Sponsored by the GNOME Foundation

We’ve been working hard on the list we’ve assigned ourselves in the GNOME Sysadmin Hackfest. So far we’ve made a large number of commits to our puppet configuration tree, as well as got two new servers installed. A large number of our web services are now migrated to a new RHEL6 based web server, which is running smoothly. This is a great step toward being able to migrate everything onto supported, high performance hardware.

While Olav Vitters wasn’t able to physically attend the Hackfest he has been making some impressive contributions to the project and the TODO list we’ve compiled. I want to put out a big thank you to him for all his contribution!

I’ve made a number of improvements to the Nagios monitoring solution, expanding it to include the new virtual machines and tweaking the sensitivity of some of the checks. In addition, I’ve written a new nfs client and nfs server puppet class, which should allow us to more easily configure our NFS shares, which we use quite a bit of.

We’ll have more to report as the conference continues. I think we’re going to have a very impressive overall report  by the time this is all over.

Sponsored by the GNOME Foundation

Today I’m at SCALE in Las Angeles. I’m here for a few reasons, including as a Speaker on Sunday morning, to help manage the GNOME Foundation exhibition booth, and to participate in the GNOME Sysadmin Hackfest.

As the staff GNOME Sysadmin I proposed and planned a Sysadmin Hackfest that would allow us to work on some of the core infrastructure improvements that would benefit from face-to-face collaboration.

A lot of the things that we’ll be working on are behind the scenes, but they’ll have a long-term positive effect for the Foundation and the development teams.

Unfortunately, a lot of the hardware that the GNOME Foundation has been working with is now outdated and out of warranty. This leaves us in a difficult situation in the event of an outage or hardware failure. This will be remedied during this hackfest! The GNOME Foundation has approved and ordered two new nice Dell servers. The new Dell R610 is now setup and ready to buildout. This machine will be the new NFS server as well as a container for new RHEL6 virtual machines. We’ll be able to migrate a large majority of the dated hardware into up to date virtual machines. We’re all very excited about this!

We’re also dedicating time to address a number of the long standing bugzilla issues. This includes a number of improvements to the user management system. We use this system to track and manage access controls, foundation membership, email and SSH key configuration and deployment and other related tasks.

I’ll post updates throughout the weekend on our progress and maybe, if you ask nice enough, we might just have a look at one of your bugs!

Be sure to check out the GNOME 2.32 Release Notes for more details.

GDM Changes

I believe it was with Ubuntu 9.10 that the GDM login manager was rewritten and the previous configuration options removed. I know there was a lot of upset about that when it happened. The functionality seemed to be the same, but the configuration options that users had grown used to were now gone. It seems, however, that there are still some settings that can be changed. Perhaps not quite as many, but one of the important ones is still available. If slightly obscure.

Updating Configuration

There are two methods of updating this configuration. There is the command-line one-liner, which I like for it’s quick and easy use. There is also the graphical method. I’ll outline both below. You can follow whichever you feel most comfortable with.

Command Line : gconftool-2

To disable the login screen user list in Ubuntu 10.04, simply run the following command, entering your password when prompted:

sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true

The next time you log in you’ll be prompted to enter your username and password, instead of selecting your username from a list.

Graphical Method : gconf-editor

To disable the login screen user list in Ubuntu 10.04 graphically, run the following command and then navigate to the proper key=value pair setting.

sudo -u gdm gconf-editor

Navigate to /apps/gdm/simple-greeter.

Check the box that says “disable user list”, setting the value to true.

disable ubuntu login user list

Whichever method you choose, you’ll end up with the same result. Disabling the list of users at the login screen. I prefer my machine to require the username + password combination. No reason in telling everyone who the machine belongs to, and removing half of the security of the login mechanism.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts on the security vs usability of a user list at login. Do you agree with me or disagree?

For those in a hurry,  I’ve outlined the quickest way known to man to move the window buttons back to the right. Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), and paste in the following command:

gconftool -s /apps/metacity/general/button_layout -t string menu:minimize,maximize,close

Magically your window buttons will be back to the “right” place.

For those that are afraid of the terminal and their copy-paste functionality, you can follow these steps:

1. Press ALT-F2 to open the application launcher.
2. Enter ‘gconf-editor’
3. Navigate to Apps > Metacity > General > Button Layout
4. Change the string value to ‘menu:minimize,maximize,close’
5. Exit gconf-editor

Those steps aren’t too bad either. I prefer the first, of course, but perhaps it has a little too much “magic” to it.

In conclusion I think the move is still controversial. I would have expected some of these controversial changes in a development release, but not an LTS (Long Term Support) release. In any case, I’m not here to make decisions.

GNOME 2.30 Released

I am happy to pass on the announcement that GNOME has released 2.30, and exactly on schedule! This release brings a number of great improvements that I’m sure you’ll be happy with in the upcoming Ubuntu release. Because Ubuntu bases its releases after the GNOME release schedule, each GNOME release means an Ubuntu release is imminent.

If you enjoy GNOME, please consider donating to Friends of GNOME. They are *so* close to their goal. I’m sure the readers of Ubuntu Tutorials could help push them over the goal! Thank you.

So, I this is my question for all of you readers out there, and don’t be shy about linking to screenshots:

What is the best GNOME Desktop theme?

Requirements

GNOME Activity Journal previews can be downloaded from Launchpad by way of bzr. You can easily checkout the latest development versions and run them, no compilation required! You will need to have the bzr utility installed, which can be done using the following command: (or click the linked package name)

sudo aptitude install bzr

Once you have bzr installed you’re ready to go! Next I will cover how to download the development previews and get started running and testing GNOME Activity Journal.

Download GNOME Activity Journal

There are two requirements for running GNOME Activity Journal. The Journal utility itself, and the Zeitgeist daemon. In the following steps we’ll checkout the latest revisions of each.

First, we’ll create a directory structure for our applications to run in.

mkdir ~/zeitgeist

cd ~/zeitgeist

Zeitgeist

Download Zeitgeist using the command:

bzr branch lp:zeitgeist

GNOME Activity Journal

Download the GNOME Activity Journal utility using the command:

bzr branch lp:gnome-activity-journal

Launching GNOME Activity Journal

Once these two utilities have downloaded we’re ready to launch them and start previewing the GNOME Activity Journal. This is done using the commands:

~/zeitgeist/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-daemon.py &
~/zeitgeist/gnome-activity-journal/gnome-activity-journal &

Keeping Updated

If you want to keep these two utilities updated, you can simply continue to track the bzr repositories and update your branches with the latest revisions. Anytime you want to check for new features or changes in either Zeitgeist or GNOME Activity Journal, simply run the following two commands:

cd ~/zeitgeist/zeitgeist && bzr pull
cd ~/zeitgeist/gnome-activity-journal && bzr pull

These two commands will move you to the directories where you have each utility checked out and pull for any new revisions in the upstream Launchpad repository. If there are no changes, you should receive the message “No revisions to pull”. Otherwise it’ll download the latest changes and you can simply re-launch as outlined above.

Preview

Check out this YouTube video of a recent build:

Conclusion

The new utilities and features in GNOME 3.x are shaping up very nicely. Between the GNOME Shell and GNOME Activity Journal we’ve got some fun and exciting new utilities to tinker with. I’d love to hear your thoughts on both of these, and what you think about the upcoming GNOME 3.x release.

The problem

You are prompted by the system to enter your keyring passphrase in order to unlock additional keys. None of your passphrases work–somehow you have become locked out of your keyring. In this situation you may not be able to unlock needed keys, such as passwords, SSH or GPG keys.

The solution

The only solution that I’ve been able to come up with is to delete the keyring contents, including the incorrect or corrupt passphrase. Note: this will destroy all stored keys in the keyring, requiring that they be re-imported. Other than the need to “start over” with the keyring manager, this solution should be otherwise harmless.

Method 1:

It is possible to clobber your keyring passphrase and settings from the Terminal. Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), and run the command:

rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring

On older systems you may need to try:

rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring

Method 2:

The second method bypasses the Terminal and uses the graphical interface strictly. To delete your current keyring, follow the steps below:

1. Navigate to Applications > Accessories > Passwords and Encryption Keys
2. Select the far-right tab “Passwords”
3. Select your keyring
4. Right-click and attempt “Change Password” or, if that doesn’t work, select “Delete”

Additional:

If you continue to have problems I would suggest looking for additional tips in the comments here or here.

I’m curious to see further improvements to the new GDM system, but until that time I prefer to require username and password to login, not just a password.

Disable User List

In order to disable the user list you’ll need to open a terminal and run the following command:

sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true

Enable User List

If you’d like to re-enable the user list you can revert the above command using:

sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list false