Ubuntu

After upgrading to Natty Narwhal I couldn’t connect to my Linux based jump host (connected via VPN): OpenSSH_5.8p1 Debian-1ubuntu2, OpenSSL 0.9.8o 01 Jun 2010 debug1: Reading configuration data /home/alj/.ssh/config debug1: Applying options for * debug1: Applying options for smallpox.xxx.dk debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config debug1: Applying options for * debug1: Connecting to smallpox.xxx.dk [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] port 22. debug1: Connection established. debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_rsa type -1 debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_rsa-cert type -1 debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_dsa type 2 debug1: Checking blacklist file /usr/share/ssh/blacklist.DSA-1024 debug1: Checking blacklist file /etc/ssh/blacklist.DSA-1024 debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_dsa-cert type -1 debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_ecdsa type -1 debug1: identity file /home/alj/.ssh/id_ecdsa-cert type -1 debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_5.5p1 Debian-4ubuntu4 debug1: match: OpenSSH_5.5p1 Debian-4ubuntu4 pat OpenSSH* debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0 debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.8p1 Debian-1ubuntu2 debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received debug1: kex: server->client aes128-ctr hmac-md5 [email protected] debug1: kex: client->server aes128-ctr hmac-md5 [email protected] debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REQUEST(1024<1024<8192) sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_GROUP Read from socket failed: Connection reset by peer The key seem to be that Natty uses OpenSSH 5.8p1 – This problem seem to affect clients newer than 5.7p1, when connecting to older servers. And the problem seem to be restricted to connecting through some firewalls, I have no problem on my home network and when connecting to hosts running iptables. ...

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 10.10 the wireless broadband connection seemed to be available from time to time – and having recently upgraded to Natty (11.04) I decided to see if I could get it to work again. ...

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 ...

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. ...

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.

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. ...

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 10.04, which has Terminator 0.14. ...

I’m not going to dwell on the subject – The Ubuntu Design team (and in the end Mark Shuttleworth) decided to change the titlebar button layout as part of the new Light GNOME theme (which is a really nice theme); for more information read this article Being the good Ubuntu fanboy that I am, I have really tried to embrace this new layout – But every time I move the mouse pointer to the right side of the window only to find the close button missing, I grew increasingly frustrated. ...

I decided to upgrade my laptop to 10.04 beta 1. When the update was done (something I had to do at home because the damn Update Manager does not work with proxies, at least not when running it manually) I was left without a working Xorg configuration, apparently because the fglrx (non-free) ATI driver did not support the x-server used in Lucid. According to the release notes, the fix is the use the open source driver (ati) instead. ...

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). ...