I installed Second Life 1.18.4 (3) on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10. Everything seemed fine for the most part, however the audio from music streams in the game was very crackly. Second Life is the only application with crackly audio, all my other applications seem fine so far.

I corrected this by installing the “esound” package, and then rebooting my machine.

$ sudo aptitude install esound

After rebooting and trying again, sound now works perfectly in the game.

I’ve been experimenting with Ubunty Gutsy 7.10 on my (relatively) new Asus A7T notebook. For the most part, everything works well after the install, but there are two annoying problems that I ran into:

1. No sound. My laptop uses the ALC882 codec.
2. When I boot up, there is no bootup screen, or splash screen. All I see is a black screen until GDM starts. Also, if I switch to a TTY terminal screen using CTRL+ALT+F1 (through F6), the resolution is incorrect; everything is huge and off the screen by several lines, which renders it pretty useless.

Here is how I have fixed both of these issues:

Fixing Sound

I was able to fix my sound issue using the alsa-base package installed by default (version 1.0.14-1ubuntu2 at the time of this writing). Here are the steps:

A. Create a new file called “/etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.modprobe”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel.modprobe

Add the following line to the file and then save it:
options snd-hda-intel model=w2jc

B. Edit the file “/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Add the same line to the end of this file and then save it:
options snd-hda-intel model=w2jc

C. Reboot. After I rebooted, I had sound.

Fix TTY and boot-up resolution

A. Edit the file “/etc/initramfs-tools/modules”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

Add the following two lines to the end of the file, then save it and close it:
fbcon
vesafb

B. Edit the file “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer”:
$ sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer

Comment out the blacklist vesafb, so that it looks like this: #blacklist vesafb

C. Set the height and width values in usplash.conf to 1024×768:
$ sudo gedit /etc/usplash.conf

Change the values to 1024×768, save the file and close it.

D. Edit the grub config file to add a vga value to set the resolution of the bootscreen to 1024×768:
$ sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the commented out #defoptions line. Leave it commented out, but add the following to the end of the line:
vga=773

Save the file and close it.

E. Regenerate initram file:
$ sudo update-initramfs -u

F. Update grub:
$ sudo update-grub

G. Reboot. After I rebooted, I saw the bootsplash, and my TTY terminals were at a better resolution.

Here is how I configure my Alt+Print Screen action for taking window screenshots:

First, install gconf-editor if you don’t have it already:
$ sudo aptitude install gconf-editor

Then, open gconf-editor with this terminal command:
$ gconf-editor

Navigate to:
/apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_screenshot

Change the ‘command_window_screenshot’ value to:
gnome-screenshot --interactive --window --delay=1 --include-border --border-effect=shadow

Now when you use Alt+Print Screen to capture a screenshot of a window, you will get a nifty little drop shadow behind your image by default. See the example below.

Check out linuxalt.com.

Welcome to the Linux Alternative Project (formally the Linux Equivalent Project). The goal is to provide an informational and available website for all linux users. The website is currently in beta form. I will be periodically updating the database with Windows software and the Linux equivalents and alternatives.

In Ubuntu, you can use the SMB protocol (Server Message Block), a.k.a ‘Samba’, to share folders from your Ubuntu Linux workstation with Microsoft Windows workstations on your network.

I use SMB to share folders between my Ubuntu workstation and my Windows XP virtual machine in VMWare Server. Note that other virtualization products, such as VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox, come with this feature built-in.

In my virtual machine, I have the ethernet card set to ‘Bridged’ so that it connects to my physical network and is assigned an IP address from my router, as opposed to sharing the IP address from the Ubuntu host using NAT. You will need to know the Workgroup that the Windows XP machine is in. You can find this by going to Control Panel -> System and clicking on the Computer Name tab. You will see the Workgroup identified there.

Now, in Ubuntu, click System -> Administration -> Shared Folders. This will prompt you for your sudo password. If this is your first time visiting this control panel, it may prompt you to install SMB and NFS support, which you should do. Once that is finished, you will be presented with the Shared Folders applet. Click Add, choose the Path to the folder you want to share, choose ‘Windows networks (SMB)’, and enter the user name that you want to allow access to this share. You can also specify whether the user will have read-only access or read-write access. Click OK.

You are now sharing a folder. However, if you try to access the folder from Microsoft Windows at this point, you will be prompted for your password over and over again. The documentation in Ubuntu fails to tell you that you need to configure the user name that you want to use to access the share.  The default configuration requires users to enter a user name and password to access the share. You can do this from the command line:

$ sudo smbpasswd -a <USERNAME>

Replace <USERNAME> with the user name you want to access the shares. That command will respond with:

New SMB password:

Type the password you want to use, then confirm it. You should now be able to access the share via Windows with that user name and password.

In a Microsoft Windows environment, you might use an application like Daemon Tools, Alcohol, or the MS Virtual CD Control Panel to mount an ISO image so that it appears as a CD ROM drive in Windows Explorer. This allows you to access a CD/DVD image without burning it to a disc.

In Linux, you can do this via the command line. First, make a directory to mount the ISO file into. Then, execute this command from a terminal:

$ sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop filename.iso /path/to/your/directory

The contents of that ISO will then be in that folder.

You can unmount that disc image with this command:

$ sudo umount /path/to/your/directory

Note that some disc images are NRG files, which is Nero’s file format. You can convert those to ISO format using a command line application called nrg2iso. First install it:

$ sudo aptitude install nrg2iso

and then convert the file with this command:

$ nrg2iso input.nrg output.iso

Also, some disc images are IMG files. You can simply rename the .img extension to .iso, and then mount the ISO file.

There is not an obvious way to disable the Recent Documents menu under the Places menu if you don’t want to use that feature. Here is how I do it:

Open a terminal window and execute these two commands:

$ rm ~/.recently-used.xbel $ mkdir ~/.recently-used.xbel

Replacing that file with a directory seems to be the only way to keep it from being populated.

Here is how to install the free VMWare Server application from the Ubuntu Commercial Repository. Note that during the install you will need a VMWare Server key, which you can get for free here.

1. Add the Commercial Repository to your sources. Here is how I do it:

A. Launch Synaptic.

$ sudo synaptic

B. Click Settings -> Repositories

C. Click the Third-Party Software tab.

D. Click Add.

E. Enter the following line and then click Add Source:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main

F. Click Close.

G. Click the Reload button in the upper left to have Synaptic update itself with the new repository. Close Synaptic.

2. Install the vmware-server package with the following command:

$ sudo aptitude install vmware-server

First, enable Remote Desktop in Gnome by going to System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop.

Check ‘Allow other users to view your desktop’.
Check ‘Allow other users to control your desktop’.
Uncheck ‘Ask you for confirmation’.
Type in the password you want to use.
Click Close.

Remote Desktop is now running on your machine.

Now, open a terminal and type this command:

$ gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled false

Go back to System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop. You will see that it is now turned off.

You can turn it back on from the command line using this command:

$ gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

The reason I find these commands handy is that I like to only turn on Remote Desktop when I actually need to use it. So, after I set up SSH and secure it, I then log into my machine remotely via SSH and run the command to enable Remote Desktop. Once I do that, I can then open up VNC Viewer from the remote machine, and do what I need to do. I then disable Remote Desktop via SSH with the disable command so that the server is no longer available to myself or anyone else that might try to access it.

I have taken this a step further on my machine and simplified this process by creating two bash shell scripts:

startvnc.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script starts enables System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true</pre>


stopvnc.sh
#!/bin/bash
#
# This script starts enables System -&gt; Preferences -&gt; Remote Desktop

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled false</pre>


After creating those scripts, I make them executable with this command:
$ chmod +x startvnc.sh
$ chmod +x stopvnc.sh
I then make aliases to them.  Open ~/.bashrc in a text editor, scroll to the bottom, and type in these two lines:
alias startvnc=/path/to/your/startvnc.sh
alias stopvnc=/path/to/your/stopvnc.sh</pre>



Now, when you SSH into your box (or open a command line), you can just type $ startvnc to enable Remote Desktop, or $ stopvnc to disable Remote Desktop.
*Remember, if you are behind a firewall, you have to allow access through port 5900 if you want to Remote Desktop into your default display (:0).
            

Virtualization allows you to create a ‘virtual machine’, which is essentially an application that runs another operating system inside of your current operating system. There are several different virtualization solutions available, some of which include QEMU, Xen, VirtualBox, and VMWare. This post will detail how to set up Windows XP in VMWare.

VMWare sells virtualization products and also offers some tools at no cost. One of their no cost tools is called VMWare Server, which lets you build and run virtual machines. I personally prefer another one of their no cost tools called VMWare Player, which allows you to run an already created Virtual Machine.

I install VMWare Player from the repositories with this command:

$ sudo aptitude install vmware-player

I then create my own virtual machine from scratch. I use the website EasyVMX to create the virtual machine shell that I will then install Windows XP into. This virtual machine shell consists of two components – a configuration file (VMX), and a virtual hard disk (split into multiple files depending on the size). So, at EasyVMX, I create my virtual machine with the following settings:

- Virtual Machine Name: xp_pro (or xp_home)
- Select Guest OS – either XP Pro or XP Home, whichever you are going to install

Network Configuration
- Use the default settings

Disk Configuration
- Floppy Disk Drive – I leave this unchecked
- CDROM Drives – I check both of the options. Later, I comment out CDROM 2 until I actually want to use an ISO file as a CDROM

Hard Disk Drives
- I select 12GB and leave SCSI unchecked. I leave Disk #2 unchecked.

Sound and I/O-Ports Configuration
- Use all of the default settings

Click the ‘Create Virtual Machine’ button, and then save the zip file that it creates for you. Note that, even though I selected a 12GB hard drive, the output files come out to be about 7.4KB. The hard drive space doesn’t actually take up physical disk space until there are actually files there to occupy the space. You now have a virtual machine to install Windows XP onto.

Extract the zip file and then open up the .vmx file in your text editor. Find the following lines:

# Settings for the optional virtual CDROM, ISO-image
ide1:1.present = “TRUE”
ide1:1.fileName = “.iso”
ide1:1.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
ide1:1.mode = “persistent”
ide1:1.startConnected = “FALSE”

and comment that whole section out, so it looks like this:

# Settings for the optional virtual CDROM, ISO-image
#ide1:1.present = “TRUE”
#ide1:1.fileName = “.iso”
#ide1:1.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
#ide1:1.mode = “persistent”
#ide1:1.startConnected = “FALSE”

Save the file. Now we are ready to install Windows XP. Put your Windows XP CD in your CDROM drive, and then open the .vmx file with VMWare Player. The virtual machine will start its boot process, it will look just like a computer booting up with a BIOS post and everything else. As the BIOS is loading, click your mouse in the window and hit the ESC key to get to the boot options and tell it to boot from your CDROM. Note that if you want your cursor back, you have to press CTRL+ALT one time. The virtual machine should now be booting off of your CDROM and you can now install Windows XP the same way you would install it on a normal computer.

Once the installation is finished, you can zip up a copy of this virtual machine folder and re-extract it anytime you want to in order to return to this ‘saved state’. So, once you install Windows XP once, you can save a backup copy of those files and should never have to reinstall it again. Instead you would just unzip a new copy.

One last consideration: VMWare Tools is an application that can be installed onto Windows XP inside of the virtual machine that makes the experience a whole lot nicer. For example, it improves the display resolution and also allows you to move your mouse in and out of Virtual Machine without having to click CTRL+ALT. VMWare Tools does not come with VMWare Player, however it does come with VMWare Server – one of their other free products. Here is how I get VMWare Tools set up in my virtual machine:

Download a copy of VMWare Server. Once it is downloaded, extract the files. The file that we want that contains VMWare Tools is in that directory in this folder path:

lib/isoimages/windows.iso

I have saved a copy of ‘windows.iso’ so that I have it whenever I need it. Now, we need to have our Windows XP virtual machine use this ISO file as a CDROM so that we can run the installer that the iso contains. Open your vmx file in a text editor again and find the section that we commented out previously:

# Settings for the optional virtual CDROM, ISO-image
#ide1:1.present = “TRUE”
#ide1:1.fileName = “.iso”
#ide1:1.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
#ide1:1.mode = “persistent”
#ide1:1.startConnected = “FALSE”

Uncomment the lines and change the fileName to match the path to where you have saved windows.iso:

# Settings for the optional virtual CDROM, ISO-image
ide1:1.present = “TRUE”
ide1:1.fileName = “/your/path/to/windows.iso”
ide1:1.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
ide1:1.mode = “persistent”
ide1:1.startConnected = “FALSE”

Save the file and then open it with VMWare Player. You will now notice an extra CDROM button at the top of the window. You can click that to enable this second CDROM (which is actually windows.iso). Windows should detect the CDROM and will either auto-launch the VMWare Tools installer, or you can navigate to the cdrom in Windows Explorer and start the installation from there. Once the installation is complete, shut down the virtual machine and then open the vmx file in a text editor and comment out those lines again until the next time you need to use an ISO as a CDROM. I usually back up a copy of my virtual machine once I have VMWare Tools installed along with all of the Windows Updates, etc.

That’s it, you can now run Windows XP as an appliation inside of Ubuntu. If I ever run across an oddball task that I can’t figure out how to do in Ubuntu, I just open up my VMWare session and do the task in there. This has eliminated the need for me to have to run a dual boot with Windows on my computer.