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Setting up Gitso on Ubuntu to provide remote support

trevorparsons — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:28:06 GMT

I have quite a few Ubuntu installations in the wild, set up for friends and clients. I support them all -- well, those of them that require support -- using Gitso, which is a nice little front end to x11vnc and vncviewer, with connections tunnelled over ssh.

The only work that needs doing at the support end is to set one's router to forward port 5500 to the machine on which you'll be doing the remote support. Then it's just a case of running Gitso, switching the radio button to 'Give support', and clicking the Start button.

At the other end, the person needing help has to run Gitso and put your IP address (or equivalent) into the 'Enter/select support address' space before clicking start. Some people find this difficult to do. So I like to set Gitso up on their machine such that it automatically connects to my machine as soon as they run it.

To do this, having installed Gitso (using the latest .deb package from the downloads page, fire up a terminal and edit /usr/share/applications/gitso.desktop, which is Gitso's launcher configuration file.

I'd tend to fire up a terminal and do

Code:

sudo vim /usr/share/applications/gitso.desktop

but if you prefer to use a graphical text editor you could click the Dash Home icon (or hit the Windows, sorry Super key) and type

Code:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/gitso.desktop

Go ahead and change

Code:

Exec=gitso

Code:

Exec=gitso --connect example.com

where example.com is your external IP address or, more likely, a dynamic DNS hostname which points to whatever your IP address is currently. I use the services of DynDNS. Other providers are available.

For aesthetic reasons I also change

Code:

Icon=/usr/share/gitso/icon.ico

Code:

Icon=/usr/share/gitso/icon.png

in order to make the Gitso launcher show the correct icon (a purple box with an eye on it).

Save the file. That's it. You might like to launch Gitso once on your friend's/client's machine to check that your support address is entered correctly (it'll come up in the 'Enter/select support address' space), and also maybe to lock the Gitso icon to the Unity launcher, so they can find it easily.

Happy supporting. And thanks to the developers of Gitso for a great bit of software.

What do you install on an Asus eeepc 701 in 2012?

trevorparsons — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:13:43 GMT

My school keeper friend Tony has discovered a stash of half a dozen Asus Eee PC 701 netbooks, apparently an unused donation to the school where he works. These are the original netbook, which we were all very excited about when it came out five years ago. I still have mine, currently running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and although my Android phone has replaced many of its functions, I still use it now and then when I need a rugged, portable machine with a keyboard.

These 701s are as they came from the factory, with the original Xandros operating system. It's still really quick, but I hit on a problem with them straight away. They consistently fail to connect to wireless networks secured with a WPA pre-shared key.

There are apparently hacks to fix this, but the wpasupplicant package link was dead, and I thought it better to go for an up-to-date operating system.

The big problem with putting a new OS on the Eee PC 701 is that its hard disk (actually an SSD) gives you only about 3.5GB of space for everything, if you allow for a small swap partition. That's too little space for Ubuntu these days, even though I found today that the hardware will run Unity quite nicely from a live USB.

So I tried Lubuntu, using the alternate installer. The installation went OK, but after a few seconds of boot, and a quick flash of the Lubuntu splash screen, I got a blank screen and unfortunately no access to consoles from the old Control-Alt-F1 recourse. At least Control-Alt-Delete worked to reboot the machine, so I could try editing the linux line in GRUB, removing

Code:

quiet splash

and replacing it with

Code:

nomodeset

but that made no difference.

Next I tried Crunchbang, which installed nicely and ran brilliantly, using a tiny amount of RAM and storage. So well that I think I will switch my own 701 to this distro. However, I fear that the target users for whom I'm configuring these machines will want a slightly more familiar interface. I tried installing LXDE on the Crunchbang install. The result was promising, but I got into a bit of a mess between Openbox and LXDE, with multiple panels, so I moved on...

...to Gnome 3 (yep) running on Debian Wheezy. I installed this using the beta netinstall ISO for Wheezy, rendered onto a USB flash drive using Unetbootin as with the others. This was a mercifully shorter process than the larger distros, as was the base installation, because I went for the very minimum of options in tasksel.

Having rebooted and logged in as root, I installed the following packages:

gnome-session
x-window-system-core
gdm3
network-manager
alsa-base
iceweasel
gedit
vlc
eog
vim

To get the display manager and network manager going:

Code:

service gdm3 start
service network-manager start

To allow ordinary users to log onto wireless networks:

Code:

vim /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.policy

and change

Code:

auth_admin_keep

Code:

yes

To allow autologin:

Code:

vim /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf

and uncomment / amend the two relevant lines as follows

Code:

AutomaticLoginEnable = true
AutomaticLogin = USERNAME

By way of tweaks to Gnome, I installed the following extensions:

remove accessibility
alternative status menu
status icon fixer
removeable drive menu
quit button

In System Settings, Mouse and Touchpad, I enabled horizontal scrolling and enabled mouse clicks with touchpad, while in Brightness and Lock I turned off lock.

Oh, and to get Flash working (which slightly struggles to play, given that these babies only come with 512MB of RAM and an 800MHz Celeron CPU), I added the following to /etc/apt/sources.list

Code:

deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy main non-free

and did

Code:

apt-get update
apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla

agreeing lazily to allow installation of a package from an unverified source.

The result is pretty good. Everything works (wireless, audio in and out, webcam etc), and I am amazed how well Gnome 3 performs on machines with such modest resources. It would, however, be a good idea to whip out the 512MB installed RAM chip and substitute with 1 or 2GB. That might even make it feasible to do without a swap partition. Also, getting an SD card and symlinking /home to it would be favourite, seeing as there's only about 650MB left on the SSD!

Let's see how this configuration fares in daily use, which I think (hope) will be almost entirely web browsing.

Kate and Phil

trevorparsons — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:51:02 GMT

I use KDE's Kate editor a lot. Recently, it has complained about opening some of my messy HTML files, giving the following slightly opaque error message:

Quote:

The file [whatever] was opened and contained too long lines (more than 1,024 characters). Too long lines were wrapped and the document is set to read-only mode, as saving will modify its content.

I searched for a portion of this text using Startpage and found just one result, in a post to the kde-commits list, pertaining to bug 234475.

Well, I've not yet experienced such hangs when opening files, so I threw caution to the wind and, in Configure Kate > Open/Save, I increased the Line Limit Length from 1024 to 2048.

Now my file opens and is writeable.

For some reason this brought to mind the time a few years ago when the estimable Phil Hands decided he was selling himself short and doubled his day rate from �512 to �1024. Let me see what he's charging nowadays...

Well, Phil's a reasonable guy. In these straitened times, he has held his price, more or less. He now charges in guineas (maybe he always did and I forgot). So that's 1024 times 21 shillings (or �1.05 in the new money), making �1075 and four shillings (�1075.20). Plus VAT.

As far as I know, no 'hang opening file' bug has yet been filed on Phil, which is good, because we want the co-sponsor and maintainer of the UK Debian mirror to be reasonably stable.

More hidden Gnome configurability

trevorparsons — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 14:36:28 GMT

Today a friend asked me how to change keyboard shortcuts in Nautilus, Gnome's file browser. He had looked at System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and found no way to tweak them there.

I dug around and discovered that Nautilus's shortcut configuration is stored in the text file ~/.gnome2/accels/nautilus

A comment in the header of that file describes it as "an automated accelerator map dump". Does that mean I can edit it and have the changes stick? Not sure.

Then I remembered a long-standing and lovely feature of GTK (the toolkit on which Gnome is built) that lets you customise your shortcuts easily within the graphical interface.

In current releases of Gnome (such as Ubuntu), this feature is disabled by default. To enable it, press Alt-F2, run gconf-editor, navigate to desktop > gnome > interface and tick the box next to 'can_change_accels'.

With that switched on, you can now move your mouse pointer over any action in a menu and type the keyboard shortcut you want to assign to that action. The shortcut is set immediately, and appears next to the action in the menu, as a reminder.

The shortcut can be either a combination (such as Control+R for reload) or, dangerously, a single key.

I guess the Gnome developers decided to disable this feature by default because too many users were setting keyboard shortcuts accidentally, and then wondering why the text editor was closing every they typed the letter 'e', for example :)

Resetting gnome panels to default

trevorparsons — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 00:46:18 GMT

I'm sorry to say that the problems with Gnome's panels persist in Ubuntu 10.04 'Lucid Lynx'.

I've found on several different machines that it's all too easy for a change of monitor resolution, or some other tweak to xorg, to trigger an unresolvable ballsup in the top panel. The applet icons in the top panel get jumbled up, and even disappear.

Today I logged in to a freshly installed, rather than upgraded, Lucid system running in VirtualBox, and was greeted with an error window saying that the panel encountered a problem while loading OAFIID:GNOME_FastUserSwitchApplet -- and offering me the choice of delete or don't delete. I chose don't delete, but noticed that the oddly named 'Indicator Applet Session' (the icon in the right-hand corner that lets you log out, suspend, restart or shut down) had disappeared.

I thought I'd just try adding the applet to the panel again, which I did by right-clicking the top panel background and choosing 'Add To Panel'. Trouble is, it didn't put the applet icon back in the corner, and it proved impossible to move it there, because the Network Manager applet, unlike every other panel icon, can't be moved. (It has no Move option in its right-click menu).

I decided to cut my losses and reset the panels to defaults. As far as I know there is no graphical way of doing this (an option for this in Panel Properties would be handy). But this is how it's reliably done in the Terminal:

Code:

gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
pkill gnome-panel

Not a nice thing for anyone to have to do, let alone new users, and especially if you've gone to any trouble customising your panel setup. Oh well.

Sorting out Isa's laptop

trevorparsons — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:45:20 GMT

My friend Isa has an Asus A6000 laptop she bought new about seven years ago. It is the mainstay or her communications and entertainment at home. It had Windows XP on it, which eventually got very slow due to cruft and malware.

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on it a year ago or so, leaving an NTFS partition in place, full of photos. (I tried upgrading to 9.10 when that came out, but couldn't make the wireless chip work with it, so downgraded again).

Isa has got on OK with Ubuntu, and I sweetened the pill by installing Spotify which she hadn't come across before. But the machine had a recurrent problem of freezing up every now and then. I superstitiously thought that might be to do with the NTFS logical partition being on the same extended partition as / and /home -- no, I can't remember how I ended up with that partitioning scheme! -- so I've been keen to delete that for a while. The other day Isa scraped together 40 quid and bought a 250GB external disk from Argos, so we were able to back up the data from that NTFS partition, spin up a live CD and delete the old partition.

That's when the trouble started. Not having pulled this trick for a while, I forgot that GRUB would need to be informed of the change, and the installed system was as a result unable to boot -- grub error 22. I spent quite a lot of time trying to fix things with supergrubdisk, and eventually was able to boot the old system. At that point, if I had known my onions, I would have deleted the old menu.lst and run sudo update-grub which would at least have fixed grub. Ah well, you live and learn.

The only way I could think of to sort out grub was to make a fresh installation of Ubuntu into a new partition in the space freed by removal of the NTFS partition. In any case I wasn't happy with the position of the root and swap partitions, because they were in the middle of the disk, preventing me from growing /home. So, using an Ubuntu 9.04 live CD, I made a new 1GB primary swap partition and a new 9GB primary ext3 partition at the end of the disk, into which I installed 9.04 (sticking with what I know works), pointing it at the existing /home.

I ran the newly installed 9.04 and installed amsn, spotify, gitso (for remote assistance) and the restricted extras, to make the new system functionally identical to the old one for Isa.

I was then confident that I could delete the old root partition. However, I didn't want to do this from a live cd in case I borked grub again! So in order to do the changes within the running system, I enabled the root account, allowed root logins, logged in as root via gdm, killed a few evolution processes that were hanging on to /home (discovered by running lsof | grep /home), and unmounted /home.

Using gparted, I then deleted the old root partition and grew /home into the space (an overnight job as for some reason parted needed to move everything left a bit). That worked fine, and the /home partition is now 44GB instead of 32GB, so there's plenty of space for more photos :D. This leaves /home as a single logical partition in an extended partition, which is an oddity, but I hope that makes no practical difference. (At least I finally understand extended and logical partitions now!)

I ran blkid and checked that the uuids of the partitions were the same as those already listed in /etc/fstab. They were, so fstab didn't need changing.

grub needed to be informed of the changes, though. I did a bit of reading and discovered that if I mv'd menu.lst to menu.lst.bak and ran sudo update-grub, a fresh menu.lst would be generated. (This is the old grub, not grub2 of course, being 9.04). Tried a reboot. WORKS!

My quaint theory of the dodgy partition causing the system to seize up was soon disproved as I encountered a lockup after having deleted the NTFS partition. It took burning my fingers on the power input plug, which goes into the power socket right next to the heatsink, to realise that the problem was probably overheating. After all, it has been quite warm here in London over the past couple of weeks, and Isa says the computer's been locking up more often.

So I decided to remove the battery for a start, because it is knackered and draws power unnecessarily. The battery doesn't provide more than a few minutes' of power, so Isa only runs this machine plugged in anyway. I then removed a cover to expose the CPU, graphics chip and associated heat sink, and used a handy can of compressed air to blow away dust. I replaced the cover and stress-tested the system by installing build-essential and using a cpubuild script from the Gentoo hardware stability guide to compile kernels continuously, which keeps the CPU usage at 90% or so. The fans kicked in and expelled a lot of hot air at the back, and the system ran for half an hour or more without a problem. So my hope is that the cleaning and removal of the battery has solved the problem.

I shall now give the laptop back to Isa and I hope she likes it!

Getting the 'windows keys' to work in KDE the easy way

trevorparsons — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:51:58 GMT

Like most people I have a keyboard with the extra keys that Microsoft introduced, and I like to set these up to do useful things for me in my KDE4 desktop.

At the moment my preference is to set the left key to bring up the often-used 'Run Command' dialogue, and the right key to pop down my Yakuake console.

However, typically if you go to System Settings > Keyboard & Mouse > Global Keyboard Shortcuts and try to set either of the Windows keys as custom shortcuts for any action, you'll find the setting doesn't stick. KDE sees that a key was pressed, but can't map it.

Previously, I've had to fiddle around using xev to detect the keycodes, setting them up in .xmodmaprc, and having xmodmap read that configuration. Not great.

But today I found a graphical KDE way of setting up these keys. I went to System Settings > Regional & Language > Keyboard Layout. There I have 'Enable keyboard layouts' ticked, Generic 104-key PC selected as keyboard model, and 'United Kingdom' as the only entry in the Active layouts list. Selecting that layout, I noticed that the Layout variant drop-down menu was showing Default. I changed this to 'Extended - Winkeys' and pressed Apply.

I am now able to assign shortcuts to these keys. Hurrah.

Installing to a Compaq Armada M300

trevorparsons — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:38:40 GMT

I'm installing Ubuntu on a Compaq Armada M300 laptop acquired as a cast-off from a client.

I tried the regular Jaunty 9.04 install disk, which failed while trying to boot into the live system, and also during the boot of the direct installer.

I then tried the alternate install disk. This failed while trying to enable the framebuffer. The screen slowly faded to white and back down to black, and stuck there.

For further amusement, I tried the netboot install. This also stopped with the same framebuffer problem.

The solution is, when the disk boots and comes up with the "Boot:" prompt, type

Code:

install fb=false

and enter. This will start the ncurses installer without trying to load the framebuffer.

As a side-note, when I was typing the above I found that I the embedded numberpad characters instead of letters. Holding down the function key while typing cured this.

Gnome not as unconfigurable as rumoured

trevorparsons — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:21:49 GMT

I have KDE on my desktop machine at home, but I run Ubuntu (Gnome) on my eeepc. The latter choice is partly because Ubuntu/Gnome looks pretty good on the eee's small screen and is well supported by Adam McDaniel's eeepc optimised kernel and hacks, and partly because it's useful for when someone calls up with a question about an Ubuntu system I've installed for them.

Gnome took the decision to simplify its interface some time back, creating an impression that it's much less configurable than KDE. In fact, Gnome offers a lot of configurability, but you have to know how to access it.

The key to tweaking, I've recently discovered, is the Gnome Configuration Editor, which you can fire up by typing alt-F2 for the 'Run Application' dialogue, into which you type 'gconf-editor' and press enter.

To save precious screen space on my eeepc, I set the bottom panel to autohide, using the panel properties dialogue. But by default there's a half-second delay on both hiding and unhiding, which feels very slow.

To fix this, in the Configuration Editor I went to apps > panel > toplevels > bottom_panel_screen0, and then in the Name/Value section I changed the values for both the hide_delay and unhide_delay keys from the default 500 to a much lower value. Quit and done.

Flash in Konqueror

trevorparsons — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:36:34 GMT

[Warning -- this solution is now well out of date!]

For ages Flash has failed to work properly for me when embedded in Konqueror on my Arch Linux system. It would start to load, look as if it was buffering, but not play, and meanwhile that tab or instance of Konqueror would be eating CPU.

Today I found a fix, as detailed by Mike Arthur.

Install kmplayer. I'm currently running kdemod3, and I had to install kdemod3-kmplayer from AUR, which I accomplished by running
yaourt -S kdemod3-kmplayer

I then added the following lines to ~/.kde/share/config/kmplayerrc

[application/x-shockwave-flash]

player=npp

plugin=/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

having first checked that that indeed was the location of libflashplayer.so on my system.

Then in Konqueror I did Settings > Configure Konqueror > File Associations, and selected x-shockwave-flash from the 'application' section of Known Types. In the Embedding tab I clicked Add, selected Embedded MPlayer for KDE, OK, OK and done.

XFCE borked KDE

trevorparsons — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:43:02 GMT

Curious to try XFCE again, I fired it up. I already had it installed on my Arch system, and it was up to date thanks to regular runs of pacman -Syu.

Well, I quite liked it. Thunar, the file manager, was agreeably quick and susceptible to being driven by the keyboard. The transparency of the terminal was cool. There were a huge number of window manager tweaks available. I only gave up my experiment because for some strange reason I couldn't get any sound out of the machine any more.

Switching back to KDE, I immediately noticed a couple of odd problems. First, my keyboard layout was wrong, the telltale sign being that " and @ were swapped. Secondly, the keyboard repeat rate was not my usual setting. Hmm. I hit alt-F2, typed kcontrol and found that the KDE Control Centre was blank. Empty. No menu items. The same was true for the main KDE menu (kmenu).

Searching the web for "kcontrol" and "blank" or "empty", I found quite a lot of posts by people that this had happened to before. Some referred to this happening after an upgrade, and some even to it happening after a tryout of XFCE. There were some references to the XDG Base Directory Specification, which apparently is something to do with freedesktop.org

What worked for me was exiting KDE, reinstalling the base packages of KDE -- pacman -S kde3mod-complete -- and just for luck recursively deleting /var/tmp/kdecache-trevor and /tmp/kde-trevorXXXXXX/

Panic over. As you were.

Three keys, two weather forecasts

trevorparsons — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:48:56 GMT

Back when the Met Office used to provide the weather forecast in a nice simple page that looked good in the Links text-based web browser, I had an alias set up in my .bashrc so that pressing 'w' and 'enter' on my keyboard would cause links to run and open the page for the South East England forecast. Lightning fast, I knew whether to pack my Gore-Tex in my pannier.

Nowadays the Met Office's forecast page comes up a useless mess in links.

Never mind. Today I worked out how to press a similarly lazy key combination to bring up the forecast -- no, actually two forecasts -- in a graphical web browser.

Run konqueror. Bring up the Met Office forecast. Press control-t to get a new tab. Bring up the Metcheck forecast. Go to Settings, Configure View Profiles. Type in a new profile name 'weather'. Tick the two tick boxes (save urls and open maximised) and save. Now when konqueror is called with the view profile 'weather', it'll bring up those two forecasts for me.

Now to set up a hotkey to do that. Start the K Menu Editor (available by right clicking on the K Menu button). Make a new item, call it 'weather forecasts' or something. Put 'kfmclient openProfile weather' in the command field. Click the button that says 'None' to the right of the words 'Current shortcut key:'. Press a suitable combination of keys (mine is control-alt-w). Save your changes (File, Save) and exit. Test.

Admittedly it takes about 15 seconds for konqueror to start and load up the pages, as compared to less than a second for links. Then again, I get two forecasts and some charts. That's progress.