At home we have an HP OfficeJet J6410 printer, which has worked brilliantly for years. Unlike every previous printer we’ve owned, this printer sits happily on our network and seems perfectly content to be used only very occasionally, whereon it willingly responds with decent quality prints and scans.

I have set up the printer with a static IP address and so the scanning is managed via the web interface http://192.168.0.100/webScan, whereon the scanned image opens a new tab in the browser, enabling you to save to wherever.

This printing and scanning Nirvana hit a road bump today, when it just instantly went to “Scan done” and failed to actually do anything. Rebooting the laptop, the printer and clearing temporary internet files all failed to resolve the problem, as did changing from Chrome to Firefox.

In desperation I tried running Ubuntu Simple Scan, but predictably enough it did not find the printer. A quick Internet search took me to this excellent Ubunutu community page.

I opened a terminal and typed:

$ hp-makeuri 192.168.0.100

CUPS URI: hp:/net/Officejet_J6400_series?ip=192.168.0.100
SANE URI: hpaio:/net/Officejet_J6400_series?ip=192.168.0.100
HP Fax URI: hpfax:/net/Officejet_J6400_series?ip=192.168.0.100

Done.

I then typed (taking the SANE URI from above):

$ simple-scan hpaio:/net/Officejet_J6400_series?ip=192.168.0.100

And it worked perfectly! Flushed with success I read on to see how to make this a permanent fixture, and it turned out that all I needed to do was configure the CUPS URI for the printer itself (it was previously set to something like socket://192.168.0.100):

$ vim /etc/cups/printers.com

DeviceURI hp:/net/Officejet_J6400_series?ip=192.168.0.100

And now simply running Ubuntu Simple Scan works perfectly.

Thank you Ubuntu community!

I was looking for a Wiki for managing the sharing of a boat, including booking usage, task lists and maintenance, as well as acting as a repository for any-and-all information available.

What it looked like was incidental, but it needed to be really simple for users to edit pages quickly. I wanted to squeeze it onto a work server, so it also needed to be really lightweight.

The Choices

I have experience of using both Wordpress and Drupal, but felt they were too complex and cumbersome for this use-case. I have also used MediaWiki in the past but, whilst easy to edit, I found it fairly cumbersome to use - it is after all designed for managing vast sites.

In the end I opted for DokuWiki, after stumbling across a site that recommended it as a really simple alternative to MediaWiki.

Installing DokuWiki

Dokuwiki is really easy to install, with delightfully simple instructions for Apache, but following my lightweight wishes I decided to try Nginx for the first time. Unfortunately I could not immediately find Nginx Instructions from DokuWiki, so instead followed these Nginx Instructions from Rose Hosting.

On first attempt the landing page would not load, but the nginx logs were very clear and helpful in pointing me to increasing a value of server_names_hash_bucket_size in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. This I found was commented out (with a default of 32), so I uncommented it and increased it to 64 and restarted nginx. At last I could reach the install page and from that point it all worked perfectly.

Later I decided to implement Nginx Pretty URLs, which again worked perfectly.

First Impressions

The main thing I love about DokuWiki is the simplicity.

Creating users is trivial, creating and editing pages is a doddle, there is a reasonably sane way of managing media files, and the Wiki syntax is bearable (not Markdown sadly).

Despite this simplicity, each time I have come across something I’d like to tweak, then there has been a way to do it without resorting to nasty hacks. Where Plugins are required, these can be installed in seconds via the web interface.

Most of what I was trying to do with this boat site was simply a matter of creating pages, but I did come across a few exceptions:

Checklists

One of the key uses for the site is to host a number of checklists, but I wanted tickboxes against each item. Not essential clearly, but it turned out to be trivial, simply deciding how to type a tickbox, e.g. square brackets for incomplete [] and [x] for complete, and then adding DokuWiki Entities to convert these into the appropriate character.

Bookings

The main problem that I faced was how to enable boat users to book time on the boat and in the end I settled on using simple text tables, but to make them simpler to edit I added Andreas Gohr’s excellent Edittable Plugin. This plug-in is so good that I would always install it in any DokuWiki that will have tables.

Whilst this will certainly do for now, I am on the look out for some sort of site to manage bookings properly - if you know of anything suitable please do comment below, otherwise at some point I will probably write one in Perl Dancer!

Conclusions

Under the Use Cases on the DokuWiki website there is the suggestion of using it for a Private Notebook - having used DokuWiki I can totally see how that would make sense - it is that simple to create and edit.

DokuWiki has definitely filled a gap in my web toolbox, alongside Perl Dancer and Jekyll.

Further to my recent post Intermittent USB3 Drive Mount, sadly I have to report that, after ten days of perfect operation, this morning once again the drive mount failed.

# dmesg | tail

[ 7659.848351] usb 2-3: Product: USB3.0 Hub             
[ 7659.848352] usb 2-3: Manufacturer: VIA Labs, Inc.         
[ 7659.852937] usb 2-3: Disable of device-initiated U1 failed.
[ 7659.856435] usb 2-3: Disable of device-initiated U2 failed.
[ 7659.856473] hub 2-3:1.0: USB hub found
[ 7664.860293] hub 2-3:1.0: config failed, can't read hub descriptor (err -22)
[ 7664.863787] usb 2-3: Set SEL for device-initiated U1 failed.
[ 7664.867279] usb 2-3: Set SEL for device-initiated U2 failed.
[ 8137.312105] usb 2-3: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[ 8137.559139] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800bc7e8a20

Power Control

Following the tack from last time, I once again checked the USB power control status:

# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control

As before these were mostly set to auto, so I switched on again using the same command as before:

# for F in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control; do echo on >"${F}"; done
# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control

Clearly I need a more permanent fix to that command.

Auto-Suspend

I also discovered two more settings:

# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend

Apparently to switch off auto-suspend you should set the delay seconds to -1:

# for F in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend; do echo -1 >"${F}"; done
# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend

To set this permanently I created a file /etc/modprobe.d/autosuspend.conf:

options usbcore autosuspend=-1

I came across Ubuntu Bug 1371233, in which there was a suggestion to try:

# echo -1 >/sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend

And on the same lines the suggestion to edit /etc/default/grub file and append to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line:

usbcore.autosuspend=-1

Followed of course by the obligatory:

# update-grub

Power Level

You can also check your USB power levels:

# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/level

Mine were already all switched on, but if not:

# for F in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/level; do echo on >"${F}"; done
# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/level

Back to Basics

Having run through all the above, I still could not see my drive. Unplugging and plugging it back in seems to have no reaction in the logs, suggesting that my drive is not being seen at all.

Re-plugging the USB hub seems to respond okay:

Nov 27 11:51:47 asusi5 kernel: [11372.680605] usb 1-3: USB disconnect, device number 2
Nov 27 11:51:47 asusi5 kernel: [11372.775937] usb 2-3: USB disconnect, device number 3
Nov 27 11:51:54 asusi5 kernel: [11379.603869] usb 1-3: new high-speed USB device number 7 using xhci_hcd
Nov 27 11:51:54 asusi5 kernel: [11379.733470] usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=2109, idProduct=2812
Nov 27 11:51:54 asusi5 kernel: [11379.733478] usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Nov 27 11:51:54 asusi5 kernel: [11379.733482] usb 1-3: Product: USB2.0 Hub
Nov 27 11:51:54 asusi5 kernel: [11379.733486] usb 1-3: Manufacturer: VIA Labs, Inc.
Nov 27 11:51:54 asusi5 kernel: [11379.734284] hub 1-3:1.0: USB hub found
Nov 27 11:51:54 asusi5 kernel: [11379.734556] hub 1-3:1.0: 4 ports detected

But still plugging in the USB3 drive into that hub still has no effect.

Next I tried re-plugging the USB hub into a different USB3 port. This time when I plugged back in the USB drive - it was recognised and worked perfectly.

Conclusions

It could be that one of the above fixes only affects new devices (the auto-suspend probably), and that by choosing a different port it was recognised as a new device and therefore worked.

Equally there could be a hardware problem with the original USB port, perhaps the connector inside the case is a bit dodgy.

For now I will monitor the situation for another week or two and report back.

After much research I decided to purchase ESET Antivirus for our Windows clients. But rather than install ESET Antivirus on each client in turn, I decided to install ESET Remote Administrator on an Ubuntu VPS. ESET Remote Administrator is a server program for controlling ESET Antivirus (and other ESET programs) on clients, you can use it to deploy the ESET Agent, which in turn can then install and monitor the ESET Antivirus software.

Our Windows PCs are controlled by an ActiveDirectory server (actually a Samba4 ActiveDirectory server, although that should not make any difference to these instructions).

I found the ESET instructions for so doing decidedly sketchy, but I eventually managed to install it and took some notes as I went. I cannot promise these instructions are complete, but used in conjunction with the ESET instructions they may be of help.

Update Hosts

Edit /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1       localhost.example.lan      localhost.localdomain        localhost
192.168.0.109   eset.example.lan           eset

Test by typing the following two commands and checking the output matches:

# hostname
eset

# hostname -f
eset.example.lan

Dependencies

# apt-get install mysql-server unixodbc libmyodbc cifs-utils libjcifs-java winbind libqtwebkit4 xvfb
# dpkg-reconfigure libmyodbc 

Install MySQL Server

Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf:

max_allowed_packet=33M

Restart MySQL

# service mysql-server restart

Configure MySQL

# mysql -u root -p

Cannot remember whether I created database and/or username and password, suggest you try without and then with.

Install ESET Remote Administration Server

Replace ??? with actual:

# sh Server-Linux-x86_64.sh --license-key=??? \
--db-type="MySQL Server" --db-driver="MySQL" --db-hostname=127.0.0.1 --db-port=3306 \
--server-root-password="???" --db-name="era_db" --db-admin-username="root" --db-admin-password="???" \
--db-user-username="era" --db-user-password="???" \
--cert-hostname="eset" --cert-auth-common-name="eset.example.lan" --cert-organizational-unit="eset.example.lan" \
--cert-organization="example ltd" --cert-locality="UK" \
--ad-server="ads.example.lan" --ad-user-name="era" --ad-user-password="???"

In case of error, read the following carefully:

/var/log/eset/RemoteAdministrator/EraServerInstaller.log

Install Tomcat7

# apt-get install tomcat7 tomcat7-admin

Wait 5 minutes for Tomcat to start, then visit http://localhost:8080 to check it has worked.

Configure SSL

See SSL/TLS Configuration HOW-TO.

Step 1 - Generate Keystore

$JAVA_HOME/bin/keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore /usr/share/tomcat7/.keystore

Use password ‘changeit’.

At the time of writing $JAVA_HOME is /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre

Step 2 - Configure Tomcat

You should have two sections like this:

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
           connectionTimeout="20000"
           URIEncoding="UTF-8"
           redirectPort="8443" />

<Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true"
           maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true"
           keystoreFile="/usr/share/tomcat7/.keystore" keystorePass="changeit"
           clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" />

These will already exist, but need uncommenting and adjusting with keystore details.

Test

You should now be able to go to http://localhost:8443.

Join Windows Domain

The ERA server must be joined to the domain

Install samba and stop any samba services that start.

# apt-get install samba krb5-user smbclient

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf:

[global]
         workgroup = EXAMPLE
         security = ADS
         realm = EXAMPLE.COM
         dedicated keytab file = /etc/krb5.keytab
         kerberos method = secrets and keytab
         server string = Samba 4 Client %h
         winbind enum users = yes
         winbind enum groups = yes
         winbind use default domain = yes
         winbind expand groups = 4
         winbind nss info = rfc2307
         winbind refresh tickets = Yes
         winbind normalize names = Yes
         idmap config * : backend = tdb
         idmap config * : range = 2000-9999
         idmap config EXAMPLE : backend  = ad
         idmap config EXAMPLE : range = 10000-999999
         idmap config EXAMPLE:schema_mode = rfc2307
         printcap name = cups
         cups options = raw
         usershare allow guests = yes
         domain master = no
         local master = no
         preferred master = no
         os level = 20
         map to guest = bad user
         username map = /etc/samba/smbmap

Create /etc/samba/smbmap:

!root = EXAMPLE\Administrator Administrator admionistrator

Edit /etc/krb5.conf:

[libdefaults]
      default_realm = EXAMPLE.COM
      dns_lookup_realm = false
      dns_lookup_kdc = true
      ticket_lifetime = 24h
      forwardable = yes

Make sure that /etc/resolv.conf points to the AD DC, and dns is setup correctly.

Then run this command:

# net ads join -U Administrator@EXAMPLE.COM

Enter Administrators password when requested.

Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and add ‘winbind’ to passwd & group lines.

Start samba services.

Update DNS

For some reason the join does not always create the DNS entry on Samba4, so you may need to add this manually.

References

• Samba
• ESET Remote Administrator Installation Instructions
• Troubleshoot Linux Installation

I have a problem with a Samsung M3 Portable USB3 external hard drive only working intermittently. I use a couple of these for off-site backups for work and so I need them working reliably. In fairness a reboot does cure the problem, but I hate that as a solution.

To troubleshoot this problem, the first step was to check the system devices:

# ls -al /dev/disk/by-id

But only my main two system drives were showing, and not the USB3 drive, which would have been sdc, being the third drive (a, b, c).

System Logs

The next step was to check the system logs:

# dmesg | tail

This showed no issues at all. Then I checked syslog:

# tail /var/log/syslog

This was completely empty, and had not been written to for almost a year. I can’t quite believe I haven’t needed to check the logs in all that time, but there you are.

I checked that rsyslogd was running and it was as user syslog. But the /var/log/syslog file was owned by root with group adm, but whilst syslog was a member of the adm group, the files all had user rw permissions only -rw-------.

This was easily fixed:

# chmod g+rw /var/log/*
# service rsyslog restart

Now the syslog file was being written to, but there was a problem writing to /dev/xconsole:

Nov 17 12:20:48 asusi5 rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="7.4.4" x-pid="11006" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start
Nov 17 12:20:48 asusi5 rsyslogd: rsyslogd's groupid changed to 103
Nov 17 12:20:48 asusi5 rsyslogd: rsyslogd's userid changed to 101
Nov 17 12:20:48 asusi5 rsyslogd-2039: Could no open output pipe '/dev/xconsole': No such file or directory [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2039 ]
Nov 17 12:20:48 asusi5 rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="7.4.4" x-pid="11006" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] exiting on signal 15.

So I duly visited the link mentioned, which gave instructions for disabling /dev/xconsole, but this made me nervous and further research suggested that that was indeed the correct fix for headless servers, but possibly not for a desktop PC. Instead I used the following fix:

# mknod -m 640 /dev/xconsole c 1 3
# chown syslog:adm /dev/xconsole
# service rsyslog restart

USB Powersaving

Now at least it seems that my syslog is working correctly. Unfortunately unplugging and plugging in the USB drive still was not writing to the logs! When I plugged in the drive the blue light would flash repeatedly and then switch off. I would have believed that the drive had a fault, if it weren’t for the fact that rebooting the PC solves the problem.

Thinking that perhaps this problem was USB3 related, I decided to Google for “USB3 drive not recognised” which found this post. Except, that post was only relevant when operating on battery power, whereas I am using a plugged in desktop PC. Clearly that page could not be relevant? Except that in my notification area there is a battery icon, relating to my Uninterruptible Power Supply. But surely Ubuntu couldn’t be treating my UPS as if it were a battery? Could it?

In order to find out the power status of my USB devices I followed the suggestion of typing:

# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control

Most were flagged as “on”, but a number of devices were flagged as “auto”. I decided to try switching them on to see if that made any difference:

# for F in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control; do echo on >"${F}"; done
# grep . /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/control

Now all the devices were showing as on. Time to try out the drive again - I unplugged it and plugged it back in again. This time the power light flashed repeatedly and then went solid.

Unfortunately the drive was still not mounted, but at least it was alive now. What next? Ah yes, I should check the logs to see if they have any new messages, now that the drive is powered and my logs are working:

# dmesg | tail
[15243.369812] usb 4-3: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[15243.616871] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff880213c71800

Faulty USB-SATA Bridge

At last I have something to go on. I searched for that error message, which took me to this Debian.net page, which suggested:

Reason is faulthy usb-sata bridge ASM1051 in USB3 drives. It has nothing to do with motherboards. See this. https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=a9c54caa456dccba938005f6479892b589975e6a Workaround was made to kernel 3.17-rc5. Now those disks works. Some perfectly and some works but data transfer is not smooth.

Could that be my problem? I checked my current Kernel:

# uname -r
3.13.0-68-generic

So yes, it could be. As I cannot read the device yet, I cannot check whether ASM1051 is present in my USB3 drive.

Having uninstalled 34 obsolete kernels and a further 8 newer kernels that weren’t in use, I was in a position to install the latest Kernel from Vivid with:

# apt install linux-generic-lts-vivid

The problem of course is that in order to boot onto the newer Kernel I must reboot, thereby fixing the problem anyway.

And finally

It would be easy to portray this as clear evidence of the difficulty of running Linux, certainly Samsung will have thoroughly tested their drive on Windows and Mac operating systems. That said such problems are not unheard of on the more popular operating systems and debugging such problems is far harder, I would argue, than the above logical steps.

Having rebooted, as expected, the drive worked. I tried running lshw to see if ASM1051 was present, but I could not find it. Of course upgrading the Kernel could have fixed the problem anyway.

For the present I will labour under the comforting belief that the problem is fixed and will update this post again when either the problem reoccurs on in a week’s time if all is well!

• Please see Intermittent USB3 Drive Mount Continued…

I was reading Phones need ‘bed mode’ to protect sleep on the BBC, that computers should have a blue light filter to help people to sleep properly at night. As I am frequently working on my laptop until late in the evening, I felt that I should investigate further. Currently I do turn down the brightness, but it seems that is not enough.

The article linked to a program called f.lux, which is free for Linux. I also came across this article on Linux Magazine Avoiding Eye Strain.

Installation

Getting this working on my laptop was trivial:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kilian/f.lux
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fluxgui

Finally I ran the program and set it to launch on start-up. I entered latitude as 51.2, which is close enough I believe.

Operation

The software feels fairly basic, whether this is the same for Windows and Mac I don’t know. That said the applet seems to run perfectly in the Ubuntu notification area.

It is very noticeable that the display is more muted and much more comfortable to view in the evening. I don’t yet know whether this will work well during the day, nor whether it will improve my sleeping. But the logic behind it seems sound and there is no reason why it shouldn’t help.

Following the demise of my Novatech n1410, I have now taken delivery of a shiny (actually “shiny” is one thing it isn’t!) new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 3. This is not a review of the X1 Carbon - there are plenty of those available already, but merely my experience of the first few days of ownership.

So why did I choose the X1 Carbon?

1. Quality of construction and life expectancy;
2. Ubuntu hardware certification;
3. Screen resolution 2560x1440 - perfect for remote support;
4. Keyboard and Trackpad quality - two of my dissatisfactions with the Novatech;
5. Weight: at 1.3kg - it is much lighter than the Novatech and much of the competition.

The high cost was a concern to me, but having paid £479 for the Novatech and it having only lasted 32 months, I was very conscious that price isn’t everything. I bought the X1 Carbon from BT Business Direct for a touch under £1,000.

When it arrived I was very surprised by the size of the packaging - this was a very small box for something so expensive! The one thing that I was not expecting was to be excited by the looks of this laptop - the words “business-like” best summed up my expectations. In the flesh I found the X1 Carbon absolutely stunning - the photo above is one of the few that I have found that do it justice.

By this point I was as happy as a Frenchman who’s invented self-removing trousers.

Ubuntu Installation

I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04-3 LTS 64-bit and copied it to my iodd 2531 Black USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure Virtual DVD Blu-ray ROM. The Ubuntu installation was flawless and fast. I opted for a whole drive encrypted LVM install and in no time was booting into Ubuntu. The screen was absolutely beautiful - for the first time I had a laptop with a screen to rival an Apple Macbook.

Display Issues

Ubuntu prompted me to run software update (I never update during the install process), which I duly did. Having rebooted - disaster struck - the boot process almost immediately dumped me to this screen. I was able to enter my drive encryption password blind and it then progressed to the beautiful LightDM login screen as before.

I logged this as a bug with Ubuntu and then installed an Ubuntu Mainline kernel and, whilst it still exhibited the screen corruption, it included a new Drive Encryption Password Prompt which did not suffer from the problem and gave me a functioning system once again (but read on for more).

Trackpad Buttons

I then noticed that the trackpad buttons were not working. Well that’s not entirely true - they were scrolling up and down a page, rather than behaving as normal trackpad buttons. This Ubuntu Question suggested that I was not alone and offered a solution - that of changing the trackpad from synaptic to imps driver. I tried this, but instantly the Trackpad felt less responsive, the cursor slowed down and whatever I tried to customise it made no odds.

But more importantly the Trackpad buttons still didn’t work.

It is worth noting that even without the Trackpad buttons, you can still left-click (single finger tap to Trackpad) and right-click (two finger tap to Trackpad). In reality this is what I shall use in day-to-day operation, so this is issue is not a show stopper - at least for me.

After much head scratching and trial and error I found that by rebooting into the original 3.19.0-25 kernel, holding the Shift key down to access Grub during boot process, not only fixed the Trackpad issue, but it also resolved the screen corruption issues during the boot process.

As a result, I decided to uninstall the newer Kernel 3.19.0-30, which contains the problem, along with the mainline kernel and generic LTS kernel packages. This will prevent any further updates to the Kernel and is clearly only a short-term fix, but the benefit is a perfectly working system.

Review of Reported Ubuntu X1 Carbon Gen 3 Issues

It is possibly worth reviewing that Ubuntu Question again and the issues raised therein:

1. Wi-Fi is disconnecting: I have not encountered this problem at all.
2. Click-buttons are not working at all: Resolved by returning to kernel 3.19.0-25.
3. Vertical Scrolling (with trackpoint and middle button): Not tested as yet.
4. Special Keys (like Brightness): these all work fine for me.
5. Screen Characters scrambled on 14.10: not experienced in 14.04 as yet.
6. Trackpoint Sensitivity: I think that was a by-product of the imps driver - which I have not needed to use.

In short, at least for the 3.19.0-25 kernel, this is a fully functioning Ubuntu laptop!

Fingerprint Recognition

I was expecting problems with Fingerprint recognition, but that was not the case. I simply installed a couple of packages, scanned my fingerprints and it all worked fine.

$ sudo apt-get install fprintd fingerprint-gui

There were two surprises: The first was that the fingerprint reader works for command line use - so no more typing the sudo password - simply swipe your finger! The second surprise was that it doesn’t appear to work for the initial LightDM login. The fingerprint scanner flashes a couple of times and then stops. Given that you only type this once in a session, this isn’t a huge deal, compared to the number of times you enter passwords for sudo and the lock screen.

There are reports of LightDM not working with encrypted home directories, but I am using whole Drive Encryption which I wouldn’t have thought would have been affected in this way, given that I have already entered my drive encryption password by this point.

If I manage to solve this problem I will of course update this page. If you have any solutions please do comment below.

WLAN - 4G Wireless

Lastly, an oddity of the BT Business Direct specification is that this laptop has a 4G WLAN slot. This was not something I particularly wanted, but of course now that I have it I have had to order a £6.25 per month Vodafone 4G Data Plan. Once the SIM card arrives I will provide feedback.

Conclusion

It is easy to be critical of some of the pitfalls in running Ubuntu on the X1 Carbon, but the reality, with a few caveats, is that it works flawlessly. The laptop is a joy to use, the keyboard feels wonderful and running your fingers across the trackpad is an almost sensuous experience - I may be getting carried away here, but suffice to say that this is a very good laptop and it is working beautifully on Ubuntu with the kernel 3.19.0-25.

With luck the bugs will be resolved and I will be able to update the kernel in due course!

I was surprised to learn that Ubuntu 14.04 can talk to Skype for Business AKA Lync 2013 using the Pidgin Instant Messaging client. The general steps were:

# apt-get install pidgin pidgin-sipe

And then restart Pidgin and add a new Account. The Office Communicator is the relevant plugin, with the following parameters:

• Protocol: Office Communicator
• Username: Your Office 365 or Skype for Business username - probably your email address
• Password: Your password is obviously required - and will be stored unencrypted in the config file, so you may wish to leave this blank and enter at each login
• Server[:Port]: Leave empty if your set-up has autodiscovery
• Connection type: Auto
• User Agent: UCCAPI/15.0.4420.1017 OC/15.0.4420.1017
• Authentication scheme: TLS-DSK

I am unclear why the user agent is required, and whether that will need to change from time to time or not. So far it has worked fine here.

Unfortunately a few days ago the above set-up stopped working, with “Failed to authenticate with server”. It seems that you must now use version 1.20 of the Sipe plugin, which fixes “Office365 rejects RC4 in TLS-DSK”. As this version was only completed three days ago, it is not yet available in any of the Ubuntu repositories that I have been able to find, you will probably have to compile yourself.

Broadly speaking I followed these key stages:

1. Install build tools if you don’t already have them:

   sudo apt-get install build-essential

2. Install checkinstall if you don’t already have it:

   sudo apt-get install checkinstall

3. Download source files.

4. Extract source:

   tar -xvvzf pidgin-sipe-1.20.1.tar.gz

5. Change into source directory:

   cd pidgin-sipe-1.20.1

6. Read carefully the README file in the source directory.

7. Install dependencies listed in the README:

   # apt-get install libpurple-dev libtool intltool pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libxml2-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev libkrb5-dev libnice-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev

These dependencies may change over time, and your particular requirements may be different from mine, so please read the README and that information should take precedence.

Lastly, as an ordinary user, you should now be able to compile. If it fails at any stage, simply read the error and install the missed dependency.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo checkinstall

I found checkinstall was pre-populated with sensible settings, and I was able to continue without making any changes. Once complete a Debian package will have been created in the current directory, but it will have already been installed for you.

For some reason I found that at this stage Pidgin would no longer run, as it was now named /usr/bin/pidgin.orig instead of /usr/bin/pidgin, I tried removing and reinstalling pidgin but to no avail. In the end I created a symlink (ln -s /usr/bin/pidgin.orig /usr/bin/pidgin), but you should not do this unless you experience the same issue. If you know the reason for this I would be delighted to receive your feedback, as this isn’t a problem that I have come across before.

Restarting Pidgin and the Office Communicator sprung into life once more. Sadly I would imagine that this won’t be the last time this plugin will break, such are the vagaries of connecting to closed proprietary networks.

Upgrading Ubuntu at work can make you rather unpopular, as the Internet bandwidth is fully utilised downloading all the updates to packages you have long since forgotten that you installed.

It also takes time, time that you should be working rather than upgrading your computer.

For these reasons I like to trickle download the upgrade over a day and only perform the actual upgrade once all the packages are ready, typically the following morning.

This is how I performed my low-bandwidth upgrade…

N.B. This is not the official or recommended way of upgrading between Ubuntu versions. Specifically my method involves manually disabling some repositories and updating others to the new release. This would normally be done by the do-release-upgrade program itself. It works for me, but please do be aware that you are deviating slightly from the official method.

Step 1: Disable 3rd Party Repositories

Launch the Ubuntu Software Centre and from the menu select Edit followed by Software Sources. Under the Other Software tab please untick all active repositories.

(This step should in any case be done automatically by step 4).

Step 2: Update Repositories

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all occurrences of  ”precise” with “trusty”. If you are of a brave disposition, the following command should do this for you:

$ sudo sed -i.bak 's/precise/trusty/g' sources.list

(This will create a copy of sources.list to sources.list.bak, in case you wish to reverse this.)

Step 3: Download Packages

Still in the terminal, type:

$ sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get -o Acquire::http::Dl-Limit=64 -d dist-upgrade

The 64 will limit the bandwidth to 64 Kbps, please adjust to suit your available bandwidth. The “-d” will instruct apt-get to merely download the packages and not to install them.

I believe this stage can be aborted with Ctrl+C at any time and run again, until such time as all the required packages are downloaded.

Step 4: Upgrade

Still in the terminal, I tend to use GNU Screen for extra resilience, type:

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

Conclusion

I am typing this on my newly upgraded 14.04 installation, after a clean and trouble-free reboot and an entirely fault-free upgrade.

The truly astonishing aspect to an upgrade is the fact that the computer remains largely usable throughout. I lost my fonts briefly in one application during Step 4, but otherwise I was able to work normally. It didn’t even seem to be slowing my computer down greatly, although this is a fairly powerful workhorse, so your mileage may vary.

Please do comment, if you feel I’ve left anything out in the above, or indeed if you have found it useful.

Good luck with your upgrade.

I thought I loved markdown. I thought Dillinger (an HTML5 Markdown editor) looked remarkable. So I downloaded and installed it on an Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS server:

$ git clone https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger.git dillinger
$ cd dillinger
$ npm i -d
$ mkdir -p public/files/{md,html,pdf}
$ sudo apt-get install nodejs
$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
$ npm install express
$ npm install phantomjs
$ cd dillinger
$ node app

It looks beautiful and works perfectly and even includes the ability to export to PDF. But it seems that, for me at least, markdown without Vim just isn’t the same.

Shame that.

At work I needed a cheap laptop for a computer-illiterate user. Giving them Windows, would have meant that they would have had to keep up-to-date with Windows Updates, with all the potential issues that would cause, along with the need for malware protection. It would also have pushed up the cost, a laptop capable of pushing Windows along reasonably decently, would have cost a few hundred pounds at least.

Generally I would just have purchased a low-end Lenovo laptop and installed Ubuntu onto it, but I was aware that Ebuyer had recently launched an HP255 G1 Laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed for £219.99 inc. vat (just £183 if you can reclaim the VAT).

Buying pre-installed with Ubuntu afforded me the comfort of knowing that everything would work. Whilst Ubuntu generally does install very easily, there are sometimes hassles in getting some of the function buttons working, for brightness, volume etc. Knowing that these issues would all be sorted, along with saving me the time in having to install Ubuntu, seemed an attractive proposition.

Unboxing

My first impressions were good, the laptop comes with a laptop case and the laptop itself looks smart enough for a budget machine. An Ubuntu sticker, instead of the usual Windows sticker, was welcome, although the two sticky marks where previous stickers had been removed were less so. Still, at least they had been removed.

Whilst we are on the subject of Windows’ remnants - the Getting Started leaflet was for Windows 8 rather than Ubuntu. Most Ubuntu users won’t care, but this is a poor attention to detail and, if this laptop is to appeal to the mass market, then it may cause confusion.

First Boot

Booting up the laptop for the first time gave me an “Essential First Boot Set-up is being performed. Please wait.” message. I did wait and for quite a considerable time - probably a not dissimilar time to installing Ubuntu from scratch; I couldn’t help but suspect that was precisely what was happening. Eventually I was presented with a EULA from HP, which I had no choice but to accept or choose to re-install from scratch. Finally I was presented with an Ubuntu introduction, which I confess I skipped; suffice to say the new user was welcomed to Ubuntu with spinny things.

The first thing to note is that this is Ubuntu 12.04, the previous LTS (Long Term Support release). This will be supported until 2017, but it is a shame that it didn’t have the latest LTS release - Ubuntu 14.04. Users may of course choose to upgrade.

Secondly, the wireless was slow to detect the wireless access points on the network. Eventually I decided to restart network-manager, but just as I was about to do so, it suddenly sprang into life and displayed all the local access points. Once connected, it will re-connect quickly enough, but it does seem to take a while to scan new networks. Or perhaps I am just too impatient.

Ubuntu then prompted to run some updates, but the updates failed, as “91.189.88.153” was said to be unreachable, even though it was ping-able. The address is owned by Canonical, but whether this was a momentary server error, or some misconfiguration on the laptop, I have no idea.

This would have been a major stumbling block for a new Ubuntu user. Running apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade worked fine, typing Ctrl+Alt+t to bring up the terminal and then typing:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I notice that this referenced an HP-specific repository doubtless equipped with hardware specific packages:

http://oem.archive.canonical.com/updates/ precise-oem.sp1 public
http://hp.archive.canonical.com/updates precise-stella-anaheim public

I assume that adding this latter repository would be a good idea if purchasing a Windows version of this laptop and installing Ubuntu.

Hardware

This is a typical chunky laptop.  But, if you were expecting a sleek Air-like laptop for £220, then you need to take a reality shower. What it is, is a good-looking, well-made, traditional laptop from a quality manufacturer. At this price, that really should be enough.

Ubuntu “System Details” reveals that this is running an “AMD E1-1500 APU with Radeon HD Graphics x 2”, running 64-bit with a 724GB drive and 3.5GiB RAM. That would appear to be a lower spec processor than is typically available on-line for an HP 255 G1 running Windows; which generally seem to have 1.75Ghz processors (albeit at twice the price).

The great news was that, as expected, all the buttons worked. So what? Well, it may seem like a trivial matter whether, for example, pressing Fn10 increases the volume or not, but I think many of us have the experience of spending inordinate amounts of time trying to get such things to work properly. And buttons that don’t work, continue to irritate until the day you say goodbye to that machine. The fact that everything works as it should is enormously important and is the primary reason why buying Ubuntu pre-installed is such a big deal.

The keyboard and trackpad seem perfectly good enough to me, certainly much better than on my Novatech ultrabook; although not everyone seems to like them. In particular, it is good to have a light on the caps lock key.

I have not tested battery life, but, as this is usually the first thing to suffer in an entry-level machine, I would not hope for much beyond a couple of hours.

For other details on hardware, please refer to the product information and read more reviews here.

Performance

Booting up takes around 45 seconds and a further 20 seconds to reach the desktop. That is quite a long time these days for Ubuntu, but fast enough I would imagine for most users and considerably faster than it takes Windows to reach a usable state, at least in my experience.

Being that bit slower to boot, Suspend becomes more important: Closing the lid suspended the laptop and opening it again brought up the lock screen password prompt almost immediately. Repeated use showed this to work reliably.

As to system performance, well frankly this is not a fast laptop. Click on Chromium, post boot, and it takes about 9 seconds to load; LibreOffice takes about 6 seconds to load. Even loading System Settings takes a second or two. Once you’ve run them once, after each boot, they will load again in less than half the time. Despite the slow performance, it is always perfectly usable, and is absolutely fine for email and web-browsing applications.

The other thing to remember is that this will be the performance you should be able to expect throughout its life - i.e. it will not slow down even more as it gets older. Windows users typically expect their computers to slow down over time, largely because of the different way in which system and application settings are stored in Windows. Ubuntu does not suffer from this problem, meaning that a 5-year-old Ubuntu installation should be working as fast as it did when it was first installed.

Conclusions

I struggle to think of what else you could buy that provides a full desktop experience for £220. And it isn’t even some cheap unbranded laptop from the developing world. Sure, it isn’t the fastest laptop around, but it is perfectly fast enough for web, email and office documents. And the fact that you can expect it to continue working, with few, if any, worries about viruses, makes it ideal for many users. It certainly deserves to be a success for HP, Ubuntu and Ebuyer.

But, whilst this low-price, low-power combination was ideal for me on this occasion, it is a shame that there are no other choices available pre-installed with Ubuntu. I wonder how many newcomers to Ubuntu will come with the belief that Ubuntu is slow, when in reality it is the low-end hardware that is to blame?

Please HP, Ubuntu and Ebuyer - give us more choice.

And Lenovo, please take note - you just lost a sale.

For more reviews please visit Reevo.

As a died-in-the-wool KDE user, I’m just coming to terms with KDE4 and mostly loving it. A few niggles remain, but in the main it is very good indeed. But I suppose I would hesitate to recommend it to a new user. Having seen and heard much praise for the latest Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, which uses the Gnome desktop, I thought I’d give it a go.

I started by downloading the ISO image from the Ubuntu website and followed my instructions to Make A Linux USB Key, basically by formatting in super-floppy format (which I find to be the most consistently successful method) and using Unetbootin to write the ISO to the USB Key. Using a USB key is more convenient, more portable and more environmentally friendly than burning a CD/DVD.

I took a spare laptop, an HP NX7300, and inserted the USB Key. I entered the BIOS settings and changed the boot order to boot first from USB. I then booted up the laptop.

HP are not know for their Linux compatibility, but Ubuntu booted up with an attractive boot splash, before logging straight into the very attractively themed Gnome desktop. The new colour scheme is purple, which is very attractive, although brown still exists in the OpenOffice splash screen to remind us of what used to be.

As expected, network manager failed to activate, and I knew from past experience that I would need to load the proprietary broadcom driver. Continuing to play it dumb, I waited to see if I would get any help from Ubuntu. After about half a minute, the restricted drivers’ manager appeared on the top panel, although there was no guidance as to why it had appeared, nor what to do with it. I clicked on it and then clicked on the option to install the Broadcom STR driver and clicked activate.

After a minute or so it had loaded the Broadcom driver from the USB stick and I noticed that the wireless light had illuminated on the laptop. Promising! Unfortunately it then suggested I reboot to load the new driver; which obviously I can’t do, as I am running off a USB stick and would effectively start from scratch again if I rebooted. I decided to just wait and, sure enough, after a while when I clicked on the wireless symbol on the top panel it offered my local wireless access point. I selected it, and entered the encryption key, and I was connected.

At this point I had a completely usable desktop environment, including a full office suite (OpenOffice.org), a working web browser (Firefox) and everything else you could possibly wish in a modern desktop environment, all working off a USB stick. I still find that just amazing.

I must admit that I am surprised by Gnome, it looks gorgeous, it feels very integrated, as if it had been designed as a whole, rather than being a collection of applications brought together. No it’s not my much loved Debian, and no it’s not my much loved KDE, but it does feel easy to use, very uniform and just… well “right”.

I was particularly impressed by Rhythmbox, which had the built in music store, podcast reader, and local collection. This does look like an application which would reassure an erstwhile iTunes user. It’s probably not as good as amaroK, but having pushed amaroK on my mother and regretted it mightily, I think Rhythmbox is a good choice, being infinitely more user friendly.

I even set-up my Gmail account in Evolution, simply by clicking on the mail icon in the top panel and following the wizard to set up my Gmail account. I played completely dumb, it provided all the necessary server information and network settings for me, and all I needed to know was my Gmail address and password. That is incredible, anyone could set up their email if it’s that easy.

Having tested it, just to decide whether to recommend it to friends and family, I find myself sorely tempted to install it on my own laptop.

Having a brand new HP ML115 Server which I bought new for £107, I decided to have a play with Ubuntu LTSP at home. Actually I decided on Edubuntu, as I wanted to investigate the thin client management which I believe are included.

I downloaded the Ubuntu Alternate CD and burned it to disk. I booted the server onto the CD, missed the fact that I needed to hit F4 Modes and select LTSP before selecting install, whereon I wasted an hour installing Ubuntu-ordinaire.

Second attempt was pretty straightforward, but, only having a single network card, it warned me to edit /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf. Booted into Ubuntu without a problem and opened my router’s web interface and cribbed the DHCP settings and DNS settings into /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf. Switched off the DHCP on my router. Set-up the server static IP address via the Gnome network manager. Restarted DHCP with /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart.

Tested a client and got the “workstation not authorized”.

Ran sudo ltsp-update-sshkeys and sudo ltsp-update-image, rebooted the client and it worked beautifully, by which I mean that the laptop’s full 1600x1200 resolution was detected, and sound kicked in immediately.

So, even with the false starts, I managed to install a working Ubuntu LTSP server with all the bells and whistles in two and a half hours. And I could have done it at least an hour quicker than that. I know Ubuntu come in for some criticism, but that really is impressive usability. To be fair, I was helped by having knowledge of LTSP, DHCP, and Debian, but supposedly a second network card would have enabled the whole kit-and-kaboodle to work out of the box.

Tomorrow I will have a crack at installing the Edubuntu-Desktop!

Good night.