information here too: http://www.zimbra.com/forums/administrators/20292-funambol-zimbra-connector-error.html

You apparently need to setup your Funambol account exactly the same as Zimbra, and enable plain text passwords for Zimbra. In Zimbra, you need to do this in the Global settings, not the server settings, and I had to uncheck “Use TLS Authentication Only”.

Also, Zimbra needs a restart for this to stick. To do this:
su - zimbra
cd /opt/bin/zimbra
./zmcontrol stop
./zmcontrol start

I’m getting very close now - it appears to be connecting but syncs aren’t completing.

I’ve had a look through the logs on the Funambol server, which are located in opt/Funambol/logs/ds-server. The error I’m getting is the first one on this page: http://zimbrafunambol.wiki.sourceforge.net/common_errors, which is to do with creating the XML file. The instructions aren’t really clear as to what has to go into that xml file… but here goes.

I checked in the correct path /opt/Funambol/config/connector, and there was nothing there (I’m sure I’d copied this in!). So I’ve put it in copied straight off the installation website to see how it goes. I’ve then started and stopped the Funambol service.

The log now looks better, but still no workie! In case it was something to do with the existing mail on my device (which is quite old), I’ve run “Cleanup” in the Funambol client and erased all my old email from my phone, but it’s still not working.

That said, it didn’t get rid of my email. So I’ve gone into ActiveSync on my phone, and unchecked “Email” in the sync settings. Did that work? No… grrr.

I’ve now added my Name and email address into the Funambol client on my phone. We’ll see if that works (dunno why it should, but I’m trying everything here). Nope.

I’ve now deleted the ActiveSync Exchange server settings completely from my phone. And, BOO-YA! It worked! Well, everything but my email did - all the Contacts and Calendar synced up OK. And the only issue with my contacts is it looks like it’s synced up my contacts in Zimbra, and a backup copy of my contacts I had in a different folder, so I now have 2 of everything…

OK, now I need to get mail setup. I’ve decided to RTFM, and I’ve got the Administration Guide handy. From page 37, I need to setup the “Officer” as my mail server. So:
1. open the Administration Tool
2. Double click Server Settings
3. in the Officer field, change from UserProvisioningOfficer.xml to EmailOfficer.xml and save
4. Double-click Funambol Email Connector
5. Click “Add” next to the list of existing server types
6. Name it, and add the host name for your local mail server (eg “Mail”) for inbound and outbound mail. Fill out the other details, and hit OK
7. Click Add next to the list of usernames
8. Double-click the account you want to add
9. Fill out the username/password etc, and save

And it LIVES!!!!

Sorry, this is a bit disjointed, but I hope that if someone is trying to do a similar setup you can follow it.