Jeroen's blog: ubuntu

Showing posts with label ubuntu. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Video editing in Ubuntu

A student asked me earlier today if I knew how to install the program Cinelerra, which seems to be a very nice open source video editing software. He had apparently tried installing it some time ago, but had failed to get it working, ending up in your usual hours of typing commands from sites and wondering what the heck they do.
As I was intrigued to see if this program would be so complicated to install, 10 minutes later I had it installed on our student library Ubuntu machine (especially for those support FOSS and/or Ubuntu), and afterwards explained how I'd done that. I'll do the same thing here, after the break.

Tasksel remove might break your system

I wrote in one of my last articles that it's handy to use the 'tasksel' command to install complete packages (called tasks in Ubuntu/Debian) like samba server or a virtual machine host. These are comparable with server roles & features as Microsoft calls that. I've been doing some more reading into this, but at the moment it is NOT advised to remove tasks with tasksel, as it might remove more then you'd like. Which in turn could render your system more or less unusable.

Simple samba file server setup

As it's nice and simple to do pc to pc file activities through a samba file server, let's set this up.

It's handy if your server can mail you alerts (think smartmon and the likes), and as gmail completely allows this and most people have a gmail account anyway, let's do a quick setup of the exim4 email server.

Just create a new email address at gmail, so we dont run into trouble with exim4 accidently sending so much messages your gmail account becomes blocked for suspected spamming and such.

My home system is behind a router I do not control (yet :). This means port forwarding so I can remotely reach my machine might seem impossible. Or not....
All you really need is a good (trustworthy) friend with his own server, and a little ssh tunneling magic.

Today I'll make a permanent password less (auto)ssh tunnel that binds local port 22 (ssh) to 11122 on a remote machine, so that when i login to the remote machine from anywhere, all i have to do is ssh to port 11122 and voila, i'm on my own supposedly unreachable server.

Simple spicing up the ubuntu server motd

On the lighter side of servers, those of us who like a little information when they login might like the following. An overview of cpu load, memory usage, disc space free for example. Or a warning that says you still have some updates to install.
Luckily there's a package that easily does this.
Just install landscape-common (which takes several python and other packages along) as:
apt-get install landscape-common

I installed a new installation of Ubuntu server 10.10 today, and had to spend two hours getting my wireless card to work. As I had to scour half the internet for tips before I finally had a working configuration, I'll share my findings here to prevent head-aches for other people.

Card: RaLink RT2561/RT61 pci wifi (802.11g) card (D-link DWL-G510)
Ubuntu 10.10 server x86 running 2.6.35-25-generic-pae kernel
Connection will be setup through WPA2 to a normal access point (with DHCP)