Mapping marble mouse buttons in ubuntu (custom configuration)

I recently purchased a marble mouse but soon found out that the mouse buttons do not function as expected on Ubuntu. This was soon remedied with the following tweaks to the Edit the locate xorg.conf.d directory using command

locate xorg.conf.d | grep d$

edit the 50-marblemouse.conf in the xorg.conf.d, replace the inputClass with the section below

### START FILE SNIPPET ###

Section "InputClass"
      Identifier "Marble Mouse"
      MatchProduct "Logitech USB Trackball"
      MatchIsPointer "on"
      MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
      Driver "evdev"
      Option "ButtonMapping" "1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9"
      Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
      Option "EmulateWheelButton" "9"
      Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
      Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
      Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
EndSection

### END FILE SNIPPET ###

Button numbers

1 – Large left button

8- Small left button

3 – Large right button

9 – Small left button

Setting up mediatomb using ffpstick on a Zyxcel NSA210

1. Download FFPStick 0.5 from here
2. Format a USB stick with FAT16, extract the contents of the FFPStick Archive you downloaded on the the root of the USB stick.
3. Shutdown the NSA210, Plug in the USB stick and reboot
4. wait for 2 minutes and then login to the box via telnet
5. change root password, delete account called “user”
6. start ssh with

   chmod a+x /ffp/start/sshd.sh
   /ffp/start/sshd.sh start

7. logout from telnet and log back in via ssh, login as root with the newly changed password.
8. stop telnet and then disable telnet service using commands

   chmod -x /ff/start/telnetd.sh
   /ffp/start/telnet.sh stop

9. Start mediatomb to create the initial config file by using the command

   chmod -x /ff/start/mediatomb.sh
   /ffp/start/mediatomb.sh start

10. Wait for 30 seconds and then issue the stop command to stop mediatomb

    /ffp/start/mediatomb.sh stop

11. Customize the /ffp/var/mediatomb/config.xml file
12. Start mediatomb again, navigate to http://cerberos:49152 and begin adding media to database.
13. To remove the listing for PC directory add the following line under <server>
    <pc-directory upnp-hide=”yes”/>
14. Verify that the upnp server is reachable using the client on a droid or using enna or moovida.

Fixing sound in fluxbox (alsactl restore)

1. Login to the box, sudo -i and enter password
2. open alsamixer, set desired levels then type “alsactl store”
3. ctrl+d to logout of root shell.
4. gedit ~/.fluxbox/startup, add alsactl restore & to the startup
5. reboot or logout and log back in into fluxbox

Mounting a drive in fstab so that it gets auto mounted on boot

1. In a terminal type blkid, this shows the drive name to UUID mapping. note down the UUID of the drive you want mounted at boot.
2. As root create a folder called Local Backup in /media
3. change ownership of the folder created in the step above to the user that logs in (IRIS9)
4. edit /etc/fstab and paste the line below after modifying the appropriate UUID and paths to the folders

    UUID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx /media/Local40Backup ntfs defaults 0 2

5. space in path top folders can be escaped by using 40
6. save the file and then type sudo mount -a. check if the drive is mounted.

Starting lampp on boot

I recently installed the portable version of xampp and needed to start it when Ubuntu starts, to accomplish this I had to

cd /etc/rc2.d and typed the following commands

ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp S99lampp
ln -s /opt/lampp/lampp K01lampp

restart server and verify that xampp admin page is accessible.

How to make the USB ports accessible to Windows Guests in virtualbox hosts on Unbutu

I tried running windows XP inside a virtual machine and found out that I cannot access the USB port from within the VM. To fix this I had to make sure that my username belonged to the vboxusers group with the command

Execute sudo usermod -G vboxusers -a <username>

then I had to set VBOX_USB=USBFS VirtualBox in the virtual box configuration

Installing Cannon MP490 printer as a shared network printer on Ubuntu

1. Download the canon drivers for Linux from here
2. Extract the .deb packages from the archive, install the common package first using the commands below (Don’t need the “–force-architecture” parameter if  using i386 architecture)

   sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture cnijfilter-common_3.20-1_i386.deb
   sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture cnijfilter-mp490series_3.20-1_i386.deb

3. Restart cups by issuing the command

    sudo service cups restart

4. Goto http://localhost:631, add canon printer as a networked printer, Select windows samba shared printer
5. Test printer

Merging multiple PDF files with GhostScript and pdftk

I had to merge multiple PDF files into one recently and wanted a quick way to do it. In order to do this I had to

1. Download and install ghostscript and pdftk

   sudo apt-get install gs pdftk

2. cd into the directory containing the files and issue command

   gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combined.pdf -dBATCH first.pdf second.pdf

How to mount remote samba and windows shares

GUI version

For a windows share, Share the folder on windows, make sure share name is short within 8 characters

Go into Linux and open nautilus, go to networks browse and locate share, click to enter user name and password.

command line version

1. Create a folder on your desktop called winshare using the command
   mkdir winshare
2. Execute the mount command
   sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.27.xxx/sharename -o username=username,password=password ~/Desktop/winshare/
3. To unmount type
   sudo umount ~/Desktop/winshare

Restoring GRUB after Installing Windows (Dual boot setup)

1. Boot the computer  using an Ubuntu live CD
2. Open a terminal and type

   sudo grub
   grub>find /boot/grub/stage1

   This will bring up a list of partitions, example : (hd0,1) = it will be different on your system.

3. type the following commands in the terminal

    root (hd0,1)
    setup (hd0)

   This will display text similar to the one below
      Checking if “/boot/grub/stage1? exists… yes
      Checking if “/boot/grub/stage2? exists… yes
      Checking if “/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5? exists… yes
      Running “embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)”… 16 sectors are embedded.
      succeeded
      Running “install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,)/boot/grub/stage2
      /boot/grub/menu.lst”… succeeded
      Done.

4. type quit
5. type reboot