Disable notification system in Ubuntu

I dont know about everyone else but for some reason I just found the notification system really annoying with my Ubuntu setup, after struggling with a few files and settings finally was able to get it all disabled.

Here is a quick how-to in case someone wants to disable/enable it….

For disabling use the following:

sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service
/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.disabled

To re-enable it:

sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.
disabled /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service

–
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

Converting IMG files to Virtual Box VDI format

In order to avoid installing the whole VM myself, I got an IMG file from a colleague for the CentOS VM. Now once I had the IMG file, but had not in the past converted it before to a VirtualBox compatible VDI format… after doing a little bit of research I found that to be a very simple process, so thought of sharing it with anyone who will like to do the same….

Once you have the .img file just run the following from command line:

VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI [filename].img [filename].vdi

Depending on the size of .img file it might take a little while as for my desktop machine it took like around 5 minutes for converting a 4GB img file to vdi format. Once its all done just add the VDI file as another disk, attach it to a VM in VirtualBox… start the VM and you just got it all working

–
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

Configuring SSH access for VirtualBox Guest Host

A few days back at work, I had to configure a CentOS VM and after I was done with installation on the host itself under VirtualBox I tried doing SSH to the CentOS VM and it didnt let me do that. I had it all configured with NAT and never thought that it will give me such a problem, googling it for a little while for an answer I found the solution… here is a quick howto for setting up SSH access to a VirutalBox VM:

Let <VMname> be the guest machine name (use quotes if it contains spaces), here are the commands that you have to execute for host machine console:

$ VBoxManage setextradata <VMname> "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/HostPort" 2222
$ VBoxManage setextradata <VMname> "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/GuestPort" 22
$ VBoxManage setextradata <VMname> "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/ssh/Protocol" TCP

The HostPort must be greater than or equal to 1024 since listening on ports 0-1023 needs root permssions (and Virtualbox usually doesn’t).

Once all goes good with the commands, you need to exit out (close it) of the guest Machine (different from a reboot as a reboot will not be enough in this case), restart it and then connect via ssh with:

$ ssh -l username -p 2222 localhost

Replace “localhost” with the host machine IP address if you are connecting from another computer.

–
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

Using projector screen with Ubuntu

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 I was having problems with using the projector for doing demos and all. It used to detect the signal from the projector to my video but I couldnt make my desktop to show on the projector screen. I didn’t care much about it then as I was able to get a colleague’s laptop and do my presentations but like last week I had to do a PostgreSQL training for which I really needed my laptop as I had setup almost everything on my machine for doing practicals.

So I thought of giving it a try to see if I can somehow make it work…

Googled it and found someone mentioning “Randr” and when I searched the same through apt-get I was able to find “Grandr” which is a GNOME Panel Applet that allows you to select screen resolution and orientation from the GNOME Panel.

Once I got it installed, connected the projector screen and opened up “Grandr” and then in the first try I was able to see my desktop on the projector screen… I did the following:

- Once Grandr was up I could see my laptop screen as LVGS and project screen as VGA
- Selected ‘Auto’ for VGA and used the normal resolution I go with for my laptop screen
- Clicked on Apply and thats it…

“Grandr ” came out very handy during the training and I was able to do the whole thing using my laptop

–
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

GCC installation problem for OpenSolaris (VM)

Just today as I was trying to port my application code to Solaris and the first thing was to install GCC for Opensolaris and I was using VMware for that purpose.

While installing GCC I got the following error:

user name not found: root

Which didnt make any sense at all so after doing a little bit research I found out that its because the /etc/passwd file is very much out of date and was showing date from 1970.

To fix that…

Simple save the /etc/passwd file with the current date using the superuser previliges and then retry GCC installation which hopefully will not give any problem after this change has been done.

-Shoaib
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

Windows 7 – My experience

I finally got the time to get it working in a VM and this is what I saw of it…

- On the performance side, yes it looks much much better then Vista but nothing like XP

- Good drivers compatibility as I didnt find any problems with any of the devices

- It has the most ugliest taskbar that you can think of, for the way it handles the multiple open windows and seriously it really was the most annoying part for me or I guess I am much more used to Ubuntu and one can never expect anything innovative or creative from M$.

- I couldn’t find Quicklaunch option, it would be good if some M$ techie could give a way around that?

Spending just like 30 minutes, I thought of just sticking to the old XP installation that I have for home use and stay away from the new version which only I would say a little behaved twin of Vista.

–
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

Quakelive on Linux

Its just not understandable when you see Quakelive for Windows but nothing like a native Linux installation. It simply sucks for me as I dont have a dual boot with the crappy old Windows on it.

I just tried installing Quakelive on Linux and it went sweeet, so wanted to share if it could help someone.

I have Ubuntu 8.1 with Wine 1.0.1, the process is something like this:

–> Install Firefox for Windows, and Flash Player for Windows using Wine on Ubuntu

–> Now browse to Quakelive.com using the Windows based Firefox, log in and then it will ask to download the Quakelive MSI. Dowload the MSI installer and use Wine for its installation.

–> Once this is done, restart Firefox, browse to Quakelive and it will update a few files which might take a while and once thats done you are all ready to get into Quakelive.

–
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

Bizzare right click behavior in Firfox 3.0.6

Its been quite a while that I am noticing a weird problem with my firefox since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.1 where a right click within the browser can at times select one of the random functions from the menu options. Its just very annoying at times, so finally today as I got time I started looking at fixing it.

While searching it on the web I found quite a number of people having the same problem as me but there wasn’t a proper fix available to it. Tried several different things and then finally after installing a Firefox addon “Firegestures” it all started behaving normally.

If anyone having the same problem do give “Firegestures” a shot

–
Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

nm-applet problems in Ubuntu

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.1 (Intrepid) I started having problems with my nm-applet not showing up in the panel, but I couldnt get time to fix it for a while.

While today I looked at solving it, saw the following problem on starting nm-applet as:

“No connections added”

After doing a few things here and there found that just editing the file /etc/network/interfaces was the solution. A simple fix to that can be remove everything from  /etc/network/ interfaces file except “lo” entries. My original file looked like:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0

Commenting out “eth0″ lines and restarting nm-applet fixed the problem for me.

Shoaib Mir
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com

VirtualBox issues with USB on Ubuntu 8.1

I just installed a WinXP instance on VirtualBox for some client specific testing and once I got everything configured and all softwares installed, I found out that USB devices were not at all accessible due to some change Ubuntu folks did for Intrepid.

So as a result you get an error while accessing USB setting in VBox Manager that “It can not be mounted”. A simple fix to that is:

sudo vim /etc/fstab

adding the following line at the end:

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

Where ‘xxx’ can be found by doing getting the group id of vboxusers or by:

‘ grep vbox /etc/group‘  and getting the integer value in there which in my case turned out to be 119.

Save the ‘fstab’ file, reboot the host OS and it should be all good.

-Shoaib
shoaibmir[@]gmail.com