Jun. 14, 2008
Updating to version 0.5.0 brings even greate power and functionality to Do. At the time of the writing this version is not available in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy. In order to install it follow the installation guide here.
I realized that I was missing a dependency (libevolution3.0-cil) needed to get the Evolution plugin running. Simply installing it after Do was in place resolved my troubles:
sudo aptitude install libevolution3.0-cil
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Jun. 14, 2008
I have been running Gnome Do for quite some time now and fully agree with it being "A powerful, speedy, and sexy remote control for your GNOME Desktop". I am now wondering how I actually coped without it in the past.
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Jun. 13, 2008
A fix for that nasty OpenVPN bug in Hardy was released this evening. No need to type the password for your keys 4 times in a row anymore. The Network manager is also back in business and works just great. I can finally remove my kludge whitelisting fix 
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Jun. 5, 2008
I have created a small workaround for the VERY annoying results of the introduction of openssl-vulnkey. Having to enter my ssl key passwords four times before establishing a OpenVPN connection and not being able to use the nm-applet at all wasn't great.
The patch adds a key to a whitelist ones it has verified it as safe and does not do any further blacklist tests for any keys located in the whiltelist. The patch is not flawless and should only be seen as a temporary workaround until a permanent solution from the vendor becomes available. It has several shortcomings, such as only being able to add keys to the whitelist if run as root.
The patch is available at the launchpad site here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/230197/
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
May. 20, 2008
Last weeks OpenSSL issues in Debian based distributions didn't go unnoticed for most of us. The introduction of openssl-vulnkey screwed up the Network Manager based OpenVPN GUI as it does no longer properly supply the underlying daemon with the passkey correctly.
Running OpenVPN from the command line now asks for the password three times as seen below:
Tue May 20 19:37:12 2008 /usr/sbin/openssl-vulnkey -q /home/user/openvpn/key.pem
Enter pass phrase for /home/user/openvpn/key.pem:
Enter pass phrase for /home/user/openvpn/key.pem:
Enter Private Key Password:
There is a incorrect but working workaround suggested at Ubuntu launchpad:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/230197/
It suggests replacing openssl-vulnkey that is intended for checking x509 certificates with openvpn-vulnkey used for checking OpenVPN shared static keys. Replacing openssl-vulnkey with /bin/true works just as good as the suggested workaround at launchpad but obviously removes the intended check for blacklisted keys as well.
So check your keys using openssl-vulnkey, replace any keys needing replacing, make a backup of openssl-vulnkey and replace it with /bin/true TEMPORARLY. If your interested in monitoring the activity of the bug, become a subscriber at the link above. If not wait for the security update and make sure to apply it ones it's released.
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
May. 9, 2008
I've been looking at the sweet small Asus Eee PC's for quite some time now. I have had a hard time deciding whether to wait for the 900-series or buy the ones that are available in stores now. Giving it some thought I decided to wait for the new ones AND buy one now 
What can I say it's a small pink beauty and so far I love it.
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Apr. 30, 2008
fails miserably. I'm guessing other distributions shipping with the 2.6.24 suffer from the same problem. The trouble starts when the installer tries to build the vmxnet network driver.
The error I'm getting is:
In file included from /tmp/vmxnet-only/vmxnet.c:36:
/tmp/vmxnet-only/vm_basic_types.h:161: error: conflicting types for ‘uintptr_t’
I found the following web page that hosts a number of patches and pre-patched sources solving the problem. http://projects.tuxx-home.at/?id=vmware_updates
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Apr. 29, 2008
Yet another tool that does not work out of the box on Hardy. If you're experiencing the following error message
/usr/lib/vmware-server-console/bin/vmware-server-console: /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: version `GCC_3.4' not found (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
Well... simply run the following command (at your own risk) and you should be all set
sudo rm -f /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | 1 Comment
Apr. 29, 2008
Why would anyone want to encrypt theire drives with random keys? Well the whole drive wouldn't be that suitable perhaps but the swap and tmp partitions could. Looking at the man page for crypttab suggests the following setup for a randomly encrypted swap:
cswap /dev/sda6 /dev/random swap
This all looked great until I rebooted the system to find it stopping at "Starting early crytpo disks". Looking into this further revealed a problem in cryptsetup which I have filed as a bug in Launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cryptsetup/+bug/223072
The work-around is to use a keyfile as for any other partition on the system.
Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments
Apr. 29, 2008
One of the first things I noticed in Ubuntu Hardy Heron was that the key agent failed to load any other keys than the first one id_rsa. Having quite a few keys with more or less complex password this was not a pleasant surprise. Somebody obviously found this out before me, however a fix never made it into the main release. BUT there is a workaround documented in launchpad;
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-keyring/+bug/195908
Basically it tells you to run the following commands. I have tested it and it works great.
mkdir ~/.gnome2/keystore; for i in ~/.ssh/*pub; do key=$(basename $i .pub); echo -e "[default]\npurposes=ssh-authentication" > ~/.gnome2/keystore/${key}.keystore; ln -s ~/.ssh/$key ~/.gnome2/keystore/; done