Alex Sleat

Ubuntu 11.10 Proxy Settings

Alex — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:18:38 +0000

Temporary proxy:

Where proxy.addr is the proxy address, 4040 is the port number. Some proxies may require “http://” before the address.

export http_proxy "proxy.addr:4040"
export ftp_proxy "proxy.addr:4040"
export https_proxy "proxy.addr:4040"

If you run this in a terminal, any programs opened from that terminal will adhere to the proxy you set but any other applications will not. This makes it useful if you just want to launch a browser for a quick browsing session but don’t need the whole system to access the internet.

If you do need your entire system to access the network, you can add these to the bottom of “~/.bashrc” this will enable any new programs running and the whole system (after a restart) to use the settings. Essentially ~/.bashrc are commands run when a terminal is opened.

NOTE: If you do this, when you remove them your machine will likely need a restart to undo the changes.

Proxy with login

If your proxy server requires a login, this is an addition of the above however the syntax is as follows:

user:pass@proxy.addr:4040

APT Proxy:

APT (used for system updates) has its own proxy settings, which seem to ignore the above settings.

Where nano is the editor, if you prefer use a graphical one such as gedit, kedit etc.

sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02proxy

add:

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy.addr:4040";

Source : http://naveenubuntu.blogspot.com/2011/09/updating-packages-behind-prxy-in-ubuntu.html

HP Pavilion dm1 (E-450/HD 6320) and Ubuntu 11.10

Alex — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:05:01 +0000

Wireless (BMC4313) Drivers:

There seems to be some issues with the current range of broadcom drivers, there are several options and some barely work and give very poor wireless signal and flaky connections.

Check you wireless card

lspci | grep Broadcom

Output:

03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)

Installation:

There are two options here:

Option 1

You should also be able to use the drivers in Additional Drivers, the “Broadcom STA proprietary wireless driver”, however before doing this you need to run these commands to install the required headers and tools as it seems this step was missed out:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic
sudo apt-get build-dep linux

To check to see if you have this directory do this:

ls /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build

Now go to Settings > Additional Drivers and simply click install on the “Broadcom STA proprietary wireless driver”, reboot and you should experience much better wireless signal and connection stability.

Option 2

If this doesn’t work for you un-install those drivers and download the source drivers and build them from source and this works well, these can be found here: http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php.

Graphics (HD 6320) Drivers:

Installation:

These can be found in Settings > Additional Drivers.

Install and reboot.

NOTE: This driver doesn’t account for sound over HDMI, the sound will continue to come out of the speakers. I’m looking in to a fix for this.

Fixing the “AMD Ubsupported hardware” Watermark:

You’ll probably now notice a watermark at the bottom right hand of the screen, reading “AMD Ubsupported hardware”. While the drivers are working away, they seem to think it’s unsupported. You can either remove the propriotry drivers and use the open source version. Or you can run the following script (found here) to remove it:

#!/bin/sh
DRIVER=/usr/lib/fglrx/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so
for x in $(objdump -d $DRIVER|awk '/call/&&/EnableLogo/{print "\\x"$2"\\x"$3"\\x"$4"\\x"$5"\\x"$6}'); do
sed -i "s/$x/\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90/g" $DRIVER
done

            view raw
            fixwatermark.sh
            This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
          

To run, either right click and save as on the link to “view raw” or copy and paste in to a file and save the file as “fixwatermark.sh”

Make executable:

chmod +x fixwatermark.sh

Run:

sudo ./fixwatermark.sh

(Thanks to Andy pointing out in his comment, this needs to be run as root (I’ve added the sudo above).
Reboot your system and the driver will still be running but the watermark will be removed.

AL lib: pulseaudio.c:331: PulseAudio returned minreq > tlength/2; expect break up – Ubuntu 11.10

Alex — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:49:56 +0000

./blender
connect failed: No such file or directory
ndof: spacenavd not found
AL lib: pulseaudio.c:331: PulseAudio returned minreq > tlength/2; expect break up
Floating point exception

Download and install the associated package to your processor from here : https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/oneiric/+package/python-openal

Restart your computer and the issue should now be resolved.

The 5 Best Features of ICS

Alex — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:23:05 +0000

Data Usage & Data Limit:

Forget 3Gwatchdog, Google have built in a data monitoring tool which is also capable of cutting you off when you’ve eaten too much data (if you want it to). It gives you information on how much you’ve used, what apps have been using it and how much and a handy chart which tries to predict from your previous usage how much you’ll be using over the next coming days.

Static Search Bar:

Some people seem to be in two minds about the new location of the search bar on the home screens, however you can’t hate it too much since it keeps the old 4×4 grid of icons and widgets but squeezes into the top so you can have all those short-cuts you had before, and more if you were wasting 1×4 grid cells with the old search widget!

Face Unlock:

Face unlock isn’t really a feature many people are going to use, in all fairness, but you will impress your friends with it a few times that’s for sure. That is until they realise they can just hold up a picture of you to the camera and get in to your facebook and frape you. It’d be nice to see a more sophisticated face unlock screen but more times than not you’ll be falling back to the pattern unlock because it can’t detect your face. Despite these issue, it’s a cool option to have and could be useful when you need to unlock your phone while concentrating on something else.

Dock Folders:

The dock bar at the bottom of the home screen can now handle folder, drag an icon over one that’s already docked and you’ll create a folder which can be clicked on to view both. While some people may wish to keep their dock bar for quick access of apps and prefer only to require a single click, for others, such as myself it’s an easy way of keeping the home screen looking clean and minimalistic.

Updated Multi-tasking Control:

The new multi-tasking screen or app switching screen is insanely useful, just holding down the home button for a couple of seconds brings up the overlay screen. Here you can see all the apps that are running on your phone, clicking on one will bring it in to focus and alternatively you can slide the app to the left or right to shut it down completely. Google have really given a lot more control over running apps than they have before and in a simple and efficient way.

Heat Management in Linux

Alex — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:40:14 +0000

When you first switch from Windows or OSX to Linux, one of the things you’ll probably first notice (especially if you’re using a laptop) is that it can run considerably hotter than the alternatives. There are a few things you can do to remedy this, however. The following software packages help you keep track of and cool down your laptop/netbook, how much will depend per machine but my HP Pavilion dm1 goes from around 60-70degrees without these tools installed to around 50-60degrees and the same goes for my older Acer Travelmate which dropped from 70-80degrees to 60-70degrees. Hopefully this information will help you shave off 10degrees from your laptop, making it cooler, easier to use and hopefully extending its life a little too!

lm-sensors

First thing that you’re going to want to do is be able to see what the temperature readings of the components (that have temperature sensors) inside your computer/laptop. This can be done by installing lm-sensors:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors

Now you’ll want to run the script which probes all the possible sensors in your laptop:

sudo sensors-detect

You’ll be asked if you want to scan for sensors and what not, follow the on-screen instructions, mostly just pressing enter, if YES is written in capitals this is the default answer and it will scan. After several times it’ll ask you if you want to save the changes, make sure you do and then you’re done.

Now you can see the temperature the sensors are reading by using the following command:

sensors

cpufreq

cpufreq is a utility which scales the frequency of the CPU, either by monitoring the systems status (if it needs more, it’ll get more) or by user controlled settings. This essentially underclocks the CPU while it isn’t in use, reducing power usage and thus heat.

Installation:

sudo apt-get install cpufreq

The best choice would be to set cpufreq to on-demand (default) or to power-saving. Alternatively, if you’re using a laptop or netbook let jupiter take care of it for you:

jupiter

Jupiter is a light weight power and hardware control applet for Linux. It is designed to improve battery life of a portable Linux computer by integrating with the operating system and changing parameters of the computer based on battery or powered connection.

Additionally, Jupiter provides quick access to some of the commonly needed hardware controls like screen output and resolution, WIFI, and bluetooth.

If you use Linux on a portable computer, let Jupiter take the effort out of going mobile.

By using this to intelligently control the CPU frequency when on battery and AC along with the tuning to the kernel and hardware, it can make a huge difference to the temperature expelled by your laptop.

Ubuntu 11:10 installation instructions: here

Graphics Card Drivers

If you have a dedicated graphics card in your laptop, you’ll also be better off installing the proprietary graphics drivers provided by the hardware vendor. While the open source ones do an awesome job of getting the card to work, more often than not they don’t include any control over the frequency scaling and keep the card running at max, along with all those other little features the card has, they’ll probably all always be running.

Nvidia : Link
ATI/AMD : Link

Updating The Kernel in Ubuntu

Alex — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:35:25 +0000

Download the latest from here:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/

The folders correspond to kernel versions and should also include the ubuntu version, for example I chose to update 11.10 (oneiric) from “3.0.0-14-generic” to “3.1.4″, this was in a directory called “v3.1.4-oneiric/“.

You’ll need 3 files (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

linux-headers-*_all.deb

For 64 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

linux-headers-*_amd64.deb
linux-image-*_amd64.deb

For 32 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

linux-headers-*_i386.deb
linux-image-*_i386.deb

Once you have the files, install them in the following order using these commands (of course, replacing the version number for the ones you’ve downloaded):

sudo dpkg -U linux-headers-3.1.4-030104_3.1.4-030104.201111281851_all.deb
sudo dpkg -U linux-headers-3.1.4-030104-generic_3.1.4-030104.201111281851_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -U linux-image-3.1.4-030104-generic_3.1.4-030104.201111281851_amd64.deb

Once that’s done, reboot. Once you’re back use the following command to check that the kernel you’re using is the one you’ve just downloaded and installed!

uname -r

“Look of disapproval” not correctly displayed in Ubuntu / Linux Mint

Alex — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:07:43 +0000

If internet memes such as the following are displaying as squares rather than the faces they should be, it’s because Ubuntu/Linux Mint doesn’t come with the correct font packages.

ಠ_ಠ

To install these packages, simply install “unifont”:

sudo apt-get install unifont

If you’re having trouble in other distros, just search for the unifont package and install in that (might be named slightly differently.)

Setting Up Surround Sound in Linux

Alex — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:21:41 +0000

It’s been a while since I bothered, the reason being it’s always seemed like an un-worthwhile struggle to get it working but either things changed or I was doing something to overcomplicate the process but it’s actually pretty simple to get surround sound up and running on your Linux machine. Now, I’m not going to go in to how to install the drivers for your specific sound card, because there are so many and I don’t have them all and most times on most popular distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse etc) you’re going to notice that the sound card is actually already supported. What I will be doing is showing you how easy it was to get my 5.1′s set up (and the same will be said for 7.1′s).

Step 1:

First off you’re going to want to edit the pulseaudio configuration file to add the number of speakers you’re using, it’s default is set to 2.

sudo gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Near the bottom of the file, there will be a line which looks like this:

;default-sample-channels = 2

The semi-colon is a comment, so this line isn’t actually doing anything unless you remove that. I would suggest leaving that line alone and adding a new line at the bottom:

default-sample-channels = 6

If you’re using 5.1′s the number of channels will be 6, 7.1′s will be 8 and I think you get where I’m going with this? So in this example, I’m using 5.1′s.

Now save and close that file. You’ll need to reboot your system now too, so that these changes will take effect.

Step 2:

So you’re back? Good..

Now you’re going to want to open up the Sound Preferences, usually you can do this by clicking on the little sound icon in your panel, or System > Preference > Sounds from the menu.

From here, you’ll want to click on the Hardware tab. Near the bottom it’ll say Profile: with a drop down box next to it. Here you can select the type of set up you have, as you can see in the screenshot I have an “Analogue Surround 5.1 Output”, yours might be different and that’s cool and if you don’t know feel free to try a few out. Next to that drop down box is a button which says “Test Speakers”, this didn’t work for me so I have to use an online test but give it a try as it might work!

That’s it, you should be done!

OpenNI – error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `System.Windows.Forms.dll’

Alex — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:41:37 +0000

During installing the OpenNi kinect drivers, found here: https://github.com/OpenNI/OpenNI, I came across this error:

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Samples/SimpleViewer.net’
gmcs -out:../../../Bin/Release/SimpleViewer.net.exe -target:winexe -unsafe -o+ -r:OpenNI.net.dll -r:System.Windows.Forms.dll -r:System.Drawing.dll -lib:../../../Bin/Release ../../../../../Samples/SimpleViewer.net/*.cs ../../Res/AssemblyInfo-OpenNI.cs
error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `System.Windows.Forms.dll’
Compilation failed: 1 error(s), 0 warnings
make[1]: *** [../../../Bin/Release/SimpleViewer.net.exe] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Samples/SimpleViewer.net’
make: *** [Samples/SimpleViewer.net] Error 2

To fix it, simply install the following package:

sudo apt-get install mono-complete

Once finished, re-make and make install and everything should be dandy!

Java – .jar Error 127 /bin/sh: javac: not found.

Alex — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:33:42 +0000

If you’re getting a similar error to this while trying to compile java files (.jar) then you’re probably missing the jdk, in ubuntu it’s called “sun-java6-jdk” so just go ahead and install that and all should be good!

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Wrappers/OpenNI.java’
javac -d Release ../../../../../Wrappers/OpenNI.java/src/org/OpenNI/*.java
/bin/sh: javac: not found
make[1]: *** [../../../Bin/Release/org.OpenNI.jar] Error 127
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/alex/kinect/OpenNI/Platform/Linux-x86/Build/Wrappers/OpenNI.java’
make: *** [Wrappers/OpenNI.java] Error 2

FIX:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Alex Sleat

Ubuntu 11.10 Proxy Settings

Temporary proxy:

Proxy with login

APT Proxy:

HP Pavilion dm1 (E-450/HD 6320) and Ubuntu 11.10

Wireless (BMC4313) Drivers:

Check you wireless card

Installation:

Graphics (HD 6320) Drivers:

Installation:

Fixing the “AMD Ubsupported hardware” Watermark:

AL lib: pulseaudio.c:331: PulseAudio returned minreq > tlength/2; expect break up – Ubuntu 11.10

The 5 Best Features of ICS

Data Usage & Data Limit:

Static Search Bar:

Face Unlock:

Dock Folders:

Updated Multi-tasking Control:

Heat Management in Linux

lm-sensors

cpufreq

jupiter

Graphics Card Drivers

Updating The Kernel in Ubuntu

Download the latest from here:

You’ll need 3 files (replace * with the kernel version you’ve downloaded):

For 64 bit systems (replace * with the kernel version you’ve downloaded):

For 32 bit systems (replace * with the kernel version you’ve downloaded):

Once you have the files, install them in the following order using these commands (of course, replacing the version number for the ones you’ve downloaded):

“Look of disapproval” not correctly displayed in Ubuntu / Linux Mint

Setting Up Surround Sound in Linux

Step 1:

Step 2:

OpenNI – error CS0006: cannot find metadata file `System.Windows.Forms.dll’

Java – .jar Error 127 /bin/sh: javac: not found.

You’ll need 3 files (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

For 64 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*:

For 32 bit systems (replace with the kernel version you’ve downloaded)*: