Linux

Ekiga in Ubuntu Karmic hangs with pulse

Joar Jegleim Leave a comment

With reference to this post I finally figured out that I could after all use a Linux softphone with our iptelephony solution at work.
At first I tried Ekiga, since it’s Ubuntu’s default softphone app, but it didn’t really work, kept on hanging.
I tried Twinkle, which worked right out of the box, but using QT 3.x libs ? I just couldn’t settle with that. I don’t like to mix QT libs in my glibs environment and I REALLY don’t like to use really old QT libs if I must have them.
I took an other shot at Ekiga, and dug up this post at launchpad which solved my problems.
Upgrade to Ekiga 3.2.6 and things should be okay with Karmic, pulseaudio and Ekiga again.
Launchpad Ekiga 3.2.6 repo here.

Disable GDM in Ubuntu 9.10

Joar Jegleim Leave a comment

When I need to disable services in Linux I’m used to symlinks in /etc/rc2.d
(for debian based distros) .
Ubuntu 9.10 doesn’t have any symlink for gdm in /etc/rc2.d
so how do I disable the freakin’ service ?
It seems gdm is started by upstart now, but they’ve also switched to grub2 and according to ubuntuforums.org we can control this from grub.

edit /etc/default/grub

Change the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to

 GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash text"

And issue:

# update-grub

Importing information_schema from an other mysql server

Joar Jegleim Leave a comment

While investigating some mysql stuff at work I imported the whole mysql dump from our production system into my localhost installation. Among the 2000 or so databases was also information_schema, and I ended up with problems like : 

root@pluto:~# /etc/init.d/mysql status
/usr/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Access denied for user 
'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' (using password: YES)'
 *

The solution was to reset password fr debian-sys-maint user in mysql.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' 
IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Where ‘password’ is found in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf πŸ™‚

I got this one from ubuntuforums.org.

A broken installation of custom kernel gave some headache

Joar Jegleim Leave a comment

I rolled my own 2.6.31 kernel for my Ubuntu Karmic, and used make-kpkg to make .deb packages for easy installation. For some reason, unknown at the moment, my .deb didn’t install properly. The kernel .deb package ended up in a iF state by dpkg. I didn’t have time to fix this when it occurred and planned on getting back to it later until I started getting annoying errors when update-manager wanted to update my system. It seemed that update-initramfs tried to reconfigure my broken kernel package and kept on failing. So I removed my custom kernel via dpkg –purge ‘name of package’ but still when updating my system update-initramfs got hung up on trying to configure my custom kernel, which no longer existed on my system. My first thought was to reinstall my custom kernel and then reinstall initramfs-tools but I got into this really stupid circular problem with my custom kernel not getting installed followed by update-initramfs failing ending up with dpkg setting a iF state on initramfs-tools package as well which again led to any kernel upgrade failing, or at least giving lots of complaints about that stupid kernel package of mine.
I finally got out of it by installing my custom kernel, which broke under installation, then do a update-initramfs -d -k ‘my custom kernel’ followed by dpkg –purge ‘my custom kernel’ and everything got back to normal πŸ™‚

terminator and real transparency

Joar Jegleim Leave a comment

Terminator is a great terminal, but running compiz it might be a bit confusing getting real transparency (if you’re one of those). With reference to the terminator man page (man 5 terminator_config), edit ~/.config/terminator/config and add these lines:

enable_real_transparency = true
background_darkness = 0.7
background_type = transparent

Note: use background_darkness to adjust the level of transparency πŸ™‚

Ubuntu 9.10 running a Windows XP guest in virtualbox.

Joar Jegleim Leave a comment

At work they recently switched to ip telephony, our supplier haven’t got any Linux client for their softphone so I had to install windows just to have a working phone !

So I end up running Virtualbox-ose and setting up a windows guest.
After installing windows xp (which takes AGES) I installed the softphone application, but my michrophone didn’t work in the guest environment !
The mic did work OK in Ubuntu, so I ended up debugging ( a lot).
I came over several people having the same problem + launchpad had a bug reported on the problem.
I uninstalled pulseaudio and the mic started working OK in the guest.
I had to do a
apt-get purge pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio + the rest of my packages related to pulse (found via dpkg -l | grep pulse),
except i still got libpulse-browse0 libpulse-mainloop-glib0 and libpulse0
Apt tells you it’s removing ubuntu-desktop as well, which probably is because ubuntu-desktop got pulse as a dependency or something. I find that apt-get doesn’t remove as much as aptitude wants to, so I used apt-get for this one.

I also installed gnome-alsamixer alsa alsa-firmware-loaders alsa-tools alsa-tools-gui
and reboot

note: volume control (in tray) and ‘system -> preferences -> sound’ in gnome is now broken, but I kan control sound via gnome-alsamixer

UPDATE UPDATE: see this post regarding “I no longer need windows for my companys ip telephone solution”

Vim + headless server + syntax highlighting

Joar Jegleim Leave a comment

After installing my favourite distro, which these days seem to have fallen back on Ubuntu I’m usually installing the ‘vim-gnome’ package. It pulls down the necessary packages for me to have a fully fledged Vim editor with syntax highlighting and so on.
But what if I don’t have X installed ?
Trying to install vim-gnome then would pull down xorg + the complete gnome-desktop environment, which really isn’t that necessary.
Since there’s a lot of packages related to vim it could be a bit confusing which one to pull down just to have syntax highlighting.

# aptitude install vim-nox

gives you, in _my_ opinion, a working and useful Vim editor in a ‘non-X’ environment :p