HowTo: Fix Virtualbox not allowing you to attach USB devices to your virtual machines.
Virtualbox is a great desktop virtualisation tool, but one of its annoying installation niggles is that when you setup and run a virtual machine you can’t attach any USB devices to it at all because all your USB options in Virtualbox are greyed out.
There are a raft of different solutions to this problem out there ranging from adding an extra line to the /etc/fstab file to modifying your udev rules, but the real cause of this problem is simply that your login name does not have permission to access Virtualbox’s USB driver which interfaces itself between the VM’s virtual USB hardware and your real USB stack.
HowTo: Fix being unable to click in Flash applications in Ubuntu 64-bit
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has a curious bug on the 64-bit Intel/AMD version whereby on some systems you can play Flash perfectly, but the Flash application does not recognise any mouse clicks in it. This means in sites such as YouTube, you can’t click the mouse to play and pause, or seek in a video – you’re forced to use the keyboard.
This is a known bug with the flashplugin-installer package and is currently being worked on by Canonical. In the meantime, if you wish to fix the problem yourself now rather than wait for the official fix, just follow these instructions…
HowTo: Remotely collaborate with another user in a terminal
You do remote tech support for clients. One client calls you up needing assistance. You SSH into their machine as usual to check out the problem. You probably also have them on the phone so you can walk them through what you are doing or ask them questions, but making long support phone calls can be expensive if you’re doing it via a mobile phone or internationally and it’s tiresome to switch to an IM client window all the time to write comments, especially if the client is not running a graphical session and only has a text server console to look at.
Sometimes actions speak much louder than words, and it would be great for the client to be able to see what you are doing without cumbersome and bandwidth-hogging remote screen tools like VNC. Is there an easy way to collaborate in a terminal?
There certainly is…
HowTo: Quickly transfer files from an Ubuntu box to another PC over a network without installing Samba, SSH or FTP.
Let’s say you have an Ubuntu PC and a second Windows PC or Mac. You need to do a quick transfer of a file or two from the Ubuntu box, but you really don’t want to go through the hassle of installing and configuring Samba or FTP just for the sake of transferring a couple of files.
Of course you could use a USB flash drive, but it takes twice as long to copy a file that way because you have to copy it to the flash drive and then copy it again from the flash drive to the destination PC. Besides that, what if you don’t have a flash drive big enough to transfer the files you want? Is there a quick and dirty way to transfer some files over a network without the need to install additional software to bridge the compatibility divide?
Indeed there is…
HowTo: Migrate an Apt-Mirror-generated Ubuntu archive to another mirror source or merge a foreign Apt-Mirror archive into yours
So, you’ve gone and created your very own local Ubuntu mirror using Apt-Mirror, and you’ve come across a situation similar to:
- You’ve decided to change where you update your Apt-Mirror archive from (eg: you’ve changed ISP’s or feel that another source is more reliable than your current one to update from)
- You’re adding another large repository to your Apt-Mirror archive (such as the next version of Ubuntu) and don’t have the quota to download it, so you’re getting a friend to download it for you from their free server using Apt-Mirror (eg: iiNet and Internode customers can access their respective Ubuntu mirrors for free), so you need to be able to merge it with your own Apt-Mirror archive and have it update from your preferred source afterwards.
So how do you do this? Read on.
HowTo: Fix a missing eth0 adapter after moving Ubuntu Server from one box to another.
Scenario: You have a box running Ubuntu Server. Something happens to the box and you decide to move the hard-drive to another physical machine to get the server back up and running. The hardware is identical on the other machine, so there shouldn’t be any issues at all, right?
The machine starts up fine, but when you try and hit the network, you can’t. Closer inspection using the ifconfig command reveals that there is no “eth0″ adapter configured. Why?
Here’s how to fix it.
HowTo: Restore the Windows Master Boot Record (without using a Windows CD) using Ubuntu Karmic.
You know how it is – you take a client’s Windows based machine, do a dual-boot installation of Ubuntu (which replaces the Windows Master Boot Record, or MBR, with GRUB and sets up an option to boot Ubuntu or Windows) so the client can evaluate Ubuntu, but then later on for whatever reason, Ubuntu is no longer wanted. It’s removed and you need to restore the system’s ability to natively boot Windows directly without a GRUB menu.
You’re probably thinking “why the hell would anyone want to do that?!”… well, the fact of the matter is you sometimes come across a client who is just too mind-set and refuses to use anything but Windows, so yes – sometimes you need to restore the Windows MBR, but how do you do that when you don’t have a Windows CD handy?
Well, here’s how to do it using nothing but an Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic LiveCD.
New server!
I finally got around to upgrading the server that serves this very page you’re reading to Ubuntu Jaunty today, up from Ubuntu Hardy. Yes I know, maybe I should have waited for Karmic, or even Lucid, but the biggest reason why I did this was that I’ve migrated this server from the little Pentium 4 Shuttle XPC that was in use before onto a Virtualbox 3.0.6 headless VM hosted on an Ubuntu Jaunty box running on top of an Intel E5200 CPU.
You’re probably wondering why I’d use an E5200 when it doesn’t have hardware virtualisation features built in? Well, the server consumes very little juice compared to the Pentium 4 (26% less in fact), it’s more powerful, it’s cheap, cheerful, produces less ambient heat, is a heck of a lot quieter and there’s loads of CPU time left over to do other things outside of the VM on the host side.
CPU wise, when the server gets really busy I’ve seen spikes as high as 50%, but it never exceeds that, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s fine. If I ever need this box to do anything more significant, I’ll upgrade the CPU to something that does have VT-x later on.
If you see anything unusual/missing/dead from today onwards, please let me know in a comment!
HowTo: Configure Ubuntu to be able to use and respond to NetBIOS hostname queries like Windows does
Users in the Windows world are very used to referencing PC’s via their NetBIOS names instead of their IP address. If your PC has a dynamic IP address (DHCP-assigned) of 192.168.0.12 and its hostname (computer name) is “gordon”, Windows users can happily jump into a command line or an Explorer window and ping the name “gordon” which will magically resolve to 192.168.0.12.
If your host is not configured with a Hosts file entry on your local PC or a DNS entry to associate a name with an IP address, Ubuntu can only use the IP address of that PC to communicate with it which means you have to remember what that IP address is with your feeble grey-matter in your head. Likewise, Ubuntu will not respond to a Windows PC pinging its NetBIOS name because Ubuntu does not use NetBIOS at all by default and so it will ignore such requests.
So how do we get Ubuntu to resolve NetBIOS names like Windows? And how can we allow Windows to ping Ubuntu like another Windows PC? Read on…
HowTo: Deal with BD+ copy protection when ripping Blu-ray titles using Ubuntu
A fair while back now, I wrote an article detailing how to decode Blu-ray titles using Ubuntu and an LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray optical drive.
This article detailed how to decrypt just about every movie under the sun except for a newer type of protection called “BD+” which I never got around to supplementing my original article with.
What is “BD+” protection? Well in short, it’s the deliberate corruption of random parts of the video track of the movie (well, OK – that is a highly simplified definition as BD+ protection can do a lot more than that, but the end result is the same – to prevent unauthorised playback which includes ripping). The idea BD+ is that when you rip the title, you can still watch the movie, but with some or all of the screen corrupt at various stages in the movie which well and truely ruins the movie-watching experience, especially since you paid good money for it and should not be forced to buy a dedicated consumer Blu-ray player when you’ve got a perfectly good PC that can do the same task.
But hang on, if the movie is deliberately corrupt, then how come it plays fine in a stand-alone consumer Blu-ray player or PlayStation3 console?
Well, let me tell you about that and how to get around it yourself.
