Posts Tagged ‘ubuntu’

Enabling VNC to Ubuntu Desktop via SSH

Over time my desktop has become a box that just sits in the corner that I boot up using wakeonlan and SSH to when needed. Tonight I wanted to jump onto the console to test a few things, but really didn’t want to go through the trouble of hooking up the monitor that now is connected to my laptop (waay too much work, I know :) ). Anyway, it turns out enabling VNC isn’t too bad over SSH.

First, enable it for your user:
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

If you’re like me, you probably enabled it at one point, set the password, disabled it and forgot what you set the password. To set it, we use the base64 utility to convert it and set it using gconftool:
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/remote_access/vnc_password $(echo -n 'dontstealmysupersecretpassword!'| base64)

I then just connected with my VNC client (I used Chicken of the VNC from my MacBook) by connecting to the IP of my desktop on display 0 and the password I had set.

Troubleshooting
If you’re like me even more, you probably ran into trouble getting connected. If you’re having troubles getting connected, you can see additional settings for the GNOME remote_access using the gconftool-2 utility:
gconftool-2 -a /desktop/gnome/remote_access

There are a few key settings including “local_only”, “enabled” (of course), “prompt_enabled” (makes VNC not prompt on the desktop to allow connection – something that would obviously be a problem if you didn’t have access to the console to begin with!), and “use_alternative_port”.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 8th, 2010

Install Killall on Ubuntu JeOS

I am playing with a new install of Ubuntu 10.04 in a minimum virtual machine and noticed there was no killall utility installed. In case you run into this, don’t fret:
sudo apt-get install psmisc

The package to install from wasn’t overly obvious, but not difficult to install :)

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 6th, 2010

Firefox Java Plugin on Ubuntu 10.04

For anyone playing with the new Ubuntu 10.04, you may be as surprised as I was to find that the sun-java6 packages are no longer included in the default repositories. The proprietary packages from Sun Oracle have been swapped out for the open source openjdk implementation. After stumbling around in the dark for a bit, I managed to figure out that the installation is quite simple:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre icedtea6-plugin

After installation, be sure to restart Firefox and double-check that the plugin has been installed by going to “about:plugins” in the address bar. You can search for “java” to make sure the plugin exists.

Just like my previous post about Flash in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.04, it’s a bit annoying, but not too bad to install.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (10) : Apr 7th, 2010

Enabling Flash in Chrome on Ubuntu 10.04

Update: The same steps seem to work on Ubuntu 11.04 as well.

Another update (10/24/2011): The same seems to work as well for 11.10. “Virtue” hints that the path may have changed to /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for me.

Hello again there, world. I’ve been away from my computer for a little while now as I relocated to Silicon Valley, but I got a chance to play around with one of the Alpha’s of Ubuntu 10.04 this weekend. The new version has some vast improvements in the looks over the last one as well as now it includes Google Chrome in the default repository. When I wanted to setup Flash for Chrome, I followed a handy how-to, but this one didn’t account for the fact that Chrome was installed via the regular repositories and wasn’t installed to /opt.

To install, I simply had to follow the step-by-step with a few modifications:

  1. Install Chrome and Flash (with the Ubuntu Software Center or with apt-get

    2. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser flashplugin-nonfree

  2. Add the Flash plugin to the Chrome plugins directory

    3. sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/

  3. Restart Chrome

That’s it. While a bit annoying that one has to install Flash for Chrome this way (especially considering YouTube – another Google product – relies on Flash), but it’s not too painful.

If you still run into problems, you can double-check the location of the file (using locate libflashplayer.so) needed and the location where Chrome is installed (using whereis chromium-browser).

If you’ve just installed Ubuntu 10.04 and came across this, you may also want to install the browser Java plugin as well.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (22) : Mar 15th, 2010

Soon We Will See Just How Loyal Search Users Are

With today’s announcement that Canonical is changing the default search provider to Yahoo, Apple’s rumored talks with Microsoft, and cell phone providers such as Verizon also jumping to Bing, we may get to see just how big of a role the default settings have on people’s search preferences. Google has been dominating the search market pretty much since the beginning with a significant boost coming from the fact that Google is the default in several of the world’s browsers, though some of it is some good old-fashioned branding and marketing.

Canonical’s decision to change the Ubuntu default search engine and rumors that Apple may be soon to switch the default provider on the iPhone (I’m assuming with regular old Safari soon to follow), Google will no longer be the default on most of the major desktop OS’s of our time. Verizon has also struck a deal with Bing and made it the default search provider on its mobile phones. I personally was pretty mad the day that the Bing icon on my BlackBerry, but that’s a story for another day.

Citing concerns over privacy, there have been several who have spoken out against Google as well. Google has even stated that it is considering pulling out of the huge market of China.

Despite these things, Google’s search market share has continued to increase month after month. These next few months will be interesting to see what happens to market share as these talks fall into place. The true test of the Google brand will be for those users who have to go out of their way to choose Google as their search provider, rather than Google enjoying its nice defaults that it has enjoyed over the past few years.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 28th, 2010

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