Ubuntu Natty: Making a Gobi 2000 wireless modem work

In the pre-10.04 days it was possible to make a Gobi 200(0) modem work by installing gobi_loader and using it to load the firmware for the modem. However, with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 (which sports a shiny 2.6.35 kernel) gobi_loader stopped working. Because gobi_loader (according to the homepage) does not support 2.6.32+ I stopped caring and used my Huwai stick instead. Recently one my colleagues noted that after upgrading to 10....

February 25, 2011 · 2 min · alj

Ubuntu Natty: Fixing the "mouse" on HP 2540p

Update: This fix is now documented in the Ubuntu Wiki After upgrading to Natty alpha 2 clicking left+right mouse no longer worked as middle mouse button (also known as Emulate3Buttons). Since version 10.04 (and for real since 10.10) Ubuntu no longer sports a xorg.conf file; all configuration is done through udev and evdev – for some reason the “mouse” (track point) in my HP Elitebook 2540p is detected as a three button mouse...

February 20, 2011 · 1 min · alj

Access your Linux disks (ext4, xfs, ReiserFS, btrfs etc) from Windows

It’s been a while since I last had to run Windows on my laptop; back then I used Ext2 Installable File System For Windows to access data on my Linux-formated partitions. In the meantime a few things have changed: Windows 7 and Ubuntu formating ext3 with a inode size of 256 – none of these are supported by ext3 ifs. Ext2read supports Windows 7 (as well as ext4 and LVM2) but it’s more like a file browser and does not support assigning drive letters to Linux filesystems and since my /home is formatted with XFS it does not help me anyway....

February 13, 2011 · 5 min · alj

Ubuntu 10.10 on Virtualbox

Just a quick heads-up. Virtualbox does not yet officially support Xorg 1.9 (which is shipped with Ubuntu 10.10). According to this ticket the problem will be fixed in 3.2.10. In the meantime, try you your luck which with this unsupported Additions build; it didn’t work for me though....

October 10, 2010 · 1 min · alj

FUSE coolness with mhddfs

Let’s say you have three disks but you wish to share with Samba or NFS clients. Of course you could just mount the disks on three separate mount points and export those. Or you could mount the three disks on three mount points inside the same directory and export the parent directory. The problem with both solutions is you have to “balance” the data among the disks – and it will make navigating your TViX, WDTV or Popcorn more annoying....

May 24, 2010 · 2 min · alj

Tip: Fixing character encoding in Terminator 0.14 (Ubuntu 10.04)

I’ve been using the excellent terminal emulator Terminator for a long time. Terminator sports (among other things) split screen and “cluster support” (grouping of screens, making it possible to type the same thing in all terminals). In previous versions of Ubuntu (Terminator versions prior to 0.14) Terminator would pick all settings from GNOME Terminal, including character encoding (ISO-8859-15 in my case). Apparently this is no longer the case in Ubuntu 10....

March 29, 2010 · 1 min · alj

Irssi notifications using Desktop Notifications and Minivan

I was pretty happy with solution to get notifications from Irssi though it had some shortcomings. A couple of days ago a colleague made me aware of a Perl modules written by another colleague (Anton Berezin) called IPC::Message::Minivan which, it turns out, is perfect for my notification script. Basing the notifications on Minivan combine the speed of using something like Dbus locally (instant notifications) with the convenience of my previous script (notifications over the network, able to handle multiple clients)....

March 6, 2010 · 3 min · alj

Facebook Chat in bitlbee

Facebook now supports XMPP. Yay. Using Facebook Chat in bitlbee is pretty straight forward (I am running 1.2.4, older versions of bitlbee require a bit more tweaking, consult the manual). For Facebook Chat through XMPP to work you need to set a Facebook username. In the &bitlbee channel account add jabber <username>@chat.facebook.com> <Facebook password> account on that’s it. Edit (04-03-2011): As some has pointed out, you need to input your username in lowercase....

February 12, 2010 · 1 min · alj