1N73RNET » Linux Mint

MythTV how-to video – Part 2

Justin Garrison — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:50:27 +0000

This is a continuation of Part 1 and in this video I just walk you through a Mythbuntu installation and what options you want to use. The next parts will be about configuring the software past the initial installation.

Sorry for the sound quality. I had to use my digital camera for video (which is what I used in part 1) but for some reason there was a ton of static on the recording.

MythTV how-to video – Part 1

Justin Garrison — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:32:13 +0000

I have been working on my MythTV box for some time now and finally got around to editing the first part of the how to I recorded when setting it up. The first part is just about setting up the hardware (not much new), but the second part (and probably third and forth) is going to be on setting up the software and getting things configured just the way you want them to be.

How-to Modify the Default User Settings in Linux

Justin Garrison — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:30:09 +0000

Just like my other two posts here is how you can modify your default user settings in Linux. This is similar to OSX but instead of “/System/Library/User Templates/English.lproj” being our template directory. It is “/etc/skel”.
The skel directory stands for skeleton and it is where the default files and settings come from when you create a new user in Linux. The skel directory is a lot more basic than Windows or OSX mainly because A) not much is needed to create a Linux profile and B) all of the configuration files are stored in plan text and not some fancy .plist or .dat file.
Typically, most distros will only include three files in their “/etc/skel” directory. Those files are “.bash_logout”, “.bash_profile”, and “.bashrc”. If you want to include any more files/settings you can simply edit the configuration in your profile (or a temporary user), copy the setting files to the “/etc/skel” directory, and chown the files with root:root.
What if you don’t want to overwrite the files that came with your distro but you still want to make a skeleton directory? Simple, edit the “/etc/adduser.conf” file and set the SKEL value to whatever you want. Just make sure that the folder is available to root when you are trying to create the new user. In other words, don’t put the folder on a removable drive.
If you are using the GUI to create the new user the files and settings will be copied automatically and if you are using the adduser command just make sure you use the -m flag.
That is really all there is too it. Let me know if you have more tips for creating a user profile or if this helped you out in the comments.

Linux Mint 7 review

Justin Garrison — Sun, 10 May 2009 00:22:47 +0000

Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” RC came out this past week and I spent some time installing it this morning. While it is based on Ubuntu 9.04, my first impressions of Linux Mint 7 are drastically different.
Here is a mini review of why I still use Linux Mint as my main OS at home.
The install was painless, as usual, and the theme was just as elegant and smooth as ever.
After the install I went ahead and updated my video card drivers and turned on advanced desktop effects. From there I needed to install some software that I use day-to-day. Instead of turning on the package manager like I normally would I opened the mintInstall tool expecting the software to refresh it’s list for the next 30 minutes. I was very surprised to have mintInstall ready to install software right when I opened it. I was even more pleased to find the featured applications option. One click on that button and it had a list of popular software that isn’t install by default. With a few check boxes I installed VLC, amarok, f-spot, picasa, etc. The only software not on the list that I needed to install was Audacity and Conduit. Ten minutes past my fresh install I had all my software installed and I was back up and running. Thanks to storing all of my information on either a network drive or a separate partition I had a fully functional Linux Mint 7 installation at this point.
One of my biggest complaints with Linux Mint in the past was the mintMenu application. While I loved its functionality of allowing you to search for programs and documents all right when the menu is open, it never had the ability to open with a hotkey, until now. I found out by accident. I pushed the “Super” key and started typing Firefox because that is what I usually do in Vista. About half way though “fire” I realized I had opened the mintMenu with the “Super” key. After reading the changlog I found that you can also change the key which is very helpful in Linux because many other programs use the “Super” key for activation (Gnome Do, Compiz shortcuts, etc.).
One other change that I didn’t expect, but am OK with, is the fact that Gnome Do does not start up by default. Because past mintMenu’s could not open with a shortcut key I began relying on Gnome Do to launch my programs and find my documents. I very much like the program but with mintMenu being able to open with just a keypress I don’t know if Gnome Do is needed any more in Linux Mint, at least not for program launching.
The only other surprising feature to find was that Evolution was not the default mail client and instead Thunderbird still held that title. While I still do like Thunderbird I feel like Evolution is a step in the right direction and I love that it can not only manage all of my personal email addresses but it can also painlessly get my works Exchange email.
In summary, Linux Mint 7 is absolutely wonderful. I have all the features and support of Ubuntu with all the polish and software I have come to love in Linux Mint. I look forward to using Linux Mint 7 more and hopefully I will be able to keep this install for at least 6 months until Linux Mint 8 comes out. Great job Clem and team, another success in my book.

Ubuntu (9.04) Jaunty Jackalope first impressions

Justin Garrison — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:00:32 +0000

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my main laptop (HP Compaq 8510p) and I wanted to post what my first impressions:

My first issue was with the installation. I am not sure if this feature was taken out or if there was just some other reason I couldn’t do it, but what happened to the ability to resize your Windows partition to install Ubuntu on the newly created free space? I only had two options on my install, use the entire disk (erasing Windows), or manually select which partitions to use (without the ability to resize a partition). What I ended up having to do was boot back into Windows Vista and resize my main partition to free up unallocated space on my drive manually. While this wasn’t horrible to do, I can imagine there are quite a few people out there that don’t know how to do this. After I had freed up 15 GB on my drive I had a third option to install Ubuntu on the largest available free space but it was still a bit of a hassle to do in the first place.
Once I actually booted into Ubuntu I was greeted with all of my hardware working out of the box…until I rebooted.
I am not sure why but my sound wasn’t working past the login screen. It worked just fine on the first boot and it has never failed to work in any previous Ubuntu installation on this laptop (8.04-9.04). I was eager to play some of my music, but I soon remembered one of the reasons I switched to Linux Mint…and that sent me to the package manager to install the restricted extra’s package so I could listen to my music in MP3 format. Once I finally had the package installed I then realized I couldn’t hear any music coming from the Rythumbox player. I started up Firefox and headed to YouTube to see if I had any audio there. Back to the package manager to install flash and then restarted Firefox to see if I had sound from YouTube. This confirmed that I had no sound working whatsoever. I went to the forums and installed the Gnome ALSA mixer cause I heard it solved the problem for some people but for me it would just open up with a blank window with no options but to exit. So I gave up on my sound thinking I could just use my USB sound card that has worked with every other distribution of Ubuntu I have tried it on (back to 7.10). Wrong I was. The USB sound card did not work with Audacity however after 3 more reboots all of a sudden my onboard sound worked again. I tested it with Audacity and I was set to record the next mintCast.
During all of this work to get my sound working again I probably had Firefox crash on me, I’d say, 6 times. While I am not new to having Firefox crash, especially not in Linux, I was quite surprised to have this sort of instability for a newly released OS. Sure I installed the Adobe Flash add-on but in the past when Flash crashed it just wouldn’t play videos anymore until I rebooted the browser. These crashes were full system locking, power button holding, not even RSEIUB would help kind of crashes. I will admit in the second day I used Jaunty I haven’t had Firefox crash on me once but the bitter taste of a unstable browser still frightens my every keystroke.
With everything working as it should I decided to test this famed boot speed improvements using ext4. I have seen video’s of sub 20 second boot times and I am very curious what my laptop can do. With Linux Mint 6 installed my boot times from the time I pushed the power button till the time I loaded a webpage with Firefox was about 50 seconds. I defiantly felt like Jaunty was faster than that, but after 2 tests (with auto login and and Firefox set to auto run) my best time was still only 41 seconds. Once again, a little bit of a downer.
Next thing to test was one of my outstanding problems with Ubuntu/Linux Mint. At work and at home I use a docking station to dock my laptop to be able to use a full keyboard/mouse and large monitor. When my computer is docked I get video on the external display but it never detects as a second monitor through the docking port, and instead it just mirrors my display and never lets me change my resolution on the external monitor. If I plug the monitor in to the VGA port on the laptop it is just fine however. I tried to open system preferences and all I was greeted with was this empty window that I had to force quit every time I opened it. This was finally another strike that made me very sad and disappointed that Jaunty isn’t what I thought it would be.
The final little nagging feature was the pop-up that asks you to confirm your shutdowns and restarts just like OSX. I heard an interview with Mark Shuttleworth and he said that this was necessary for the new desktop notifications so I wasn’t too bummed about it but it does make shutting down a little more annoying.
On the plus side I do like the pop-up notifications, which I didn’t think I would, and I like the improvements made to Evolution (and it is really winning me over from Thunderbird). I think 9.04 isn’t a step backwards like 8.10 was compared to 8.04, but I don’t feel like 9.04 is living up to the hype.
I have no plans to stop using Linux Mint or Ubuntu (or Linux in general). I think they are both fantastic operating systems and I am so thankful for the countless people that put in all of their free time and talent into the system. I try to contribute in as many ways as I know how and will continue to support the community whenever I have the chance.
For now, I am looking forward to what Ubuntu 9.10 will have in store.
Let me know what things you love and hate about 9.04 in the comments.

Error with CIFS on shutdown in Linux

Justin Garrison — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:04:34 +0000

I kept getting this error with Linux Mint and my NAS. When I shutdown I got an error saying:

CIFS VFS server not responding

and the system would hang before shutting down and sometimes not shutdown at all. Of course with so many people using Linux the problem was only a Google search away.
I found that the problem is because Linux Mint would turn off the network connection before it would unmount the mounted volumes I had. It does this for security reasons because if you have system folders or home folders mapped to network shares it needs to have those system folders until it is done shutting down. Of course you would still run into problems when the network connection is killed but I don’t program so I am sure there are other reasons why it is done this way.
Anyway, a good solution is to have the drives unmounted earlier in the shutdown process. To do this we are going to make symbolic links to the script that unmount the volumes for us and then just put that in the folder that is processed earlier during shutdown and reboot. I found bits and pieces on how to do this in the Ubuntu forums but I found a good blog with all this info in one place here. here.
The code you need to run to make the symbolic links is here.
ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh
ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh
Here is a quick explanation of what this does from the other blog I found.

This will create two symbolic links to the umountnfs.sh script, one in runlevel 0 (shutdown) and one in runlevel 6 (reboot). The links have a “K” prefix to let the init system know that the script should be called with “stop” as an argument, and they have a priority of 15 to ensure that they are run before avahi-daemon and dhcdbd are stopped

OK that fix didn’t work. I finally found a solution that really works. Do this in a terminal instead.
cd /etc/rc6.d ls -la
You will see two files S31umountnfs.sh and S15wpa-ifupdown.sh. The number still represents the order at which the script runs. All you need to do is change when the umountnfs.sh script runs. Do that by typing in:
sudo mv S31umountnfs.sh S14umountnfs.sh
You will need to run the command one more time in the /etc/rc0.d folder too.
Now my shutdown doesn’t hang anymore on unmounting the CIFS mounts.
I hope this helps.