Category: My Hardware

Installing Ubuntu 15.04

digitaleagle BackupPC, My Inspiron 17R, Uncategorized Leave a comment

Labor Day Weekend made for the perfect time to get my laptop updated.  I know Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has been out for a while, but I am just now getting it installed.  Here are my notes.

Installation

I didn’t take screenshots of all of the steps.  They were pretty straight forward.  The one thing that I did change was the partitioning.  I read that having the Swap partition on the SSD drive will wear it out, so I went ahead and moved it onto the regular drive.

So, here’s what it looked like:

Install_003

BackupPC

In previous installs, I was using Duplicity/Deja Dup.  This time, I have been using BackupPC for backups.  It is a nice centralized solution that de-dups and compresses nicely.

Now, to restore… The BackupPC FAQ: SSH Setup is a good place to start.

To troubleshoot, I went to the backuppc server, and ran:

$ ssh pistachio
ssh: connect to host pistachio port 22: Connection refused

That tells me that the ssh server is not installed. So, I ran:

sudo apt-get install ssh

On the BackupPC server, I had already run the keygen. So, I just had to open the id_rsa.pub file and copy it’s contents.

sudo vi /var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Then, on my laptop, I pasted it onto the end of the authorized_keys2 files (which, in my case I had to create):

$ sudo mkdir /root/.ssh
$ sudo vi /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Next, I tried to connect to my laptop of the backuppc user on the server:

sudo su - backuppc
sudo ssh root@pistachio

I had to run:

ssh-keygen -f "/var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/known_hosts" -R pistachio

List of Restores

These are the directories that I restored from my backup:

  • ~/Documents: This is where I put all my document files
  • ~/Pictures: I have Shotwell pointed at this directory, so it contains all the pictures from my cell phone and digital camera
  • ~/GideonTaylor: I keep my work files in a different directory
  • ~/app: This has all of my programming stuff (“application development”)
  • ~/.config/google-chrome-beta: The settings for Chrome (extensions, bookmarks, etc)
  • ~/.local/share/keyrings: My saved passwords, see below for more information
  • ~/.Skype: Skype history
  • ~/.remmina: The settings for my remote connections
  • ~/.ssh: The keys for my remote ssh connections
  • ~/.local/share/shotwell: The settings and thumbnails for my photos
  • ~/.sword: The downloaded Bible files for Xiphos (and the underlying Sword library)
  • ~/.filezilla: The settings for my FTP connections
  • ~/.sqldeveloper: The connection settings for SQL developer
  • ~/.vim: stores the plugins installed in Gvim
  • ~/.vimrc: preferences for Gvim  (for my settings, I also had to create the ~/.vimtmp directory)
  • /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections: this saves all of my wireless connections and VPN connections
  • ~/.VirtualBox: The settings for my virtual machines

Next

From here, you can see all the steps that I took in this series, or the next step is the Utilities and Configuration.

Resources

Mediatek 7630 on Ubuntu

digitaleagle ASUS TP500L, Drivers, Networking, Uncategorized, Wireless Leave a comment

We are now proud owners of an ASUS TP500LA-AB52T laptop.  It is a new laptop to help my wife with her new teaching job.  I have installed Ubuntu on it so that it matches the rest of the computers in the house.

The first issue is that the wireless doesn’t work on first boot.  This is a major blow because the point of the laptop was so that she could catch up on her teaching plans anywhere.  Being tethered to the router in the back room kind of defeats the purpose.

Here’s the wireless card information:

$ lspci | grep -i wireless
03:00.0 Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7630e 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter

The fix was to just to manually install the wireless driver.  I found a bug post with fairly good instructions (Thank you keshara Dorakumbura).

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Ubuntu 14.04: Hybrid Graphics

sphillips My Inspiron 17R, NVidia, Ubuntu 14.04, Uncategorized Leave a comment

This is part of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 on my laptop.  In the previous post, I worked through installing Virtualbox for VMs.  In this post, I am working through installing the video drivers for optimal use of the video cards.  My laptop has a hybrid graphics card, so I attempted to use Nvidia Prime.  When that didn’t work, I dropped back to Bumblebee.

Just so you can see what I have, I looked in lspci.  Here’s the Nvidia controller:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 650M] (rev a1)

Here’s the Intel controller:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

 

Here’s what I did…

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Ubuntu 14.04: Media Programs

sphillips Audacity, Gimp, MuseScore, My Inspiron 17R, Ubuntu 14.04, Uncategorized, Video Leave a comment

This is a continuation of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.  My previous post covered installing programming environments and applications.  In this post, I’ll go through the different media programs that I installed back onto my laptop.  If you would like to see the complete list of posts, check out my Ubuntu 14.04 install page.

Visual

One of the most important programs that I use now is Shutter.  It allows me to easily take screenshots of what I am working and edit the screenshots.  The shutter package is easily installed from the Software Center.  Once installed, I tweaked a few of the settings in Edit > Preferences.

First, I changed the path for the screenshots from the Pictures folder to a new folder that I created called screenshots.

Setting Shutter Output Path

In addition, I checked the first two options on the “Behavior” tab to allow it to start when I boot up the computer.

Shutter Preferences

I installed the following other programs for working with visual media:

  • Gimp: for editing photos
  • Inkscape: vector-based drawing
  • Xournal: has features that allow marking up a PDF

Audio

Videos

These are the programs I use for playing and editing video:

Codecs

This installed many different things for media.  For example, I noticed that it installed True Type fonts.  It also installs codecs for playing videos, etc.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

In addition, I installed the libdvdcss to get the restricted formats.  That was simply by installing this package…

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

Then, I ran the script…

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Finally, I determined that I had to use the /dev/sr0 as the device for playing my DVDs.  Like this:

Opening a DVD in VLC

Next Steps

If you are following along with the complete install, check out my next post about Virtualbox.  Or, you can go to the list of posts in this series (Installing Ubuntu 14.04).

Resources

Ubuntu 14.04: Programming Environments

sphillips Andriod, Brackets, Eclipse, gVim, My Inspiron 17R, SQL Developer, Ubuntu 14.04, Uncategorized Leave a comment

This is a continuation of my Ubuntu 14.04 Install.  In the previous post, I covered all of my notes on installing network/Internet-related configuration.  In this post, I’ll cover setting up my programming environments and applications.  If you would like to see the list of posts in this series, you can look at the Ubuntu 14.04 Install page.

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Ubuntu 14.04: Restoring Files

digitaleagle Install Help, My Inspiron 17R, Ubuntu 14.04, Uncategorized Leave a comment

This is a continuation of my previous post on my install of Ubuntu 14.04.  In this post, I took notes on restoring files from my backup.  You can see the complete list of posts on Ubuntu 14.04 on my main install page.

Before installing, I had used Deja-Dup and duplicity to back up my laptop before I installed it.  I’ll blog screenshots of backing it up eventually.  The first thing after reformatting and installing is to restore my files back onto the laptop.  On my last install, I used the command-line to install.  This time, I wanted to try a GUI method.

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