- Published:
- April 14, 2009 – 10:56 am
- Author:
- By Dave
As previously written on this blog, I have set up a display in our lobby at work to display the day’s current events and meetings using Ubuntu and a tiny PC. Since this is a display which is on all day, the screensaver and monitor blanking (and other Energy Star features) are all turned off. Under the auspice of wanting to save energy and also extending the life of a new monitor, someone suggested that we turn off the monitor at night using an electrical timer. A lightbulb went off in my head, that there must be a better way to do this via command line and then run it in the cron. It turns out the solution is very simple. The xset command is the X server preferences command. It has a simple command to turn off the monitor: 1$ xset dpms force off and to turn the monitor….
Categories: Code Samples,Hardware,Linux,Shell,Software,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: display, energy, energystar, lobby, monitor, power, saving
- Published:
- March 17, 2009 – 3:58 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
Running sudo apt-get upgrade, I started getting this error: 1Reading package lists… Done 1W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net intrepid Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 313D312748A22A95 1W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems Ah ha! But apt-get update is the command causing this problem. The solution is to import this key from the gpg servers; I don’t know why this isn’t done automatically, but here is it: 1sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 313D312748A22A95; gpg –export –armor 313D312748A22A95 | sudo apt-key add – Resulting in: 123456Executing: gpg –ignore-time-conflict –no-options –no-default-keyring –secret-keyring /etc/apt/secring.gpg –trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg –keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 313D312748A22A95 gpg: requesting key 48A22A95 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com gpg: key 48A22A95: public key "Launchpad PPA for Filip Brcic" imported gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg: unchanged: 1 OK Congrats! sudo apt-get….
Categories: Configurations,Shell,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: apt-get, gpg, Ubuntu
- Published:
- December 7, 2008 – 2:10 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Readers should note that this applies to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex only! ZFS is a relatively new filesystem created by Sun. It is released under the CDDL License which is incompatible with Linux’s GPL License, meaning that it can not be installed natively in the kernel. Therefore, for not it is relegated to addon packages and is brought to Ubuntu via the Fuse framework. For more information on this see the Ubuntu Wiki article on ZFS. The wiki article also explains this, but getting ZFS installed on Ubuntu is actually pretty straightforward by issuing these commands: $ sudo echo “deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/brcha/ubuntu intrepid main” >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zfs-fuse.list $ sudo echo “deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/brcha/ubuntu intrepid main” >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zfs-fuse.list $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install zfs-fuse This installs zfs onto your system. Now to create your raid-z array! Its dead simple. $ sudo zpool create media -m /storage raidz /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc In….
Categories: Configurations,Linux,Shell,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: filesystem, RAID, sysadmin, zfs
- Published:
- November 13, 2008 – 12:39 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I recently took upon the task of setting up a presentation display in the lobby of our building. This display had previously used an old computer running Windows 2000, and displayed a fairly simple PowerPoint presentation with a few frames, mostly a schedule for anyone coming into the building. We did a renovation and this display moved from a desk to on the wall. Therefore we needed to figure out a way to drive this display. We had 3 main options: Run the VGA cable upstairs to a room where the PC would sit. Purchase an expensive display driver box that could show PowerPoint along with other things like RSS feeds and video streams. I quoted this out and it was about $1800 for this fancy box. Install a small computer behind the display and use that to drive the presentation. I decided to purchase a FitPC Slim to drive….
Categories: Configurations,Other Technology,Shell,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: display, lobby, power point, powerpoint, Ubuntu
- Published:
- October 6, 2008 – 11:45 am
- Author:
- By Dave
It is possible to install Active Directory authentication in Ubuntu 8.04 and later. The Likewise Open packages accomplish this task, and it is actually pretty easy. Just a note – when installing Ubuntu, do not add a user named “administrator” as I did. This makes it impossible to join the Ubuntu workstation to the domain using the “administrator” active directory user – but you can use a different Domain Administrator username and password. The steps to follow: sudo apt-get install likewise-open sudo domainjoin-cli join fdqn.yourdomainserver Administrator sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start As a side note – you should also consider adding the following code to make it so that users do not have to login with DOMAIN\username on the ubuntu login screen. You can do this by changing /etc/samba/lwiauthd.conf and adding this line: 1winbind use default domain = yes Also, another helpful tidbit of information is getting your….
Categories: Linux,Security,System Administration,Ubuntu,Windows
Tagged: active directory, likewise, login, lwidentity, Ubuntu
- Published:
- January 31, 2008 – 4:31 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I recently formatted my laptop and installed Windows first, using half of the hard drive, and then installing Ubuntu 7.10 on the other half. It had been a while since I tried Ubuntu – it has a come a long way – but that is another story. The install worked fine, however at the end, it just sort of hung while installing grub. GREAT. I reboot and it kicks me to a (grub) standard prompt. It took me a while to figure this out, but you can manually boot Ubuntu via the grub prompt. The tricky part is finding out the right commands since your system is totally inaccessible. You can find your available hard drive name by typing: 1> root ( <tab> pressing tab will list your available hard drives and partitions and hopefully your Ubuntu ext3 partition. Continue setting the root boot partition. This includes your partition….
Categories: Linux,Site Updates,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: boot, grub, Ubuntu
