Linux Journal - Photo of the month?

I received an email today that made me very happy! After forwarding some tux images I had on my pc (and I have many), Linux Journal offered to put one o them on their magazine. The featured photo is below:


I'm yet to receive a confirmation that this will happen... but never the less I'm very excited to even have received an offer. Now I just need to keep checking whenever I receive a new issue if the photo has been published.

Mississauga Linux Group

I'm trying to organize a monthly LUG meeting for the area that I live (Mississauga, ON). I started with emails to the Ubuntu CA mailing list, which I got good results.

We also have a Wiki page up, and I will posting a thread on the Ubuntu forum. I hope we can get a few users that are willing to sit down, drink some coffee and talk about Linux.

Wiki: MLUG

1st Meeting
24 September 2008, 6:00pm
Mulligan's Pub and Grill, 2458 Dundas Street West, Mississauga

O'Reilly School of Technology

Yesterday I stumbled on the site for O'Reilly School of Technology. There's not much that needs to be said about O'Reilly. They have great technical books that are very well laid and easy to understand.

The on-line training provided by the site has different courses, as well as certificate programs that upon completion will provide the student with a certificate from the University of Illinois.

Courses go for around U$398.00, and there is a 7 day trial period (refund).

The creators of the first commercial Web Site once again are doing a great job! It's worth your time to take a look.


Vic

Problem with vlc play back sound on Ubuntu

After upgrading my laptop to Ubuntu 8.04 (via a re-install), I noticed the sound on my vlc play back did not work. Usually I would have to logout and log back in to get it to work. At one point I got tired of doing this (it didn't take much) and decided to investigate the issue.

Looks like the problem is related to the playback system. You might notice that this problem only occurs when another program (like Firefox or a player) is open.

The fix is simple. Install the “vlc-plugin-pulse” package to fix it.

$ sudo apt-get install vlc-plugin-pulse

Launchpad bug: 188358

How to change Rogers search hijack

Couple of weeks ago I noticed that when I typed a bad address on my browser, instead of getting the all known and familiar Google Results page I was getting a Rogers page. Apparently Rogers added this feature after customer feedback requests.

In my opinion this feature might be helpful for the not so tech savy people, but a draw back for others.

There is an easy way to fix this and it's by changing your DNS settings, the problem is that you need to provide the DNS server of your choice. This were a service like OpenDNS comes in. They are a free as in beer DNS service (or free as in Google) that provides faster, safer and more reliable DNS access.

More info:
Site: http://www.opendns.com/
DNS1: 208.67.222.222
DNS2: 208.67.220.220

Here are instructions on how to change the DNS option on your machine:

XP
1- Follow the instructions given on Rogers help site
2- Use the OpenDNS addresses given above

Ubuntu
Note: These settings will not stay if you are using DHCP. If that's the case, try changing the settings on your DHCP server instead.

Type in the following command in a terminal window:

gksudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf

Edit the line with “search” to look like the one bellow:

search 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220

Save the file and close it.

Now run the following code in a terminal window to restart your network:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

That's it!! Now you can enjoy your bad URL results on Google.


Vic

Cannot see shared folder on VBox

After I re-installed Vbox on one of my servers I had a problem where I could not see a shared folder on my guest machine (XP).

The command to set the share is quite simple:

VBoxManage sharedfolder add “[machine]” -name "[share_name]" -hostpath \n "[/home/username/foldertoshare]"

If you issued this command but you still cannot see the share, the solution is actually simple. All you have to do is re-install Guest Additions (if you haven't done so), reboot the machine and you are set.

You can find more information and thank the guy who found this here.


Vic.

Useful VBox commands

For those of you that are running VBox on a server (headless), here are some common used commands that you will most likely need.

Change memory to 256MB

VBoxManage modifyvm "[machine]" -memory "256MB"

Register an ISO image

VBoxManage registerimage dvd [/full/path/to/iso.iso]

Add ISO image to machine after registering

VBoxManage modifyvm "[machine]" -dvd [/full/path/to/iso.iso]

Start Machine

VBoxHeadless -startvm "[machine]" -p [port] &

Change state of machine

VBoxManage controlvm [machine] poweroff VBoxManage controlvm [machine] reset VBoxManage controlvm [machine] savestate

** Other “controlvm” options
pause|resume

Set a shared folder

VBoxManage sharedfolder add “[machine]” -name "[share_name]" -hostpath \n "[/home/username/foldertoshare]"

Vic.