Ubuntu Tutorials

There is some built-in functionality on the MacBook hardware that I have that I have grown accustomed to, but not really enjoyed.  It has been one of those slight annoyances–something that you just kind of get used to–although it gets under your skin.  Well today I decided I had enough and hunted down the solution.  And, as is my nature, I have decided to blog my findings so you won’t have to look as hard as I have.

To reverse the function key behaviour on MacBook and MacBook Pro (I assume) you need to create an entry in one of the files in modprobe.d/.  The reason we want to do this is that, by default, the fn key behaviour is already reversed from what you might expect.  If there was such a key as fn-lock (think caps lock) imagine that being stuck on all the time.  This suggestion will fix that for you.

First, you’ll need to create a new file in the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory.  For my machine and for the sake of this tutorial we’ll call that file ‘function’.  You might use a command such as:

sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/function

Within that file you will want to add one of the two below entries depending on your kernel version.  (If you are unsure your kernel version run the command ‘uname -r‘ to find out.)

# Reversing the fn behaviour ( >= 2.6.20 kernel)

options hid pb_fnmode=2

or

# Reversing the fn behaviour ( < 2.6.20 kernel)

options usbhid pb_fnmode=2

After you have pasted in the appropriate entry you may want to restart your machine or try reloading the hid or usbhid kernel module, after which the function behaviour should be corrected.

I’ve been doing some research this week on getting a better, native driver installed for wireless on my MacBook. Some of you may remember my previous post about getting wireless to work under ndiswrapper, which has been working great so far, but I have been hoping for more.

Digging through the Ubuntu Forums today I ran across a command that I never knew about and thought I would share. It’s helpful in finding and recognizing detected pci hardware on your machine. After running it and listing my pci hardware again things are better recognized and with more detail. The command is:

update-pciids

This will, as the title says, download a newer version of the PCI ID list and give you better output on your recognized hardware. This is particularly helpful for those of you that do work with drivers or, in this situation, try to see if your recognized hardware will be compatible with native drivers or not.

I hope to have a write-up done today or tomorrow on wireless support (including WEP/WPA) for a MacBook without using ndiswrapper. w00t! In the meantime check out that command and see the difference. It’s a tiny app, but cool nonetheless.

I’m still working out a few minor bugs on my Apple MacBook running Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty” before I write-up my end-all tutorial for Ubuntu on the MacBook.  While perusing the Ubuntu Forums this morning I found a nice little hack / script / tool that can help you disable your touchpad while typing.  I’m sure many of you have run into the problem of having your touchpad move your cursor while you’re typing and really screw things up.  I know it has been a minor annoyance of mine for a while, but this fix seems to do the trick.

note: I have only tested this on my MacBook but I don’t see why it won’t work on any type hardware meeting the minimal requirements.

1. You’ll need to have your touchpad enabled
2. You’ll need to have “SHMConfig”     “on” set in your xorg.conf

If you meet these requirements (pretty simple requirements, I know… and, yes, you should be able to simply add the SHMConfig line if you need to) you’re just about there.

The tool we’re going to use for this is called syndaemon.  You may want to “man syndaemon” for more details, but my basic command below should do the trick.

syndaemon -d -t -i 2

• the -d flag tells syndaemon to run all the time and monitor the keyboard
• the -t flag tells it to only disable tapping and scrolling, not pointer movement
• the -i flag is how long (in seconds) to disable the touchpad *after* the last keypress

Basically, if you didn’t follow all of that here is what this does.  It launches syndaemon as a daemon to continually monitor input activity.  It only disables the tapping and scrolling, but not motion activity (ie; you can still move your mouse but you can’t click or scroll text).  Lastly it unlocks that input after only 2 seconds.  Update the “2″ to your own preferences if you like.

You could try adding that command to your gnome sessions (System > Preferences > Sessions) to have it load at gnome login, or create a boot time script.  I wont go over the boot time script setup here however.

I’d be very interested to know how well that works on other hardware.  I don’t see why it wouldn’t but, again, I have only yet tested it on my MacBook and it works just fine.  Enjoy.

Based on a comment I had last week concerning the Wacom Tablet support and having done a little research I wanted to offer some resources for getting these tablets going on your Ubuntu machines. Much of this information comes from the Wacom Ubuntu Community pages so please refer to that for more information. It sounds like many of these fixes are very simple and could be updated fairly easily (from what I can tell). If you are having trouble with such a tablet take a look at these suggestions and see if you can get them going. If you are a developer with access to the Wacom packages perhaps you could dedicate a bit of time looking at getting these slightly better supported?

There is a huge amount of instruction on the community page for using these tablets within Ubuntu and its applications. Please refer to the Wacom Support Page for all of those details. Here are also a few links on troubleshooting and seemingly simple fixes:

Wacom Tablet Issues

Wacom Troubleshooting

Install Linux Wacom Drivers

I hope this’ll help some of you Tablet users get things going better out of the gate. Big thanks go to the Community Docs team and volunteers for getting those steps and fixes documented.

This will be a quick post to outline a fix for something that we ran into this afternoon. My buddy herlo recently upgraded to Edgy and the sound had issues working after completion. After doing some digging we found a solution to the problem so I thought I would share this with the rest of you. This solution was found at the Kubuntu Forums.

This solution is to verify your user account is authorized to use sound (odd, I know, but its wise to check):

adduser [user] audio

Another solution that you can try is found at the Ubuntu Guide.

I hope either of these help anyone with audio trouble. They are rare–I haven’t had trouble with audio–but they happen. Enjoy!

Update: A comment has pointed out that I made an error in my original syntax for adding the user. I apologize if it caused trouble for anyone. The appropriate command is now listed above and offending command removed. Also, if you’ve made changes using the previous command you may want to use this command to see what changes were made and recover accordingly as it removed the user from groups instead of adding. My apologies.:

sudo diff /etc/group /etc/group-

(this will work as long as no additional changes have been made.)

Technorati Tags: gnome, hardware, sound, kubuntu, audio

Update: This post has been updated based on comments by users. See comments for more details.

I realize that this might be something understood by many people but last night I went to set it up and realized I needed some documentation. The documentation that I did find was rather limited so I thought I would put together a quick tutorial for setting up NFS on an Ubuntu system.

For those that aren’t familiar with NFS here is a quick breakdown of what it might be used for.

• Commonly used data can be stored centrally over an NFS share and accessible by networked machines.
• Centrally store user /home directories on an NFS share allowing them to take their user settings with them on any locally networked machine.
• Centrally share CDROM drives, USB drives and more over the network. If a machine does not have a CDROM simply share that device over NFS and get access.

Below are quick steps on installing and configuring an NFS share on your network. I set this up last night in about 5 minutes to share my media (video and audio) to the other machines on my network.

• sudo aptitude install nfs-kernel-server (install on the central machine you want to share)
• sudo <editor of choice> /etc/exports (this is the configuration file for NFS)

At this point you’ll have to list the devices or locations that you’d like to share and any specifics of that share. Below is an example of my entry and an explanation of each section.

/media/video *(ro,sync)

The first part of this entry, /media/video, represents the location that I want to “export” or share to the network. This, if you hadn’t guessed is the location of my video files.

The second part begins with *. *, as you probably know, represents everything or in this case everyone on the network. You can replace this with a hostname to limit just who can connect to your NFS share. In my case I want all of my local machines to connect so I’ve left it with *.

After that you see ro which defines “read-only”. All of my local machines can access the folder but none can make changes to any of the files. For now this is what I’d prefer. I’d hate for someone to “accidentally” erase half of the video files so its look but don’t touch access.

Now for the good part. How do I use the share that I’ve just setup? It’s quick and easy and uses our good friend the “mount” command. Below is an example of how I would mount the share I created above.

sudo mount media:/media/video /media/video

Here is a quick breakdown of that command. sudo, of course, to gain the privelege of running that command. mount is the same that you’d use to mount a cdrom or usb flash drive. media: represents the machine on the network. Why isn’t that an IP? I’ve specified media in my /etc/hosts file so I can make that shortcut. /media/video is the name of the remote share (as defined above) and /media/video is the location that I would like to mount to. I know it looks like some repetition but I like the organization. You could easily use anything in those places. (ie; sudo mount server:/home/user /home/Desktop/user)

note: the mount destination must already exist and must be empty to properly function.
Quickly, before I wrap this up. Below is an example of how you can set the NFS share to auto-mount on each boot. This would be helpful if you wanted to take advantage of the example above by centrally sharing /home folders.

sudo <editor of choice> /etc/fstab

Add the following entry (replacing with your specifics) to the bottom of that file.

example.hostname:/share_location /mount_location nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0

You’ll notice that the first part of the entry is very similar to the example for manually mounting the share. The last part, beginning with nfs, specifies the file system type (nfs, vfat, ext3, etc) and the last part specify the rest of the details for that nfs system.

I hope this helps anyone new to setting up an NFS share on their network. Some argue that a problem with Linux is lack of helpful documentation. Well, stick this in your pipe and smoke it.

technorati tags:nfs, network, filesystem, ubuntu, 6.06, 6.10