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: 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.
HowTo: Pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Jaunty for file transfers etc.
Following up my previous article of how to pair your Bluetooth mobile phone with Ubuntu Intrepid, I present this updated article for pairing your mobile phone using the updated version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack and the newer and better Blueman applet for Jaunty which greatly simplifies the process of pairing Bluetooth devices and transferring files to your mobile phone.
HowTo: Setup your Nokia N95 mobile phone as a Mobile Broadband Device via Bluetooth in Ubuntu Jaunty
Following up my article of how to setup a Nokia N95 as a mobile broadband device using a USB cable, we’ve been waiting for the Network Manager and/or Bluetooth stack to be updated so we could do the same thing via Bluetooth – damn those pesky cables to hell!
Well, it’s finally happened. While Ubuntu itself hasn’t been updated yet, the Bluetooth package that Ubuntu uses has been updated by the parent Blueman Project.
So here’s a guide on how to update your Ubuntu Jaunty installation to the latest version of the Bluez Bluetooth stack, pair your Nokia N95 and how to setup a Broadband connection to go through it.
HowTo: Get a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook 5000 mouse working under Ubuntu Jaunty.
The Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook 5000 mouse is an affordable, compact mouse that worked really well under Ubuntu up until Jaunty 9.04 when the Bluetooth stack changed so drastically that the mouse would not pair or work anymore.
While the Ubuntu-provided Bluetooth stack has not been updated to correct this problem yet, the Blueman Project that Ubuntu uses keeps marching on in development and the latest version of of the Bluez stack and Blueman applet finally corrects this problem.
Here’s how to employ it on your own setup.
HowTo: Flash your BIOS without a boot floppy disk using Ubuntu
All current “IBM-Compatible” PC’s use a Basic Input/Output System also known as a BIOS. It’s a program that tells the PC how to start up when you switch it on, raises any critical faults with the system and then passes control to an operating system on a boot medium.
As time goes on, like any program, bugs are found, improvements are made, and the manufacturer of your PC’s motherboard will provide updates to the BIOS, usually supplied as a small downloadable file. Normally it is usually intended that you reboot your PC onto a DOS-compatible boot floppy disk and run the BIOS update program to install the new BIOS firmware. These days this process has been a bit simplified what with Windows users generally being able to do this from within Windows itself and even more recently, from the BIOS itself or even though starting the system on a FAT16-formatted USB stick.
This is all well and good, but what if you have an older system that cannot be flashed from Windows? What if you don’t even have Windows? What about a system that still relies on booting from a floppy disk to flash the BIOS? I don’t know about you, but I highly doubt any of the remaining floppy disks in my garage work anymore, and besides that, there’s a good chance that the floppy drive itself on older PC’s probably doesn’t work anymore.
So what can you do?
Well, we can utilise a floppy disk image that ultimately boots from your hard-drive, but acts and operates exactly like a DOS floppy disk would.
HowTo: Make use of Ubuntu PPA repositories
What is a PPA repository?
A PPA is a Personal Package Archive hosted by the ubuntu.com servers that contains binaries and/or source related to a project. The project can be anything from a new application to a backport of an existing one. A good example is the easy availability of OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 to Intrepid users before Jaunty came out rather than having to deal with the mess of packages from Sun’s own website.
PPA’s can be wholly personal to you or may be open to the public. In particular it is very useful for providing Ubuntu packaged versions of a given application instead of dealing with tarballs or converting RPM packages.
So how does one make use of a pre-defined PPA and are there any things to be wary about? Read on.
HowTo: Build a MythTV box from scratch using Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04
MythTV is a project that brings analogue and digital television to your Ubuntu-powered PC. It primarily functions as your television and personal video recorder (PVR), but can be made to do many other things (refer to the official MythTV site for more information), however one thing that can catch people is actually building a MythTV box from scratch. Over the years, MythTV has been one of the largest causes of baldness in users who have torn out their hair in frustration.
Nowadays, tailored distributions such as Mythbuntu make the task pretty much trivial, but not everyone likes to use the tailor-made distributions. For one, Mythbuntu has a lot of its own branding across it which I personally don’t really like, and I’d prefer not to have it install all of that plus XFCE as the default desktop and then have to undo it all just to get back to a regular Ubuntu desktop.
Since I recently built a MythTV server for my folks, and on top of that connected it to their aging CRT television rather than the latest in visual technology, this makes for a perfect tutorial on how to take a vanilla Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 installation and turn it into a simple, functional MythTV server without all the branding. We are going to just install only the components required to get MythTV up and running. Anything else you add is purely up to you.
HowTo: Fix MythTV’s Frontend not going full-screen in Ubuntu Jaunty.
The next version of Ubuntu is here – 9.04 aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Along with a wealth of new features comes a wealth of new minor bugs to fix. Not enough to be show-stoppers, but enough to annoy the heck out of you, and here’s a doozy.
If, like most people, you have Compiz enabled and you start the MythTV Frontend, you will notice that rather than go full-screen, Myth will start as a window, essentially, even if your settings within Myth say to go full-screen.
In a single-screen scenario, the MythTV window will start just underneath the upper Gnome panel and the lower Gnome panel will sit over the top of the Myth window, obscuring part of the display. Proof that it’s a window can be found by holding down the ALT key and then dragging the MythTV display around with your mouse.
If you’re like me and use two displays with Myth being run on the second screen, you will see a gap at the top of the screen that is the same height as the upper Gnome panel and you will see your wallpaper showing through there, as shown in the illustration below.
Click for full size (520K)
Here’s how to fix this problem.
EDIT June 2010: This problem still plagues Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04, and this fix will work for those releases as well.
