The Fox from Switzerland

e-Sword and Ubuntu 12.04

Martin — Sun, 27 May 2012 07:23:21 +0000

On a 32 bit install of Ubuntu 12.04 there is an error message in the log of Crossover 11:
“Failed reading JPEG because unable to find libjpeg.so.62″
This will prevent e-Sword from starting.

Just install the package libjpeg62: sudo apt-get install libjpeg62

Now e-Sword should work ok.

The above came from the World of Warcraft questions on the Codeweavers site.

Note: you have to enable logging to see the error message. You can do that by using the Debug options on the “Run a Windows command” in the Crossover menu/list of applications.

End of an era (switching off a Netware server)

Martin — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:27:34 +0000

I shut down the Novell Netware 3.12 server in the office today for the last time. It was installed in 1995, running on a Caldera DR-DOS machine, and for 8 years or so was the only server the company had. It provided a printing service as well as file management. Since 2003 or so the file management has been almost entirely a Samba/Linux arrangement, and printers have got smart enough to be directly connected to the network, but we had one legacy Access 2.0 time management program that would not seem to nicely run on anything else.

As of 31.12.2011 this program was replaced by an updated enhanced version running under Access 2007 and so the days of the little Netware server were numbered. It was mega stable, typically having an uptime of more than a year between restarts, and needed very little management.

I remember trashing a hard drive in 2002 or so and having to work out how to reinstall and recover the system using fancy nlm modules.

Raspberry Pi!!

Martin — Thu, 24 May 2012 08:58:06 +0000

Finally received my email from RS in the UK and ordered a unit immediately. Saw a cool Tracker: http://rastrack.ryanteck.org.uk/ I downloaded a couple of images to put on SD cards and now have to wait for 3 weeks or so … Continue reading →

VMWare and Ubuntu 12.04

Martin — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:17:41 +0000

Having trouble getting VMWare workstation/player to work in Ubuntu 12.04?

Try the patch referenced here.

The blog post is dated 26 Jan 2012 but still seems to be relevant – I could not compile the vmmon module etc for version 7.1.5 of VMWare workstation in Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit).

You can grab the patch here:
for v 8.0:
vmware workstation 8.0.2 / player 4.0.2 fix for linux 3.2+
or for v 7.1.5:
vmware workstation 7.1.5 / player 3.1.5 fix for linux 3.2+ (patch by Ariel)

Thanks to weltall.

XFCE and disappearing window title bar and borders

Martin — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:50:10 +0000

I was happily customising my new XFCE installation of Linux Mint 13 and rebooted just to check that all was well.
All was not well, I had no title bar at the top of a window. This was the case on every application I tried.
I found from the references below:
1. xfce4-session uses the contents of the ~/.cache/sessions/ directory for
starting previously saved sessions.
2. delete ~/.cache/sessions folder
3. Log out/restart

All was fixed. Proves once again how useful the archverse is – wiki and bbs.

References:

http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=21023

pointed me to

https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7324

and

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=114235

Ubuntu 12.04 / Mint 13 and multiple graphics cards

Martin — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:01:32 +0000

On my desktop machine at work I have 2 NVidia GeForce 7300 GT video cards and three separate monitors.

I stayed with Mint 9 for a long time, primarily because I could not find a way to activate the 2 cards/3 monitors under Gnome 3.

After Ubuntu 12.04 was released, I installed Kubuntu and it worked fine – but was still (!) KDE and I have been a Gnome fan for many years. Much of my software is GTK based and I found I was “contaminating” the KDE environment more and more with GTK apps.

I got to thinking that as the problem is not with Gnome/GTK per se, but rather with the underlying desktop system, perhaps Ubuntu 12.04 and Cinnamon (which seems to use muffin (aka mutter) not clutter) might be something. I have used Cinnamon on a machine at home and found it quite ok for my needs as a simple but very functional desktop environment.

So I installed Ubuntu on a spare partition, checking the box for proprietary drivers, and got it to boot up, albeit with only one monitor recognized. I ran the Update manager to update a heap of basic files and then rebooted.

Next step was to log in, go to the Additional Drivers screen and install the latest NVidia driver. Before rebooting again, I copied my xorg.conf file from the old installation to /etc/X11.

Bingo. After a new boot, all 3 monitors fired up with the correct resolution/rotation.

So that was pretty much proof positive that the system with Cinnamon would work.

This afternoon I downloaded the RC of Mint 13 and installed that over the top of the Ubuntu install, carrying out the same post-install steps as above. It seemed to work fine.

So this approach may be a very good stop gap approach to allow people to use multiple graphics cards until clutter and Gnome Shell get their act together.

I would very much like to see this latter happen as I personally like the Gnome Shell desktop manager implementation, at least after applying a number of extensions and tweaking some settings.

Arch, Grub and Windows 7

Martin — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:27:29 +0000

I upgraded a laptop which had Arch and Win XP running on it. I replaced XP with Win 7 so that I could have an English windows and update at the same time. I knew that I would lose my bootloader but there was nothing for it.
The Win 7 installation went fine. Naturally Windows did its usual arrogant stuff and overwrote the MBR with only a win boot.
So now to make it proper again.
I booted up with an Arch CD (from 201108) and selected the option to install Arch.
At the prompt I ran km to select the Swiss German keyboard.
Then I mounted the root partition of Arch under /mnt: mount /dev/sda8 /mnt
and the boot partition: mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/boot.
With the command:
grub-install –root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda
I reinstalled the grub bootloader on the MBR of the hard drive.
A reboot and my grub menu appeared and allowed me to log into Arch again.
I edited the entry for Windows in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst to have the correct title for Windows 7 and also to comment out the line makeactive. This last is recommended in the Arch wiki for dual booting with Windows 7.

Axigen Mail Server and Clamav – post installation

Martin — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:18:23 +0000

The Axigen mail server is very simple to install and set up.
It has very few external dependencies and installs from a self executing script.
The free version supports multiple domains and accounts with a renewable annual licence.
I wanted to combine Axigen with Spamassassin and Clamav to control spam and virus detection.
Installation of clamav on an Ubuntu server is straight forward.
Post installation problems were relatively minor but prevented the mail server from working!

The first one is the presence of apparmor. If this is running, there is a need to include
in the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.clamav:

#for Axigen
/var/opt/axigen/ rw,
/var/opt/axigen/** krw,

and to restart apparmor.

Clamav needs to run as user axigen rather than the more normal clamav.

In the file /etc/clamav/clamd.conf change the user as below:

#LocalSocketGroup clamav
#LocalSocketMode 666
# TemporaryDirectory is not set to its default /tmp here to make overriding
# the default with environment variables TMPDIR/TMP/TEMP possible
#User clamav
User axigen

also the log file location:

LogFile /var/log/clamav/clamav-axigen.log

and then to make sure the clamav-axigen.log file is writable by user axigen.

One ‘gotcha’ is to look at the logrotate configuration. When the logrotate daemon kicked in, it created a new log file but
owned by clamav. This prevented axigen from processing any mails in the queue!

I modified the /etc/logrotate.d/clamav-daemon file to:

/var/log/clamav/clamav.log {
rotate 12
weekly
compress
delaycompress
create 640 clamav adm
postrotate
/etc/init.d/clamav-daemon reload-log > /dev/null
endscript
}

Grub stops at the menu – timeout does not work

Martin — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:45:38 +0000

First a disclaimer – this is a quick and dirty fix to a problem. If there is a better way then I will post again.

After an upgrade of grub (I think), one of my machines booted up into the grub menu ok, but then stopped. The timeout function seemed to be broken or something.

After a trip to the office server room to fix a machine with the same problem (late night decision to reboot a server – bad move), I figured I needed at least a temporary fix.

Although I do not know why it happens, I could find that changing

set timeout = -1
to
set timeout = 0

in the file /etc/grub.d/00_header, under the line with recordfail

insmod gettext
if [ ${recordfail} = 1 ]; then
set timeout=-1
else
set timeout=10
fi

I made the change also in the grub.cfg file but this will not survive an upgrade to grub. The skeleton file 00_header should make sure that this modification is written to future grub installations.

What is strange is that not every machine seems to have this problem. I first came across it in Arch linux (0.97-21), but not in Mint 12 (1.99-12ubuntu5) on my laptop although Mint12 on another machine in the office with the same version of grub does show it.

The machines are all running different kernels – 3.3.1, 3.0.0 and 2.6.30.

Anyway, until I get to the bottom of things, this will at least allow unattended reboots!

Update:
I had this happen on another machine, after connecting and subsequently removing another internal hard drive. It seems that it might relate to the labelling/numbering of drives?

After it occurred, I reinstalled grub with the sudo grub-install /dev/sda command. This seemed to fix it.

Arch and testing repositories

Martin — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 20:31:54 +0000

I guess there are warnings everywhere, for many distros, about using bleeding edge repositories.
We all use these at one time or another and mostly they work pretty much ok.
So I enabled the testing and community-testing repos in /etc/pacman.conf. All went well for a while. I have Arch installed on a couple of machines, one being a Thinkpad T61 with an NVidia graphics chip. Naturally I wanted bells and whistles so I installed the latest NVidia driver from their website. Great stuff.
One evening I came home and did a pacman -Syu, lots of packages to install, and of course I said Y to everything.

One reboot later and wham – no login

Well it did not take much thinking to work out I had wrecked the system with the upgrade.
Turned out that by enabling the testing repos, the kernel was updated to a 3.3 version ( testing version) and the NVidia factory drivers do not support testing kernels.
I was able to log in on the command line, change the repos and reinstall a 3.2 kernel and the NVidia factory driver. This got me back to a graphical login/UI. As pacman keeps previous downloads in the /var/cache/pacman/pkg folder, the 3.2 kernel files (previously downloaded) were able to be reinstalled using a simple pacman -S command.