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

• The directory I want to server with Apache is: /var/www/html
• I have three developers: Joe, Jack and Amy
• Apache (by default on Ubuntu) runs as user www-data with group www-data
• The server is a Linode VPS (link uses my referral code)

Instructions

1. Create a new group called web-dev: groupadd web-devThis will be the group to which uses will be added in order to read and write files and directories within /var/www/html

   Note:
   I could also have added the users to the existing www-data group used by Apache, but then the Apache user would have gotten read and write privileges together with the rest of the group. I’m not comfortable doing this, because if an attacker would gain access through Apache, it would give the attacker the same privileges as the Apache user. Therefor I don’t want to give the Apache user anymore privileges than absolutely necessary. In my case nothing more than the ability to serve the files and directories.

2. Add the users to the web-dev group: useradd -G web-dev joeRepeat this for all users you want to be able to read and write the files within /var/www/html.

   Note:
   This is the common group for which we will set the correct permissions.

3. Change the ownership of /var/www/html to one of the developers and the common group they belong to: chown -R joe:web-dev /var/www/html/
   Make sure the directory is still accessible (read for files and execute for directories) by Apache.

   Note:
   By changing the ownership to one of the users in the common group, in our case joe with group ownership changed to the common group web-dev we have established a common directory for all users part of the group web-dev. Update: It may also be a good idea to change the ownership to root. This prevents accidental removal of the directory by the group members. Thanks Jaap for mentioning this!

4. Make sure the /var/www/html is group writeable: chmod -R 775 /var/www/htmlIf the directory is already group writeable you may skip this step
5. Make sure any new files or directories within /var/www/htmlwill inherit the parent directory’s group owner: find /var/www/html -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod g+sThis uses the setgid permission bit to make sure any new file or subdirectory will belong to the same group as it’s parent directory. In our case web-dev

   Note:
   Many thanks to rthomson’s answer on ServerFault for the command and concise explanation of setgid

6. Make sure new files and directories created by users are group writable:
   1. Install libpam-umask (mine was installed using libpam-modules by default): sudo apt-get install libpam-modules
   2. Add the line: session optional pam_umask.so umask=002 to the file /etc/pam.d/common-session
   3. Make sure there is no umask line in /etc/profile/ or ~/.bashrc otherwise this will be combined with the umask set in PAM causing the umask to be changed from 002 to something else. If you do find a umask defined in the previous mentioned files, just comment them with a pound sign #.

   Note:

   By default Ubuntu uses an umask 022, which ensures new files are only writable for the owner (i.e. the user who created them). In our case we want files and subdirectories created in /var/www/html to be group writeable and therefor the umask for the users should be changed to umask 002. As far as I know this cannot be done on a per-directory base (although some mentioned that you could do this using POSIX ACL) so we need to set this either per user using ~/.bashrc or systemwide for all users using /etc/profile or by setting up PAM.
   In our case I decided to use PAM so that regardless how a user logs into the server his/her umask will be set correctly. I’m not sure if this is the right way of doing this, since this means that every user would have his/her files group writeable by default which may pose a significant security issue. Our case is (for now) limited to a single purpose server with a very small group of users, so I’m willing to take the risk, however I do think a better solution must be at hand (perhaps POSIX ACL’s?).

7. Type: umaskThis shows the current umask. It should be 022. Now logout and login again to make sure the changed PAM settings take effect when logging in. Again type umask. It should be 0002, if the PAM settings have taken effect.
8. Finally create a new file called test.txt into /var/www/html: touch test.txtUse this file to see if other users can edit it, remove it and create it again. If this little test succeeds everything should have been setup correctly.

“Some instructions:

List your partitions:

ls /dev/sd*
If you haven’t got an encrypted disk just do (where sda5 is the corrupted
partition):

fsck /dev/sda5
If you are using an encrypted hard-disk (i do) do

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 something
where sda5 is the encrypted partition and someting is the name under which
you will find the partition (/dev/mapper/something).

The install Lvm and look for volumes :

sudo apt-get install lvm2
sudo pvscan
sudo vgscan
The last command should list the at least one volume-group
Enable it or the ones you’re interested in

sudo vgchange -a y groupname
Now list the logical volumens

sudo lvscan
Your drive you’re interested in should now appear under /dev/mapper

do a fsck

sudo fsck /dev/mapper/logical-volume
Lots of errors! Off course you want to have them all fixed. REBOOT!
This worked for me!”

“Too many authentication failures”.

As far as I understood this happens due to SSH trying each key on the client for logging and failing due to hitting the serverMaxAuthTries in the SSH server configuration. I use the following quick fix to work around this, by forcing SSH to use a password instead of a public key:

ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no username@hostname.com

I’m pretty sure there has to be a better, more durable solution for this issue, but the above fix allows you to at least gain access to your server again. Btw I use this on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) with OpenSSH_5.3p1 Debian-3ubuntu4.

I did not make any notes, but I’ll try to describe my process as accurate as possible. Oh, before you start make sure the keyboard works and has batteries installed.

• Switch the wireless keyboard on by using the switch on the side.
• - Use Search in the Blueman interface to find the keyboard. If it can’t find it try the switch. The keyboard is probably switched off already.

If i’m not mistaken the led on the right side on top of the keyboard started to blink after which it appeared in the list of bluetooth devices.

• – Now you can add the device to your trusted devices and pair it. Without pairing the keyboard might be connected to your system, but it won’t work as an input device.

The pairing is the most annoying part.

• – You need to type a PIN number which you first have to type in on another (wired!) keyboard and afterwards you need to type the same PIN in on the Apple wireless keyboard.

You won’t see a thing, but after you have typed the PIN correctly you should get a notice that the device has been paired. You might have to use Blueman setup to make sure the wireless keyboard is used an input device.

ps: I also added this rough howto to the Blueman wiki. Please update that version if you encounter any issues with my howto and know how to fix it. Oh and feel free to leave me a comment to notify me

If you want the above clock in your linux terminal then run this command:

watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet"

Source: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2009/07/23/s02e09-the-dimensions-of-time/

If always had problems (since 7.04) with some static or distorted sound from the left speaker / left headphone on my book. I found serveral solutions on the internet like:

- options in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-options: only worked out on 7.10, never in 7.04, 8.04, 8.10 for me
- reloading snd-hda-intel on boot with /etc/rc.local: dind’t work since alsa or pulse is already running at that time

…but reloading the module was a fix I found in several tests with different inits.

So a simple solution for me is reloading the module BEFORE anything else sound relevant is started. I’ve done this through rc-inits:

Code:

echo -e '#!/bin/bash\nrmmod snd-hda-intel\nmodprobe snd-hda-intel' | sudo tee /etc/init.d/soundrestart

This one adds a script to init.d wich is only removing and loading the snd-hda-intel module.

Code:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/soundrestart

This line will make the script executable.

Code:

sudo update-rc.d soundrestart start 10 2 3 4 5 .

And the last one will add it to the different inits at a really early stage (10), before hal (24) pulse (25) or anything else is loaded.

Never had any static, distortion or noise in my left output anymore – neither after boot, nor after reboot, wakeup or something.

pulseaudio -D

This wil start the pulseaudio server as a daemon and now you should be able to enjoy some musica.

First:
./configure

Second:
make

Third:
sudo make install

Now swfmill should be properly installed. Check this by typing:

swfmill -h

It should show you the possible options with sfwmill.

ERROR?
If you get an error message such as: ‘ swfmill: error while loading shared libraries: libswft.so.0: cannot
open shared object file: No such file or directory’ then there is probably an issue with swfmill not finding a dynamic library due to the path not being set. According to this message on the swfmill mailinglist you can fix this by running:

sudo /sbin/ldconfig -v

In my case this solved the issue. Questions, remarks? feel free to leave a comment.

haXe is a high-level object-oriented programming language mainly focused on helping programers develop Websites and Web applications. haXe has been designed to be easily portable across several platforms.
source: haxe.org

I downloaded the Linux installer and also the HaXe 1.18 for Linux and Neko VM 1.70 zipped files into one directory. Then started a terminal and navigated to this directory and started the installer:

sudo ./hxinst-linux

This launched the GUI installer, which used my previous downloaded zipped versions of HaXe and Neko instead of downloading them again. Nice! I closed the window after the installer finished and typed in the terminal:

haxe

This resulted in a long list of options possible with haxe. Installation succeeded! Next: install swfmill