Messages

46

Development and Scripting / Re: Push out update to firefox?

« on: February 11, 2013, 07:35:10 AM »

Thanks for all that!!
We are in the middle of our Chinese New Year holidays over in this part of the world, but I'll make sure to check it out as soon as I'm back at work next week.

Adding the Ubermix PPA is also a good idea, for sure. I was "sedding" the sources.list files to tackle the GetDeb demise. I hope someone picks up that project soon, it was incredibly convenient.

47

Development and Scripting / Re: Push out update to firefox?

« on: February 04, 2013, 11:40:23 PM »

Hi,

I've just deployed the browser-check indicator at our school. The idea is great, but I'm running into a couple of issues. Here is then a "bug report"

When both Chrome and Firefox require updating, the string concatenation code is not working correctly. It ends up running:

Code: [Select]

indicator-browser --chrome+ --firefoxNote the "+" right after "--chrome".

In the file /usr/local/bin/browser-check, the line that says:

Code: [Select]

FLAGS=$FLAGS+" --firefox"should probably be:

Code: [Select]

FLAGS="$FLAGS --firefox"
Second, I would be very very very happy indeed if the indicator would somehow detect that the student hasn't run apt-get update in ages before calling synaptic. Or make synaptic check for updates first no matter what, and then upgrade the browsers.

As it is, it still succeeds in its goal. Students will upgrade Firefox, and then eventually reboot and upgrade Chrome. So it's still a nice improvement in any case.

Thanks!!

48

General Discussion / Re: Cloning USB Keys - DD no work-ey, Clonezilla does?

« on: January 05, 2013, 07:29:39 AM »

We actually use Clonezilla, but we put Clonezilla and the image on the stick. In our case, it meant that we could use 4Gb sticks (that we already had in a significant number) instead of 8Gb. Our customized version has grown quite a bit, and Clonezilla seems to compress more than the standard Ubermix installer.

But I duplicate the sticks using dd, as I said above. It's fast enough for my needs so far. But I'll definitely give your idea of one to multiple a try.

49

General Discussion / Re: Cloning USB Keys - DD no work-ey, Clonezilla does?

« on: January 03, 2013, 06:41:38 PM »

Hi,

In my experience, adding bs=1M (or more, bs=4M) makes things go much faster with dd, especially when writing to a new key.

So it would be:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=my_key.img bs=1M
Put in a new key, and then:
dd if=my_key.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

I hadn't thought about using CloneZilla, but that one to multiple restore looks like a really neat way to get things going for the summer mass-imaging!

50

Development and Scripting / Re: Push out update to firefox?

« on: November 30, 2012, 09:20:37 PM »

According to this page:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ubuntu-package-management-from-command-line-using-apt-advanced-packaging-tool.html
you could do this in the remote updates:
apt-get install firefox

You probably should do an apt-get update beforehand, though.

So maybe this:

Code: [Select]

FIREFOXVERSION=$(firefox -v | awk '{printf "%.0f",$3}')
if [ "$FIREFOXVERSION" -lt 17 ]; then
    echo "apt-get update" > /tmp/update-firefox.sh
    echo "apt-get -y --force-yes install firefox" >> /tmp/update-firefox.sh
    nohup bash /tmp/update-firefox.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 &
fi
I would put this as far down the update.sh script as possible, right before the line "if $REBOOT; then".

It should work, unless there is already some other process doing package management. And I used the number 17 there because that's the latest version of Firefox as of today. Adjust accordingly if you read this much later!

If you have a local proxy (like we do), and your students reboot or reconnect often (like our students do), very very quickly you will have everyone on the latest Firefox. You can then comment this code out.

Feel free to comment or suggest improvements!

51

General Discussion / Re: Disable nm-applet by group?

« on: November 27, 2012, 07:02:06 PM »

For shared devices, the auto-reset function works well for us:
http://wiki.ubermix.org/page/Auto-Reset

Essentially, the laptop is reset to "factory defaults" every time you reboot it.

52

Q&A / Re: Making changes permanent/restorable...

« on: November 27, 2012, 07:00:44 PM »

Try pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7 when it finishes booting. That's where the root terminal will be, when you boot in single mode.

53

Q&A / Re: Making changes permanent/restorable...

« on: November 26, 2012, 04:35:26 PM »

I was actually doing this yesterday. Here is the info:

http://wiki.ubermix.org/page/Sync_User_Home

54

Hardware Specific / Re: AMD proprietary drivers in Ubermix 1.062?

« on: November 22, 2012, 08:06:15 PM »

It seems that blacklisting the radeon driver was the fix for me.

Add the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-radeon.conf

with this inside:
blacklist radeon

It should be "safe". Why would you want to load the radeon driver after installing fglrx?

55

Hardware Specific / Re: AMD proprietary drivers in Ubermix 1.062?

« on: November 22, 2012, 01:45:29 AM »

I'm using the new package, yes, but on our customized Ubermix image, which has a lot of changes, including hibernate enabled.

I'm going to go back to an image that I have without hibernate enabled, and see if it works then.

56

Development and Scripting / Re: Minor suggestion for check_swap.sh

« on: November 22, 2012, 01:43:42 AM »

The trick there would be to detect:
- If it's a hard disk.
- If the user has already run the "enable hibernate" script.

Or the "enable hibernate" script needs to take into account the possibility that the swap file already exists. Not too hard either.

For detecting the drive, "hdparm -i" might be the way to go. I don't have any netbook with flash drive to try.

But yes, I agree, having swap with any netbook with a hard drive makes sense. Maybe just forget the checking for type of hard drive, and always create the swap if the /home/ partition has more than, let's say, 20Gb free?

I don't think we'll be seeing SSDs of that size in budget netbooks anytime soon.

57

Hardware Specific / Re: AMD proprietary drivers in Ubermix 1.062?

« on: November 21, 2012, 07:00:46 PM »

Wow. I really need to get that working.

I'm still running into trouble, but maybe is due to my customizations. I'm going to experiment more.

On the Asus 1225B, which was happily running with the Radeon drivers, when I install the AMD drivers, I reboot to a black screen

58

Development and Scripting / Minor suggestion for check_swap.sh

« on: November 20, 2012, 07:40:51 PM »

Change the line for "swapon" so it happens as long as there is a /home/.swapfile

Delete it from where it currently is, and add this at the end.

Code: [Select]


if [ $MEMTOTAL -lt 1000000 ]; then
        if [ ! -e /home/.swapfile ]; then
                dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/.swapfile bs=1k count=524288 >/dev/null 2>&1
                mkswap /home/.swapfile >/dev/null 2>&1
        fi
fi
if [ -e /home/.swapfile ]; then
        swapon /home/.swapfile
fi

If the user has chosen to create a swapfile at some point, we should use it, right?

59

Hardware Specific / Re: AMD proprietary drivers in Ubermix 1.062?

« on: November 09, 2012, 06:30:09 AM »

Ok, I've tried with an Asus 1225B. I installed fglrx, and lost 3D acceleration on reboot.
I ran aticonfig --initial, and then I had black screen on reboot.

This was all using -generic. I don't know if it would work on -aufs, but I'm happy to try on Monday.

60

Hardware Specific / Re: AMD proprietary drivers in Ubermix 1.062?

« on: November 08, 2012, 05:10:09 AM »

I think I used the fglrx-updates package. I will try again with fglrx and let you know.

To be honest, I can't remember exactly what happened, so I'll let you know about everything tomorrow