• 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.

After setting up the alignment according to some tutorials I found online, I started the setup process. Shortly after starting the copy step of the installation, the whole process came to a grinding halt with filesystem errors. Looking into the kernel debug messages it seemed like SATA commands were causing errors. After checking hardware, cables and switching SATA ports, I began researching the issue and soon found that the issue might be fixed in the next firmware version of the drive. So I wanted to upgrade from 1.23 to 1.24, which could only be done in Windows…

After installing a trial of Windows 7, I finally wanted to upgrade the firmware, but the drive was not detected, but was accessible. The release notes indicated that I would need to switch to AHCI mode. After several attempts, includig a BIOS update, I realized that there was no way to do this with my old hardware, as my nForce 430 chipset simply doesn’t support it.

So my only remaining option was to simply try the kernel arguments I read to be the fix for 1.24 with the 1.23 hardware.

So, if you add the following kernel option during installation and afterwards for every boot, the disk seems to work quite well (source):

libata.force=norst

Actually, this forces the ATA driver in Linux to not issue any reset commands on the bus. I really don’t understand why this improves/fixes the problem, but it seems the device has issues when being reset on my chipset. I can also notice this that in 2 out of 3 attempts if I reboot the PC the disk is not recognized any more before I reboot again.

Despite these issues, the SSD now runs with astonishing performance with the suggested 32 head / 32 sector alignment, and a 512kB partition alignment scheme. After an initial TRIM with hdparm‘s wiper.sh I enabled -o discard for my ext4 partition and could also verify using hdparm that this results in the sectors being trimmed. Please note, that you need to manually compile and install the latest hdparm version on Ubuntu 10.10, as the included version fails with the very long free block list and doesn’t handle splitting the sectors in multiple requests. The latest version doesn’t have this issue any more.

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.

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).

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]

Together with Austrian-based one “H.U.I. Starter” rate (250MB @ UMTS, reduction to 56kBit/s above, 10€/month) this would be a nice package. However, if I could have UMTS, well, that would be better. Personally, WLAN is even more important for me, I could use it in the office or in my home, where I have WLAN access available and fall back to GPRS while being “on the road”.

For me this means: standby for autumn, because I can’t afford to invest US-$300 now and another US-$450 in a couple of month. Still, I am really, really interested in OpenMoko (and normally I wouldn’t invest that amount of money into a hobby of mine). Which means, I am standing by and waiting for news from the OpenMoko community…

In the meantime, if you understand German, you could listen to this very interesting Chaosradio Express Podcast.

On YouTube there are some very interesting videos about the Neo 1973.

Edit 2007-07-18: I accidentially misspelled OpenMoko as OpenMonko in the inital release, both in the title and in the text. I corrected this and the URL of the article to reflect the real name of the project: OpenMoko.

Unable to make device node for ‘temporary-cryptsetup-32733′

While searching around the net I found a lot of people asking the same question but hardly any answer, until I finally read this article
on the Ubuntu forum.

The solution to the whole problem is rather simple:

sudo mkdir /dev/.static/dev/mapper

With a little bit more verbose error message of cryptsetup I might have figured this out myself…

Well, if you are using Apache together with mod_ssl you can easily run into the situation that after starting up Apache, requests to it will block up to several minutes or time out. This happenes, if Apache is configured to use /dev/random as a source for random numbers which are required in the initialisation of mod_ssl and similar, if you have to few entropy information left for the generation of more secure random numbers.
As suggested in a Gentoo Forums article, you can emerge the tool sys-apps/rng-tools, which provides you with rngd, a daemon collecting entropy from hardware random number generators and feeds /dev/random with this data.

If you happen (like me) to not having a hardware random number generator on your server’s mainbord, rngd will use /dev/urandom as a source of entropy and mix it with entropy collected from your system. While this will indeed result in a certain drop of “randomness” of /dev/random, it still has major advantages by reducing the startup time of apache to several seconds, as /dev/random will not block any more.

Don’t forget to add rngd to your server’s default runlevel (rc-update add rngd default).