Published!

Like others, I’ve just received my complimentary copies of Linux Desktops Hacks to which I contributed hacks #49 & #59.

My only complaint is that my contributer blurb (page xi) says:

C’mon – I gave up on Fedora ages ago in favour of Ubuntu!

Nice to see my name (and work) properly in print though.

I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter

Although I’ve got some familiarity with Netfilter/IPTables, I rarely bother with complicated rules on my desktops (although I’d probable be more paranoid if I was connecting my machine to someone else’s network).

I’ve played with some of the firewall GUIs that ship with Fedora (mainly the firewall questions in the installer, and occasionally gnome-lokkit), but I didn’t really get into them that much.

Yesterday I came across Firestarter which is a really nice tool for configuring and monitoring your firewall, so now my home machines are more secure.

As a downside to this, I discovered the NFS really doesn’t play nicely with firewalls. This became particularly apparent on my first reboot after enabling Firestarter. Ubuntu mounts remote drives before starting the firewall, so the initial NFS mount worked fine but the firewal then broke the connection. Not realising this, I tried to log into GNOME with then hung because of the blocked NFS mountpoint. Took me ages to figure out exactly what was occuring, during which time I did more damage trying to fix it!

Because all my music is hosted on another box, I was using NFS to access it but now that’s gone out of the window in favour of a more elegant solution – SlimServer and Softsqueeze. Except now of course I’ve added a Squeezebox2 to my (ever growing) hardware wish list…

Whilst I was setting up Slimserver, I also configured mt-daapd for the same music repository, so any machines that are running iTunes (my work laptop) or can speak DAAP ( i.e. XboxMediaCenter) can use the media with little/no effort.

On a final note, apart from my Bluetooth headset/VoIP softphone solution I’ve now migrated to Linux full time for everything else. For the time being I using a wired headset with the softphone, but I’m looking into hardware units instead. You can tell you’ve turned the corner when it’s quicker/easier to do things in Linux than Microsft Windows!

Semi-Spatial Nautilus

For some reason (I’ve not looked into it, so someone please tell me) Ubuntu decided to break the spatial nautilus in Hoary (5.04). Now when you open folder, it opens in a new window (as before), but is closes the previous one.

Not good.

Fortunately, there’s a (relatively) easy way of fixing this:

Compiling MPlayer on Ubuntu Hoary

After discovering the Ubuntu MPlayer package is broken for non-P4 systems, I decided to compile from source. I followed MacEwan’s instructions, but I was getting a strange compile error…

 /usr/lib/libGL.a(glxcmds.o)(.text+0x2eea): In function
 `glXGetMscRateOML':
 : undefined reference to `XF86VidModeQueryVersion'
 /usr/lib/libGL.a(glxcmds.o)(.text+0x2f1a): In function
 `glXGetMscRateOML':
 : undefined reference to `XF86VidModeGetModeLine'
 collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
 make: *** [mplayer] Error 1

Turns out there’s a package missing:

 $ sudo apt-get install libxxf86vm-dev

And everything compiles cleanly now!

Mono 1.1.6 is out

On the same day as the Ubuntu Hoary Release Candidate came out, Mono released version 1.1.6. It’s looks like they’re holding true on their recommendation to concentrate on the 1.1 branch as there’s no corresponding release for the 1.0 branch like there usually is.

Release notes are here.

Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog Release Candidate

It was announced two days ago, and they expect to release the final version within a week! I’ve tried Hoary before, and found it quite usable then. Seeing as I recently had to dump my Warty installation (temporarily needed the space for a Windows based project) I’m in the process of downloading it at the moment and will hopefully have it installed by the end of the day. I’m also going to grab a couple of the LiveCD images to take along to my next LUG meeting.