Disabled inputs in Firefox with the Ubuntu Ambiance theme

And here’s what it looks like when using the New Wave theme in Ubuntu:

Disabled inputs in Firefox using the New Wave theme

This issue caused me a few moments of panic when I thought I’d broken the app – I was glad it was just a theme glitch! I’ve switched to using New Wave for the time being until I can figure out how to get the Ambiance theme to behave properly without screwing the rest of the system colours.

UPDATE (2010-05-27): Ok, so this turns out to be actually caused by a strange coincidence meaning that our CSS style for disabled inputs had exactly the same colour as the disabled text in the Ambience theme. Since the res of our users are running Windows and IE, it’s not a problem. It only affects us developers using Ubuntu :-)

At work, I’m stuck behind an NTLM authenticated proxy which I can get my system talking to thanks to running cntlm locally and setting the gnome proxy settings to point to that. On my previous laptop, I was running 32bit Ubuntu and Eclipse just automatically picked up the native proxy info and worked fine. It turns out that this functionality isn’t available by default in the 64bit version of Eclipse 3.5. Despite having the option to select “Native” in the Network Connections preferences in Eclipse, no values are picked up and I couldn’t connect to the outside world to install the extra features I need.

It turns out that the solution is to grab the native proxy library from the forthcoming 3.6 version of Eclipse and install it into 3.5, as explained in this eclipse bug. Here’s how I did that using the Ubuntu supported version of Eclipse.

1. Download the 64 bit Linux version of Eclipse Classic 3.6.0 (M6 at the time of writing)
2. Extract it locally and copy the file plugins/org.eclipse.core.net.linux.x86_64_1.1.0.I20091106-0506.jar to /usr/share/eclipse/dropins (you’ll probably have to create the dropins directory first).
3. Edit /etc/eclipse.ini to include the following: -Dorg.eclipse.core.net.enableGnome
4. Delete the eclipse 3.6 directory unless you have a pressing need to keep it around ;-)

When you next start eclipse, the Network Connections preferences will be prepopulated with the gnome proxy settings. It took me a while to figure this out, and I’ll no doubt need to do it again sometime, so this post is mostly for my own benefit, but hopefully someone else will find it useful too.

Bootnote: You may be wondering why I didn’t just install 3.6 and run that. Well mainly because it’s not fully supported by the SpringSource Tool Suite and also it’d mean looking after upgrades and dependencies myself. I’d rather have apt handle all that for me.

Sadly, I’ve been very disappointed so far. It seems that the version of Likewise-open that ships with Kucid, has a number of glaring bugs that make it virtually pointless.

Firstly, there is no support for a default domain. This means that the user has to always log in as user.name@domain or domain\\user.name which is a pain. It’s not a show stopper but it is trivial to set up using samba, so why can’t Likewise support it? Well, Likewise claims to support it, via a registry setting, it’s just that it’s broken.

More importantly, is the broken credential caching. Laptops aren’t always connected to the domain, so any solution needs to be able to cache credentials to let the user log in when they’re out and about. It turns out that the default cache timeout in Likewise is 4 hours. And there’s no way to change that. 4 Hours! So that means when you take your laptop home with you at night, intending to work at home the enxt day, you faced with the fact that you can’t log in in the morning, or even later that evening. How handy.

Until these issues can be resolved, I’m going to purge Likewise and resort to the Samba config method. It’s long winded, but at least it’s tried and tested and I can actually configure it to work how I need it to. Who knows, maybe Meerkat will have working Likewise, it’s just a shame Canonical were touting it as a big improvement in Lucid.

Oh yes, and on a side note, when I upgraded my netbook from 9.10 to 10.04, it killed my wifi and lost the nice netbook remix clutter UI. Ho hum. Time to do a clean install and see if that fixes things.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still a big Ubuntu and Linux fan, I just would have liked this launch to have gone a bit smoother…

The auto.cifs file shown in the howto requires you to create a credentials file for each machine that you want to access. This is handy when the machines you’re accessing have different logins, but here at work all machines authenticate against an Active Directory server and so share the same credentials.

Initially I solved this problem by symlinking to the same credential file, but that’s still an inconvenience when you need to access a new machine (and boy, do we have a lot of them). Finally I did the sensible thing and altered the auto.cifs file to fallback to a master credentials file if it can’t find a machine specific one. Here’s my auto.cifs file:

#!/bin/bash
# This file must be executable to work! chmod 755!
key="$1"
# Note: create a cred file for each windows/Samba-Server in your network
#       which requires password authentification.  The file should contain
#       exactly two lines:
#          username=user
#          password=*****
#       Please don't use blank spaces to separate the equal sign from the
#       user account name or password.
credfile="/etc/auto.smb.$key"
if [ ! -e $credfile ]
then
    credfile="/etc/auto.smb.master"
fi

# Note: Use cifs instead of smbfs:
mountopts="-fstype=cifs,file_mode=0644,dir_mode=0755,uid=19654,gid=124"
smbclientopts=""
for P in /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin
do
	if [ -x $P/smbclient ]
        then
                SMBCLIENT=$P/smbclient
                break
        fi
done
[ -x $SMBCLIENT ] || exit 1
if [ -e "$credfile" ]
then
        mountopts=$mountopts",credentials=$credfile"
        smbclientopts="-A "$credfile
else
        smbclientopts="-N"
fi
$SMBCLIENT $smbclientopts -gL $key 2>/dev/null \
   | awk -v key="$key" -v opts="$mountopts" -F'|' -- '
        BEGIN   { ORS=""; first=1 }
	/Disk/  { if (first) { print opts; first=0 };
		  gsub(/ /, "\\ ", $2);
		  	   sub(/\$/, "\\$", $2);
			   	       print " \\\n\t /" $2, "://" key "/" $2 }
        END     { if (!first) print "\n"; else exit 1 }
        '

The important, and trivial, change is this test:

if [ ! -e $credfile ]
then
    credfile="/etc/auto.smb.master"
fi

All it does is check for the existence of the credfile. If it can’t find it, it uses /etc/auto/smb/master instead.

The beauty of this is that I can use one credentials file for the majority of the file shares yet still provide different credentials for the one or two servers I need to access as a different user (such as an admin user).

First a little history; Oracle bought BEA, makers of Java application server Weblogic, a number of years ago. Sun, obviously, has their own opensource application server Glassfish. Oracle isn’t known for their embracing of opensource philosophies so there was a lot of worry that the Sun technologies would get dropped and merely have the good bits integrated into Oracle’s products.

As it turns out, Oracle is doing some of that, but they’re also keeping the Sun products around but targeting them at a lesser departmental level than Oracle’s own offerings.

Sun’s HotSpot virtual machine is getting merged with Oracle’s JRockit vm, so now there will be one “high performance” virtual machine to choose, hopefully better than the separate ones.

JavaFX, Sun’s attempt at competing with Silverlight and Adobe Flex lives on for some reason. And who knows, maybe Oracle can make it an attractive proposition, lord knows Sun couldn’t.

Sun’s IDE NetBeans lives on, along with Glassfish but will be target at departmental applications rather than enterprise ones. Oracle’s JDeveloper and Weblogic will be marketed as the tools of choice for full scale enterprise apps (mainly because Oracle can charge for Weblogic, I would guess).

Thankfully Hudson, Sun’s open source continuous integration and deployment server/tool lives on under Oracle’s ownership. This is particularly good news for me as I’ve been looking at that for improving the Java development and deployment at my employers (I’d have hated to have gone down that route only to find the product is being mothballed).

As for development of Java as a language, Oracle now has main control over the Java SE, EE and ME specifications and they’ve committed to adding more staff and money to developing them, which is good. Although it remains to be seen which directions Oracle will choose to take the language in.

As an aside, I notice that the Sun website has now been Oracle-ised, which means it’ll probably end up being as painful to navigate as Oracle’s. Look forward to URLs changing on a weekly basis and bookmarks to help pages and so on dying regularly!

The OU is pretty heavily geared towards using Microsoft Windows and associated software when studying and submitting assignments, and I’m strictly a Ubuntu kind of guy, so I’m going to be in for a few issues along the way, no doubt. I’m aiming to use Linux alternatives wherever possible, falling back to WINE to run Windows applications if I have to and I’ll document my progress here.

M865 requires you to use project management software to do some of the assignments and activities, and you’re provided with a copy of Sciforma PS8 to do this. Thankfully, this installs and runs fine using WINE, so I’ll be able to use that if none of the open source alternatives work, but I intend to investigate the linux native options such as Planner, Taskjuggler and Openproj.

I have managed to find and install a linux version of the FirstClass messaging software that the OU use for discussion forums. Whilst you can access the forums via the website, the functionality is reduced and it’s not so nice to use. There’s a debian package available, along with a generic linux archive. It’s a simple case of installing that package and running it on Ubuntu 9.10

The first time you run it, you need to click on the advanced link on the login screen to configure the server to use, this will be either oufcnt1.open.ac.uk or oufcnt2.open.ac.uk. Try both if you have authentication problems, you may not have an account on both.

Next up I’m going to investigate the eTMA assignment submission system and see if there’s anything specific I need to do for that.