Quite a Bright Light » Ubuntu

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!

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.