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One of the better things in Virtualbox over VMware Player is it’s ability out of the box to have host integrated two-way copy/paste.
What do I mean by that? Well, you fire up your guest OS – in my case XP – and you can copy/paste test from an application in XP to one in Ubuntu (or whatever else your host OS is) – and vice versa. Really useful if, as for most of us, you’re only putting up with a bloody awful guest OS because of a couple of critical applications – iTunes and Sharepoint Designer for me.
All well and good, but this exposed a horrible little bug in my latest iPod recovery (see previous post) as I was copying the Apple Computer software from the Guest OS to my spare XP box. A little bug exposing itself in the simple fact that I couldn’t copy/paste files or folders from within the guest OS!
This took a lot of digging around – together with no small amount of swearing – until I happened upon closing down the guest OS and looking at it’s settings; It kind of figured that you wouldn’t be able to use the host/guest bi-directional copy/paste to shift files back and forth, so I disabled this from the “Advanced” tab in the General settings, fired up the guest OS and – voila – all well and good and you can now copy/paste files and folders from within your guest OS to destinations relevant to it.
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Ξ September 11th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Ubuntu |
This raised it’s ugly head as I was trying to link to an existing .xlsx file from an Apache site hosted on Ubuntu Server that I had set up for someone.
All worked fine and dandy from Firefox 3 under Jaunty, but and Windows clients were trying to open the file with their default .zip client – despite seeing the file as a .xlsx.
As it happens, this is the correct default behaviour – as a .xlsx file is meant to be an archived XML file anyway. Despite the correctness of the situation though, it wasn’t too handy for all the Windows user in the office.
The simplest answer lay in updating the Mime types in Apache;
You could update the /conf/mime.types in the Apache installation – however, this would be overwritten should you later update Apache. The answer then, is to update your httpd.conf or, if you’re doing this on a per-directory basis, using the .htaccess file.
The entry that you’ll need for .xlsx is ;
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet xlsx
If you want the full set of Mime types for Office 2007, then here you go ;
AddType application/onenote onetoc onetoc2 onetmp onepkg
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12 xlam
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12 xlsb
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12 xlsm
AddType application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12 xltm
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12 ppam
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12 pptm
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slide.macroEnabled.12 sldm
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12 ppsm
AddType application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12 potm
AddType application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12 docm
AddType application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12 dotm
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation pptx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slide sldx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow ppsx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template potx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet xlsx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template xltx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document docx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template dotx
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(Sort of – anyway)
One of the biggest PITAs of the last few months was SAS upgrading to Exchange 2007. Whilst the Microsoft fan-boys reveled in the increased emasculation of their UI, us Ubuntu users had to revert to OWA – as the Exchange connector in Evolution only supported up to 2003.
With the release of Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 and the associated 2.26.01 of Evolution, there was hope in the air.
The first thing that you’ll need to do is to install the MAPI connector. (If your Exchangebox isn’t running MAPI, then you’re buggered);
sudo apt-get install evolution-mapi
Next, you’ll need to either edit your old Evolution profile or create a new one. On the drop-down list of sources, you’ll see the new Evolution MAPI connector listed.
The first bug that you’ll encounter is that using the FQDN in the server entry will generally cause Evolution to bomb when you click the “Authenticate” button. To remedy this, use the IP address – open a terminal window and ping the FQDN of you don’t know what it is.
The authentication should work now and you will enter Evolution and wait whilst it builds your mailbox for the first time.
This is where the second, and in my case show-stopping, bug appears. The process of building the mailbox for the first time uses a vast amount of memory. My laptop has 2gig of RAM, and that is eaten up and a page-fault (80000405) occurs before the mailbox is built – with Evolution then crashing.
Assuming that your Exchange 2007 install isn’t as big as ours and/or you have more installed RAM than I do, you should get through this point and be up and running.
As a side note, I used swappiness to try and force the OS to page rather than chew up the RAM by typing
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=100
in a terminal window. This had no effect atall, so I’m guessing that someone, somewhere has been a little short sighted in the way that they have implemented this aspect of the Evolution set up.
Your mileage may vary! So please let me know how you get on.
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I’m typing this into Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 – codenamed Jaunty Jackalope.
“How so?” You may ask. “It’s not released until tomorrow.”
Well, to be truthful, I’m typing this into Firefox on Ubuntu 9.04 RC (release candidate). The beauty of Ubuntu over Windows (one of the beauties) is that, in Windows, the release candidate is usually as flaky as hell and your mileage may well and truly vary. With Ubuntu, the opposite is generally true and bearing in mind that the servers will be overloaded tomorrow with folks downloading the production version, I’ve done my usual trick of installing the RC.
For those that don’t know how, simply take the following steps ;
- System -> Administration -> Software Source -> Third Party Software
- Uncheck all entries here
- ALT-F2
- update-manager -d
- Check
- Install update
and that’s it.
So far, so good. On this laptop (Dell XPX M1330) I needed to enable the Pulse audio server to get the sound working.
On the PC at home (Sony VAIO) everything went fine and dandy.
The boot time is absolutely blistering – bearing in mind Ubuntu p***es all over Windows boot times anyway, and I’m just wading through the various features now.
The only thing I haven’t done yet is to enable ext4 – as there are still a couple of bugs to iron out before tomorrow, and I don’t want to hose my file system.
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Blimey, this had wound me up for a while!
All of a sudden, when opening the BBC’s web-site in Firefox, the browser window would freeze, grey-out and then come back again if there was any media content on it. The text and images would render fine and dandy, but I couldn’t play any of the videos, and – as they seem to be relying on these more and more – it was becoming a wind-up.
So, time to have a dig around and work out what’s going on;
First-up, you should only really be using the Adobe Flash plug-in, so there are a couple of places to check.
In Firefox, click Tools->Add-ons->Plugins and see what you’re using to render Shockwave Flash. It should be called “Shockwave flash with a version number”.
Next-up, click Edit->Preferences->Applications and see what’s being used to render the two Shockwave mime-types. Again, it should be “Shockwave Flash”
Next, remove any non-Adobe flash stuff from Synaptic. Click on System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager. If you need to create a filter for installed software, then do the following; Settings->Filters->New->(Make sure only “Installed” is checked in the tick-boxes)->OK. Now use the “Quick Search” to find “flash” (without quotes). You want to make sure that the only Flash plug-in is the Adobe one.
Next, find any orphan or rogue libflashplayer.so files. Open up a terminal and type locate libflash -> the only instance you find of libflashplayer.so should be in /home/<yourname>/.mozilla/plugins (I had one lurking in the .trash). If there are any others, then delete them.
Next, make sure everything is clean. Again, from the terminal, type sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoremove -> this will get shot of any old or reduntant bits and pieces.
Fire up firefox, visit the BBC and you should now be able to play their videos OK.
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That’s a succinct title isn’t it!
Since upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10, I’ve been plagued with a problem encoding videos to .flv format. The video stream is fine and dandy, but the audio content is always missing.
After a lot of digging about, I’ve managed to find a solution, the long and short of which is to use the medibuntu version of ffmpeg. Here’s how you do it;
1.) You’ll need to enable the medibuntu repository
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
2.) You now need to add the GPD key
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
3) Next, remove your existing FFMPEG installation
sudo apt-get remove ffmpeg
4) Install the medibuntu version
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
5) Now install the necessary tools
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libavutil1d libpostproc-dev libpostproc1d libswscale-dev libswscale1d
And you’re ready to go!
Try this to test;
ffmpeg -i -b 700k -r 25 -ab 256k -ar 4400 -f flv -y
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There comes a time in everyone’s life when you “want to be alone”. Maybe you’re surfing t’internet at home and don’t want the man to track your every move. Maybe you’re stuck in China and don’t want to end up in the slammer. What ever the reason, being able to effectively access the web without leaving a trace is pretty useful. To this end tor is a superbly effective application. You can read about it’s principles and practices all over the place but in essence, when fired up, your first internet hop is an SSH tunnel into a cloud of thousands of anonymous onion servers. You are then bounced randomly through that until you emerge at the other end – with a new identity. Follow the instruction below to get it installed and try for yourself;
Open up a terminal window and install the tor package;
sudo apt-get install tor
Next step is if you are behind a firewall. For example, at work or univeristy or something. If you are at home with a direct internet connection, you can skip these steps and go to the privoxy bit. You will need to know the name and port of your corporate proxy server. If you don’t know this then, assuming your inflicted OS of “choice” is Windows something or other fire up internet explorer and have a look at the network options. There will either be a hardcoded proxy and port or a link to a configuration script. If it’s the latter copy and paste the address into your browser address box and choose to save the file locally. Open it in Wordpad and you will see the address and port number of your proxy towards the end of the file.
Armed with this information, you will need to point tor out through the corporate proxy. Iin your terminal type;
gksudo nautilus
Nautilus file manager will open in super-user mode. Now navigate to /etc/tor where you should find a torrc file. Open the file and add ;
HttpProxy my.proxy.server.com:portno
(replacing the values above with your own). I put this line after the first set of comments in the file. Save the file. Now close Nautilus.
Now we’re going to install privoxy. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it adds a wonderful layer of control to your anonymous session;
sudo apt-get install privoxy
The way that this is going to work, is that Firefox is going to use your privoxy session as a proxy server. The privoxy session will be routed out through your tor daemon. The tor daemon – as mentioned – is an SSH session to a random ball of string.
The install of Privoxy will ask you a few questions – one of them being whether you are using tor. Yes, to that and accept the defaults.
If you want to, you can edit the config file for Privoxy in /etc/privoxy – I do this to comment out the logging options. After all, there isn’t alot of point in being anonymous and then logging everything you do to your local machine.
Next, search for the line that contains forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 and uncomment it.
Nearly there now. We just need to install a firefox extension. Point your browser to here ;
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2464
and install the foxyproxy plug-in. Once you have re-started firefox, you will see a status box in the bottom left of the bowser window. Left-click the box and a list of configured proxies will appear. Click “Add new proxy” and enter the following information ;
Under General;
Enabled: Tick
Proxy Name: Privoxy
Animate ….: Tick
Include …..: Tick
Under Proxy Details;
Manual Proxy …. : Tick
Host Name: 127.0.0.1 Port: 8118
SOCKS proxy? : UnTick
Under URL Patterns;
(If it doesn’t exist already)
Add new pattern;
Enabled: Tick
Pattern name: All
URL pattern: *
Whitelist: Tick
Wildcards: Tick
Then OK out of the dialogues.
Now we need to start the two daemons. From your terminal window;
sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy start
You’re now ready to give it a try:-
Open up firefox and go to the following address;
http://whatismyip.com
Note the IP address.
Right-click the FoxyProxy status box in your browser and select the Privoxy menu item.
Refresh the browser and note the entirely new IP address! Note: The onion network is a “cloud” of privately operated machines all over the world, all sharing their bandwidth freely. Sometimes it may run very slowly, sometimes it may run quickly. Live with it. As it is, your tor daemon will swap routers every ten minutes anyway – so you won’t have to live with it for ever.
If you’re at work and want further proof. Try activating privoxy and browsing to a file-sharing or torrent site – most will be blocked, but you’ll find that you can access any site quite happily.
Caveat time: You now have the ability to browse any web-site you want. Please don’t be a dick and do anything illegal. Don’t abuse the ability and don’t think that you’re some kind of 3li7e hAxor
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As I’ve been playing with the system over the last couple of days I’ve come across a superb feature for you folks running Ubuntu as a home system;
Get tired of your kids getting into your profile directories and grabbing your stuff?
Are you a kid who’s getting sick of your parents grabbing all your pirated MP3s?
If that, or something else, is the case, then I’m pleased to introduce Secret Hidden Folders. By following the steps below, you can create a hidden and encrypted folder within your Home directory. The process is linked directly to your userId so, if you’re logged in, you can see the folder and contents but other users won’t even know that it is there. Superb!
The package isn’t installed by default so open up a terminal window and enter;
sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils
this will install the necessary packages. Then type ;
ecryptfs-setup-private
You will be prompted for a couple of passwords and then be faced with your “private” drive mounted on the desktop.
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Odd title?
As posted earlier, I managed to get VMware player 2.5 to open my VM (Windows XP Pro) that I had previously been running on Workstation 6.05. The only problem that I was left with was how to log in to the system.
Being Windows, it required CTRL+ALT+DEL to open up the log-in prompt. However, CTRL+ALT are the Vmware Player hot-keys to release the VM session.
The documentation says that CTRL+ALT+INS should do the job, but I found that this had the same effect – simply releasing the VM session.
After alot of playing around, I’ve discovered that CTRL+ALT+Prnt Scrn is the correct combination to log into your Windows XP VM session.
Enjoy the fact!
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I had another go at recompiling Vmware Workstation 6.05 yesterday – using pre-compiled modules. This time, I actually got it to compile correctly. However, linking it to my copied virtual machine, I got a whole bunch of errors meaing that it wouldn’t start correctly.
Hacked off with all this, I fired up the supplied VMware Player. Other than complaining that it was an old version (thanks Ubuntu) it seemed happy enough to try and load the VM.
I downloaded and installed the current version of VMware Player – 2.5 and, what do you know …… my VM opens and works correctly. Result!
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