Tag: Free Software Tips

EasySync USB-CAN Bus Adapter – Works great in Ubuntu after some fiddling

Neat little package
Neat little package

The toys just keep coming in!  Another one of those wallet killing impulsive orders whilst I was sick in bed last week just arrived today, a USB-CAN bus converter module by EasySync that promises a great interface and should work in Linux!  This will give a little bump start to my Mazda CAN Bus / mChumby projects.

Note : EasySync UK’s online form doesn’t allow international shipping but a short E-mail or two managed that.  There is a US subsidiary with US and international shipping, but the international shipping rates on the US site is plain ridiculous [$68USD to ship a $88 device to Australia].

Note 2 : I hear the interface is mimicking the Lawicel CAN-USB interface…only hearsay…

Plugged it in – didn’t work.  Doh!  Took a peek at the manual and website, nothing on Linux other than “Linux drivers provided”… So much for the marketing material, guess I have to try make it work myself.  (Yes I got it working, read on for the quick run-down post aimed at helping others)

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Citrix Linux Client 64bit (AMD64) for Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04

This post is record to help myself if I ever decide to do a fresh install again, so it might be a bit messy.  (Posting helps me keep these untitled files off my hard-drive hehe)

Download the Citrix Linux client (v11) from :-
http://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/index.asp
URL mileage may vary, go back to the home page if its not right.

Unpack the tarball and install… e.g.

tar -xvzf linuxx86-11.0.140395.tar.gz
sudo ./setupwfc

Might be missing a ‘cd’ step here obviously…
If run using sudo, default installs to /usr/lib/ICAClient

Confirm it doesn’t run because of libmotif

/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfcmgr
/usr/lib/ICAClient/wfcmgr: error while loading shared libraries: libXm.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Download a 32bit (i386) Open Motif package from :-
http://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/o/openmotif/

Rip out libXm from it…

$ dpkg -x libmotif3_2.2.3-4_i386.deb ./tmp
$ cd ./tmp
~/tmp$ cd usr/lib
~/tmp/usr/lib$ ls
libMrm.so.3      libUil.so.3      libXm.so.3      X11
libMrm.so.3.0.2  libUil.so.3.0.2  libXm.so.3.0.2
~/tmp/usr/lib$ sudo cp libXm.so.3 /usr/lib32/
~/tmp/usr/lib$ cd /usr/lib32
/usr/lib32$ sudo ln -s libXm.so.3 libXm.so.4

Then this stupid error…
You have not chosen to trust “Equifax Secure Global eBusiness CA-1”, the issuer of the servers security certificate (SSL error 61).

Download the root 1 (Base64) Cert from :-
http://www.geotrust.com/resources/root-certificates/index.html
Change the extension to .crt
Copy it to Citrix Installation Path/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts

$ mv Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.cer Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.crt
$ sudo cp Equifax_Secure_Global_eBusiness_CA-1.crt /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/

Set firefox to open the ICA with /usr/lib/ICAClient/wfica

Voila…

Need to tidy this post up in the future

Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope AMD64 (64 bit)

I’ve finally made the jump and using the AMD64 version of Ubuntu as my primary installation.  There are a couple of tricky things to deal with, primarily with closed sourced applications such as Adobe Flash Plugin and Skype which are two applications I need to use.

How to install Adobe Flash Plugin 64 Bit for Ubuntu 9.04

A lot of the tutorials/guides online will tell you to use nspluginwrapper or similar.  Adobe has released an ‘alpha’ version of their 64 bit player which is pretty stable so far…

Download it from :-http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Unpack the archive and copy the only file to the Firefox plugins folder in ‘/usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins‘ :-

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

How to install Skype 64 bit for Ubuntu 9.04

You would think you could just go to www.skype.com and ask for a download and it’ll be like the Adobe site detecting that you have a 64 bit system right?  Wrong (at time of writing).  Annoyingly that’ll just let you download an i386 package!

You could manually remedy this by downloading the AMD64 .deb package from :-
http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64

Everything else?

So far the respositories have been kind to me… but i’ll update if I run into any other troubles 🙂

Voila happy 64 bit Ubuntu’ing.

Essential Free Software for a Windows Install

Yesterday I went and bought a laptop for my dad to learn how to use computers and the internet.  A base install of windows is not functional nor safe enough to let loose on the internet without some additional software.  Being an avid fan of things that are free, I went and downloaded the latest versions of free software that I thought would be essential for this new PC.

I hope this post is useful for other people, but its really a lazy way of me bookmarking everything in-case I have to do it again.

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Parametric Modelling in Google Sketchup and Ponoko friendly SVG export for Sketchup

The problem

I’ve recently signed up Ponoko’s Prime account and wanted to get something made.  I rather into a rather annoying problem, Alibre Xpress doesn’t have a SVG export.  I needed a way to design something and export it as SVG.

I’ll admit the long post title is a problem too 🙂

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