Frets on Fire with Guitar Hero World Tour (GhWt) on Ubuntu

The last few days i decided to add another trick to my Media Center (running Ubuntu 9.10) : Play FoF with it.
The guitar that i had was the one from the Metallica Edition , which after reading up and down about it, turns out is of the World Tour (GhWt) breed.

Grabbed the bluetooth adapter, the guitar and the software of the cwiid package: libcwiid1, wminput, wmgui and the python cwiid module.

If you are reading this post you must know by now that the GHWT is not supported by the libcwiid1 found in the repositories.
This leaves as an only option compiling it from source.
The source of version 0.6 can either be picked up from
the old location of the project http://abstrakraft.org/cwiid/,
or from
the new location on GitHub http://abstrakraft.github.com/cwiid/.

At the end of this post i will post a script for each one of the options since the sources seem to differ.
The version from Github is meant to work as soon as compiled with GHWT. For me, no matter what guitar script i use it did not.
I will anyway present it as an option for the truth’s sake.

Ubuntu on Acer Aspire ZG5 : Scripts to fix Wifi And Microphone issues

I lately had to set up a couple of Acer Aspire ZG5 laptops with ubuntu 8.10.
(later on this solution turned out to work also for 9.04 and 9.10).
After the installation that went on without a glitch i came to realize that the wifi card was recognized but not configured.
Also the audio input was not working. That being both the front mic and the jack input.

This : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne is a extremely detailed and useful page where i could find the solutions to both my problems.
For entirely different purposes , days after i had to reinstall ubuntu , so i though i need to automatize these procedures.

Th following two scripts are just a collage of instructions found in that page.
Since they spared me loads of repetitive effort in the following installations of other machines i thought i’d share:

Microphone Issue :
Downloads and installs the latest alsa driver : link

Wifi Issue :
Downloads and installs the latest madwifi driver : here

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.

Installing Openproj on Ubuntu

I was looking for a new application to use for project management. Amongst people that i spoke to, and e few web resources OpenProj seemed to be quite a must.

OpenProj by Serena Software is a desktop replacement of Microsoft Project. OpenProj has equivalent functionality, a familiar user interface and even opens existing MSProject files. OpenProj is inter operable with Project, with a Gantt Chart and PERT chart

sourceForge page

Seems to be pretty handy. On it’s SourceForge page though there’s only a .rpm noarch package.
The RPM packet manager is available for Debian-based systems indeed, non the less there are a few complications.

When attempting to install openproj with rpm:

sid@dev:~/Desktop$ rpm -i openproj-1.4-2.noarch.rpm
rpm: To install rpm packages on Debian systems, use alien. See README.Debian.
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - No such file or directory (2)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm


What’s alien?

Alien allows you to convert LSB, Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware Packages into Debian packages, which can be installed with dpkg.
It can also generate packages of any of the other formats.
This is a tool only suitable for binary packages.

Here goes the installation from the Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt-get install alien

Afterwards it’s time to convert Openproj from a .rpm package to a .deb one.

sudo alien openproj-1.4-2.noarch.rpm openproj-1.4-2.noarch.deb

Once the package is created, double click on it, to install with the gDebi installer.

Been using it for a few days now, and i must say, i regret not having picked it up earlier.

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