Dual Screen Ubuntu – Windows XP with Synergy

Truly, i cannot believe i had missed this piece of software up until a few weeks ago.
Here’s the description from the official page:

Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Says it all, and was exactly what i was looking for.

Synergy works with a client server architecture. The box that i mainly use, runs Ubuntu 8.04, and i will be using this one as a server. The other machine, that i want to share the input devices with , is my laptop, that i will be booting into Windows XP. This one will be the server.

Remotely monitoring MySql databases with Mytop and Terminator

When finding yourself maintaining Mysql servers within a cluster, network, or even further spread out, it becomes very handy, for monitoring purposes, to take a peak at the activities of Mysql.

A very useful little tool that helps doing this, is MyTop

mytop is a console-based (non-gui) tool for monitoring the threads and overall performance of a MySQL 3.22.x, 3.23.x, and 4.x server. It runs on most Unix systems (including Mac OS X) which have Perl, DBI, and Term::ReadKey installed. And with Term::ANSIColor installed you even get color. If you install Time::HiRes, you’ll get good real-time queries/second stats. As of version 0.7, it even runs on Windows (somewhat).

The source can be found on the official page. For ubuntu, the package is in the repositories, and this is the case we’ll be talking about.

Java support and latest Flash for Konqueror on Amd64

A few days ago i installed Konqueror on a Ubuntu 64bit machine, upon request.

The installation went smooth (why not?). The issue came up while attempting to get Flash and Java to work.
The workaround was fairly simple.

Java
After installing Java, the trick is done by giving Konqueror the absolute path of the executable:

Konqueror -> Settings ->Configure Konqueror -> Java & Javascript

and set (in my case) to /usr/bin/java

Flash

Open a shell window and type:
sudo apt-get install konqueror-nsplugins flashplugin-nonfree

Konqueror -> Settings ->Configure Konqueror -> Plugins.->Scan for new plugins

Restart Konqueror.

Enabling Desktop Effects for Ati Radeon Xpress 200M on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

To make sure that this is the model of your graphics card, on a terminal window and type:

lspci | grep -i vga

The output should be similar to this :

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)

Now we need to install the fglrx driver:

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx

Enable the Ati driver from the System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers.

Reboot the system, open a terminal window and type:

fglrxinfo

The output should be the following:

display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon Xpress Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7412 Release

That’s it.

Configuring Windows Media Center Remote control for Elisa on Ubuntu 8.04

Hardware used:

Windows Media Center Remote (usb, 2nd model)
Hewlett Packard Easynote R0933 Laptop

Software used:

Ubuntu 8.04 Website
LIRC Website
Elisa Media Center Website

Before we begin, it would be a good idea to check your remote model.
Use this documentation over here.

Hardy On Acer Aspire 3680

Today did an installation of Ubuntu 8.04 on an Acer Aspire 3680, which up until this point was used as a Windows machine.

Turns out this model too has the Atheros AR5007EG (AR242x ) installed.
The same as the Aspire 5315.

In previous post i had described a fix for this card using ndiswrapper.
The same instructions are valid this time too.

Here’s the link : /hardy-on-acer-aspire-5315/

Video Surveillance system on Ubuntu 8.04 with Zoneminder

In this scenario we will be using:

Hardy Heron ( Ubuntu 8.04 )
Packard Bell Easynote R0933
ZoneMinder 1.22.3 website
Panasonic BL-C1 network cameras

It is assumed that the machine is a fully working Lamp server.
If you don’t have that yet, here’s a quick setup.

First we need to install a few libraries to support Zoneminder :

sudo apt-get install libarchive-tar-perl libmime-perl libstdc++6 libjpeg62 ffmpeg
libarchive-zip-perl zlib1g libdate-manip-perl libwww-perl libdevice-serialport-perl

Afterwards, we grab the latest .deb from the repositories
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/net/zoneminder

Enable Remote Desktop on Ubuntu from command line

On some of the workstations i happen to use, at times it’s neccessary to have Remote Desktop enabled.
Here’s a quick and dirty way to turn it on and off.

sudo gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

To disable it set it to false.

In a similar way you can enable disable the confirmation request:

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/prompt_enabled false

LAMP ( Linux, Apache, MySql, Php ) Server on Ubuntu 8.04

In a post, a few days ago, i described how i had to restore and reinstall my system.
Meaning daily, i’ve been finding some of the software i need and reinstalling it.

So here i found myself needing to make use of a Lamp server on my laptop.
There’s literally thousands of guides about how to achieve this. Fact is that, on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron ), it can be reduced to a few easy steps, and all the trick is done.

Once more, for the sake of clarity, and to spare some time:

Install mysql
sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.0

Install Apache2
sudo apt-get install apache2

Install php and the apache module for it
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Reboot apache (very important)
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

PhpMyAdmin, if you need it
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

That’s all folks!

Custom made Ubuntu system image

In one of the previous post i described how to get the Atheros wifi card of a Acer Aspire 5315 to run correctly under Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.

That was the biggest issue and got resolved, plus i also noticed that Ubuntu was running like a charm on these machines. So why not wipe out the whole Linpus installation ? 🙂

Redid the whole process altogether with the ndiswrapper procedure. Got Skype and aMsn to correctly work with sound and video from the builtin webcam. So it’s all peaches. The only thing is that i have to do this procedure for all laptops now.