Scrambled Xvnc Keyboard Mapping on Ubuntu Feisty

This is just a bug workaround:

If you log in through Xvnc (I use it with xinetd) and see the gdm screen, log in to gnome fine, but then after that your keyboard comes out scrambled, here's a quick and dirty fix (you'll have to do this from a console that is working, maybe SSH?):

sudo mv /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.us /usr/share/xmodmap/xmodmap.us.bkup

Of course, this only works if you were using the US keyboard layout. This is not ideal, but it gets the job done in this particular case.

The fix for this is apparently already in the upstream code and should be available in the next gnome update from Ubuntu.

Getting rid of the tooltips in the Gnome panel

Tooltips in the panel seem pointless to me, they hardly ever tell you more information that you can already gather by just reading the menu entry. If you are using Compiz or Beryl and have menu effects turned on, all those tooltips popping up and sparkling everywhere could get old very fast.

Here's how to get rid of them:

Open a terminal and type gconf-editor. This should open the Gnome Configuration Editor. Navigate to Apps > Panel > Global and uncheck tooltips_enabled. Enjoy your tooltip-free Gnome Panel!

Watching Television on the Internet

After making the switch to Desktop Linux, I have finally got around to figuring out what to do for entertainment. Getting DVD media to play was a breeze, perhaps because it seems to be the first thing anyone asks after getting their OS up and running. Of course, we should do our best to push for open formats to replace DVD, but in the real world a little bit of "closed media" is likely to keep people from actively using Open Source everything-else. If a computer can't fulfill the basic human need for entertainment, it won't last long.

My next place to turn was to Television programs. There are a few series that I have enjoyed in the past, and I just gave away my 23" television to free up some space in the apartmet, leaving me with a 13" TV that I have decided only to use for 8-bit Nintendo. Television over the Internet would be a sweet alternative. Some shows are available for "free" viewing on their official websites, others are not.

The shows I think I'm interested in viewing right now are: 24 (Fox), LOST (ABC), The O.C. (Fox), The Office (NBC), Prison Break (Fox) and Veronica Mars (CW).

I will chronicle my level of success in this endeavor here:

I asked my brother "So how does one watch TV on the Internet?" and off the top of his head he referred me to ABC's website. I want to say "well done" to ABC for their episodes available online. They have done a decent job and it seems like Flash player is all that is required, making it a trivial matter to watch their content in Firefox on Linux. This takes care of my need for LOST, and opens up the possibility to some new programs which at the moment don't look very compelling for me, but may be possibilities. The first episode I watched had the same commercial played in every single break. I wonder about the effectiveness of this, and would have rather seen three separate commercials, even if they were all for the same product, simply because watching the same thing three times within an hour is not more productive than seeing it once.

Next I turned to Fox. Obviously I'm a fan of Fox, I have my eye on three of their shows, and I have purchased more Fox DVD box sets than any other show. In fact, it may well be true that every DVD box set I own is produced by Fox. The programs they put out seem to be of a high quality. I looked up the web site for Fox, clicked on Prison Break, and saw an inviting link that I may be able to watch full episodes for free. It directed me to a MySpace page belonging to Fox, which was a bit surprising: I thought MySpace was home to teenagers, not corporations. I observed right away that the site wasn't as clean and streamlined as ABC's, but then I got confronted with a major problem:

We're sorry, but only the following operating systems are supported at this time:

Microsoft Windows 2000/XP (not Vista)
(Intel) Apple Macintosh OS X or later
(PPC) Apple Macintosh OS X or later

Please check back soon for support for other operating systems.

It seems that Fox also has its programs available on iTunes, but I hear they will only play on the newer iPod devices, and the free iTunes software is only supported on Windows and Macintosh. I read an interesting article about "DVD-Jon" and some of his buddies writing some software that would let you purchase songs at the iTunes store using Linux, but I think it only worked for music, and furthermore, it was abandoned and does not work with the current iTunes Store. I would pay Fox directly to watch these shows if I could. So it sounds like I may have to wait until the current seasons of 24, The O.C., and Prison Break are released on DVD (if they are.)

NBC doesn't offer any apparent way to play full episodes from their websites, and if they are offering them for viewing in other venues they are not making this obvious by advertising them in any way. They do seem to offer short video clips and deleted scenes, etc., but I'm not one for spoilers. I will investigate at a later time to see if they offer them through another outlet, but except for my academic curiosity to investigate this at a later time, they would have lost my viewership.

The CW has a full episode feature, which links to this page, but the center area of the page just remains a white box and selecting a series from the right-hand list doesn't seem to do a thing. Right clicking on the white reveals that it is a Flash player. I don't know why it is broken, but I will presume they aren't supporting the Linux version of Flash (I don't know how that is possible), but I will give it another shot later in case they are just temporarily down.

So it looks like ABC wins. Stay tuned for an upcoming article on why even their solution isn't the best choice and why Television producers need to make some decisions in the upcoming years.

Converted from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux

I'm now running Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook computer. I have named this computer Mercury (as opposed to Pericles, the Ubuntu web server that I've been writing about thus far.)

There were a couple pieces of hardware that I had to tinker with in order to get it working or optimized:

• Wireless: BCM4318 AirForce One 54g 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller
• Graphics: Intel Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller

Here is a list of the software I'm running on the system so far. This list isn't exhaustive, but basically includes things I frequently use and things that I had to deliberately install:

• Gnome (desktop environment)
  
• Mozilla Firefox (web browser)
  
• Evolution Mail
  
• Kopete (with MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and IRC connections.)
• Tomboy Notes (a Wiki-like sticky note applet)
  
• gnubiff (a tray notification tool to make a penguin dance if I have any email.)
  
• xmms (music player)
  
• Totem xine (movie player)
  
• Codecs for virtually all Windows and Macintosh audio and video formats and full DVD playback.
• wine (a windows API replacement layer to support a few windows apps that I still use.)
  
• VirtualDub (a GPL'ed video manipulation program for Windows. I run this through wine.)
  
• Internet Explorer 6 (I use this to test the websites I develop for my business. It also runs through wine, and I installed it using the very convenient IEs4Linux script.)
  
• vmware player (I have it set up to boot off of a 6GB raw SCSI partition, with the MBR and other partitions mapped to zero so they cannot be affected by the virtual machine. I use this to run a few design tools that I don't have functional Linux equivalents for yet.)
  
• Compiz (eye candy for Linux.)
  

I will be following this up with a series of posts to explain how I have already (or will yet) accomplish any non-trivial configuration tasks.

Ubuntu Edgy Eft Xvnc Disconnect Problem

Diagnosis of Problem:

I installed the Automatic Updates on Ubuntu Edgy Eft recently, sometime around January 06 (2007-01-06), and after a reboot, my Xvnc running through xinetd stopped receiving connections. It disconnects immediately after connecting, or immediately after receiving the password. Log files turn up almost nothing, there is a "xinetd[nnnn]: warning: can't get client address: Transport endpoint is not connected" error showing up in /var/log/daemon.log and /var/log/syslog and upon telnetting to the vnc port I received nothing but RFB 003.008 (the usual VNC protocol greeting) followed by an immediate drop of the connection. xinetd does pass the connection to VNC, we know this because the greeting is given, but an examination of the running processes will not show Xvnc in the list because it closes immediately after opening.

Running Xvnc server manually with the appropriate options and connecting to it with vncviewer resulted in a gray screen (so-called "root-weave") with an X or a watch cursor on it, and the gdm (Gnome) session never starts.

The Solution:

Temporary solution: This happened because of an upgrade in the vnc4server package. Run synaptic package manager, search for vnc4server, click on it, go to Packages, Force Version and choose the previous version. Downgrade to the previous version and you should be alright for now. Wait until the next version comes out before you attempt to update this package again.

How I Found the Solution:

It took me many hours, but I found the answer on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vnc4/+bug/78282

The person who first reported the bug incorrectly listed the date of the upgrade as 2006-01-06 (happy new year feranick).

I hope this helps! Drop a comment to let me know if this post eased your pain.

Welcome to Your Linux Filesystem

If you're trying Linux (or Unix) for the first time, you may be alarmed when you first see the filesystem. Windows users (who install fresh) are used to seeing something like this:

Volume in drive C has no label.
Voume Serial Number is EXPE-NSIV

Directory of C:\

12/05/2006 04:04 AM             0   AUTOEXEC.BAT
12/05/2006 05:34 AM    12,286,482   AVG7QT.BAT
12/05/2006 04:13 AM           241   boot.ini
12/05/2006 04:04 AM             0   CONFIG.SYS
12/05/2006 05:28 AM         <dir>   Documents and Settings
12/06/2006 01:22 AM   267,964,416   hiberfil.sys
12/05/2006 04:04 AM             0   IO.SYS
12/05/2006 04:04 AM             0   MSDOS.SYS
08/03/2004 01:38 PM        47,564   NTDETECT.COM
08/03/2004 01:59 PM       250,032   ntldr
12/06/2006 01:21 AM   402,653,184   pagefile.sys
12/06/2006 10:44 PM         <dir>   Program Files
12/05/2006 05:26 AM         <dir>   RECYCLER
12/06/2006 11:28 PM         <dir>   WINDOWS
      10 File(s)  683,201,919 bytes
       4 Dir(s)   984,405,442 bytes free

The picture in Linux is very different:

bin   cdrom  etc   initrd      lib         media  opt   root  srv  tmp  var
boot  dev    home  initrd.img  lost+found  mnt    proc  sbin  sys  usr  vmlinuz

As one continues to use Windows, the root directory of your boot drive continues to gain a few additional files (fewer in the latest versions than in the past, mostly all you'll see is logs now) In Linux, the root directory almost invariably remains pristine without much variation from the 22 items listed above. I never had anyone bother to explain these to me, so I thought this might be a useful subject to cover for those becoming acquainted with Linux for the first time.

/bin/ ... This is like the Windows folder (or more accurately, like the old DOS folder), in that it holds the basic system tools that all users may access. In Linux, these are considered "essential" programs.

/boot/ ... This folder holds the files for the boot loader. It is similar to ntldr on a Windows system.

/cdrom/ ... This is just a convenient symbolic link to /media/cdrom (see below)

/dev/ ... This folder holds devices, which in Linux are treated like files. The items listed in here are visualized in a method similar to serial ports (COM1, COM2) and parallel ports (LPT1) in Windows or DOS.

/etc/ ... System-wide program settings are held here. This is similar to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive in the Windows Registry, or the "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data" folder. For newer and more elaborate packages, a specific subdirectory within /etc is usually created to hold system-wide settings for the package.

/home/ ... Each local user gets a home directory here. This is similar to the "Documents and Settings" folder in Windows, with the root of each home directory being considered similar to the Windows "My Documents" folder.

/lib/ ... *.so Libraries (sets of compiled functions in shared object files, used by many programs) These are like the *.DLL files found in the C:\WINDOWS\System or C:\WINDOWS\System32

/lost+found/ ... This is where files recovered during a file system check (fsck) are placed. I like to think of it as similar in its temporary nature to the Windows RECYCLER folder, but it isn't really the same purpose. (Windows places deliberately deleted files in RECYCLER until you empty the Recycle Bin.) In reality, the Windows chkdsk utility saves recovered fragments directly in the root.

/mnt/ ... This is where mount points go for temporarily mounted filesystems. On Windows, you would use A: B: and possibly D: E: or F: for this sort of storage, but in Linux drives get mapped to a mountpoint in the root ("/") filesystem.

/media/ ... This is similar to /mnt, but specifically for removable media such as a CD-ROM drive which is typically found in /media/cdrom. On a Windows system, this would be found as D:, E:, or F:.

/opt/ ... Optional software packages are installed into this folder. It is similar to "Program Files" on a Windows system. In reality, this folder is slightly confusing and hardly used, it serves arguably the same purpose as /usr/local (see below)

/proc/ ... This holds a virtual filesystem with kernel and process information. There really isn't a Windows equivalent, but it gives access to information somewhat similar to what can be found in the Microsoft "System Information" tool (click Start, Help and Support. Click Support button on the Toolbar, under Tools and Links on the left side click Advanced System Information, and then in the details pane click View detailed system information. They make this really easy to get to. To do the same thing in Linux you type cd /proc)

/root/ ... This is the home directory for the main system administrator account. In Linux, the administrator is named root (because they have access to the whole filesystem from the root down). Root shouldn't represent an individual, but is an account used during administrative tasks by utilities such as sudo or su. Thus, the administrator will also have their own personal account, as well.

/sbin/ ... This folder is similar to /bin/ but contains utilities specifically for tasks restricted to the superuser (i.e. root, the system administrator). See also /usr/sbin, and /usr/local/sbin.

/tmp/ ... Temporary files. This is similar to C:\TEMP, C:\TMP, or "C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Temp" on a Windows system.

/usr/ ... This contains "user" files, meaning non-system files (the system should be able to boot without these files). It contains another bin, lib, and sbin with like meanings to their root level counterparts, excepting that the files are non-essentials. It also contains include (standard include files) and src (kernel source code), which are useful for developers, X11R6 which is where the graphical "X Window System" resides, and local where another set of bin, include, lib, sbin, share, and src reside which are considered specific to this single host (machine). I should point out that /usr is limited to read only data. Host specific (machine specific) data is stored in /usr/local rather than directly in /usr.

/var/ ... Variable files. This includes logs, databases, websites, and temporary email files. There is another tmp folder in here, which is preferred in lieu of /tmp when the system is in multiuser mode.

I will soon post a follow-up article on Filesystem Permissions in Linux.