Category: Linux

The system bell is one of the most annoying features on many Linux installations. When an error occurs regarding keyboard input, the system will response with an annoying beep. If you use the tab function on the console this feature can drive you crazy….

There are 2 ways to shut up your box:

In order to change the setting system-wide, add following line to /etc/inputrc:

bell-style none

you can also receive a visible response (flashing screen) by setting the parameter to:

bell-style visible

If you want to change this setting for a specific user, go to a users home directory and create the file .inputrc and add one of the above options to the configuration file.

Here is a quick and dirty method for creating an arplist for a squid acl rule from static dhcp.conf entries:

cat /etc/dhcp3/dhcp.conf | grep 00: | cut -d " " -f5 | cut -d ";" -f1 > /etc/squid/arplist


Lets take a closer look at a default dhcp.conf entry for static adressing:

host mypc {
hardware ethernet 00:01:02:03:04:05;
fixed-address 192.168.1.10;
}

• grep will fish out the mac addresses with the identifier 00:
• the first cut will reduce output to 00:01:02:03:04:05;
• the second cut removes the semi column from the output
• output is written into a file

If you are using customized config files, you will need to apply the command properly (duh!)

Including the acl list in your squid.conf

acl mylist arp "/etc/squid/arplist"
http_access allow mylist

The next Leap for Linux – an article in the New York Times

Yet another positive response to the Linux community and once again its Ubuntu and Dell that are bringing the awareness of free software to the masses….

Just bought a random 12€ 5.1 surround pci sound card at a hardware retailer in order to provide my moms ubuntu workstation with sound functionality.

Well, inserting the sound card in the motherboard was just about it…

Finally, plug and play is working the way it always was intended to (since 1995 😉 )

Btw. Gutsy has now reach final beta stage and is due to be released on October 18th.

Free, functional and secure – 3 options that have the potential to blow MS Vista and Mac OS X out of the way and pave out the road to success for a mainstream Linux.

Easy for beginners to install and use, it consists of the Debian base prefered by the veterans in the Linux sector. The german news magazine Spiegel is taking a look at Ubuntu in a practical context…

Day 1: Intro

Day 2: Live Boot

Day 3: Choose a Desktop 

Comment: Ok this guy seems to be a good test subject since he is a real noob. In the article he writes that he obtained a usb wlan device in addition to his integrated one in order to surf faster on the net…

Upgrading a 802.11b (11 Mbit/s) to a 802.11g (54 Mbit/s) device will do squat if you only have a 4MBit Internet connection unless you are actually using technology that is about 10 Years old (regarding original 802.11 hardware used from 1997-1999 with 2 Mbit/s) 😉

Since i will be replacing my laptop pretty soon i am currently looking for a worthy successor for my old Acer Aspire. Critical Factors this time are CPU Power and Hardware Virtual Machine Support (such as Intel VT in the current Core 2 Duo models) and mobile battery life.

I dont really care about the host system since that will not drain the resources from the hardware ( but be sure, the virtual machine lab will 🙂 )

Currently still in the battle are a Lenovo Thinkpad R60 and a Macbook 2,2 ghz (black) which are about the same price (where the Thinpad has a 3D card and the MacBook a bigger Hard Drive)

On the other hand, i might consider getting an Inspiron 6400 from Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled.

I have had quite some experience now with Thinkpads from the field, solidness, data security and well… several small issues that can drive me crazy.

As a testing platform i performed a Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 Horde 5 install which will be going final a few weeks.

Setting up the system was as always quite easy and the first boot revealed that practically all hardware components were working (didn’t try out the fingerprint scanner yet).

Sound was no problem although the default System Beep is very annoying. Lan and WLAN connection worked instantly and will connecting you out of the box if you are connecting to a dhcp device.

The proprietary drivers for the wireless Intel 3945 network card were installed as for the other restricted driver devices (gpio and ATI radeon card) were waiting to be enabled.

The system correctly installed an smp kernel and load balancing seems to be working fine.

Some of the hardware keys were running (try playing with the thinpad-keys packet) such as the volume control and the screen brightness. So after just 30 minutes, i hade a fully operable system with essentials like an office suite (OpenOffice) email applications (Evolution) and a Webbrowser (Firefox 2.0.0.6) running.

So far no drivers required to be installed yet 🙂

The performance test was done overall with beryl and compiz and running pretty smooth with the onboard 3d card.

Jono Bacon, community manager of Ubuntu has just announced the 8.04 release with LTS support.

Jono’s Growing Ubuntu speech @ LinuxTag 2007 

By now everyone schould be getting the connection between the release names and the date of release, so obviously.. it will be released in April 2008 😉

from jonobacon.org

I am delighted to have the pleasure of announcing the Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04), the next version of Ubuntu that will succeed Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10, due for release in October 2007). Not only will the Ubuntu community continue to do what it does best, produce an easy-to-use, reliable, free software platform, but this release will proudly wear the badge of Long Term Support (LTS) and be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop. We look forward to releasing the Hardy Heron in April 2008.

The DesktopLinux.com survey results about the most favored Linux Desktop solution were published today.

The big winners of the Destkop environment are:

– Distribution: Ubuntu

– Destkop: Gnome

– Browser: Firefox

The Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Firefox thingie were pretty sure to win, i am sort of surprised that Gnome outbeats the Windows Like KDE. Standard Ubuntu ships with Gnome – so i guess this is the reason why Gnome takes the lead….

Btw. my prefs are Ubuntu / Gnome / Firefox / Evolution (so pretty close to the winner)

Here is the raw data

Today i took some time to upgrade and enhance our student printing functionalities. As i checked the usual printer queues i noticed that cups was suddenly listing a lot of new printers that were not even on our network. Tracing the error lead to a Mac book on the student network that was running a cups daemon with gimp-print drivers.

Quite odd that a Mac OS X based cups deamon is broadcasting printers to another cups server without checking if the printers are actually availabe.

Ill try to find out more scenarios in which a cups server will include shared printers from another printer deamons.

Disabling the printer search

Browsing off
in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf will disable this feature

1. Get the current linux-nvidia drivers from nvidia.com
2. Instal build-essentia, xserver-xorg-dev, linux-headers-‘insert your kernel version here
   sudo apt-get install build-essential xserver-xorg-dev linux-headers-2.6.x
3. Stop your x.org server
   sudo /etc/init.d/./gdm stop
4. In /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common, add nv to DISABLED_MODULES=””
5. Run the installation script you got from nvidia, it should take you through the installation process. When asked if you want to download a suitable Kernel from nvidia, select no.
6. When asked if you want to auto-configure xorg.conf select yes and reboot your machine.