First, we need to have ssh server installed and running. Just type the following:

apt-get install openssh-server

Now, we need to download deb packages from here. Then install them:

sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.0.0-84_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxnode_3.0.0-88_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.0.0-74_i386.deb

After the installation we need to add a user to nxserver. I am using my regular username which I login to the system.

sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --useradd $username

That’s it. You should be able login to your system by using NX client. Ensure that you have an SSL connection enabled when setting up the connection.

If you want to run SSH and freenx at a different port then you need to change the port numbers at the following files:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# What ports, IPs and protocols we listen for
Port 22
# Use these options to restrict which interfaces/protocols sshd will bind to
#ListenAddress ::
#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
Protocol 2

Change the port number and restart the ssh server:
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Edit the nxserver config file at the two locations where you see SSHDPort:

sudo nano /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg
# Specify the TCP port where the NX server SSHD daemon is running.
#
SSHDPort = "22"


# Specify the TCP port where the SSHD daemon is running on the NX SSH
# authentication server.
#
SSHDAuthPort = "22"

Edit the node config file:

sudo nano /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg
# Specify the TCP port where the NX node SSHD daemon is running.
#
SSHDPort = "22"

Restart the nxserver:
sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --restart

Almost a disastrous install on Toshiba M40 laptop !

I was not expecting this from Ubuntu. First problem was at partitioning. I have a windows partition located at /dev/sda1. I changed the mount point of this partition to /windows but I suggest to leave it as /media/sda1. Otherwise it stucks at creating ext3 file system for /. Then you need to run Gparted and unmount the windows partition so installer can continue. I spent many hours to find this. This might be a bug because it did not happen in Kubuntu 7.10.

Installation was OK but when I logged in I saw about 400 packages waiting to be upgraded. This surprised me because I wasn’t expecting this much upgrade for a new released distro. Update was slow because of heavy trafiic through servers but went flawless. I think waiting a week after a new release is a good idea.

The second part of the problem was screen resolution. Gutsy installs nvidia-glx-new (100.14.19) as default. If you have a 6xxx or 7xxxx series card, I suggest to use nvidia-glx driver(1.0.9639). With the new driver it can never activate it and falls back to 640×480 resolution. This is my nvidia card:

lspci -nn|grep 300
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV43 [GeForce Go 6600] [10de:0148] (rev a2)

I first did the full upgrade without enabling restricted drivers. Then restarted the computer and installed nvidia-glx driver from synaptic. Then changed the “nv” driver section of my xorg.conf file to “nvidia” and CTRL+Alt+Backspace. You can do the following trick if borders of the windows are gone when you activate compiz-fusion from System –> Preferences –> Appearance:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24

I added medibuntu repos for the non-free stuff like acrobat reader. The instructions are here. Basically add the repo and the gpg key:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

For Java and Acrobat Reader type the following:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-plugin acroread acroread-escript acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread

Now, everything works. It took me almost a day to accomplish all this. I installed Ubuntu two times and Kubuntu once to get it right. Good luck.

Linux has very useful commands but usually they need some extra parameters to read the output easily. du and df are among these. du reports the file and directory usage. It is the command to find about the size of a directory and its sub-folders. Here it is how I use it:

du --block-size=1M --exclude='./.*' --max-depth=1 |sort -n

and the output,

--block-size gives the file size in 1 megabyte blocks, --exclude='./.*' does not select the files&folders provided by the pattern which is hidden files&folders and --max-depth=1 shows only the directories. After these options I sort the output so that it lists by ascending according to directory size. The last number 7107 is the total size of my home directory in megabytes except the hidden folders&files. You can put this command as duu into alias list by typing

echo alias duu='du --block-size=1M --exclude='./.*' --max-depth=1 |sort -n' >> ~/.bashrc


df is similar but for file systems. You can check the home and root folder usage easily:

df -h

-h parameter is for human readable output. It provides the total usage in mega or gigabytes. Otherwise numbers are in bytes which is hard to read.

On Kubuntu 7.04 I did the following steps to install prosper class for Latex:

Download seminar and prosper to your home directory,

wget http://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/seminar.zip

download prosper-1.00.4.tar.gz and contrib-prosper-1.0.0.tar.gz from http://prosper.sourceforge.net/.

Installation:

sudo apt-get install kile
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/
cd /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/
sudo unzip ~/seminar.zip
sudo tar -zxvf ~/prosper-1.00.4.tar.gz
sudo tar -C prosper/ -zxvf ~/contrib-prosper-1.0.0.tar.gz
sudo texhash

It’s ready to use. You may want to take a look at http://amath.colorado.edu/documentation/LaTeX/prosper/ for usage. Kile is an excellent GUI&editor for Latex.

After my friend’s attempt failed to have an open source software development environment (Cygwin) setup on Windows, I suggested to him to install Kubuntu. I said Kubuntu because I gave up on Suse after failing on the X server as a result of new Nvidia driver update with YAST. Anyway, my friend liked the Kubuntu 7.04 live CD and wanted to install but installer gave an error at resizing the windows partition. He has an IBM Thinkpad provided by the university (which he is doing his PhD) with 512 MB Ram and Pentium M processor. Even though he defragmented the hard drive, there were couple of things showing as unmovable files at the windows defragmenter. We tried Gparted live CD and no luck. We tried Partition Magic and nothing worked. Then I suggested to use Wubi. It’s a linux installer on windows. You just need to download the installer and after running it enter couple of essential things like your username, password, language and Ubuntu flavor. You can install Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu and Ubuntu Studio. It downloads the ISO file and starts to install by creating an image file on your hard disk without partitioning. You can select OS at the boot. It worked very well.

It is fun to try out multiple Linux distributions on a single OS without partitioning your hard drive. If you don’t want to install VMware server, player version is an excellent tool for either virtual LiveCD or installation purposes. You can see various distributions installers and improve your Linux installation skills.

First, you need VMware Player. You can download it from http://www.vmware.com/download/player. I have version 1.0.3 installed on my Windows XP box but you can try the newest one. You need to fill out couple of things to be able to download it. Other than that it is free. After you ran the VMware Player, it will ask you to select a vmx file. If you are clueless about how to make one, this post will show you how to get one.

http://www.easyvmx.com/ is your friend to get configuration files for VMware Player. Click on Super Simple Virtual Machine Creator. You can fill the tables as shown below with your information.

Hit Create Virtual Machine button and save the zip file on to your computer. Extract the package. You will see couple of vmdk and one vmx file. vmdk is your virtual hard drive and vmx is your configuration file. When you double-click on vmx file it will open up the VMware Player and start loading whichever file you specified at LiveCD (ISO) section above picture. Below is showing Fedora 7 boot selection:

You can start installing or playing your virtual Linux system. You will see your virtual hard disk during installation. After the installation we need to make a small change on the configuration file so that we can boot into newly installed virtual OS. Otherwise, VMware player will boot into .iso file. Open up your .vmz file with wordpad and scroll down:

# LiveCD
ide1:1.present = "TRUE"
ide1:1.fileName = "G:\Fedora7\F-7-i386-DVD.iso"
ide1:1.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
ide1:1.startConnected = "TRUE"
ide1:1.mode = "persistent"

Change the TRUE value of startConnected to FALSE. By doing this, we turned of booting into  the .iso file.  You  can  make different configuration files using EasyVMX  and try  different tastes of Linux without  partitioning your hard  drive.

FreeNX is one of my favorite software that enables me to connect my home machine (full KDE or Gnome desktop) securely and fast. It’s a free implementation of NoMachine NX. It took me some time to find the right apt source for Debian. Following apt source provided nxserver 1.5.0-60. Here’s how I did.

#echo deb http://kern.nl/freenx ./ >> /etc/apt/sources.list
#apt-get update
#apt-get install freenx

You will see freenx configuration screen. I hit OK.

Then it will ask you which type of key you want to use. For simplicity I selected NoMachine Keys.

When the installation ends you need to add a user to nxserver:

#nxserver --adduser $username
#nxserver --passwd $username

You need to substitute $username with your regular username which you use to login your system. You can give a different password. You can use NX Client for Windows. The version that I am using is 1.5.0-114. I also tried the newest version at the time of this writing which is 3.0.0-65 and it works well. Below is a snapshot showing connection to Etch from Suse using knx.

I installed newly released Etch (Debian 4.0) on my other system which has Gentoo on it. I wiped it all because I didn’t have the time to maintain it. It’s a Pentium-III Celeron (Coppermine) 950 MHz with 128MB RAM and 20 GB HDD. Compiling takes time on this machine.

Installation

I just downloaded the net install CD. You can download it from here. It’s 158.9 MB. After burning iso CD and booting up, installation started. First it couldn’t detect the correct screen size and gave me message to select or continue. This might be because of i810 Intel graphics card. If you encounter something like this just hit the spacebar to continue, it’s not a big problem. Then I did the usual things: selecting language, country, partitioning (full hdd), timezone, user and root setup … When I come to the package manager configuration to select network mirror and hit Yes, I stuck.

I waited maybe 10 minutes but no luck. I made a hard reset and at the same place I select No for network mirror. I installed a minimal system without desktop. I’d like to configure them later.

Post Install Configuration

Since I had the problem with network mirror configuration, I setup the network after the initial boot up. I logged in as root and just edited interfaces file:
# nano /etc/network/interfaces

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.2.11
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.2.1

then turn off and turn on eth0:

# ifup eth0 down
# ifup eth0 up

I edited the apt sources file:

# nano /etc/apt/sources.list

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1 200
70407-11:29]/ etch contrib main

#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1 2007
0407-11:29]/ etch contrib main

#Main
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

#Security
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free

#Multimedia
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

Multimedia source needs a keyring:

#apt-get install debian-multimedia-keyring

I updated package list and installed essentials, KDE, kdm and Xorg:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install build-essential kde kdm xorg

I changed the video driver in xorg.conf:

# nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
# Driver "vesa"
Driver "i810"
BusID "PCI:0:1:0"
EndSection

Time server, ssh, synaptic:

# apt-get install ntp ssh synaptic

Now, some multimedia, plugins and non-free stuff:

# apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-fonts sun-java5-plugin flashplugin-nonfree acroread acroread-escript acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread mplayer mplayer-skin-blue mozilla-mplayer w32codecs mplayer-doc

It’s time to fire up. I exited root and logged in as a user and typed startx. That’s all. I think it’s pretty easy and clean. Apt makes the installation really easy. Editing source file is very simple. Debian is stable and easy to maintain. You can check out http://lunapark6.com/debian-40-etch.html and linuxforums for more information.

Merriam-Webster has “google” as a verb in their dictionary.

A close friend of mine, Kursat, sent me these videos:

• Chinook ground resonance
• Waves in a Large Free Sphere of Water
• Plane struck by lightning
• Russian jet crash
• Airbus A380-800 brake test
• Truck vs jet engine
• Guy sucked into jet engine
• Emergency landing without gear
• Remote controlled airplane
• Candle power
• The world’s shortest runway