For years I used rely on the ies4linux project to get IE running under Linux project to get Internet Explorer working for me, but unfortunately the project no longer seems that active so a new way had to be found. Luckily I found it can be done through wine tricks which is actually easier than the original method.

So here I will run you through the process of installing Internet Explorer 7 on your Ubuntu box with Wine this way you can still manage some basic testing without having to worry about getting a complete copy of Windows.First up make sure your system has Wine & Winetracks installed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.2 winetricks

If you look under your applications menu you should now have a Wine subfolder with an entry called “Winetricks” click on this this to get started.

Select the option labelled “Install a Windows DLL or component”.

Then select your chosen version of Internet Explorer to install, be warned though don’t get greedy and try an install them all under the same Wine prefix as they wont play together nicely.

Form here it should be pretty smooth sailing just accept the EULA which you are breaking by installing on Linux and you should be good to go!

At the end it will say you need a reboot just hit the “Restart now” option, it won’t actually reboot your system Wine will simply simulate a reboot for it. After the process completes simply run:

wine ‘C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore’

For a somewhat buggy but “good enough” version of Internet Explorer on your Ubuntu box.

How It Works:
inotify is a Linux subsystem available from the 2.6.13 release of the Linux kernel that monitors changes made to a file system and reports these changes to interested applications. lsyncd is an application written in lua that uses the inotify service to inform it of changes made to monitored directories and then when notified of a change uses rsync to replicate the changes on a remote service.

Getting lsyncd
The lsyncd sourcecode can be downloaded from Google Code and compiled but depending on the distribution your server is running, the install process be even easier as lsyncd is included in the repositories of many popular Linux distros.

Installing On Debian / Ubuntu
While lsyncd is included in both the repositories of Debian and Ubuntu but unfortunately its an outdated version so check what version you are going to get beforehand with the command:

apt-cache show lsyncd

If apt-cache tells you that only one of the 1.x versions are available, I would recommend grabbing one of the 2.x versions from the Debian testing repository instead, the amd64 package can be found here  and one for the i386 architecture here. Then install using the dpkg command i.e

cd /root
wget wget http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lsyncd/lsyncd_2.0.4-1_amd64.deb
apt-get install lua5.1 rsync
dpkg -i lsyncd_2.0.4-1_amd64.deb

CentOS 5 Installation

yum install lsyncd.x86_64

Preparation
First step for getting started with lsync over two hosts is to create a shared SSH key to allow authentication without a password.

ssh-keygen

Now transfer the servers newly generated public key to the second server you are going to mirror content to.

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@my2ndserver:/tmp

After copying the file the second server add the public key to the ssh authorized_keys file.

cat /tmp/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

While you are logged into the second machine also double check that rsync is installed and install it if it isn’t. Now decide the directory you would like to mirror across your machines. In this example I am just going to keep it simple by starting fresh and creating a new directory in the same location on both of my servers:

mkdir /home/mirror

Quick Test Run
cd /home/mirror
touch test_file
lsyncd -log all -nodaemon -rsyncssh /home/mirror sync@my2ndserver /home/mirror

(Note: Unlike the scp command the target host and directory are given as two separate arguments to lsyncd at the command line)

Which should produce output that looks something similar to:

kernels clocks_per_sec=100
Call: configure()
Inotify: inotify fd = 3
Call: initialize()
10:08:17 Function: Inotify.addWatch(/home/mirror/, (true), (nil), (nil))
10:08:17 Inotify: addwatch(/home/mirror/)->1
10:08:17 Normal: recursive startup rsync: /home/mirror/ -> sync@192.168.20.127:/home/mirror/
10:08:17 Exec: /usr/bin/rsync [--delete] [-r] [-lts] [/home/mirror/] [sync@192.168.20.127:/home/mirror/]
10:08:17 Call: getAlarm()
10:08:17 Debug: getAlarm returns: (false)
10:08:17 Masterloop: going into select (no timeout).
10:08:17 Call: collectProcess()
10:08:17 Delay: collected an event
10:08:17 Normal: Startup of ‘/home/mirror/’ finished.
10:08:17 Normal: Finished Blanket on /home/mirror/ = 0
10:08:17 Delay: Finish of Blanket on /home/mirror/ = 0
10:08:17 Call: cycle()
10:08:17 Function: invokeActions(‘Sync1′,(Timestamp: 17184171.29))
10:08:17 Call: getAlarm()
10:08:17 Debug: getAlarm returns: (false)
10:08:17 Masterloop: going into select (no timeout).

Look in the mirror directory on the second server and with any luck you should see your test file has migrated across from the first server.

Potential Issues
When performing the test run you may get some output that appears similar to the text below:

kernels clocks_per_sec=100
Call: configure()
Inotify: inotify fd = 3
Call: initialize()
10:14:39 Function: Inotify.addWatch(/home/mirror/, (true), (nil), (nil))
10:14:39 Inotify: addwatch(/home/mirror/)->1
10:14:39 Normal: recursive startup rsync: /home/mirror/ -> root@192.168.20.131:/home/mirror/
10:14:39 Exec: /usr/bin/rsync [--delete] [-r] [-lts] [/home/mirror/] [root@192.168.20.131:/home/mirror/]
10:14:39 Call: getAlarm()
10:14:39 Debug: getAlarm returns: (false)
10:14:39 Masterloop: going into select (no timeout).
rsync: on remote machine: -sltre.iLsf: unknown option
rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1231) [server=2.6.8]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(601) [sender=3.0.7]
10:14:39 Call: collectProcess()
10:14:39 Delay: collected an event
10:14:39 Error: Failure on startup of ‘/home/mirror/’.

This tends to happen if you are using an older version of rsync on the 2nd server, no need to stress though I found when creating a config file for lysncd removing the -s rsync option seemed to solve this issue.

Creating A Config File
Fire up your preferred editor and create a new file to store your configuration:

nano /etc/lsyncd.conf

With the contents:

settings = {
   logfile    = “/var/log/lsyncd.log”,
}

sync{default.rsync, source=”/home/mirror”, target=”192.168.20.131:/home/mirror”, rsyncOps=”-rltvu”}

Then start the deamon with the comand:

lsyncd /etc/lsyncd.conf

This will start the daemon in the background, go create a new file in your mirror directory then watch the log with the tail command:

tail -f /var/log/lsyncd.log

With any luck you should be able to see your newly created file getting picked up by lsyncd and mirrored on your second server.

Sun Jul 17 11:03:09 2011 Normal: Calling rsync with filter-list of new/modified files/dirs
/myfile.txt
/
building file list … done
./
myfile.txt

sent 139 bytes  received 48 bytes  374.00 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00
Sun Jul 17 11:03:09 2011 Normal: Finished a list = 0

As you can see the process is not instantaneous with around a 5 – 15 second delay before initiating a transfer and obviously the delay while the file itself transfers across but it is handy for backups and other situations where a small delay is not too much of a concern.

Further Reading:

The lsyncd manual

On a Debian / Ubuntu based machine simply execute:

apt-get update
apt-get install vnstat

CentOS is a little more difficult here as vnStat is unfortunately not available in the default repositories so you will have to grab it from a 3rd party source.

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
yum install vnstat

Now that vnStat is installed on your system you need to initialise a database to store information for the interface you would like to monitor. For example the command below would create a database for the eth0 interface:

sudo vnstat -u -i eth0

This will give a message similar to:

Error:
Unable to read database “/var/lib/vnstat/eth0″.
-> A new database has been created.

After this you just have to give it some time to start gathering data if you run the command before it has enough data for the chosen interface you will get an error similar to:

eth0: Not enough data available yet.

Reporting

After vnStat has enough data getting information backout is easy for a high level summary simply execute the command on its on for a report similar to:

Database updated: Tue Jul  5 15:15:01 2011

    eth0

       received:       9.90 GB (7.5%)
    transmitted:     122.09 GB (92.5%)
          total:     131.99 GB

                    rx     |     tx     |  total
    ———————–+————+———–
    yesterday      4.04 MB |    6.82 MB |   10.86 MB
        today      2.64 MB |    4.20 MB |    6.84 MB
    ———————–+————+———–
    estimated         3 MB |       6 MB |       9 MB

For a look at bandwidth usage per day over the last 30 days simply add the -d flag.
vnstat -i eth0 -d

To see a breakdown of the last 7 days, the current week and the previous week use the -w flag.
vnstat -i eth0 -w

Last but not least if you want a monthly breakdown of bandwidth usage use the -m flag.
vnstat -i eth0 -m

Reports delivered straight to you
Logging in and running the command to get your usage is one thing but in the long run you are probably going to want something a bit more automated. The solution, run the vnstat command as a cron job and email the output to yourself with something similar to below:

55 22 * * 6 /usr/bin/vnstat -i eth0 -w | /usr/bin/mail myemail@mailserver.com -s “host.myserver.com Weekly Bandwidth stats” > /dev/null 2>&1

Related Links:

The home of vnStat

Enter the Pencil Project released under the GPL licence as a Firefox plugin to quickly create wireframes and application prototypes, its free, cross platform and very easy to use. Only problem is it doesn’t work with Firefox 4 & 5 (seriously who still uses 3?), fortunately using the XULRunner package Pencil can be run on its own as a stand alone desktop application.

Below are some instructions on installing Pencil on a Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (11.04) system, but realistically it shouldn’t be a big issue to get it working on any recent Linux distro.

First download the Pencil app from the the website to the directory you would like to install the application, in this case I am using ~/software/pencil.

wget http://evoluspencil.googlecode.com/files/Pencil-1.2-0-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Uncompress:
tar zxvf Pencil-1.2-0-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Update your systems package repository:
apt-get update

Install the XULRunner package to run Pencil as a standalone program:
apt-get install xulrunner-1.9.2

Now you should be ready to run, to get started with Pencil simply execute:

xulrunner application.ini

After install a shortcoming I found, is that I needed to install an extension to support exporting my prototypes as a HTML document. This was fixed by downloading the plugin:

http://evoluspencil.googlecode.com/files/DefaultHTML.zip

Then in the application select the the “tools” menu and the choose the “manage export template” option then browse your file system select the plugin zip file to install

No issue I thought after I upgraded I will just use the “Ubuntu Classic” option at login until the new Unity interface matures, unfortunately whilst coding in Eclipse earlier today I noticed using the classic interface or not some issues are still there. I was looking at a wide piece of code in Eclipse and started to become alarmed, what the hell has happened to my editors scroll bars?

I didn’t really pick up on the missing vertical scroll straight away as the scroll wheel on the mouse still got me where I was headed without issue, but I was left without any easy way to browse to the far right if the code was wider than the display area.

I am told the scroll bars are supposed to appear when the mouse hovers in their vicintiy although this doesn’t seem to happen when using Eclipse at present. Luckily it seems pretty easy to fix, I just wrote a 3 line bash file that gives me back the classic scroll bars I have come to love.

Simply saved the file made it executable with:

Updated my menu and desktop shortcuts to point to my script rather than directly to the Eclipse executable, restarted the application and thankfully problem solved!

To get started open a terminal and enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable

Potential Issue: depending on your network, corporate firewalls often block Port 11371, which is used to communicate with the key server causing timeouts. If this happens to you the key can be downloaded over port 80 using the command:

sudo gpg –keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 –recv-keys CE49EC21

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Close Firefox if its currently running and open again and enjoy your new look browsing experience.

Simply open a terminal window and execute:

apt-get update
apt-get install youtube-dl

You can run the command with the url of the youtube video you would like to download e.g

youtube-dl “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cbTPKmjHl8″

If the output comes back with the error below you may have to update your copy of youtube-dl.

[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Extracting video information
ERROR: unable to download video (format may not be available)

Luckily update process is very easy, simply execute run youtube-dl as a superuser with the -U option.

sudo youtube-dl -U
Updating to latest stable version…
Updated to version github

Chances are you will have to run the command twice, to update it properly on the second run it will output something similar to below:

sudo youtube-dl -U
Updating to latest stable version…
Updated to version 2011.02.25c

Now if you try and grab the video you wanted again you should be successful.

youtube-dl “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cbTPKmjHl8″
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: 0cbTPKmjHl8.mp4
[download] 100.0% of 24.21M at 192.89k/s ETA 00:00

The file will be save in your current directory and will look something similar to 0cbTPKmjHl8.mp4, you can then open this file up in VLC or movie player to ensure it downloaded correctly.

Open a terminal windows and execute:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install rcconf

(Chances are you may already have the rcconf installed.)

sudo rcconf

Scroll down the list of services till you find the service labelled “Ondemand”, this is the service that controls the CPU scaling. Unselect the option and hit Ok to exit, now when you reboot your system should run at full speed all the time.

VM Setup In Virtual Box

To have a bit of a play first up I set up a virtual machine using VirtualBox with 2099MB Ram and a 25GB hard drive.

Lucid Lynx has apparently made alot of positive changes to the installation process, unfortunately though by force of habit I had down loaded the “alternate” install image.

Installing the system….

Having used the alternate install disc the install process was pretty uneventful and took a little over 40 minutes to complete. Although this would of probably been a bit quicker had I been installing the operating system on a physical machine rather than a virtual one.

The new release has a new look boot screen, pretty plain and I am not a fan of the purple background but that is not where the major improvements lay. A lot of changes have been made to Lucid Lynx in order to speed things up. Timing the boot process from bios to login screen on my VM gave 19.48 seconds, I also had a a virtual machine running Karmic Koala to time which gave 40.03 second, which is an improvement of over 51%!

After booting we are brought to the login screen, its only marginally different to the Karmic Koala login. Personally I think it doesn’t look as sharp in this release due to the theme having less contrast.

After logging in we are greeted by the new look theme named “Ambience”, the old brown colour scheme is gone and replaced by purple. Ubuntu 10.04 also comes with another new theme named “Radiance” which is basically just a light coloured version of the Ambience theme.

The administration menu is almost identical to 9.10 the only thing striking me as being slightly different is rename “USB Startup Creator” to just plain old “Startup Disk Creator”.

The preference menu like the administration menu is almost unchanged, except for new entries labelled “Messaging & VoIP Apllications”, “Ubuntu One” and “Broadcast Preferences”.

The places menu is unchanged.

Installing the additions for Virtual Box, as you can see in the image the minimize / maximize / close button up the top of application windows have moved from the right side to the left.

The software manager has under gone a very welcome make over, with software categories being further categorised  into sub categories. This makes life a lot easier when your looking for a particular application in one of the more populated categories. A new root category has also been added called fonts that covers all your typeface needs.

Like all the Ubuntu releases before it proprietary codecs etc are not installed with the base install due to licensing, copyright and patent issues that go against the Ubuntu Free Software Philosophy.

Rythm Box now contains a tab for the Ubuntu One Music Store, this is a new addition. The range at the moment is somewhat limited at present when compared to something like iTunes, and the appearance rather bland but nevertheless  a great feature which will only get better as it matures.

A lot of work has also been done on improving Ubuntu’s handling of the iPhone and iPod touch, music can even be played in Rhythm Box from the device. Unfortunately though you cannot write music to the device so we are still stuck using that abomination iTunes to sync content for the time being.

The new version of Gnome integrates social network into the desktop itself, just configure your account details and you can be tweeting or updating your facebook status directly from the desktop.

Lucid Lynx also brings inbuilt integration with the Ubuntu One cloud storage. Like the very popular Dropbox service this allows users 2Gb of storage space for free in the cloud  to store and share files etc.

Overall I was very impressed with the latest Ubuntu release very polished and some great new features, over the next few days after backing up my data I will definitely be upgrading my Desktop.

So Whats Been Improved?

• Easier configuration of multiple monitor setups
• A number of video cards now have free drivers available
• Significantly faster boot up times
• Support for the ext4 filesystem
• Improved range of wireless and 3g devices supported
• Intelligent switching between wireless and 3g connections
• The server version comes with Eucalyptus, allowing you to play with cloud computing before paying money for the likes of Amazon’s ec2

Can I Upgrade From 8.10?

Sure, just press the ALT & F2 keys, in the dialog box that appears type update-manager -d.This should open up the update manager which will tell you a new release is available. To get the ball rolling simply press the upgrade button the next screen will show you the realease notes for Jaunty. Press the upgrade button down the bottom of this screen and the system will go have a look at what pakages it needs to complete the upgrade.

If no issues are found a window will eventually pop up asking you if you would like to start the upgrade. Pressing the “start upgrade” button on this dialog box will then start the upgrade in earnest downloading all the packages it needs and then installing them. Be forewarned the actual upgrade can take a long time especially if you have a slow connection or are not getting great speeds from you mirror of choice.

When the process is done you will be asked if you want to remove any obsolete packages, just click the “remove” button to continue . The next dialog box will inform you the system requests a restart, click the “restart now” button and wave goodbye to Intrepid Ibex and hello Jaunty Jackalope. Upon restart if you want to be absolutely sure you didn’t get short changed open up a terminal and type sudo lsb_release -a, you will be told what version of Ubuntu you are currently running in the output.

Links

Ubuntu

Kubuntu

The Ubuntu Forums

Ubuntu 9 Tweets