Ubuntu

Hopefully a super quick one (while I’m procrastinating from procrastinating). Debian Jessie is a lovely operating system until you try and do anything with it. Lots of Package deprecations etc etc etc. Anyway, I’ve got a history with GPU stuff and I’ve been playing with integrating it into some of my research, but in a bout of insanity I decided while I’m over in Liverpool (for another 4 hours) to wipe my old workstation and bring it over from Ubuntu 15.04 to Jessie (which I’ve been using on my main laptop for a while now). ...

There’s several very valid tutorials and guides around about getting Ubuntu, Debian and Mint to automatically update and upgrade, but they don’t do much explaining/checking. This is a short post filling in the gaps I observed. Get the package sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades -y Enable the package scheduler File Being Messed With: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades Log File Being Watched: /var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log I’ve got no idea why this isn’t automatic; possibly that in other environments, you only want security level upgrades to core system components rather than updating all regular applications. (Not doing this left me scratching my head for a while wondering why the logs kept saying No packages found that can be upgraded unattended when apt was telling me something completely different. Anyway, put the following into a new file named above. ...

I’m always amazed by Canonical. Particularly their documentation. Ubuntu Touch is the grand movement to bring Ubuntu into the mobile domain, and it’s developing fast. Can’t say the same about the documentation; too long and doesn’t really make sense. And for what is actually a fantastically simple process, it deserves better. The phablet-flash folks have done an amazing job. So without further ado, the assumption: If you’re thinking of putting Ubuntu on your device, I’d say it’s reasonable to assume that: ...

Had an interesting if annoying problem recently that I assumed would just fix itself eventually. But when you’re sick of prodding a power button to force a machine to reboot, you gotta do something. TL;DR**_ if you’re getting messages like “Restarting System” on an attempted reboot, try setting the reboot=pci kernel boot flag_** To do this, at the grub boot menu, press e to edit the current boot parameters. Find the line starting with “linux” (this is the line that actually kicks off the linux kernel) and at the end of that line, put “reboot=pci”. ...

I am a pirate. I voyage across the root-zones in search for content. Movies available months before local DVD release in a format that my media centre laps up (mostly), I watch once, and don’t take up shelf space for years; TV shows via RSS that I watch at my leisure; and, on the rare occasion that I want to ‘Game’ and not feel like an idiot, I torrent. Today was such a day; I’d had my old memories of Deus Ex (Otherwise known as ‘THE GREATEST GAME IN THE WORLD [Where the lead character can actually talk]) floating around for a week or so, and had locked off a Lazy Sunday to get back into it. Sunday rolls on, and I fire off a friendly torrent. ...

_Never having to think about updates again _ is a good thing in my head, so here’s how to set up Unattended Upgrades under Ubuntu for fun and profit. $ sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades $sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades Uncomment the line // "${distro_id}:${distro_codename}-updates"; $ sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic Make it look like this APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1"; APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1"; APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7"; APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

PCap files are a pain; weird format, difficult to parse viserally even if you have the ‘right’ tools handy. Wouldn’t it be easier to be able to ‘see’ the network flow, like it is in all the textbooks? Well now you can! In playing with NS-3, I came across this problem, and googled for a solution. Now here’s an end-to-end ‘I have pcap files and want to make them pretty’ solution. ...

After a long time in the oven, Farset Labs is up and running. Unforanately we don’t have any of the crazy equipment yet, since we’re broke. As my first ‘official’ Farset Labs project, I’ve installed a ‘Big Red Button’ to notify the @FarsetLabs twitter feed and #FarsetLabs on Freenode to the status of the space. Basically, first person pushes the BRB down in the morning, then one of the directors key-unlocks the space to ‘close’ it. ...

IRC, Python, Ubuntu linux. Simples! Same as by Twitter post, but for IRC. Biggest problem with this one was working out that the IRC server needs to be kept alive with the irclib.IRC.process_once() command. This is wrapped in the while loop that assumes that there is other stuff going on for which you are waiting on a condition to be satisfied, but could easily be ignored if one is just sending out one message. Also, the PRIVMSG command can be used to broadcast to a channel, as is used here, or, as the name suggests, to communicate with a specific user. ...

This is my own self-indulgant reminder for how to do the things I like. I’ll keep adding to this as I think of them. Basic Setup Install Ubuntu Latest (currently 11.10), With the third party libraries and a home partition leaving at least 20GB for ‘/’. Then Update everything, during which time you can plod along to download the relevant packages for Chrome Beta, Dropbox, etc Once the update is done (I’d restart in most cases), additional packages I like to add are; ...