The previous fix for Hardy should no longer be used as the mountdevsubfs.sh looks different in Intrepid. The following solution was proposed in a ubuntu forum and looks as if it does the job. Simply add the following line at the end of your /etc/fstab file:


none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0


Make sure that your user is member or the group with gid 46 or adjust the above line. Once added to fstab mount the file system using:


sudo mount /proc/bus/usb


I solved the keyring problem by deleting the .gnome2 folder in my home directory. This could most likely be solved a lot easier but I didn’t have the time to dig deeper at the time. Changes have been made to the Networkmanager which now supports mobile internet connections. So far I have not successfully been able to connect to my provider using this new functionality so I’m sticking with the wvdial method.

A really annoying new thing with the network manager is that it shows all my interfaces with static ip-addresses from /etc/network/interfaces. So what? Well if you’re running a lot of systems with dedicated “Host interfaces” in Virtualbox, I guess you see what I mean. As a bonus, each time I attach the network cable it tries to bring up one of those virtual interface with a static ip instead of the eth0 interface… Luckily I’m using 3g and wi-fi a lot, otherwise I would have to face facts and fix the problem

Hopefully something that can be configured better. I haven’t bothered to look at any documentation, things should just work . Perhaps an alternateive strategy by dynamically creating interfaces when starting Virtual boxes, leaving the interfaces file and ifconfig output cleaner.

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

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.

So what is it? Well, GNOME Do is inspired by Quicksilver and GNOME Launch Box. There are quite a few screenshots and movies at their homepage which gives it the presentation it deserves. But, basically it allows you to start your applications in a very speedy, efficient and sexy way. You activate Gnome Do using a predefined keyboard sequence, the default being Super + Space. Using the default subset of plugins Gnome Do is aware of your Music collection, your pidgin contacts, Evolution contacts, Gnome Menus, Firefox bookmarks, ssh servers and much more. By simply starting to type the name of an application, a contact or the name of a song Gnome Do proposes a number of matches with matching actions. Typing the name of a e-mail contact Gnome Do proposes the action Email.

A beatiful feature of Do is that it actually learns what tasks your commonly doing and proposes applications, contacts, music better and better and better each time. As an example the first time I locked my screen I had to type super + space followed by “lock screen”. Today I simply need to do a super + space followed by the letter “l”.

Well, try it out and hopefully you will be as pleased as me. I have went so far as removing all gnome panels, and menus and simply running Gnome Do and Avant Window Navigator now.

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/

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.

I ripped out Xandros as I couldn’t stand it and installed Ubuntu 8.04 which wasn’t that much of a hassle. I decided to install a eee optimized version from here: http://ubuntu-eee.tuxfamily.org/index.php5?title=Main_Page

Apart from needing a LOT of updates taking a LOT of time to install, it all went pretty smooth. In case I would ever want to go back to the original software for any not that obvious reason I backed up the whole 4Gig device using dd using the Ubuntu live CD and an external USB harddrive.

After applying all updates I installed the following packages available from the URL above:

• http://www.x2on.de/eeepc/eeepc-acpi-module-2.6.24-16-generic.deb
• http://www.x2on.de/eeepc/eeepc-wlan_1.0-1_i386.deb
• http://www.x2on.de/eeepc/eee-osd-ubuntu-2.1.1.deb

The result was still not good enough alot of things were not working as they were supposed to do. In order to get the wireless interface running I had to disable the card in “Hardware Drivers”, rename or remove the /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile/ath_hal.ko as it was interferring with the drivers above. In order to get it to load at boot I had to add ath_pci into /etc/modules.

I also made a number of small fixes to fix sound etc. However this seems to be handled in the scripts available for download from here: ftp://ftp.samiux.com/public/eeepc/. I commented out building the madwifi wireless driver from source in the 700-1.3 script and then successfully ran it fixing most/all of the remaining problems such as OSD and fn-keys. There is some more useful information in this guys blog: http://samiux.wordpress.com/

I also installed a new theme called clearlooks-compact which uses the screen a bit more efficiently buy compacting buttons and texts. The clearlooks-compact theme is available from here: http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/11/04/clearlooks-compact-gnome-theme/

In order to free some disk space I ended the setup with

apt-get clean 

removing any retrieved packages stored in the local repository.

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

/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