Merry Christmas, everyone! We have a special card just for you:
http://www.tolaris.com/xmas/xmas2009.php
(In case you miss it the first time, try reloading or clicking the button.)
Read on if you’d like to know more about how our awesome card works.
Year: 2009
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virt-manager now in repo
The latest virt-manager package in Ubuntu karmic is broken. We use virt-manager to manage KVM/QEMU virtual machines over an ssh tunnel. This worked fine in hardy and jaunty. But it is partially broken in karmic.
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kregexpeditor, grip now in repo for karmic
Both kregexpeditor (removed since the KDE 4 upgrade) and grip (unmaintained since 2005, relies on old libraries) are missing from Ubuntu karmic. I expect to find alternatives to grip, but for now I’d like to keep using it. And I’ll give up kregexpeditor when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
The hardy version of kregexpeditor still works on karmic, and I’ve used pbuilder to port the jaunty package of grip to karmic. Both are now in the repo.
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Securing laptops with ecryptfs, cryptsetup, and tmpfs
One of the awesome features of the last several Ubuntu releases is support for ecryptfs, an encrypted filesystem. At Talia we depend heavily on GPG, OTR, SSH keys and other forms of encryption and secure identification. Loss of those keys and other confidential data to laptop theft, corporate espionage, or the US Customs Service is a big concern for us. This week I secured my laptop, as a prototype of our new corporate laptop setup. Here is how I did it.
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Enabling the Sleep button on a Dell laptop in Kubuntu Karmic
Update 2010-05-02: See this comment.
I read an article in the Dec 2009 issue of Linux Magazine, one of several Linux-focused magazines we get at the office. I’d like to link directly to it, but it the magazine’s own website doesn’t offer the article or even a reliable permanent link to the issue number. Hint: hey guys, sort that out.
The article was about configuring ACPI hotkeys to support your specific laptop. IE, the buttons for “sleep”, “brightness up”, etc. For most laptops this already works on Ubuntu. On my Dell Vostro 1500, every button except for “sleep” worked right after install. This is Linux, so there is always some way to fix that.
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Poor VirtualBox guest performance with Intel VT-X on Ubuntu 9.10
Since upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 I’ve noticed poor performance of VirtualBox guests with Intel VT-X hardware virtualisation enabled. This has been noted in a few places, but I didn’t enable VT-x until recently so I can’t be sure that the problem began with Karmic. I can be sure that it is happening to me now.
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Running root apps on a user’s desktop with qtcurve
I previously wrote about running apps as root on a normal user’s desktop. I still recommend that you follow those steps, but one thing has changed with the release of karmic and the inclusion of the qtcurve widget style.
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Upgrading from Kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10
Friday I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” to Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Here are my notes on the upgrade.
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Moving cPanel services and /home/virtfs
We are currently moving our customer hosting platform from our old colo to our new one. The servers run cPanel on CentOS 4. The process of moving these services goes something like this:
- install new servers at new location of same or similar model as the old servers, and load them with a basic CentOS install
- rsync oldserver:/ to newserver:/ including customer files
- reboot new server and fix whatever goes wrong (MAC addresses changing, etc)
- move BGP announcement of hosting IP range to new colo
- shut down and remove old servers
The actual process is more complicated. During step 2, I hit a problem with cPanel’s /home/virtfs directory tree.
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Replacing Bacula with BackupPC