Being the Linux fanboy that I am, I set to work tweaking my Acer Aspire One, which by default comes with the Linux distro Linplus. My first reaction was to be gone with the default OS and whack Ubuntu on, however I came to love Linplus and its fast bootup time. And by fast .. I mean fast. If I wanted to find out the weather, I could probably boot this laptop and hit weather.smh.com.au faster than my Blackberry could load the site

One of the first things you’ll need to do is get your Linplus working like an actual Linux operating system, and we can do this by turning on the advanced menu, which allows you to right click the desktop for a traditional menu.

1) Hit Alt + F12 and type xfce-setting-show
2) Find Desktop preferences, then the behavior tab and click “Show desktop menu on right-click”.

Some interesting and useful Tweaks

Installing Skype on the Acer Aspire One
One of the reasons why I wanted one of these tiny notebooks was for traveling purposes. And what better way to communicate with home than over Skype.

1) From the advanced menu (right click desktop) click terminal
2) Type: sudo yum install skype

This will install Skype and the necessary dependencies.
To add Skype to the infamous Acer Aspire Linplus background menu .. do the following

1) (Hopefully you’ve enabled the advanced menu as per above) Right click the deskop, select command prompt
2) Type: mousepad /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xml

As you can see, there are the 4 sections, Fun, work etc..
Under Fun, add a line similar to the others and use this as the path;

/usr/share/applications/skype.desktop

Reboot your laptop and the lovely Skype icon should appear!

More tweaks than you can poke a stick at

(Please let me know of any articles that you know of that you think should be listed here!)

• Change the default mail client to Thunderbird
• Installing VLC on the Acer Aspire One
• Install the new Open Office 3.0
• Learn how to control the Acer Aspire One fan (and even turn it off!)
• Install MAC OS x on the Acer Aspire One .. (what the hell?)

More tweaks coming soon, stay tuned!

No related posts.

The Sonicwall device was located in a data center, whilst the Linux machine was located in an office protecting a 192.168.0.0/24 network, and my task was to join the two devices using IPSec. The best way to illustrate this setup is by displaying the configuration files. As an example, the following are the IP addresses used in the config samples.

Sonicwall TZ170 = 111.111.111.111
Linux machine = 222.222.222.222

The Linux IPSec Server

The Linux server is running Debian so a simple “apt-get install ipsec” had IPSec installed in no time.
Initially, I decided to use a simple preshared password for authentication. PLEASE NOTE the order that my ipsec.secrets file is displayed, there are many articles on Google which flip the left and right sides around.

My /etc/ipsec.secrets file

222.222.222.222 111.111.111.111 : PSK “test”

My /etc/ipsec.conf file

conn sonicwall
auth=esp
authby=secret
auto=add
esp=3des-sha1
ike=3des-sha1
keyexchange=ike
keyingtries=1
pfs=no
type=tunnel
left=111.111.111.111
leftsubnet=111.111.111.111/32
leftnexthop=%defaultroute
right=222.222.222.222
rightsubnet=192.168.0.0/24

The Sonicwall TZ170

Please note, even one incorrect setting will render your IPSec connection useless so triple check everything. Once logged into the Sonicwall TZ170 device, click the VPN menu then click the “Add” button.

To get this point-to-point VPN working with a Linux server using IPSec, you MUST use the exact details in the following diagrams. Simply substitute 111.111.111.11 with the Public IP of the Sonicwall device and substitute 222.222.222.222 with the Public IP of the Linux server.

Where it has “Choose Local network from list”, you’ll need to create a network object which represents the local network your protecting. In my example it was 192.168.0.0/24. Where it says Choose destination network, you’ll need to create a network object that represents the Linux server, so for this example it would be a single internet host with an IP of: 222.222.222.222

Once both sides have been configured, switch back to your Linux machine and from the console (be sure your logged in as root) simpy type;

ipsec auto –up sonicwall

Hopefully you see something like; (The main part to look for is the “established” part.

Oct 23 20:54:06 localhost pluto[18968]: “sonicwall” #2411: STATE_MAIN_I4: ISAKMP SA established {auth=OAKLEY_PRESHARED_KEY cipher=oakley_3des_cbc_192 prf=oakley_sha group=modp1024}

If you run into troubles look through the logs on the Sonicwall to see why the connection failed. Another good place to look is on the Linux machine under /var/log/secure

No related posts.

If you’re an Ubuntu user who needs access to Windows applications for work or university like myself, VirtualBox is certainty the way to go and I’ll briefly tell you why.

• It’s free
• It’s fast
• I can store files on my Ubuntu system and access them from Windows
• Once the VirtualBox tools addon had been installed within Windows, it made switching between Windows and Ubuntu a dream.
• VirtualBox’s networking features are superb. Setup a virtual interface to allow your Virtualbox to be its own networking device, or use the inbuilt Network Address Translation (NAT) feature to streamline network connectivity to your VirtualBox OS.
• Because VirtualBoxes are stored in a single .VDI file, its never been easier to backup your entire virtual operating system. Simply burn the VDI file to disc and in case of an emergency you can simply restore your entire Virtualbox operating system.

So How Do you Go About Installing VirtualBox?

Lucky for you, its dead simple.

Simply download the .DEB package that suits your Ubuntu operating system (depending on whether you have Hardy, Gusty or Drapper) and install.

Download VirtualBox .DEB Packages here

Once downloaded, use

dpkg -i VirtualBox_1.3.8_Ubuntu_yourubuntuversion.deb

You may get asked a question telling you to accept the terms and conditions so simply select yes. Once installed, you should see VirtualBox under Accessories > System Tools > Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Enjoy!

No related posts.

Updating WINE

The first step is to update your WINE version to 1.1.4.

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

sudo apt-get update

Installing prerequisites

There’s a few software packages you need in order to get Chrome up and running. Winetricks is a script which allows you to quickly download necessary windows components.

Note: The last command below will install FIREFOX in WINE, you’ll see why in a second.

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

mv winetricks /usr/sbin/

winetricks riched20 riched30 flash msxml3 corefonts firefox

Installing Chrome

During the above process, you’ll be prompted to install FireFox 3. Proceed with the WINE installation of Firefox.
Note: Yes I know you can get around this step by not installing FireFox, but this way seems to the be the easiest way to do it.

Once Firefox is installed in Wine, RUN Firefox in WINE and visit

http://www.google.com/chrome/

Download Chrome and run the Chrome setup. It will proceed to download and install the Google Chrome browser. Once it’s complete, use the following command to run Chrome.

Running Google Chrome

wine “$HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/$USER/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe” –no-sandbox –new-http

And there you have it. A fairly simple way to get Chrome up and running on Ubuntu Hardy.

Sources: Ubuntu Forums

No related posts.