Matt Van Stone

I am so happy right now. First tonight I got my mouse working in Ubuntu 6.10 without having to reseat the USB dongle every time I start up. Now I have all 8 buttons and both the vertical and horizontal scroll working.

It was pain staking, I’ll tell you that much. I got most of my information from ubuntuforums.org, but some of it was all me.

First off, my setup was a bit different than most users on the forum. I have the Logitech MX5000 Bluetooth Desktop which comes with an MX1000 mouse and an MX5000 keyboard. Most people on the forum just have the mouse. In the average user’s case only one device would go through the USB receiver making it easy for Linux to identify. In my case both the keyboard and mouse go through the same receiver, so specifying to evdev which device was the mouse got a little trickier.

If you are having a problem getting all of the buttons on your Logitech mouse working I would suggest you first read over this post at ubuntuforums.org. It is very informative and has helped many people.

Let me outline some of my specifics here. The following code snippits are what is currently working on my computer:

Read the rest of this entry »

I am writing this while it is still fresh in my mind. After running Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft for a few months now and having to reconnect my USB dongle for my Bluetooth wireless keyboard every time I started it up, I finally got annoyed enough to try and fix it.

I installed Edgy right when it came out and right away realized my keyboard and mouse were not working. I went back to a wired one so that I could do some reading on the issue on ubuntuforums.org. Right away I discovered that others were having the same issue, but there wasn’t much feedback, so I just let it be. The most I could find was the peripherals would work again if you unplugged and plugged back in the USB adapter. This was all 2 or 3 months ago.

Tonight I went back on ubuntuforums.org to find quite a bit of replies and a lot of new posts around Bluetooth and Edgy. Most had to do with mice not being recognized by built-in Bluetooth receivers. However, this wasn’t my issue. My issue was specifically with the Logitech MX5000 desktop including the MX1000 mouse. Digging a bit more I found the official bug report and in there I found some help.

First off I found that if you remove all of the bluez packages in most cases the bluetooth mouse/keyboard will start working again. This was the case for me. I did a quick

sudo apt-get remove bluez-cups bluez-pcmcia-support bluez-pin bluez-utils

then rebooted and to my surprise my mouse worked without having to touch the dongle. Just to make double-sure I did a complete shutdown and power on, and again it worked.

Don’t get too excited though… this is really only a workaround. If you use any other Bluetooth devices (phone, headset, camera, etc), removing the bluez packages will mean you will no longer be able to connect these devices. However, that didn’t matter in my situation because I don’t have any of those.

From the bug report I also found that this seems to be a bug at the kernel level with bluez and it should be fixed when Ubuntu goes to kernel 2.6.19. The only thing I’m not sure about is this post:

The kernel patch applies to all platforms (it changes arch-independent sources).

But the bug doesn’t occur on the other platforms:
- x86 is 32bit userspace on a 32bit kernel
- amd64 is 64bit userspace on a 64bit kernel.

The bug only appears when a 32bit userspace is used on a 64bit kernel – this is the powerpc64 platform.

So the kernel patch applies to all platforms, but it only fixes breakage specific for powerpc64.

So this may mean that the bug is only fixed on the powerpc platform. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Here is the link to Bug #32415: Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard Broken in Dapper/Edgy/Feisty encase anyone is interested in reading up on it. Oh come on… I know you are excited.

1. This article is outdated!
   I have written a new post with a better mounting method. Please read my new Mounting Windows SMB Shares v3 post before trying anything in this one.

My first guide on automatically mounting SMB shares worked pretty well most of the time. However, I found that after installing updates and rebooting sometimes I would get this error message “Failure Initializing HAL!” and I would not be able to get into the desktop. I realized eventually that if I commented out the two share lines in my fstab file that I could then get into Ubuntu. Then I could re-enable the auto shares until next time I updated when I would have to go through the procedure again.

Another method for automatically mounting a share on boot would be to create a bash script to run when your computer boots up.

First you still have to install SMBFS

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Then you can create the folders in /media for your shares

sudo mkdir /media/Storage

Then you can create a new bash script

gedit ~/.mountshares.sh

put the following line in the file

#~/bin/bash
sudo mount -t smbfs \FILESERVER\storage /media/Storage -o uid=USER,gid=users

Replace FILESERVER with the DNS name of your SMB server and USER with the user name of the local Linux account

Save and close the file and then make it an executable

chmod 775 .mountshares.sh

If you run the script now you will see it prompts you for a password twice. We don’t want to be prompted for a password every time we restart our computer, so we need to create a file called .smbcredentials in our home directory.

gedit ~/.smbcredentials

Then in that file we want to type

user=Guest
password=

and then save the file. If your SMB shares are password protected you would put the SMB credentials above instead of Guest.

Then change the lines in our mountshares.sh file to look like this

sudo mount -t smbfs \FILESERVER\storage /media/Storage -o credentials=/home/USER/.smbcredentials,uid=USER,gid=users

Now we want this script to run after we log into Ubuntu. I was never able to get it to work by adding it to the gnome session startup items so I added it to the init process instead. Open a terminal window and type the following two commands.

sudo cp ~/mountshares.sh /etc/init.d/
sudo update-rc.d mountshares.sh defaults

Now reboot and you should see your share on the desktop.

1. This article is outdated!
   I have written a new post with a better mounting method. Please read my new Mounting Windows SMB Shares v3 post before trying anything in this one.

After my move to Ubuntu I was finding the built in network browser very slow. I decided to see if there was a way I could mount my SMB shares to the /media directory so they show up as a drive on the desktop. Better yet, I wanted to make it so they mount automatically on boot.

First you have to install smbfs:

sudo apt-get install smbfs

Then create a folder inside of the /media directory to mount the share on:

sudo mkdir /media/Storage

then you can run the following command to mount a share manually:

sudo mount -t smbfs //fileserver/Storage /media/Storage -o uid=USER,gid=users

Note: Change USER to your linux username. The uid=USER,gid=users is important because if you dont use that, only root will have access to write files to the mounted share.

Or you can edit the mount list in /etc/fstab to have the drive mount on boot

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

And add this line to the bottom of the fstab file, but change //fileserver/Storage to the path to your share on your server.

//fileserver/Storage /media/Storage smbfs credentials=/home/USER/.smbcredentials,uid=USER,gid=users 0 0

In the above line change USER to your user account in both spots. Before this will work you also have to create the .smbcredentials file in the above users home directory.

sudo gedit ~/.smbcredentials

Add the following information to the file, but change Guest to your SMB username and add your SMB password.

username=Guest
password=

Note: My fileserver allows Guest access to the shares, so I just use the username Guest with no password. If your server requires a username and password put it in here.

To test if the auto mount works just run the following command

sudo mount -a

You should see a new mount show up on your desktop for the drive.

If you are worried about people who dont have root access being able to read login and password from the .smbcredentials file you can give only root and admin group access by typing

sudo chmod o= ~/.smbcredentials

Note: Do not try and mount a folder on a share, it wont work. The source for an SMB mount has to be a share.

Note: Do not put a trailing “/” on the share path or the directory path, it will cause it to fail.

SMB Shares with spaces in the names

If you have an SMB share with a space in the path you can replace the space with \040. For example:

//fileserver/Storage\040Share /media/Storage\040Share smbfs credentials=/home/USER/.smbcredentials,uid=USER,gid=users 0 0

Change USER to your linux username. This will mount the share “//fileserver/Storage Share” to the directory “/media/Storage Share” and give USER r/w access to it. If you are using the mount command you dont have to do this, you can just put the source share and the destination directory into quotes like this:

sudo mount -t smbfs "//fileserver/Storage Share" "/media/Storage Share" -o uid=USER,gid=users

Most people who want to try Linux arent ready to give up Windows quite yet. This is where dual booting comes in. By splitting your hard drive into two partitions you are able to install Windows on one partition and Linux on the other. When you turn your computer on you will be given a simple menu which will let you choose which operating system you want to use.

Before we get to dual booting you will have to get yourself a copy of Ubuntu Linux.

The Prep work:
1) Download Ubuntu. Ubuntu runs on i386, AMD64, and PowerPC (Mac). So first you have to find out which type of platform you are on. For the average PC user I would suggest i386. If you go for the AMD64 version you have to make sure you have the right CPU, also you may not be able to find 64-bit versions of every program. If in doubt use i386, and if you are on a Mac use PowerPC.
I highly suggest using the BitTorrent files to download it. It saves the server bandwidth and will probably be much faster. If you dont know how to use BitTorrent then just grab the ISO.

Download from a specific location:
http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Download from the Canada Server:
ubuntu-6.06-alternate-i386.iso.torrent
ubuntu-6.06-alternate-i386.iso

2) Once the download is complete open the ISO in your favorite CD burning utility and burn it to a CD. I use Nero on Windows. Incase you are brand new to burning ISO files, an ISO is a disk image. You do not want to burn the ISO file to a CD, you want to open it using the Open… command under the file menu of your burning tool. This will take the files inside the ISO and burn them to a bootable CD.

Dual Booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.06
Once you have your Ubuntu CD burned you can use this video guide to setup your dual boot. This video requires you re-install Windows. If your hard drive already has 2 partitions you dont have to re-install Windows, just delete your 2nd partition and start from the point in the video where they start to install Ubuntu.

If you get into any trouble you can feel free to post questions here, or visit http://www.ubuntuforums.org/.