Just a quick note to self. Only use it on a copy of the bzr repo as it will kill the bzr repo:

git init && bzr fast-export `pwd` | git fast-import && rm -r .bzr && git reset HEAD


This is just a dump of my experience in getting the Transip VPS Console interface to work on Lubuntu 11.04 (64-bit) with Chromium 14.0.835.202 (Developer Build 103287) Ubuntu 11.04.

Transip uses a Java Applet for accessing your newly created VM. At first I could not get the Java applet to work with the packages available on Ubuntu. This is not Transip’s fault, but rather due to the issues surrounding Java on Linux. Oracle decided to change Java ‘s license and thus forcing Ubuntu to change the way they are handling Java. Basically making installing Java unnecessary difficult. Anyways, if you follow these steps you at least should get a working Transip Console, albeit a very buggy and highly annoying to use console.

Since I use a 64-bit version of Ubuntu the following steps might be different for the 32-bit version. Oh, this worked for me, it might not work for you and eat your cat or something evil like that. Use the following information at your own risk! For now I’m ONLY interested in getting Java applets to work with Chrome & Chromium. If you need a different browser or want to use this Java version on the desktop, you’ll have to find out yourself on how to achieve what you need. Leave a comment if you have done so

Anyways, let’s start!

1) Download Oracle Java JRE 7 (Use the link otherwise you might get lost in a forest of corporate speak…). In my case I’ve downloaded only the Java Runtime Environment (JRE 64-bit tar.gz) version and not the Java Development Kit (JDK) since I only wanted to use an Java applet.

2) Unpack the tar.gz. In my case I used the following path: /opt/jre1.7.0_02
I’ve symlinked this from /opt/jre-oracle to make it more accessible and easy to change.

3) In order to make Chromium use the newly installed Java plugin you need to tell it where it can find the plugin. You need to do this by making a symlink:

sudo ln -s /opt/jre-oracle/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins

4) Restart Chromium and check if the plugin is found. Do this by entering chrome://plugins in the url bar. If you see multiple Java plugins, for instance something with IcedTea, disable all except the one you just installed (probably called similar to this: ‘Java(TM) Plug-in 1.7.0_02′

5) Check if you can use or view a Java Applet. I’ve used this example from the excellent Learning Processing site by Daniel Shiffman

Note: In theory nothing should happen to any other installed Java version you might have, since we only changed the Java plugin for Chromium, but keep in mind that Java Applets will now run using the Oracle JRE and not any previous installed Java versions.

After following the above steps I finally managed to ‘use’ the Transip Console.

PS: Transip, if you’re reading this please fix this abomination you call a console. You can do so much better as you have already shown with your awesome employees responding diligently and the spot on price quality ratio in your products. Except for this horrible VPS console! Please check out Linode and learn from them.

Oh, feel free to contact me if you need a beta tester for a new console

Due to Ubuntu using secure_path in sudo you can’t change the $PATH environment variable. Thanks to http://serverfault.com/questions/182995/problems-with-sudo-in-path I fixed it in my ~/.basrc with an alias:


alias sudo='sudo env PATH=$PATH $@'


This allows me to add my ~/Scripts/bin path for personal scripts that make my life easier while allowing those scripts to be run with sudo.