I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )
Category: Tech Support
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PDF printing in Ubuntu
One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key – web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to find a place to file. But, ubuntu (dapper) doesn’t seem to be setup for pdf printing by default. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to set up…. install cups-pdf (apt-get install cups-pdf), navigate to System -> Administration -> Printing and doubleclick to add a new printer… no pdf printer is detected… there must be work to do (click cancel). As root (“sudo nautilus”) navigate to Filesystem, then /usr/lib/cups/backend – right click cups-pdf and select properties and check “set user id”. Now, try to add a printer again and you should see PDF Printer, add it with the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b) driver, name it PDF-printer or something like that and now you should have PDF’s dropped into a folder in your home directory named PDF.
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Linux software raid notes
Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First… from the software raid howto, I’ve done the following….
sfdisk -d /dev/hda > /raidinfo/partitions.hda
sfdisk -d /dev/hde > /raidinfo/partitions.hdeSo…. I’ve now got a good snapshot of the partitioning data. When I hooked up an external usb drive to add to the array, all I needed to do is this…
sfdisk /dev/sda < /raidinfo/partitions.hda (more…)
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Nxclient into xubuntu box
I like nx server and client, it can really make good use of low bandwidth connections to get a gui link. But, by default it’s quick and easy to setup gnome and kde login sessions within nxclient, but if you’re using xubuntu then you will need to setup a “custom” session and the command is startxfce4 …. so, start up nxclient, click configure and on the General tab, halfway down it should say Desktop, leave Unix and change KDE to custom, then click settings and check “run the following command” now, type startxfce4 and you should be set.
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Mail command missing in ubuntu by default
Not really, news, but I was reminded again this evening that mail is not available at the command line in recent default installs of Ubuntu (or kubuntu /xubuntu). If you’re like me and make use of this for scripting notifications…. you’ll need to sudo apt-get install mailx (and a MTA like postfix.) Mailx requires postfix/sendmail/qmail and that’s why it’s not installed by default so users don’t have an MTA sitting on their system for no good reason.
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Live filesystem “capture” into a virtual disk image
ah… the joys of *nix utilities…. I’ve just successfully tested a “capture” of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don’t mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a live, booted and logged in system and imaged the primary hard drive that it was living on, into a file on another machine. (Yeah, I know, there are probably a few people reading this and saying they’ve done that and most people that would need to do this already know how…. sorry I missed the memo.) Not too long ago, VMWare released a tool to do something like this (that tool is for windows…) This should work on any platform that supports dd and netcat (although I’m not sure if piping output from one program to another works with a dos command shell – maybe cygwin would be a good environment to accomplish this with.) Anyway… here are the details.
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Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 out…
The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake…) One of the biggest changes I can see from reports is the init process replacement. It sounds like they’ve yielded some good bootup improvements and I’m looking forward to downloading and trying it out. I found it interesting to see that the plan for the 7.04 release of Ubuntu is to include native support for Autopackage which is another approach to making “just any” old program trivial to install on any linux variant.
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Flash Player 9 for Linux
Now… available in Beta form… The Linux version of the Flash player has been stuck at 7 for some time, while many sites require flash 8 for video/etc… (The page to find the beta download is here.)
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Ebay “sell your item” upgrade leaves linux behind?
Ebay is apparently aware of some problems with their new “Sell your item” tool and linux web browsers. The linux.com article above says that they tried with several browsers windows/linux/mac and the common denominator was linux. Even firefox on linux failed where firefox on windows worked (and the user agent switcher tool caused things to work if the agent was spoofed as being firefox on Windows.)
Ebay says they are aware and working on a solution and suggest linux users to use the 2.0 version of the sell your item tool.
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Booting from CD when a systems BIOS won’t let you
Along the way on my permissions nightmare last night, I made matters worse by changing permissions on a fairly important file. In order to fix that I was going to need to reboot from a boot disk. The only problem was boot floppys typically don’t come with reiserfs support (only the boot cds I’ve found have that.) AND my server has for some time refused to boot from the CD. Now, the BIOS will let you choose CD as the first boot device but it promptly decides that there is a “BIOS checksum mismatch” and reloads the defaults which leaves you booting from floppy, then hard drive…. Now, I’ve changed the CMOS battery twice within a 2 month span and I think the longest things lasted were about a week before it reverted to that “BIOS checksum mismatch” (For those of you smart enough to suggest I replace the CMOS battery.) Now, it could be that the battery I replaced with had expiired it’s shelf life already I suppose. But….