The Dallemagnes → Ubuntu

Found some old Ubuntu & Kubuntu Disks

Computer Clipart
Computer Clipart

The other day I was doing some cleaning and came across some old Ubuntu & Kubuntu Disks. I can’t bring myself to throw them away since, they no longer do the disks and it reminds me of when I first discovered the world of Linux.

Ubunut & Kubuntu Disks

Ubuntu & Kubuntu Disks

Installing Private internet access with OpenVPN on Ubuntu Server

I wanted to use a VPN on my ubuntu server, after googling I gathered a bunch of information from various sources. The following is a step by step guide of what I did. Hopefully it will will work for someone else as well.
install openvpn 
  1. sudo apt-get install openvpn
Download The Private Internet Access OpenVPN configuration files
  1. wget https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/openvpn/openvpn.zip
Unzip the files
  1. unzip openvpn.zip -d ~/openvpn
Move the files to the openvpn directory
  1. sudo mkdir /etc/openvpn/pia
  2. sudo mv ~/openvpn/* /etc/openvpn/pia/
Create a credentials file 
  1. sudo nano /etc/openvpn/auth.txt
on the first line enter your username
on the second line enter your password
Save the file and change permissions on it
  1. sudo chmod 400 /etc/openvpn/auth.txt
Copy the following 2 files to the openvpn directory
  1. sudo cp /etc/openvpn/pia/ca.rsa.2048.crt /etc/openvpn/ca.rsa.2048.crt
  2. sudo cp /etc/openvpn/pia/crl.rsa.2048.pem /etc/openvpn/crl.rsa.2048.pem
To have the vpn connect automatically on system startup copy the opvn file you wish to use to the openvpn directory changing it to a .config file.
  1. sudo sudo cp /etc/openvpn/pia/UK\ London /etc/openvpn/UKLondon.conf
Edit the config file 
  1. sudo nano /etc/openvpn/UKLondon.conf
Find the line that says
auth-user-pass
and change it to
auth-user-pass auth.txt
Test the connection by running the vpn
  1. cd /etc/openvpn
  2. sudo openvpn --config /etc/openvpn/UKLondon.conf
If all runs well reboot the system and check your ip address with the following command.
  1. wget http://ipecho.net/plain -O - -q ; echo

Getting Started with Cord Cutting

The following is help list to get anyone started with cutting their cable T.V. cord.

Streaming T.V. Boxes:

A Streaming media box is a little box you connect to your t.v. which connects to the internet either wirelessly or with an ethernet cable to stream internet media to your television.

How to install 3rd party user scripts & extensions in google chrome

Chrome recently implemented a change removing the ability to install scripts & extensions from 3rd party websites. You can easily work around this to install the ice quick stream script and other user scripts & extensions from 3rd party locations by doing the following.

  • Find the google chrome icon on your desktop
  • Right click on the icon and then select properties
  • In the dialog that opens you’ll see a box labeled target
  • The target box contains something similar to the following line
    C:\username\App Data\Local\Google Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
  • at the end of the line add a space then paste the following:
    --enable-easy-off-store-extension-install
  • your end result should look like this:
    C:\username\App Data\Local\Google Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-easy-off-store-extension-install
  • Click apply and then click OK
  • close chrome completely by clicking the wrench and clicking exit and then relaunch it using the shortcut you just modified. You should now be able to install user scripts & extensions from any website once again.

I hope this helps.

p.s. this also works on linux launchers.

Adding G+ to your KDE Desktop

Adding Google+ to your desktop is simple for KDE users. Simply download and install the PhoneWebView Plasmoid and use the following url as your default url https://m.google.com/app/plus/?force=1 There you have it..a beautiful mobile view of G+ right on your KDE Desktop!

Re-enable alsa channels in Kmix for Kubuntu 10.10

So I installed Kubuntu 10.10 only to find it’s now using pulseaudio. In all honesty it seems to work fine with one exception. Kmix the system tray volume manager & mixer only showed pulseaudio channels instead of my standard alsa channels. I could access them fine by going to command prompt and typing alsamixer, but in kmix it was a no go. So I went on the hunt to see what I could figure out.

After a bit of googling I found the following steps could restore kmix to it’s former alsamixer glory:

  • Close Kmix by right-clicking on it in the system tray & clicking quit
  • in konsole run the following command

kquitapp kmix && KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix

  • You should now be able to access your normal alsa channels via kmix

To make it run on on startup I did the following:

  • open kate or your favorite bash editor
  • add the following code to the document

#!/bin/bash kquitapp kmix && KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix

  • save the document to ~/.kde/Autostart
  • make the document executable

chmod 755 ~/.kde/Autostart/kmixfix

  • Log out and back in and you should now have your normal alsa channels back in kmix upon login

This is just a simple fix and I’m sure there are much cleaner ways to get it to run on startup. But it works for me and I now have all my mixer channels back in kmix where they belong.

LOTRO Going Free to play & pylotro

Well Lord of the rings online is going free to play on the 10th of September. Some of us over at the Ubuntu forums were wondering if pylotro would be updated. So I email the developer and asked him and he has since posted over at the forums that he indeed plans on updating pylotro for the change. So good news for all you linux loving lotro players, including me!

LOTRO & DDO on Kubuntu 10.04

I wanted to share how I have gotten both Lord of the Rings Online & Dungeons & Dragons Online Eberron Unlimited working on my Kubuntu 10.04 install

My Methods will require you to either have a copy of windows running in virtualbox or a dualboot with a working LOTRO install.
First I downloaded pylotro Though the program is called pylotro it is a launcher for both LOTRO & DDO. I also download and installed wine. My current working version is 1.2-rc1

  1. I used the regular download manager from turbine in Virtualbox and downloaded both LOTRO & DDO . You should make sure to do full download of all game files, be forewarned it could take a while.
  2. I created a folder called Turbine in
    /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/
  3. Using grsync I copied everything from
    C:\Program Files\Turbine\
    to
    /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine
  4. Using winetricksI installed
    • win2k
    • gecko
    • vcrun2003
    • vcrun2005
    • vcrun2005sp1
  5. I then installed pylotro in wine
  6. Once I ran pylotro I had to go into the settings and point it to my LOTRO and DDO installs. While I wasn’t able to patch DDO I can play it just fine. With LOTRO I was able to patch and everything runs just fine.
  7. Note You’ll have 2 folders(1 if you only play LOTRO or only play DDO) in your /home directory called
    Dungeons and Dragons Online
    and
    The Lord of the Rings Online
    These would generally be the folders that would appear in your Documents
    folder in windows.This folder will normally hold your
    UserPreferences.ini file along with your lotro.keymap file. For reference HERE is a copy my UserPreferences.ini file

I haven’t had any sound issues and my game seems to run fine. Of course I
don’t use pulseaudio being on kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. One thing I
did notice is that settings aren’t saved to the ini file so if you say
adjust your sound one session then log and come back later your need to
readjust them. I worked around this but just editing the volume settings
in the actual UserPreferences.ini file instead of using the in game
options.

Duh Moment

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I have 2 hard drives in my system, all my music & videos are kept on the second hard drive which I mount to /storage up until last night I hadn’t been able to figure out how get actual links to the folders in my home directory without dolphin file manager opening in a new window. Then last night out of the blue it hit me that I all I had to do was create symbolic links to all the files in the folders in my home directory. So I ran these 2 commands in terminal:
ln -s /storage/Music/* /home/angel/Music
ln -s /storage/Videos/* /home/angel/Videos
the * is a wild card and means that anything in those folders will be linked to. But I knew this and really felt it was a “Duh” moment on my part…..lol

Making apt:// work in firefox kubuntu

I finally figured out how to make apt:// urls work in firefox kubuntu. apt:// urls allow you to install software at the click of link in your browser. The fix was actually rather simple, just run the following command in your terminal.
sudo apt-get install apturl firefox-3.5-gnome-support
After running the command head over to allmyapps and test it by trying to install one of the programs they have listed.