3rd Stage Opening Windows with Ubuntu Password

Lost is a problem commonly faced by mankind. If you forget your Windows login password, no way to recover it using the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

The first thing to do is create a Live CD or Live USB stick Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu Live will be used to boot into the system and perform the procedures required to dismantle the Windows password earlier.
The easiest way to do that is by downloading

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Compiling a new wpa_supplicant for Debian or Ubuntu and Network-Manager

There are a few changes to dbus files so you should best just replace the wpa_supplicant binary in /sbin with your version. Use this .config file to make a binary that works as plug-in replacement with network-manger in Ubuntu and probably Debian as well.

Read more »

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Eduroam with Linux (incl. Android!)

The guide my university supplied did not work after all with Linux. So I used an alternative guide, which also turned out to be working for Android:

Security: WPA2 Enterprise

Authentification Tunneled TLS (TTLS)

Anonymous Identity: none

CA-Certifikate: (none)

Inner Authentification: MSCHAP2

User: user@your-uni.com (as in the Windows settings guide of your home university)
password: your password, as in windows.

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Immediate Fix for Slow Open and Save Dialogs in Ubuntu OpenOffice

I'm using KDE and I think it's somehow related to that. Anyway, you need to execute the following command to fix it:

echo -e 127.0.0.1 \\t $HOSTNAME localhost $HOSTNAME.'(none)' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Hope this helps. Found in the Ubuntu Forums here.

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Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Upgrade Went Fine

The upgrade went absolutely flawless for me. There was only one dubious moment: At the almost very end of the upgrade the system started counting upwards very slowly from 0 to 100. This did really take several minutes in my case and the counting number without any further notice was a bit confusing and tempting me to abort the upgrade. But my patience was rewarded with a system which still worked flawlessly after the upgrade.

My GMA500 (Poulsbo) netbook will still have to wait a bit, I want to be sure the graphics work fine -- including VAAPI acceleration -- before I start the upgrade. But of court LTS makes it very attractive then.

Update
It turns out though the backlight control is much prettier, it's also broken and thus much more useless...
But I really like that most customized repositories were automatically re-enabled as lucid variants after the upgrade.

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Must Read Article on the Issues of Ubuntu, Open Source and Linux

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/06/many-hands-make-light-work-few-make-it.html

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Poulsbo is Already working on Ubuntu 10.04

It's not a flawless support and currently without 3D, but there is a poulsbo driver for Ubuntu 10.04. (The link helps for all Ubuntu versions.)

You can download the driver here.

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Why it's a problem that Ubuntu spinned off of Debian

Check out this great article.

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Ubuntu One Privacy in the EU

I was just about to look into using Ubuntu One. But I chose not to, because I would have had to install tons of Gnome dependencies and use the Gnome client. It's not integrated to KDE yet. Then I read about their privacy policy, because recently we see a lot of bad privacy policies I would say. And I'm not too happy about what I read.

"Canonical may disclose any or all personal data and contents you have sent, posted or published if required to comply with applicable law or the order or requirement of a court, administrative agency or other governmental body." (https://one.ubuntu.com/terms/)

So if the local village chief somewhere in East Timor wants ("requires") to see your private documents, he is welcome to. Or do we use eiusdem generis rule? Well, I would still say any administrative agency is not very narrow. I think we can at the very least expect not only secret services or police, but any part of the US federal and local government to have access to any of your saved data at any time they require it and without any court orders. The link also lists as administrative agencies: the labor relations board or the Farm Credit Administration, the Maritime Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Immigration and Naturalization Service or FCC and IRS. So quite a lot of people with potential access to all of your private information.

We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to provide you with services, comply with the law, or protect our rights. (https://one.ubuntu.com/privacy/)

Canonical's rights could be a lot of things I think. Maybe it could include the right to get payed by you? If you didn't pay in time, it looks to me that by the contract terms they might share your personal information with "anyone" to protect their right to be payed.

The quotes are from the UK version of Ubuntu One, but probably apply similar everywhere. I think they actually really tried to make it privacy friendly. But at the same time, they really wanted to make sure they couldn't possible get in trouble through protecting your privacy.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer - this is not legal advise. This is just a discussion view and a try to inform the general public about something that may or may not be interpreted by professionals as here stated. You are invited to share your views in the comments.

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Linux System Hardening Done Professionally

I just took a short look at the measures Google took to harden their Chromium OS. But I must say, I was pretty impressed. It seems to be a very, very secure system.

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While I'm busy... List of Ubuntu Blogs

I found an extensive list of ubuntu blogs.

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Ubuntu 9.10 User Guide

I can very much recommend this extensive guide to Ubuntu 9.10:

http://www.johannes-eva.net/index.php?page=2009_10_useful_ubuntu_guide_karmic

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Kubuntu 9.10 is a Beauty

It works nicely on intel graphics (except GMA500!), installs fine and seems much snappier than the 8.10 I was still using. It's a definite upgrade recommendation, as well for your friends who are thinking about Windows 7. ;)

I'll let you know if I'll have any worries. But so far, everything has been wonderful. KMS works great, suspend-resume is fine, KDE 4.3 is lovely... :)

Good work guys!

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Pretending a Package is Installed by Creating an Empty Package with Checkinstall (for Debian-based Distributions)

After installing ffmpeg from svn with checkinstall, I had the problem that the also installed library libavcodec51 is not compatible with the one delivered with Ubuntu. But I could not simply uninstall it so that the manually installed version was used because that caused problems with libxine1-ffmpeg, which stopped kaffeine, amarok and other software from running properly.

Unfortunately, checkinstall's --provides option did not work as expected. So I had to find a way to have them use the manually installed version I compiled from svn and hiding that fact that my package manager. I had to let the package management system know the package was already installed.

So I ended up creating an artificial package that only has the same name and a similar package version, but no actual contents. Create an empty directory, place the following Makefile into it and execute the following checkinstall command. You may need to adjust the parameters for different packages, refer to the output of apt-cache policy somepackage for an appropriate version number)

Makefile:

install:
install -d /usr/local/bin

checkinstall commands:
checkinstall --nodoc --install=no --pkgname=libavcodec51 --pkgversion=3:0.svn$(date +%Y%m%d)-12ubuntu5
checkinstall --nodoc --install=no --pkgname=libavutil49 --pkgversion=3:0.svn$(date +%Y%m%d)-12ubuntu5
checkinstall --install=no --nodoc --pkgname=libavformat52 --pkgversion=3:0.svn$(date +%Y%m%d)-12ubuntu5
sudo dpkg --install ./*.deb
sudo ldconfig

This elegantly fixed the error "ffplay: symbol lookup error: /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.52: undefined symbol: av_gcd" and "ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libavformat.so.52: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" for me.

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Intel Graphics Users: Don't Upgrade Your Ubuntu

As phoronix points out, the intel driver woes in the newest Ubuntu version 9.04 are so bad, you should probably skip this distribution upgrade... and wait for 9.10.

Update: Here is some advice if it's already too late for you. Check the H for more information.

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What packages are installed in Debian/Ubuntu

Howtoforge has a nice article on how to install the packages you've installed on another computer. It's written for debian and ubuntu systems, including step by step screen shots for doing it in Ubuntu with Synaptic. Here's how you can do the same thing in CLI(also in that article):

sudo dpkg --get-selections "*" > package_list
and
sudo dpkg --set-selections < package_list && sudo apt-get -u dselect-upgrade

Oh and from the article's comments: The method only works well if you use the exact same version of Ubuntu on both computers. Let me add that it only works at all if you have the same /etc/apt/sources.list and sources.list.d/* files on both computers.

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Automatically switch to connected External Display on Boot with XRandR

I bought a notebook to be flexible, but when at home I use it with external monitor, keyboard and mouse to be comfortable. Now the problem was that I couldn't tell Ubuntu I want to only use the external monitor - if it's available.

Well, I've written a one-liner that fixes that problem. If the external display is attached, it will automatically switch over to it and display the internal display. Otherwise it boots normally (leaving the internal display enabled).

I put the script into the Xsession.d directory so it gets started for every user on boot: /etc/X11/Xsession.d/98vgaonly and made it executable.

The actual script line is this:
xrandr -q | grep 'VGA connected' && xrandr --output LVDS --off --output VGA --auto
It checks if the line 'VGA connected' was found in xrandr's query and then asks your X server to turn off the internal output and use the external one with automatic resolution detection.

So to automatically switch to a connected VGA during boot just execute:

echo 'xrandr -q | grep \'VGA connected\' && xrandr --output LVDS --off --output VGA --auto' | sudo tee /etc/X11/Xsession.d/98vgaonly && sudo chmod a+x /etc/X11/Xsession.d/98vgaonly

You may have to change the name of the outputs for your setup. xrandr -q will let you know what's available. It would probably be possible to somehow call this script automatically when plugging in a monitor, but I've not figured out how. xrandr only works when called from inside the running X session in my experience.


If you want to know more about XRandR, check this recent article.

Any comments are welcome!

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Testing the Development Kernel in Ubuntu

Testing the bleeding edge development kernel from Linus' git tree has never been easier. You can now download precompiled debian packages for the current release candidates from the Ubuntu kernel ppa.

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Set the Default Sound Card in Ubuntu

If you have more than one sound card, you might want to set the preferred/default one:

You can find out the sound cards' names with
asoundconf list
and change the default one with
sudo asoundconf set-default-card xxx

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OpenOffice 3.0 in Ubuntu 8.10

Here's a quick guide. It's all about downloading it and installing the deb files... ;-)

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