Ben's Ramblings

For a seeming eternity Ubuntu has for whatever reason failed to ship a version which upon install that can pair properly with Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. Bug after bug has been filed on this to no avail. So to my lack of suprise, after installing the new 10.4 (Lucid Lynx), Bluetooth would not pair with the keyboard.

Luckly, the situation has seem to improved to the point where only two changes are needed to get it working:

• Install the blueman package

aptitude install blueman

• Add hid_apple to /etc/modules (must be first) to allow Bluetooth to survive a reboot.

Progress? Kinda…..

10.4, apple bluetooth keyboard, apple keyboard, bluetooth, lucid, ubuntu

I downloaded the newest Ubuntu to toy with in VMware and I really had the great desire to strangle who ever decided it would be a good idea to move the minimize, maximize, and close buttons to the LEFT side of the window bar.

After my momentary, are you kidding me, thoughts, it occurred to me that OSX has the same setup.

Now, interestingly enough I have a Mac and I use the left side buttons on it. Yet for at least a hour I continued to try to click at the right to get things closed in Ubuntu. Muscle memory, for those who do not think consciously about where to click when getting rid of, was going to cause me headache for the foreseeable future.

So to save you the headache I went through, enjoy the fix (from the command line):

gconftool-2 –set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout –type string “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

Its been awhile since i’ve setup a PPTP server in linux but the overhead of server 2003 for under 10 users is hard to justify the cost. I’ve compiled a short how-to for reference. This is based off Ubuntu 8.10 but would most likely work for any flavor of both Ubuntu or Debian.

Install software…

aptitude install pptpd

Get your ip address

ifconfig – get eth0 ip address

First Config File

sudo nano -w /etc/pptpd.conf

what is -w? it turns off automatic line wrapping

Edit the following information:

localip      192.168.0.5 (this address should be the IP address of your server [inet addr] when you type ifconfig, see above )

remoteip   192.168.0.241-246 (this will provide you with 6 working IPs (aka a /29))

Get your DNS Servers

cat /etc/resolve.conf  ( your looking for the numbers after the word nameserver )

Second Config File

sudo nano -w /etc/ppp/options

Edit the following information:

ms-dns  18.70.0.160 (replace information from /etc/resolve, copy only the IP)

ms-dns  18.71.0.151

Third Config File

sudo nano -w /etc/sysctrl.conf

fine the line that says:

#net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1

remove the #

This will allow the kernel to foward packets to your VPN clients

Final Config File

sudo nano -w /etc/ppp/chap-secrets

Format:

username service password ip

(* will allow any IP address to conncet)

alice pptpd secret-password-here  *

bob pptpd secret-password-here *

Lastly, reboot.

When your machine comes back up, you may need to /etc/init.d/pptpd start