Ubuntu

terminator and real transparency

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 🙂

Ubuntu 9.10 running a Windows XP guest in virtualbox.

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

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