en-us rdesktop keymap problem with thinstation 2.3beta

The beta version of thinstation has a permissions problem on some keymap files that does bad things to rdesktop sessions, at least with en-us. The arrow keys stopped working along with the page up, page down, home, end, etc. The number pad keys worked in navigation mode only.

Here is a simple fix, if you have a local build folder.

As root:

cd <path to thinstation folder>

find packages/keymaps-* -perm 0600 -print|sort|xargs chmod 644

./build

link

Installing VMWARE server on CentOS 5 or RHEL 64 bit version

Installing VMWARE server on CentOS 5 or Red hat enterprise Linux 64 bit version

disabling tap to click in gnome

I can barely function on a laptop with tap to click enabled. The newer versions of Ubuntu simply have a GUI tab in the mouse preferences. In RHEL, CentOS, and many other distribution which use gnome, there is no GUI interface. Here is how to you disable it:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find the “InputDevice” section (which has the Identifier “Synaptics” line):

add the following line:
Option “MaxTapTime” “0″

Save and exit from the file (ctrl-x, y). The next time you restart X the tapping will be disabled.

No audio on Dell laptops with ubuntu gutsy 7.10

I had this exact same problem with a Dell Latitude D531 and a Dell Precision M4300. With a fresh install they both reported not having audio drivers, but they could see the audio card in lspci.

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic

reboot

Sound is working!

freenx

freenx is a free implementation of nomachine’s nxserver and client. It is compatible with thinstation and ubuntu linux. It provides a remarkably high speed remote graphical session. Here is a procedure to get freenx server working with Ubuntu gutsy.

fast network file copying using tar and nfs

Configure an NFS export on the remote machine (e.g. 192.168.1.3) to copy to (e.g. /remotedir).

Create empty directory on local machine, and mount remote directory to it:

mkdir /remotedir

mount 192.168.1.3:/remotedir /remotedir

tar -c localdir/ | tar -C /remotedir/ -xv

That will copy contents of localdir to /remotedir on remote machine.

I used the above method to quickly copy some vmware images to a new server. scp copies were taking way too long. I was using ubuntu dapper servers, but it will work basically the same on any linux machines.