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.

Today is April 24th, 2008, and the second LTS of Ubuntu has been released! I am not that excited though since I have been using it for quite some time now. There's still a few issues (I think) with Pulse Audio, but the developers are hard at work to get it fix; so no worries peeps.

Look what I found on Ubuntu.com...


I guess everyone is upgrading!

The easiest way to upgrade from Gutsy is to open up a terminal, and then (make sure your Gutsy is fully updated first yea)

... and then you are off. Do it before you go to sleep, the upgrade will surely take a while.

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.

There are times when you need to remove extra kernels from your Ubuntu installation. For instance, when you are a beta tester of the upcoming Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Every time there is a kernel update, the previous kernel is kept as a fallback for you should you run into any showstopper bug while using the new kernel. If you are like me, you will end up with these bunch of kernels:

That is just too much, isn't it? So how do you delete them? I wouldn't recommend doing an 'rm' command here as that would screw up other things in Ubuntu. What you should do is:



When you check your /boot again, you will notice that the kernel you want to remove is gone:



So, that's how you do it, just like removing a package in Ubuntu :)

If you need to check what other kernels you have installed, do this:



And that is how you manage your kernels in Ubuntu :)

Believe it or not, I suck at X configurations. I really do. I don't have the time to study more about X so I took the easy way out.

1. Connect the projector to your laptop.

2. Do this in command line.

3. Just press Enter through every screen.

4. Restart X for the changes to take effect by pressing CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE.

5. Log in again as you always do.

6. And finally, the projector will automagically display your Ubuntu desktop and you can show off your desktop effects to your co-workers.

Okay, I am off for a quick shower.

This is just a small update post as to what you can expect from me in the next 1 week.

I have just upgraded my laptop from Gutsy to Hardy. Everything went smooth and everything is working as it was intended to be. Yes, a happy Ubuntu Hardy Heron user here :) Of course, I will update how I did it and what sort of problems I got into. Nothing big, really. I cannot think how simpler a Linux can be.

Next up, is the Avant Windows Manager on Hardy 32-bit. I have not tried it with 64-bit, so maybe I will do that later this week :) Anyhow, yes, you can expect an AWN post within this week hopefully. Windows user, beware! Your eyes might be popping out seeing all these flashy stuffs. I might need to hangout at Starbucks again just so that I can blog properly. Talk about time, lately I just don't have enough that. Thank you to PSP gaming.

That's it! Hopefully more time tomorrow to blog properly...

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

I actually wrote this post quite some time ago, but totally forgot about it! So go on...

LimeWire is a p2p program that is Java based, if I am not mistaken. We are fortunate to have a Linux version of this excellent software. It's not available on any repositories that I have came across, so you will have to download the deb package.

Go here and start downloading. Choose the basic package (which is FREE) and admit that you will never use it for copyright infringement :P Get the Linux version of the software for Ubuntu. As of today, the file name is LimeWireLinux.deb.

So to install a DEB package, you do this:

It shouldn't take long. Once its done, you can launch the program located at

Applications > Internet > LimeWire

If you feel like you hate it, you can always do this to totally remove it; no traces left. One of the reasons why I started using Ubuntu again was because of this :D


-P means purge.

Have fun!

Update: Beta 4 is out and it works better for me. So I am going to give this Beta 4 a little spin :)

A reading a few reviews on Firefox 3 Beta, I decided to give it a little spin and see how it is for myself. So this is how I installed it.

1. Get the Firefox 3 Beta 3 on Mozilla website.
2. Browse to where you downloaded the BZ2 file, and then

3. Move it to /opt. This step is optional but I like to keep things organized.



4. Now, we need to make sure that the plugins work. We'll use plugins from the current installation of Firefox 2.



5. Before we start launching stuffs and break things, let's backup the .mozilla directory first.



6. Create a launcher on your desktop by Right Click on Your Desktop > Create Launcher. Make it look like in this screenshot.


Now you can launch Firefox 3 via the launcher on your desktop :D

So far, I HAVE NO IDEA WHATSOEVER why is it any good! Maybe I have done something wrong; but I think its sluggish, and uses up the CPU time for no reason! It never crashed on me, though. So maybe I should start thinking about getting myself a new laptop :P

Some of my Add Ons don't work anymore, so you might want to check whether your favorite plugins will work on Firefox 3 or not :)

There is no way to mount BIN files in Ubuntu, but there's a way to convert BIN to ISO. From there, you can mount the ISO and browse your CD image :) Here, I am going to use bchunk.

For more info, you can read up the manual via:

I have been wanting to post this for a while, but I don't know if I should. Over at Ubuntuguide, there is a mention on how to do this. But I eventually found another way - a very simple way to achieve this. I have mentioned before about VLC Media Player, how much I prefer that one compared to Totem. Not to say I hate Totem, it's just that Totem didn't work very well for me.

What you need for DVD playback is actually, VLC! Let's install it.

I know, tonnes of packages, just do it already :P

Launch vlc.

Applications > Sound & Video > VLC Media Player

or if you like CLI



Make sure that you have already inserted your DVD movie. Now on VLC, go to

File > Open Disc...

Make sure that the Device Name is correct, and then press OK. Tada! Instant DVD playback!

The next iteration of the Ubuntu Linux is now known to be Intrepid Ibex. If you noticed, it seems like we are going in alphabetical order (since Dapper Drake).

• Dapper Drake (6.06)
• Edgy Eft (6.10)
• Feisty Fawn (7.04)
• Gutsy Gibbon (7.10)
• Hardy Heron (8.04)
• Intrepid Ibex (8.10)

And maybe some of you don't know that, the first digit in Ubuntu version represents the year it was released, while the last 2 decimal points is the month it was released.

Now you know when we are going to get our hands on the Hardy Heron (8.04)!

If you noticed in Ubuntu, the file /boot/grub/menu.lst has an entry for Memtest. It's using Memtest86+ v1.7. The latest version is v2.0 which was released on February 8th, 2008.

To get the latest memtest is easy. Just download the Pre-Compiled Bootable Binary from here.

Unzip the archive, and copy the bin file over to /boot/. You are going to need root privilege to do this, so:

We have to edit Grub's menu.lst so that the new Memtest shows up in the Grub menu.



Put this end at the end of the file:

title Ubuntu 7.10, memtest86+2.0
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/memtest86+-2.00.bin
quiet

Save it, and close the file. To test, you can reboot, press escape when Grub is loading and choose the new entry and the Memtest will start as usual :)

If you have been an avid user of Evolution (it's an email client), you might have encountered this bug before. This bug has been around for quite some time and was never completely fixed; or so I was told. Anyway, if you are stumped with this bug, fortunately there is a workaround.

1. Terminate Evolution.

2. Run these lines in terminal.

3. Run Evolution and the error shouldn't be there anymore.

As usual, big thank you to UbuntuForums :)