TT’s Jottings-Blog of VU2SWX

I am using pidgin as  chat client for both yahoo and gtalk. Recently, yahoo has stopped support for older versions of their own yahoo messenger clients. ( anything less than version 7.5  fails ) . It also means that most of the third party clients such as pidgin has  problems  in login.

On my ubuntu 9.04, the default  pidgin version is  2.5.5.   You can work around the yahoo login problem  as shown below.

Open Accounts-> Manage accounts.

Click on the account you want to  fix

Click on modify.

Click on advanced tab.

The pager server is set to  scs.msg.yahoo.com

Change it to    cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com

Click on Save

Restart  pidgin

It seems yahoo is  rolling out a new authentication protocol. Let us wait for  a new pidgin  update

Update:

Pidgin 2.5.7 which fixes the yahoo login problem is out. You can install it as given below.

Import the  public key  for Launchpad PPA for Pidgin Developers

$ sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \     67265eb522bdd6b1c69e66ed7fb8bee0a1f196a8

Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu   jaunty main

Run apt-get update and apt-get install pidgin.

The PPA contains new pidgin releases for other versions of ubuntu (  dapper gutsy, hardy ,intrepid and karmic) You can just replace jaunty in sources.list line indicating this ppa with you distro and enjoy yahoo messenger on pidgin.

Scribefire  is a cool firefox add on which a  blogger cannot miss   Using this  firefox add-on, you can blog with out leaving your browser.   Installation is simple. Browse to this page Just click on the addto firefox button and restart firefox.

You can start scribefire  by clicking on the scribefire icon. It will open up scribefire as shown below.

Now, you can set up a blog account from the blogs menu and start enjoying scribefire. It supports several features such as notifying various blog aggregations services , ftp uploads etc. Have a look at the features.

Scribefire startup screen

The  notification system in the newly released ubuntu 9.04 ( Jaunty)  uses the notify-osd framework.  This system provides a standard way of  doing passive pop up notification on the  desktop.The notifications are semi transparent click through  bubbles.  These pop ups will disappear after  a short period of time.  Some  times  these bubbles    can be irritating.

You can disable the  notifications with the following command.

#  mv /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.Notifications.service.disabled

( You have to restart X )

You can switch back to the original gnome-style  notification system  by installing the package named  gnome-stracciatella-session. Also ,  have a look at this blog.

# apt-get install gnome-stracciatella-session

Installing LTSP and enabling thin clients to boot from your ubuntu 9.04 machine is very  easy.

I did the following steps.

a) Install ubuntu 9.04   ( aka Jaunty) desktop   with a static IP.    (  A static IP is needed as your ubuntu box is going to act as a server. My IP is 192.168.0.1). Set up Internet access on this machine. You need to download a lot of packages  from the net to complete the installation.

b)  Install  the packages  ltsp-server-standalone and openssh-server

# apt-get install ltsp-server-standalone
# apt-get install openssh-server

c)  Build the LTSP client environment.

#ltsp-build-client

This  command will download all the necessary packages from Internet and build  your environment.

Have a look at /opt/ltsp/i386. This directory will  now contain the chroot environment for the thin clients.  If you want to tweak any settings  you cna do it here.

d) Edit the  /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf to suit your network setting. This file  will serve  the ip range  192.168.0.20 192.168.0.250 by default. If your network uses this range you can leave it  as it is. (The default file worked for me as my server IP is 192.168.0.1)

e) Run the following commands.

#ltsp-update-sshkeys

#ltsp-update-image

The first  command above will export the ssh keys of the server  to the ltsp client environment. The  ltsp-update-image command will rebuild a squashfs image from the ltsp chroot environment and place it under /opt/ltsp/images directory.  This image will be exported to the thin client as root file system by the NBD daemon on the server.

Your LTSP server is ready.  Try booting form a client via pxe or etherboot. You can also try to boot the thin client in qemulator.
There is a sample script for this in /usr/share/doc/ltsp-server/examples/ named qemu-ltsp.

Note:    If you change any thing under /opt/ltsp/i386 , you must rebuild the image for the change to be reflected on the client. Also, if you change the IP address of the server you must do an ltsp-update-sshkeys followed by  ltsp-update-image.

Today  I was  playing with ubuntu 9.04 .  I tried to install  wwwoffle the  off-line  proxy server.  At the end of installation it failed with a  ” Sub process /usr/bin/dpkg failed ” message.  There was some thing wrong.    Fixing the system required removal of the package. I tried the following in succession in vain.

# apt-get remove wwwoffle

#dpkg -P wwwoffle

#dpkg –force-all  -r wwwoffle

I was stuck.  I did a manual removal of the deb package like this.

a) List out all the file of the deb package.

# dpkg -L wwwoffle

b) Removed all the files from the above list by hand.  If you are smart enough you can write a script for that.

c) Remove the package using apt

#apt-get remove wwwoffle