Posts with tag: ubuntu

Trying Gutsy

| tags: ubuntu

I tried upgrading to Gutsy on my old Dell D800 today, it took about 7 hours to download the packages and then the upgrade failed. It couldn't get the screen resolution right and didn't detect my graphics hardware. The CD does it just fine. So I wiped the root partition and did a clean install. That seems to work fine. The wireless configuration was effortless. Now to figure out all the packages I need. I should keep some notes on the changes I make too.

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Editing remote files with emacs and tramp

| tags: programming, ubuntu

Our web pages are in AFS space, which would be great but AFS is a pain. The security policy requires me to login with a password in order to get a token in order to access an ACL protected directory. I decided to see if I could get the emacs package tramp to help me with this. Tramp will use scp to retrieve remote files and to write them on save. How can I get it work with AFS?

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VMware sound on Feisty

| tags: ubuntu

Lots of pages out there address problems people have getting sound to work with VMware running on Linux hosting Windows but none of those solutions did it for me. VMware Workstation 6 insists on using /dev/dsp which for some strange reason I didn't have. I noticed I had /dev/dsp1 through /dev/dsp5 but no plain /dev/dsp. A few minutes fooling with Audacity showed me where each of those played, and /dev/dsp3 seems to play through the speakers on my Audigy 2 so I knew that was the one I wanted it to use. I simply did: sudo ln -s /dev/dsp3 /dev/dsp and that seemed to do the trick.

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Doh! Wireless doesn't work on my R60 laptop

| tags: ubuntu

Wireless actually works except for the campus network. I can connect to the network over at the Inn (by accident I assure you) but our campus network uses WEP and does not broadcast SSID. Something about that kills it. Lots of Googling hasn't produced an answer. Michael suggests trying ndiswrapper.

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My Logitech web-cam is faster on Feisty than on XP!

| tags: ubuntu

I was surprised and pleased to see that CVtypes, our python ctypes wrapper for OpenCV, actually worked with my Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 right out of the box. Later when I started to seriously try it out I was disturbed to see I was only getting 10 frames per second. I tried setting the frame rate with the interface provided by highgui but that fails for the frame rate. Anyone know why? Then I discovered setpwc a command-line utility for viewing and setting parameters on cameras that use Phillips chips. It revealed my camera was set for 10 fps. It was easy to change the setting to 30Hz at 320x240 and now my OpenCV apps run at 30Hz. I was never able to go above 15Hz on Windows XP. This is great.

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Open web links from programs in Ubuntu

| tags: programming, ubuntu

In both Python and VMware I've noticed that attempts to open a link in the browser failed with a very strange file:// link containing double quote characters. A bit of searching revealed this is a problem with the calling syntax from Firefox in System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications. Changing from "Custom" to "Firefox" so the Command is firefox %s fixes things nicely.

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Turn on the firewall!

| tags: ubuntu

Murray kindly pointed out that my ssh port was getting assaulted by various lower forms of life trying to guess a user name and password. Yikes! A bit of Googling revealed firestarter a nice GUI for iptables. A few rules limiting access appear to have shutdown the script kiddies.

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