Capi's Corner

When upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 I noticed two annoyances (which actually are just a matter of personal taste):

• The OSX-like positioning of the close, minimize and maximize buttons on the left instead of the right of the window.
• The fade-out (invisibility) of other windows when using Alt-Tab for tabbing through the available windows on the current desktop.

As I tend to forget and need to Google every time I encounter a newly setup 10.04 system, I now jot down the settings to change.

For changing the window buttons:

1. Start gconf-editor.
2. Find /apps/metacity/general/button_layout.
3. Change its value to menu:minimize,maximize,close.

For changing the opacity of inactive windows during Alt+Tab window switching:

1. Start gconf-editor.
2. Find /apps/compiz/plugins/staticswitcher/screen0/options/opacity.
3. Change it to any value you like, where 100 is fully visible and 0 is totally invisible.

For some unknown reason, Microsoft decided that only the “Ultimate” version of Windows Vista ships with the telnet client installed by default. It can, however, be easily installed on all the other versions as well.

• Open the Control Panel
• Select “Programs”
• Select “Turn Windows features on or off”
• Scroll through the list, select “Telnet client”
• Press OK
• Wait (for surprisingly long)

That’s it, voila, the telnet client is now installed on your Windows Vista Non-Ultimate.

I just upgraded to OpenOffice.org 3 and I really like it. But there was a small, but very anoying problem: OO.org seemed to be unable to find any dictionaries. I found out rather quicky, that starting with OO.org 3 dictionaries are only available as extensions. Well, basically this is no problem, but the English (at least the US and GB variante) are supposed to be bundled with the installer and are not available as seperate extension.

It seems there is a little bug with the installation on Vista under certain circumstances which causes the extensions not being registered properly with OO.org.

To solve the problem, follow the same following steps:

• Locate your OO.org “install” directory of your installation, usually it is C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\share\extensions\install” [Updated 2008-12-21 to include "extensions", thanks to the anonymous commenter!]
• Manuylla install the appropriate dictionary extension (“dict-en.oxt”, “dict-de.oxt”, “dict-fr.oxt”, “dict-it.oxt”) by either launching the oxt directly or by chosing Tools -> Extension Manager.

For me this worked after restarting OO.org totally (i.e. closing down all Writer, Calc, …).

Just played around with Google Chrome. First impression: Wow! This is definitely going to encourage development of other browsers as well!

It feels lightweight, fast for JavaScript applications, and offers some nice features (I especially like the possibility to open an “anonymous window” which will forget all cookies etc. when being closed without being forced to delete all other cookies as well.) Tabs can be dragged out and dropped back into the browser, something I’d always wanted Firefox to be able as well.

Each tab runs within its own process and Chrome offers a “Task Manager” (Shift-Esc), which will display memory usage, CPU usage and bandwidth consumption for each tab, which I consider very handy.

Chrome is available for Windows only at the moment, but is expected to be released for MacOS X and Linux as well. I am really curious how this is going to develop and if this is going to really affect “the Internet as a whole” (I really believe Google has gained enough market power to push their products).

udev renames you network interfaces

Sometimes udev renames your devices. This happened to me when upgrading a server, eth0 suddenly became eth1 and vice-versa. Of course, this broke nearly all firewall scripts on the server… There is a nice explanation how to get udev to name your devices the way you want.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003

When installing Visual Studio Service Pack 1 under Windows Server 2003, it might fail because it cannot verify the signature. You should take time and visit the link provided in the error message, because it will take you to a hotfix that will correct the problem.

(via Mark Caroll’s Blog)

VMWare Server on Ubuntu 8.04

A nice tutorial for getting free VMWare Server 1.0.5 running on Ubuntu 8.04.

As I definitely should post more on my blog, I now try to start a new series: “Nice to know”. It will be a collection of interesting things I consider memorable but which don’t deserve their own blog-post.

Trickle

Tricke allows you to limit bandwith for processes that do not support bandwith limitation out-of-the-box. It works by preloading and simulating the socket API. You use it as a wrapper when starting the process, like trickle -d 80 someapp.

You can use it to limit rsync speed for instance (thanks to http://www.yak.net/fqa/404.html): rsync -auvPe “trickle -d 80 ssh” user@host:/src/ /dst/

VMWare Tools and Kernel 2.6.24

VMWare Tools out of the box do not install on kernel 2.6.24 (as used in Ubuntu 8.04 for instance). A possible solution is described here. It is based on using the open-source version of the VMWare tools (open-vm-tools).

The new TrueCrypt 5.1 version finally enables hibernation with pre-boot authentication. I am going to try it out as soon as possible. A big thank you to all the developers!

Update 2008-03-16: Today I finally had time to test out pre-boot authentication. It simply worked great. No problems at all. As I was using it on a notebook, I was very happy about the possibility to interrupt and resume the encryption process.

[tags]encryption, windows, truecrypt[/tags]

After quite some time, a new version of my favorite encryption tool is out: TrueCrypt developers have released version 5 of their product, introducing a new killer feature (among others): System Volume Encryption with pre-boot authentification (only Windows 2000/XP/Vista). This means, that TrueCrypt will encrypt everything on your system drive, including page- and hibernation file, finally making hibernation a safe and easy possibility.

I am going to look into this next week, as I need my notebook on Saturday (just in case anything goes wrong).

Update 2007-02-08: As my first commenter below points out, it seems hibernation is disabled by TrueCrypt while having your system partition encrypted. I don’t really understand why at the moment, but I will investigate further. For me this is a primary show-stopper, as this was the long-awaited functionality I was waiting for.

Nitpickers Corner¹: Of course I am aware why encryption and hibernation in general are no-goes together, but I don’t understand why this is an issue when full-system encryption is enabled.

Update 2007-02-08 (again): Ok, in this TrueCrypt forum thread they explain why they cannot support it at the moment: Windows treats the hibernation file differently, it seems to bypass the TrueCrypt driver and therefore would still write keys to disk without encryption. Ok, still get to wait for my dream feature then, but I still refuse to buy PGP Thanks to the developers for their great work anyhow!

¹ a tribute to Raymond Chen

[tags]security, encryption, truecrypt, windows, linux, osx[/tags]

Today I had to give quick support to a colleague working from home in order to resolve a networking issue. This was the perfect situation to evaluate CrossLoop, a free remote-assistance tool similar to NetViewer (but, as mentioned, free).

The experience was nice, it just worked “out of the box”, after installing and sending me the access key, the connection was established despite our firewalls in between. It is easy enough I would trust almost all customers to get it working. I’ll have to evaluate how the software behaves if you don’t have administrative privileges on your system.

Crossloop is based upon TightVNC and as a consequence you get the typical feeling of a VNC session, which is not as fluent as NetViewer, Remote Desktop, or similar, but it was more than enough to work on the issue at hand.

So if you are searching for a low-cost (i.e. free) alternative for quick support of family members, co-workers, or even customers, you should give CrossLoop a try. CrossLoop currently is only available for Windows, but Linux and Mac versions are planned.

By the way, CrossLoop just got a 3-Million-$ Series A investment, so hopefully this service will continue to exist for some time.

[tags]vnc, crossloop, remote access, software[/tags]

Amazon announced that they are going to offer S3 storage service inside Europe.

This for sure will provide a great boost in speed for my JungleDisk backup. I am now checking out what I have to do to get my data moved to the European data centers. I suppose I have to re-upload everything because you have to specify for each bucket if it is located in the USA or in Europe. JungleDisk at the moment does not provide support for this. I opened a topic regarding asking if they’ll support this in the near future (article1, article2).

It’s also interesting to notice that storing data in Europe is more expensive. It costs $0.18/GB/month as compared to $0.15 in the US. Bandwidth at the moment do not differ based on location. So I’d only switch if the upload/download speed is significantly higher than to/from the USA.