Samba in Ubuntu (Mint)

I am currently using Linux Mint 12, which is derived from Ubuntu 11.10. The reason is more to personal reasons, but since most of the works are originated from the similar code base so I will keep blogging in this blog. 

I always forgot how to set up a *working* minimalist Samba setup so that I could transfer my files from my Android phones or tablet. Here goes.

In /etc/samba/smb.conf, as root edit as follows:

[Videos]
browseable=yes
readonly=no
create mask=0755
path=/home/najmi/Videos

Later, create a user with smbpasswd command;

smbpasswd -a najmi

Then restart smbd and nmbd:

sudo /etc/init.d/smbd restart

sudo /etc/init.d/nmbd restart

Test:

smbclient -L localhost -U najmi
Enter najmi's password:
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.5.11]

    Sharename       Type      Comment
    ---------       ----      -------
    Videos          Disk     
    IPC$            IPC       IPC Service (Samba 3.5.11)
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.5.11]

    Server               Comment
    ---------            -------
    VOSTRO-MINT          Samba 3.5.11

    Workgroup            Master
    ---------            -------
    WORKGROUP           

Using WebDAV with Box.net cloud

You may want to mount you box.net account by your Ubuntu.

What you need;

sudo aptitude install davfs2 -y

This will get DAV file system being enabled.

Later, what you could do is to put your details in davfs configuration file, located at /etc/davfs2/secret

https://www.box.net/dav

Next, you need to mount the box.net through davfs using mount command. 

You can put inside your etc/fstab too, but I found out the system will complain it cannot mount the filesytem (heck, you need to connected to network before you can mount. Wireless connection usually only being enable when you already reached your desktop interface). So I suggest you simply use the command line mount command:

Create mount location first;

sudo mkdir /media/box.net

A bit lengthy, you could paste this to a file, let say mountboxnet.sh and chmod +x, execute by ./mountboxnet.sh later on:

 

sudo mount https://www.box.net/dav -t davfs /media/box.net

You can also find someone else blogged the methods of accessing box.net WebDAV by using nautilus, which is fairly simple too. But I prefer the CLI way :)

Ubuntu 12.04 bakal mengembalikan antaramuka "Gnome Classic"

Ubuntu 12.04, dengan kod nama "Precise Pangolin", dalam preview di sini bakal mengembalikan antaramuka klasik yang digunakan di dalam Gnome 2. Perkara ini sudah dilakukan oleh Linux Mint, distro derivatif daripada Ubuntu.

Nampaknya pihak Canonical sudah "tersedar" dari lamunan utopia mereka tentang penggunaan antaramuka yang ekstrem tanpa memikirkan hal "usability" di dalam pembinaan antaramuka.

Ini adalah cekupan dari laman blog yang dipetik di atas

Unity vs Gnome 3 your choice?

Finally I have to admit that I need to adapt with either Unity or Gnome 3. Although Unity is the default UI for Ubuntu 11.10, I don't feel I like it much. After few experiments with XFCE, KDE, Gnome 3 and the default, I decided to use Gnome 3 instead?

Why?
For me because I can simply add more workspaces using add drop, also tweaking the UI - not much  config avail though using gnome-tweak-tools.

As long as I can do my job, it's fine.

Buffalo Network Area Storage (NAS) LS WXL

I recently bought a 2 bays Buffalo NAS, which costs RM295 without hard disk. HDD that I bought was 1TB 64MB cache for around RM170.

The reason is that I need a reliable backup since I was quite pissed with Dropbox which deleted my important files silently, given that I enable many devices with dropbox, some of them might be deleting the changes that being done on another machine with dropbox demon (at least, from what I suspect. Shouldn't it just commit the NEW changes instead? I am not sure).

This beast, considered cheap, since there are more expensive, enterprise level NAS out there.

Anyway, this box enable FTP,SFTP and SMB by default so you might be happy with that. But for me, I love rsync, and I need root account to do that (don't ask why, this is proprietary device anyway). There are people out there who documented their Debian/Gentoo experience but I might try that later since if anything happened that bricked my device, the warranty is void.

Anyway, to tell you the steps, in summary

1- Get acp_commander
2- Use acp_commander to change your device to emmode
3- You need Windows or Mac unfortunately to "flash" (I hope I'm using the right term) the firmware. As of the current firmware, v1.54, we have to create the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys from the machine that you intend to login..
4- Using LS_UPDATER, push your custom firmware
5- You should be able to log in using your root account

I managed to use rsync and enable NFS.. which aren't by default. So far so good. But I think for normal user, you might want to try another NAS out there.. seriously.

Google+ :)

Google+ with Facebook Theme on Chrome(only?) since it's using script from here

Converting Media in Ubuntu using FFMPEG

Let's say, we have a media in FLV format that we got it somewhere. Ubuntu's default ffmpeg wasn't compile with conversion option into MP3 (at least from what I understood). In order to make use of FFMPEG to the most is by getting FFMPEG straight from it's farm (terbaik dari ladang, so to speak).

The complete HOWTOS is here

The only thing that I could say important is libmp3lame support, which could allow the conversion. After the steps from the website that I linked before being done, we can check the flag of the compiled, installed FFMPEG;

najmi@vostro:~/ffmpeg-git$ ffmpeg
ffmpeg version git-N-30459-g58fd70b, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Jun  2 2011 19:52:29 with gcc 4.5.2
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab
  libavutil    51.  3. 0 / 51.  3. 0
  libavcodec   53.  6. 1 / 53.  6. 1
  libavformat  53.  2. 0 / 53.  2. 0
  libavdevice  53.  1. 0 / 53.  1. 0
  libavfilter   2. 11. 0 /  2. 11. 0
  libswscale    0. 14. 0 /  0. 14. 0
  libpostproc  51.  2. 0 / 51.  2. 0
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder
usage: ffmpeg [options] [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...


Use -h to get full help or, even better, run 'man ffmpeg'

As we can see, given the right flag being ENABLED, we can make use FFMPEG to the most.