Laptop Build: apt-get behind a proxy

We have a Netcache webproxy in use at work and so to get the various apt-get and adept commands to work it is necesary to do some configuration.

There are a few posts on the web about how to do this some, saying you just need to set the environment variable http_proxy, others that you must specify the proxy settings in the file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf . For my Kubuntu install I found a mixture of the two was required, more of which anon.

Firstly a word about what the url for your proxy should be: If it is a proxy that requires authentication then it will need to be of the form “http://username:password@proxy.blah.com:8080″ using your username, password and the dns name or ip address of the proxy itself and whatever port number your proxy listens on at the end.

N.B. If your password ever expires and/or gets changed then you will need to update the proxy url wherever you set it.

Following is a summary of my findings and what needs to be set where.

• Adding a line
  export http_proxy=”http://username:password@proxy.blah.com”
  in /etc/bash.bashrc works fine for using apt-get commands from the command line but the graphical tool adept does not appear to read this file or somehow ignores the http_proxy environment variable.
• For adept to work you must remove the line Acquire::http::proxy “false”; from /etc/apt/apt.conf to get any other apt.conf.d file settings to work.
• Add in the line
  Acquire::http::proxy “http://username:password@proxy.blah.com:8080″;
  to the end of /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf (this file seems to be the “traditional place” to put this setting.)

This got me up and running. I also found the command apt-config dump very useful for displaying the settings that apt-get is going to use. Bear in mind however that for command line apt-get usage the http_proxy environment variable, if it is set, appears to overule whatever Acquire::http::proxy settings you may have in apt.conf.d files.

You can just set the Acquire::http::proxy setting and apt-get from the command line will use this in the same way as adept does but as I like to use wget for fetching the odd file from the ‘net I needed http_proxy set anyway.

Clear as mud? That’s got that sorted then.

Laptop Build: NTFS Resize, First Clean Your Windows

I needed to be able to dual boot my laptop as the VPN client we use “Aventail” is only available for Windows and I would need to be able to log on from home when I am doing out of hours support. The Kubuntu Dapper install caters for this and offers to resize your Windows partition for you.

However when I tried that it failed saying it was unable to resize. I got a similar result when I tried a manual resize using the qtparted partition manager tool.

The reason was when that I had been using the laptop booted in Windows and surprise, surprise it had had some problems shutting down so I had to do a forced power off. This however left the NTFS partition in a non-clean state. As soon as I booted back into Windows and did a full shutdown then the installer resized the Windoww partition no problem. The moral of the story: First clean your Windows.

Practise what you preach….and write it down

Over the last couple of months or so I’ve been using Kubuntu on my laptop at work. I thought it would be a good way to find out if Kubuntu can really hack it in a commercial environment specifically an almost completely proprietary Microsoft one. I administer HP-UX servers so I connect to Unix systems all the time and aside from anything else it is just easier to manage that connectivity from a Linux based system.

So while no-one was looking I set up my Toshiba Tecra P4 256MB 40GB system to be dual boot with Kubuntu Dapper. I encountered quite a few little hurdles to overcome to get the system doing everything I could when it was booted in Windows XP but was able to sort them all out. I had the idea of write a series of posts on what I had to do to tweak Kubuntu so other people could perhaps find the answers easier and quicker than I did and of course it would be a handy reference for me whenever I wanted to do this again.

Well you know how it goes one thing came up then another and I never got to writing stuff down; and serves me write too. When I got my new company laptop, a Dell Latitude 520 Intel Core Duo 1GB 40GB, I found I was floundering around to work out how I did some of the stuff I did before.

So this time I’ve made notes of all the steps I’ve taken to get Kubuntu working how I want and I’m going to post them here over the coming days and/or weeks. In an unusual attempt at brevity I’ll do a separate post for each item. Watch this space………

Kopete version reversion

Well following on from my previous post, I was able to revert to the previous version of Kopete once I found out exactly what it was called. I did this by checking in adept on my desktop at home that I hadn’t yet applied the upgrade on. So i then ran:-

sudo apt-get install kopete=4:3.5.2-0ubuntu6.2

Now I have the old Kubuntu themed version back. It may have whatever bugs the upgrade was supposed to fix but at least I have a usable system. Meanwhile (sic) my bug report languished, unloved.

Meawhile…..Sametime Kopete Krash

No it’s not the narrator of the 1960s/70s Batman about to switch to the Joker’s lair. Meanwhile is the name given to the open Source messaging protocol and library that works with Lotus’s Sametime messaging system.

I use (K)ubuntu at work on my laptop (more of which in another post) and I use the Kopete messaging client to talk to people in other offices over our Sametime network.

However it appears that my life is starting to mirror LUG radio podcasts. In their most recent episode they discussed the issue of applying upgrades and how much trust you have that they won’t break your machine. At the time I thought well I have a great deal of trust in (K)ubuntu and generally have a quick look at the list of upgrades to see how long they’ll take to download and then apply them there and then if I have time.

So it was on Thursday that I applied an Kopete upgrade and then found that whenever it tried to log on to the sametime server using the Kopete-Meanwhile plug in it crashed, if I un-installed the meanwhile plug in it was fine though not much use as only one person is on my little jabber server.

This was a real pain for me as I use Meanwhile/Sametime in my work a lot as it saves time with email ping-pongs or telephone conversations that mean both parties are tied up 100% for the duration.

Further following the lead from LUG Radio in a prior episode I thought I had better do the decent thing and contribute so I decided to report this bug. Having searched a few forums and not found anything similar I posted my very first Kubuntu bug. Here it is number 65640

Here’s a few things I found whilst investigating this problem:-

1) If you want to get backtrace info from the KDE Crash handler you need gdb installed:-

sudo apt-get install gdb

2) The bug I found has been in the KDE bugtracking system since August:- http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132450

I guess not many people use the Meanwhile plug in so there’s not urgency to fix it and I’m guessing the Kubuntu team didn’t think it was a major issue when they released the update.

3) You can get a working system again by installing the the beta .deb package for Ubuntu from here

Download and apply with dpkg -i kopete_0.12-beta1-dapper-1_i386.deb

Note this will use a different look and feel to Kopete, though if you want I guess you could apply the Kubuntu theme to it.

4) I could not find any simple way to undo the package update I had installed that broke this in the first place.

I knew I could install a specific version using sudo apt-get install kopete=x.y.z etc. but the only version that seemed available was the current one which was bust.

I feel sure I’ve missed something obvious here and there is an obvious and simple way to roll back an update but I can’t find it at the moment.

If anyone can point me in the write direction you’ll have my eternal undying gratitude.

I shall be keeping an eye on the progress of my baby bug and see what becomes of it.

Editors, validators, samba shares and needless exes

Well it’s a week and a bit in to the tt280 web design course and I am enjoying it and finding doing it on Linux is not too hard so far. Below are a few items I’ve had to deal with or useful things I have found so far.

First Class Conferencing

The course uses a series of conferences in the OUs online system called FirstClass. There is a web front end and for posting a quick message or reading through the site it is ok but to really participate and be able to search and change how you view things you really need the Windows or Mac client. I’ve found the Windows version runs fine in my VMWare virtual PC. I hope they OU starts rolling out its moodle project soon though.
BlueFish HTML Editor

I’ve chosen BlueFish as the HTML editor I am going to use. I needed something that gave me a bit more help than just vi, kate or kwrite ( i.e. syntax highlighting ) but that would still let me get at the base XHTML tags. I really like the BlueFish interface and it’s light and quick to use. It also looks like you can do an awful lot more with it that the stuff I’ll be doing.

Offline Validation

The course stresses the need to have good quality XHTML that conforms to standards and suggests use of the W3C validator to check your pages but the site can be quite slow. So I was very pleased to find you can install a version of the validator on your own machine to run under Apache. These instructions made it really easy and quick to set up.

Samba Shares and Passwords

I wanted a simple way to keep all my files in one place but still be able to access them from the VMWare virtual PC so I decided to use Samba to share a folder on my host Linux system. I found this hard work with the Shares option from the KDE System Settings. It’s not intuitive at all and it seemed I couldn’t add my own user as a username to access the share. I added it by hand but then the virtual PC kept prompting for a password and username and regardless of the various combinations I could not get access.

A bit of googling and I discovered that I needed to set a Samba password using the smbpasswd -L command. Doing “smbpasswd -L simon” allowed me to set a password for the user simon and now I can use that to map a drive on my virtual PC to the shared folder on my Linux host.

I really must look into Samba properly one day.

Needles Self-Contained Animations

On the whole completing the course so far has been quite easy with Linux but there was one animation provided by the OU that showed the exchange of messages over HTTP and this was a self-contained exe so I could only run it on the virtual PC. The animation itself was very basic and could certainly have been done as a movie to watch in some format or at worst as an embedded flash movie.

Warriors of the Net

As a quick refresher of how the Internet works the course asks us to watch the movie Warriors of the Net . I thought it was really cool and would recommend it to any one who wants a quick overview of the net and TCP/IP . Very entertaining.