Tag Archives: Ubuntu

GTK G-Rays2: Debian/Ubuntu packages

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Still I like to make use of my WBT-201 GPS logging device by Wintec. (I might have mentioned this before ;-) ). Wintec does not provide software for Linux and the latest version for Windows is from 2008. However, there still is this nice peace of software by Jonathan Hudson called “GTK G-Rays2“. He recently released a 2.x version as source, now supporting GTK3 but doesn’t provide packages for Ubuntu anymore. So based on his former 1.x packages I did my worst and built them for Ubuntu 12.04. I also built Debian packages for Debian Squeeze, but of course they are still version 1.x based.

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Pimping Unity’s indicator panel

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With Unity becoming Ubuntu‘s default desktop we had to say goodbye to all those nice applets we got used to (or at least I did) while running Gnome 2.x. I’m especially thinking about sensor-, CPU- and system-monitor-applets. Those applets are not available anymore for Unity. Instead it’s making use of indicators. So I just fired up synaptic (still don’t like Ubuntu Software Center) and searched for “indicator” – and I pretty much found what I was looking for. :-)

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Lucid desktop install with lvm2

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As I recently “reorganized” the partitioning scheme on my desktop system to gain some space for my flac music files I also changed the linux partitions to further run from logical volumes. To install Ubuntu on logical volumes you need to run the alternate installer – which in my case pretty much failed. I don’t know why, but half the way of copying the new system the installer insisted on putting in the CD medium (which of course was still in the drive) and no matter what option I chose – “Continue” or “Cancel” – the request wouldn’t go away. This was the first time an Ubuntu installer didn’t work out for me. Still wanting to install Ubuntu’s latest release I came across a post in Linux Mint‘s (another Ubuntu offspring) forum, describing how to install Linux Mint with lvm2. See the original post by piratesmack (thanks!) here. I more or less followed this howto.

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WLAN with Asus Eeepc 1000H and Lucid Lynx

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Ubuntu‘s latest release “Lucid Lynx” is out for a while now so I decided that this would be the right choice for my netbook “Asus Eeepc 1000H”. I went for the default i386 desktop release as I don’t like the netbook editions. With the help of “UNetbootin” it’s quite easy to create a bootable USB stick from the downloaded iso file. The installation was a peace of cake and if you previously installed Ubuntu somewhere (and even if you didn’t) it should not be a problem. I recommend keeping a wired network connection during installation (and as it shows, you will need it).

Once installed, fully upgrade your system to the latest packages and this might even pull in a new kernel. Then reboot and try to establish a WLAN connection… At least, I failed. :-( There seems to be a an upstream bug in Lucid’s kernel which prevents WPA protected WLAN connections to work properly. The solution seems to be installing the latest Ralink RT2860 WLAN driver. I found this workaround at launchpad published by killerbee – thanks for that! (Have a look at post #25 of the bugreport.) So, I will more or less just sum up his advice here.

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“gpsbabel 1.3.5″ for Ubuntu Hardy

Ubuntu Hardy Heron is out but sadly it comes with a rather old version of gpsbabel: 1.3.3. To read data from my Wintec WBT-201 I need at least gpsbabel version 1.3.4. With 1.3.5 already released I wanted the latest version – of course!

I tried to follow my own instructions given here to build a deb package for Hardy, but it didn’t work… It wouldn’t compile cleanly and errored out with:

lmx.c:34: Fehler: »link« als andere Symbolart redeklariert

(Sorry, got it in German only)

I googled a lot, but nothing… Compiling the sources worked well, but not if I tried to build the deb package via “uupdate”. As I’m no expert in building packages this gave me a hard time, but finally I got it: you have to edit debian/rules a little and it works! But now, step by step.

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Ubuntu 8.04 aka Hardy Heron (beta)

It isn’t for long, until the new Ubuntu Linux “Hardy Heron” will be released. Time for me to have at least a short look at it and provide some screenshots. So I installed both Ubuntu and Kubuntu as virtual machines using VirtualBox. Kubuntu will come with two flavors: one with KDE3 and long term support (LTS) like the Ubuntu version and one with KDE4 and I guess without LTS. KDE4 is still missing some apps and sometimes has some minor issues with stability. Anyway, of course I chose Kubuntu with KDE4.

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libmtp7 for Ubuntu Gutsy (Creative Zen & Ubuntu Gutsy)

As already mentioned in my last post, Ubuntu Gutsy does not come with a current version of libmtp which is required if you want to get your Creative Zen running with Linux. Luckily, it’s very easy to build new packages: just download the latest source from here and follow my HOWTO on building new packages for gpsbabel – it works just the same. You’ll end up with four packages (libraries, development, documentation and tools). You’ll have to install at least “libmtp6_0.2.6.1-1_<arch>.deb”. Once your new package(s) is/are installed, you need to do one more thing though: when building the new package, we were updating from Ubuntus libmtp6, so the package is named “libmtp6…”, but what we actually have inside the package is libmtp7. Amarok expects “/usr/lib/libmtp.so.6″, but we now have “/usr/lib/libmtp.so.7″ (which is a symlink to libmtp.so.7.1.0). We do overcome this small issue very easily:

cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libmtp.so.7.1.0 libmtp.so.6

You may now run Amarok and start syncing your media files! (See some details here.)

If you don’t want to build the packages yourself, feel free to download them from here (build on Ubuntu Gutsy i386):