Archive for the 'Linux' Category

Vpnc under Ubuntu: Connection established, but not being used

Working from home, the need for a proper vpn connection with my university got quite important to me. I had installed and configured vpnc earlier, but I couldn’t get any further then establishing a connection. Once the connection was made, I still couldn’t get on university-only sites or make use of certain services. So I thought I’d try to find out what was wrong. Turns out that there’s a standard setting that makes the VPN not being used for all network traffic. You can turn it of by going to the VPN settings (“configure VPN” and select the VPN connection, click “edit”), go the “IPv4 settings” tab, click on “Routes…” and uncheck “Use this connection only for resources on its network”. That trick did it for me.

Don’t really know whether it’s vpnc or network-manager-vpnc that is to be blamed for the standard settings.
My versions: Ununtu 9.10, vpnc 0.5.3-1 and network- manager-vpnc 0.8~a~git.20091008(…)-0ubuntu1

Sage on Ubuntu: the error message is: (‘EOF in multi-line statement’, (805, 0))

Installed sage under Ubuntu yesterday. Just for trying out. (Well, actually I tried it out a little bit already on their fantastic webservice)
The first thing I tried, however, gave me an error message!


ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (805, 0))


ERROR: An unexpected error occurred while tokenizing input
The following traceback may be corrupted or invalid
The error message is: ('EOF in multi-line statement', (785, 0))

And then more blabla. Not very nice, I would say. Apparently, it is a conflict between certain versions of Sage and Maxima.

My solution: building Sage myself from source. Not hard to do, and you get the latest version fully installed. Disadvantage: it takes a couple of hours of compiling!

Arch Linux: bash: /etc/init.d/vboxdrv: No such file or directory


After a kernel upgrade, Virtualbox instructs you to run “/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup” as root. When you try this on Arch, you get an error message, however:

bash: /etc/init.d/vboxdrv: No such file or directory

Turns out that on Arch, there’s a different path to follow. As root, do:

/usr/bin/vbox_build_module

Followed by:

modprobe -r vboxdrv

And you should be set! Still, if you’re not, please don’t hold me responsible. Everything you do as root is your own responsibility!