February 2007 – Page 2

Beryl Cube doesn’t work with the Workspace Switcher

Sometimes I get a little carried away with messing around with the settings in Beryl. I think that through various upgrading to 0.2, downgrading and then upgrading through the SVC repository and playing with options, I’ve probably wasted 5-6 hours of my life.

Anyway, one thing I have noticed is that the desktop switcher sometimes doesn’t rotate the cube, but instead opens a new workspace with a different cube. Not really much use, but I think I’ve found something that resolves this:

Open up Beryl Settings Manager, and click Desktop
Make sure that you have Desktop Cube and Rotate Cube selected
Click on General Options, and then General Options (on the left)
Scroll down to the option Horizontal Virtual Size. Make sure it is set to 4 (you can change this after the cube rotate is working again).
Set the Vertical Virtual Size to 1
Set the Number of Desktops to 1

Now click quit, and try the virtual desktop switcher. If all has gone to plan, then it will work, and you’ll be in a switching dream.

If it doesn’t still work, don’t worry:

Reopen Beryl Settings Manager
Under General Options, scroll down to Vertical Virtual Size, and change the value to 2. You should see the active windows change size in the workplace switcher.
Change the value back to 1, and try to switch the desktop again

If all has gone to plan, you can now use the workplace switcher to rotate the cube again.

For those concerned, I am running Ubuntu Edgy with Beryl 0.2 – your mileage may vary.

Getting Mousey with the Logitech MX5000, MX1000 mouse, Ubuntu, Evdev and some Extra Mouse Buttons

As I get more and more stuck into getting Ubuntu to work nicely for me – I find myself more and more determined to resolve the little issues that nag me.

Today, I decided to finally get the extended mouse support for my Logitech MX5000 desktop working, and thankfully the process wasn’t too fraught with Bad Stuff Happening(TM).

So, after a quick google, I found that Mat Van Stone has very recently tried the same thing, which has made my life a great deal easier. Also a post from the Ubuntu forum assists in the expanding of the functionality.

I haven’t got into Section 2 of the guide yet, but I’ll be trying that out soon. In the meantime, I have used Beryl Settings Manager to configure the task switch button to run the Scale function, which is how I used it in Windows XP with TopDesk (the Expose for Windows prog).

What’s nice is I use ALT+the task switch button to Scale windows on all desktops, and the button alone for the current desktop.

It’s reasons like this I’m liking using Linux more and more.

Fetch email with Fetchmail and Ubuntu

I decided that seeing as I’m making a serious crack at using Ubuntu, one of the serious issues is getting at my email.

To that end, I’ve finally got around to setting up fetchmail to grab my personal emails for me. For my work emails, I’ll still be using E.F.S., as that’s running on the mail server itself and is effectively 24/7.

So, here’s a guide to getting the thing set up quickly and with minimal effort, and keep it running on the system while turned on.

Step 1 – Create a configuration file for fetchmail

Because I’m not going to go into all of the parameters for fetchmail here (they are well documented), we’ll be using fetchmailconf, which is a GUI for configuring fetchmail configuration files.
Open the terminal and enter fetchmailconf. This will open up the fetchmail launcher.

Click ‘Configure fetchmail’ and run through either the Novice or Expert configuration. Once you have completed the setup, make sure that fetchmail works by clicking the first ‘Run fetchmail’ button on the configuration menu.
NOTE: It’s a good idea to select ‘Suppress deletion of messages after reading’ while testing so that your emails are not lost.

Step 2 – Copy your configuration file to the system settings

Back to the terminal window, and do the following:

cd
more .fetchmailrc – this should print the configuration file to the screen. If it does then great, we’re on the way. You should be able to recognise the settings that you have made
sudo cp .fetchmailrc /etc/fetchmailrc – this copies your configuration file to the system area for the fetchmail daemon to use
sudo chown fetchmail /etc/fetchmailrc
sudo chmod 600 /etc/fetchmailrc – these last two command set the file permissions for the fetchmail user to access the file, but otherwise keep your email password secure.

Step 3 – Set fetchmail to run when the system is booted

Now we’re just going to make sure that fetchmail is set to run in the background, and will run when the machine is booted up.

sudo gedit /etc/default/fetchmail
In gedit, change the line START_DAEMON=no to START_DAEMON=yes. Save and close gedit.
Back to the terminal
sudo /etc/init.d/fetchmail start – this will start the fetchmail daemon, while will run in the background on your Ubuntu system.

That’s it! Load up your email application and check that the email you expect to be downloaded arrives.

If you want to check that fetchmail is running, enter ps -A | grep fetchmail in the terminal. If fetchmail is running, you’ll see a line like this:

11985 ? 00:00:01 fetchmail

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Trying to get the Logitech Bluetooth MX5000 Dongle to start with Ubuntu

Although reconnecting the bluetooth USB dongle is a good workaround for Ubuntu, it is starting to get a tad annoying.

On the Ubuntu forums, it is apparently just since the Edgy release that this occurs. There is a workaround by removing the bluez packages – although the side effect is that you cannot add other bluetooth devices.

As it happens, I’m not a huge fan of bluetooth devices anyway, so I’ll give this a shot.

VitualBox goes Open Source

After cursing Linux for not seeming to have a decent open source virtual machine platform, I’ve found out that an application called VirtualBox is now open source.

Seeing as I’ve been quite comfortable using Virtual PC 2007 up to now, I thought that it would be nice to see if I can get Windows XP running nicely under Ubuntu.

You never know, this might mean my migration to Linux after all…

Windows Vista Virtualisation Rights

A humerous article appeared on slashdot today, with the typical Windows bashing that’s to be expected.

But for my own reference, and hopefully the benefit of others:

Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium cannot be ran on a virtual machine legally, whether that be Linux, Apple or even Windows 95.

Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium cannot run a virtual machine of itself using the same licence (eg. Installing Vista Home Premium onto a new PC, and then install it again in Virtual PC with the same product key).

This is the same as Windows XP Home.

Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate have virtualisation rights, which means that it is legal to run the same copy of Windows, with the same licence key in a virtual machine.