There were some changes in the latest kernel release (2.6.34) that prevent VMware's VMCI Socket module to compile on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat).

Even though I pretty like OpenVPN, there is still some devices that might not support the TUN/TAP driver needed by OpenVPN.

Take IPhones, Android phones for instance, you need to root them in order to get that feature, assuming somebody has already cooked a ROM for your device.

L2TP is quite and old standard that allow setting up VPNs.

On the other end, it does not provide any kind of encryption mechanism, and as such, it is pretty common to get L2TP running over an IPSec link.

I already spoke about Terminator a while back. Since then,, quite some time has passed and lots of features were added...

In the last 7+ months, cmsj as worked a lot on getting the whole architecture re-implemented in a more object-like architecture which makes the different component of Terminator interact together more naturally.

If like me you use MPD as a service daemon to listen to music, you might be annoyed anytime GDM start a pulseaudio process which prevents MPD from accessing the sound device.

Typically, the output of ps will produce the following output:

$ ps aux | grep pulse
gdm 1371 0.0 0.4 98180 4776 ? S<sl Jun13 0:00 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
gdm 1411 0.0 0.2 10748 2968 ? S Jun13 0:00 /usr/lib/pulseaudio/pulse/gconf-helper

When working in a chrooted environment, there is a few special file systems that needs to be mounted so all programs behave properly.

For instance, grub will need to access your disk devices....

While most special file systems might be mounted with:

# mount fstype -t fstype /tmp/chroot/mountpoint

Where fstype will be sysfs, proc, /dev is not following this rule.

I was trying network-manager-openvpn plugin today on Lucid, I could import my configuration, DNS was set up correctly upon connection/disconnection, route imported correctly (almost :)).

One issue though is that it was also changing the default route to the VPN tunnel while this should not happen.

When you hotplug a hard drive in a virtual machine, the drive do not show in fdisk -l output until you reboot your VM.
In order to get the drive to appear, the SCSI bus need to be rescanned.

There is a few software that will use the editor command to find out what text editor to use. Example commands will be dch to add a new .deb changelog entry, revision control softwares when prompting for a commit message ...

Lately, I have been experiencing a funny network issue when using VMware Workstation VMs with NAT interface. Roughly, the IP network was working fine, but DNS resolution was not anymore. It happened intermittently, but I could see that this mainly happened when I was suspending my laptop, going to another location and resuming.

Forcing the VM to use a public DNS would solve the issue.

I have been looking around for a while for an autotune effect (pitch correction, or whatever name you care to call it) for linux. Unfortunately everything I have found either cost money or wasn't for linux, or required special setup (wine, or other nasty things). All I could find in terms of linux autotune was people also looking for autotune. However, all the answers were unsatisfactory, either because they required manual pitch recognition (Not so good for the tone-deaf among us), or people confused it with pitch shifting in general. I eventually did find that praat (it's in synaptic), a speech analysis tool, comes surprisingly close to autotune functionality. It will give you a T-pain like effect, but it requires you to manually place the notes (although it will detect the pitch for you). I am not very experienced with praat, although this is what I figured out how to do (some of it from the original mailing list post, other I read from the manual or figured out).

Although it's GUI isn't too nice, and it isn't designed for musical manipulation, it gets the job done.