Today I installed Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10) Amd64 on a Dell Latitude E4310. The laptop itself is very nice, brushed metal type exterior.

Functionality:

• Graphics: Integrated intel card was detected, 3d effects enabled by default, all working smooth
• Disk: Disk was detected, and worked, although the GPT partition table prohibited the installer from working. To work around this, from the live cd I ran ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1′ and that nuked any traces of it, allowing the installer to work as expected. I do not multiboot, so you do not want to run that if you do.
• Wireless: Intel integrated wireless was detected. External wireless switch also functions as expected.
• Ethernet: Ethernet detected with e1000e driver, works as expected
• Function keys: Media keys adjust volume, mute etc as expected

All and all, a pretty smooth install. The laptop itself was configured with an i5 processor with Vpro, which is interesting to see 4 processors appear in ‘top’ on a laptop this small.

Bored of the normal everyday terminal colors? These can be easily changed by right clicking on the terminal window, clicking preferences and changing the colors:

You can see how my terminal colors are different than standard:

If you want to know where this information is stored on your filesystem:

#!/bin/bash
cat ~/.config/terminator/config

My current palette:

palette = "#2e3436:#cc0000:#4e9a06:#c4a000:#c48dff:#75507b:#06989a:#d3d7cf:#555753:#e52222:#a6e32d:#fc951e:#3465a4:#fa2573:#67d9f0:#f2f2f2"

The same can be done for gnome-terminal, but that stores it’s defaults in gconf. You can retrieve them using gconftool-2:

#!/bin/bash
gconftool-2 --all-entries /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default

This is fun as these colors carry over into Vim etc, so when you are not using the graphical versions, you can still spice up your syntax highlighting.

My Desktop
Read Seif’s post on his desktop, so I copied most of that style (original post) :

I actually enabled compiz for the first time in a long time, and AMD’s linux drivers have come a long way since my critical posts a few years ago about them. Great to see the whole stack improving.

Default Search Engine
This week I switched over my default search engine to Duck Duck Go.

I really like it’s clean interface, and their attention to privacy and technology enthusiasm.

New Home Page
In addition, I updated my generic landing page using Python / Flask to pull feeds etc, I really like the simplicity of Flask and the well thought out design / documentation. I also published the source on github.

Although you should almost never have a decent rationale for doing this, at some point I needed to do it, and documentation was scarce. The basic idea is we have a website – https://www.securewebsite.com and our clients cannot use https (ssl), so we need to decrypt it to http for them.

In order to accomplish this, Apache 2.x is needed, along with mod_ssl and mod_proxy. Here is the magic:

<VirtualHost virtualhostipaddress:443>
        SSLProxyEngine on
        #SSLProxyCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/google.crt
        SSLEngine on
        RequestHeader set Front-End-Https "On"
        ServerName testing

        #SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL
        SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key
        #LogLevel debug

        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/ssl_proxy_error.log
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/ssl_proxy_access.log combined

        <Proxy *>
                Order deny,allow
                Allow from all
        </Proxy>

        ProxyVia On
        ProxyRequests Off
        ProxyPreserveHost Off
        ProxyPass / https://www.securewebsite.com:443/
        ProxyPassReverse / https://www.securewebsite.com:443/

        #SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
        BrowserMatch "MSIE [1-4]" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
        BrowserMatch "MSIE [5-9]" ssl-unclean-shutdown
</VirtualHost>

Obviously replace virtualhostipaddress with the ip you want to bind to and securewebsite.com with the actual website.

I have another position open, it’s a contract position for 3 months atleast. Pays great, will need to come onsite to Cincinnati.

Skills we need:

• Administration – familiar with Apache / SSL / SSH / Kickstart or autoyast / rsync / hardening etc
• Virtualization – xen
• RPM creation
• Perl (Catalyst is a plus)
• PHP (Symfony is a plus)
• Python (Django is a plus)
• C
• Compiling kernels, making slight adjustments to drivers etc
• Thin client experience is a plus
• Software distribution (ZLM / Altiris)
• Bash scripting
• Javascript / Jquery
• HTML / CSS
• Rest
• XML / JSON / Yaml
• Git / Bazaar / Svn
• Having a github or launchpad account is a plus

If you think you fit the bill email me ASAP as it is an immediate opening, and I will put you in touch with my HR department. You can find my email through Launchpad or Google.