Quite a Bright Light » Linux

Vpnc under Ubuntu: Connection established, but not being used

jefke — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:38:28 +0000

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))

jefke — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:09:06 +0000

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

jefke — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:02:54 +0000

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!

Opensuse: kmymoney: symbol lookup error: kmymoney: undefined symbol

jefke — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:29:06 +0000

Had an error message when opening KMyMoney in opensuse:

kmymoney: symbol lookup error: kmymoney: undefined symbol: _ZN14KMyMoneyPlugin14ImporterPlugin16staticMetaObjectEv

Solution: updating KMyMoney!

Something I miss in comparison with Arch, or even Ubuntu: the constant (rolling) updating of your total system. I know selecting all possible updates is possible somehow in Yast, but still…

VirtualBox: WinXP guest from Ubuntu crashing and rebooting in openSUSE

jefke — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:16:53 +0000

At work, I sometimes need Windows for legacy programs, or for not messing up the layout of protected Word documents. For all these little things, VirtualBox (non OSE for me) works like a charm. Since my switch from Ubuntu to openSUSE, however, I was unable to use the virtual windows disk (vdi file) I created under Ubuntu: right after booting up Windows, I would get a glimpse of a BSOD (blue screen), and Windows would reboot (not even leaving me time to study the BSOD). Booting into safe mode wouldn’t help.
Not wanting to create yet another virtual disk, I set out on an epic quest: a veritable search-and-destroy-the-cause mission. What finally fixed the whole thing, was setting the IDE Controller Type (Settings – General – Advanced) to PIX3 instead of PIX4. Apparently, the default setings are different between different distro’s.

Pentax K20D firmware update under Linux

jefke — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:55:25 +0000

Pentax has recently issued a new firmware update (1.03) for their current top DSLR, the K20D. Linux users might be suprised to see that only Windows and Mac users are supposed to download the firmware, as there’s only a download link for those two. A closer look to the accompanying text, however, shows that the Mac download is actually an ordinary zip file. I have yet to see a Linux distro that doesn’t support extraction of zip-files, and this particular zip-file extracts to the bin-file you need to update the camera. Even under Linux (or BSD or…)

Opensuse 11.1: Connection was not provided by any settings service

jefke — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:09:28 +0000

Recently, I put openSUSE on my laptop, with the kde4 windows manager, and it was (kind of) love at first sight. A couple of days ago, however, I played around with some vpn related packages to login to my work’s vpn. Using Yast, I installed a couple of packages and Yast automatically installed some dependencies with them (of course). Little did I know, that I was breaking my wifi…

After I was done, I noticed that while knetworkmanager still showed the available wireless networks, I couldn’t connect to any of them. Clicking on a connection that had been set up before, didn’t seem to do anything. Never underestimate the power of Linux, however. (OK, it shouldn’t have broken in the first place, but well…) What did I find in /var/log/NetworkManager? This:

NetworkManager: wait_for_connection_expired(): Connection (2) /org/freedesktop/NetworkManagerSettings/Connection/0 failed to activate (timeout): (0) Connection was not provided by any settings service “

Not being a Linux-guru myself, this didn’t mean a whole lot to me, but it provided me with the necessary seeds to sow in the google-field, and true enough, after a couple of minutes, google bore a nice ripe peace of fruit: the answer. A short synopsis for the not so adventurous: I had to remove the (inadvertently installed) package “NetworkManager-kde4″, which worked perfectly.

Now openSUSE and I are on friendly terms again.