Alter Ego

Well, in Windows you usually do this:

ipconfig /all

They call it the ipconfig command, but in truth, you can never config-ure anything with that command. In Ubuntu, or any other Linux distro in particular, you simply do this to get your gateway IP.

netstat -r | grep default

or you can also do...

ip neigh

The latter is a lot faster though.

Useful when someone needs to configure their IP statically/manually.

There's been a security vulnerability in Ubuntu Linux namely versions 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04 LTS. For more information, read here.

Here, are steps that you can take to prevent your machine from being exploited.

Level 1 is the brand I trust when it comes to a wireless router. Reason is; its cheap and it works. When my first Level 1 router got struck by lightning, I simply bought another one; the exact same one. And that one too got struck by lightning, crap.

Now I am running on a backup router supplied by my brother. Not sure how long I can use this one though.

And to make it worse, my trusty Ubuntu 64-bit desktop is down. Apparently, the network port is FUBAR-ed by the lightning somehow. The device can still be detected in Ubuntu. I am going to try to install a PCI network card. Actually, I did try last night, but it didn't work out as well as I thought. Ubuntu just refused to cooperate. Since I will be gone until Saturday before I can start working on it again, my Ubuntu 64 will just have to wait for me until then.

Man, just when I was thinking of getting a 500GB HDD, and then this happened.

With the coming of Ubuntu 8.04 (or Hardy Heron), with it comes Pulseaudio. If you have noticed, if you use VLC to play your videos, you will notice that you cannot play more than 1 video at any 1 time. The second video of your playback (while having the first one still running in the background) will not have any sound.

So, what gives?

Well, you need the Pulseaudio plugin for the VLC. To install it...

Now that the plugin is installed, you need to set the VLC audio preference to use the new plugin.

Launch VLC Media Player by going to Applications > Sound & Video > VLC Media Player.

Go to Settings > Preferences.


Under Audio, click on the Output Modules submenu, and then click on Advanced Options checkbox at the bottom of the screen.

Now, choose Pulseaudio audio output from the list box for the Audio Output Module. Click on Save.


VLC Media Player should now play nicely with Pulseaudio. This should work for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 8.04.

And to think that my life couldn't get any better, man I was dead wrong.

I have been looking for a way to get webcam to work; and I want it to be as painless as possible. No installation of weird drivers or running any weird scripts, I wanted things to be as smooth and as painless as possible.

I just got a tip from someone that Skype works like a charm. So I went off to Skype's website and download it. I chose the Linux version for Ubuntu 7.04+ (I am currently on Ubuntu Hardy Heron Release Candidate).

I am trying to install it on a 64-bit but the application is 32-bit, so you gotta do a --force-architecture to get it to install flawlessly. So this is exactly how I did it.

1. Browse to where you downloaded the DEB file.
2. If you are on 32-bit Ubuntu, no problem then, just double click the DEB file and Ubuntu will awesomely resolve the dependencies for you and download the necessary packages. You are done, so go have fun.
3. For 64-bit users, we need to put in a little bit of effort, just a little. Its painless. First, install these 2 dependencies.

4. Once that is done, do this to install.



... or whatever your DEB filename is.

That's it! Make sure that your webcam is already connected, log in and check out the Options, go to Video Devices, and Click on the Test button, and.... TADA!

Ubuntu, I am loving it. Do add me! Please add an introduction message so that I know who you are. ID is teslarage ;)

I have just finished doing some troubleshooting on my Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron Beta (talk about Betas, I really love to be on the bleeding edge (read: love looking for trouble by using unstable software) ). Anyway, that's the fun I get for being a geek, thank you very much.

So, there I was sitting in front of my desktop wondering what the hell is going on with my Firefox.

First thing I realize, my bookmarks are gone. That's not good. I love my bookmarks.

Second, the Google search box ain't working. You input some random words and press Enter and nothing happens. This is terrible, I love Firefox because of that search box.

I went through every single folder in ~/.mozilla and still couldn't find anything wrong. I even did a chmod 777 * and still things remained the same.

Hmm.

Okay, let's go safe mode.

Still nothing works!!

*&@(#^&@#%^*)&@^#%)&*#@*%@#$

Out of nowhere I simply typed in



And as expected, Ubuntu would display my current hdd space and guess what...



Doh! I used up everything! I went through some stuffs and deleted some videos I downloaded off the net, did a



and then



and tada! My Firefox is back with its full glory; bookmarks and search engine all working again.

Now I know that Firefox needs some hdd space to run properly! :D

Lesson of the day: Get that WD 500GB SATA 16MB hard disk. Yes, go get them. Get 2 of them. Then I can join that Terabyte Club. And oh, bragging rights.

On 64-bit, when trying to use Qemu with KQemu (Qemu accelerator - you will want this), instead of using:

... do this and you should be able to get Full Acceleration with KQemu.



I have highlighted the difference in bold.

Because of this, qemu-launcher is utterly useless; as when you click on the Launch button, it will actually use qemu instead of qemu-system-x86_64; which will not work with the option -kernel-kqemu. If you are on 32-bit, then any part of this post shouldn't be a problem for you.

For more info on getting Qemu and KQemu to work with your Ubuntu, please refer to here. This was how I got Windows XP Pro up and running on top of Ubuntu :)

I've just installed the latest Alpha version of the next and upcoming Ubuntu. So far everything is working fine. Firefox 3 Beta 4 is awesome; web surfing is so much faster, and it runs on less memory (making my 4GB worth of memory seems... worthless :P)

I managed to install Flash and got it working via apt. So from now on, I guess I will be posting more howtos on this version of Ubuntu soon. Meanwhile, check out the screen shot; if you want to see more, please tell me :D

Btw, I installed the 64-bit version since I am on my desktop running on an Intel E2160. Here is my desktop specs, just in case you are interested to see what hardware I am using this Alpha on.

Motherboard: Gigabyte EP35-DS3
Processor: Intel E2160 1.8GHz (overclocked to 3.2GHz)
HDD: A very old 40GB PATA HDD
Graphics: XFX 7900GT VIVO Edition

Update (May 6, 2008): The best way to install Flash Player for both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu is to use this command:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

At time of writing, I am running on the latest Ubuntu, the Gutsy Gibbon (7.10).

When I first the launched Firefox from Ubuntu and went off to a flash-based website, I got stuck as I don't have the Flash Player installed yet. I decided to use the easy way and clicked on the 'Install Missing Plugin' button. It will automagically install Gnash SWF Viewer. Sadly, that plugin didn't work very well for me, so I decided to get one from Adobe.

Here's how you install Adobe Flash Player 9 on Ubuntu 7.10.

1. Download Flash Player 9 from here. Get the .tar.gz version.
2. Close all instances of Firefox.
3. Untar the downloaded file. Just use right-click and 'Extract here'.
4. Then open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal).
5. Browse to where you untar-ed the file.
6. Type this in and press Enter:

sudo ./flashplayer-installer

And you're done! If at any time you were asked to input the location of Firefox installation, by default, it should be at /usr/lib/firefox.