disabling FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad track pad.

Linux help.

I created a script to disable the FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad track pad on my gigabyte Q1585n note book. The Sentelic FigerSensingPad is two sensitive, and I have a mouse. When I type I want to disable the track pad. The note book does not have a hardware button combination to disable the track pad.

So I wrote this script to switch states. Every time you run it it changes it from enabled to disabled. Run it again and it switches from disabled to enabled. I tested it on my Ubuntu 11.04 and my friends fedora 14.  It should work on any Linux machine with xinput installed.

here is a link to a zipped file I uploaded to google docs.
tracpad.sh.tgz


to extract the archive

tar -xf ./tracpad.sh.tgz

to make it executable

chmod a+x ./tracpad.sh

to run it
./tracpad.sh


Here is the contents of the script. I use xinput. If you just want to use xinput  to disable the touch pad or any thing else handled buy xinput read its man page.


#!/bin/bash
#
# Author: Aaron Nel
# Created: 23 12 2011

# This script disables and enables the track pad
# every time it is run it switches the state of the track pad
# Specfically the "FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad"

#test to see what state the tracpad is in
padE=`xinput --list-props "FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad" | grep "Device Enabled" | cut -f3`
#echo $padE

case $padE in
    0)
        xinput set-prop "FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad" "Device Enabled" 1
        echo "device enabled"
        ;;
    1)
        xinput set-prop "FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad" "Device Enabled" 0
        echo "device disabled"
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Error:"
        echo "Device in an unknowen state"
        echo "$padE"
        ;;

esac

If you are looking for more info or other solutions  check out these links.

http://www.google.co.za/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&ie=UTF-8&q=FSPPS%2F2+Sentelic+FingerSensingPad

How to configure the touch pad, to make it less sensitive and other nice tweaks.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1502560

The souceforge driver project page.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fsp-lnxdrv/

Reading the documentation in /usr/share/doc especially the .gz compressed files

Have you ever wanted to read the the documentation in the /usr/share/doc directory. If you install apache it makes it nice and easy to read all the documentation that comes with most Linux packages.
First install Apache2

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-doc

apache2-doc is the special case here. It allows you to browse your documentation /usr/share/doc/ through your web browser. from

http://localhost/doc/

This does not work out right though. you need to change the configuration of apache to get it to decompress and show the *.gz files as plain text.
I posted on Stackoverflow to get a way to use the apache to show the content of *.gz documents in the /usr/share/doc/ directory. This is what was posted as possible solution
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5242106/apache-gz-gzip-content-handler-for-linux-documentation-usr-share-doc-and-local

Here are those instructions in brief. It tells apache how to deal with .gz files to process them as plain text and send them to the browser as plain text.

 sudo a2enmod headers
 sudo a2enmod deflate
 gksu gedit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Go to the bottom of the file and find the section with Alias /doc/ "user/share/doc/" and change it to look like this.

Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/local/doc">
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128

    AddEncoding gzip gz
    <FilesMatch "\.gz$">
      ForceType text/plain
      Header set Content-Encoding: gzip
    </FilesMatch>
</Directory>   

 sudo apache2ctl restart

Now you are done and can read your *nix documentation that comes with most packages.

Z formal systems specification tool and CZT

I recently as part of a systems engineering course had to write a few system specification documents using the Z language. I now had to find a nice way to do this. The Community Z Tools at source forge provided the best and simplest way for me to get things done. They have integrated their tools in to jedit so that it would be very simple for them to get things working.

The instructions at source forge are not exactly straight forward. It seamed to me that I need to download the source and compile from source this is not the case. Just download the czt binary file form source forge and extract. The follow the instructions at http://czt.sourceforge.net/jedit/index.html ignoring the step to download and install the source. Every thing is include in the czt download.

The jedit tool also seams to be a quite useful tool worth a look.

Ubuntu Network manager, static interface setup, multiple profiles, no internet, no dns

Recently I decided to experiment with the multiple profiles feature of the network manager provide by Ubuntu 8.04. I set up my lan network card with a static ip address so that I could manager port forwarding on my router specifically for my laptop.

I still wanted to be able to switch to the roaming mode provided by the network manager if I went to university or some where else. So I decide to save the set up in the network manager as a separate profile. I then saved other profile for the roaming modes on my wireless lan, and my cable lan interfaces.

After a restart I found that I could no longer get out on the internet after start up. I was not sure what the problem was. I could ping my router but nothing beyond my router. In checking my network manager set up I could see that where I used to have my router as a dns, I now had nothing.

So I add some dns servers saved the settings under my static profile and applied these setting buy clicking the green tick. Now every thing was working again. I could connect to the internet web pages would now load in firefox.

Again after a restart I found I had the same problem so I check my network manger and found that the settings were still there but were not applied. So I again choose the correct profile and applied the settings. This behaviour of being not being set up after a restart continued. It gets a little irritating having to go into network manager and apply setting after ever restart.

After reading around in fourums I found about about resov.conf resolvconf /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/resolvconf/interface-order and /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/. I could see that in interface-order and ifconfig my cabled lan card was begin configured correctly at start. In the resolv.conf file no dns servers were configured at start up, having no dns server to resolve requests out to the internet I could not browse the web or send emails or any thing you would need to do.

To solve the problem of not being set up at start up open the /etc/resolveconf/resolv.conf.d/base as root in a text editor and add a dns server like your router or some other dns server. Read the man resolvconf to find out why. Redundancy here is a good thing, have it point to more then one dns server.

Simply place entries like "nameserver 127.0.0.1" or "nameserver #your router#". Obviously 127.0.0.1 is localhost and probably wont work for the average set up. If your not sure what dns servers to use, ping a top level domain like www.com or www.co.za and get their ip address. Do a traceroute and look for domain names with .dns in them. You can see and example of how network manager saves one of these file in /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/original.

linux the cisco vpn and monash south africa

I have spent quite a bit of time trying different options for the vpn connection to Monash South Africa. The open source vpnc dose not work because when importing the cisco profile it warns that IP tunnelling across TCP has been enabled. Which may cause undesired resualts, in this case it simply dose not work.

The only option left for linux is the cisco client which has not been updated since 2006. Major problem. Thus we now have to go to projects.tuxx-home.at. Here is the only way to get support for the cisco linux vpn client. There are instructions for intallation, patching and support forums. Every thing a person would need. I have used them on a number of different kernel builds, 2.6.18 -- 2.6.24. They all worked.

The vpn client on the web site dose not, but you still need to down load it to get the correct profile configuration file. It is called sa.pcf. You will need to copy that file to the cisco /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles/. Then all you need to do to start it is type "sudo vpnclient connect sa".
Enter your user name and password and every thing should work.

I have found some small issues with the gnome network manager and haveing both my lan network card and wireless network card enabled. So depending on how I am connecting to the internet I disable which ever one I am not using. Type "ifconfig" to find out which device to disable. Then type "ifcofig eth#" where # is the device number, some thing like 0 or 1.

Here is some more info on getting the cisco vpn working www.blog.arun-prabha.com/2008/05/01/cisco-vpn-installation-issue-with-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron/.

Problems in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I found that after using it for about 20 minuites their were certain things I could do that would totally crash the whole system. Later I found that it was a bug in the released kernel, check https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/188226.

It has to do with the cpu schedualer (Completely Fair Schedualer), not being configured properly for the desktop system. Their is already a way to fix it, but in requires over 100 mb of downloads to fix the problem. This will be a serrious problem to people who pay exhorbitant rates for internet access.

The basic solution is to update your system to an the latest development release kernel. From 2.6.24-16-generic t0 2.6.24-17-generic. Caution this 2.6.24-17-generic kernel
is a developmental release used for testing changes and bug fixes, it is not the same as the release version kernel. This new kernel will only be released 2008-07-01 it the next version of hardy, ubuntu-8.04.1.

Any way I upgraded to ensure that I have a Linux desktop that dose not stall any time I open two many windows or try to do thing as a different users, ie every time i use the sudo command to do some thing cpu intensive.

Fix
Using synaptic
Open Synaptic > Settings > Repositories
Go to the updates tab and select Pre-released updates ( hardy proposed)
Close the window and reload the package information.
Either navigate through the Base System Section or search to find
linux-image-2.6.24-17-generic
linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-17-generic
Select both packages.
If you are using an nvidia graphics card you will need to also up grade it. Serach for
nvidia-glx-new - we want the version that matches our kernel, 169.12+2.6.24.12-17.36 instead of the old one 169.12+2.6.24.12-16.36 notice that the 12-16 / 12- 17 referes to the version of kernel supported. This should automatically include the
linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24-17-generic. Which include the binary / compiled modules necessary for the nvidia driver to work.
This should be all the updates that you need to fix the problem with out a major difficulty.
Next click apply and wait.
When it finished be sure to disable the Pre-released updates ( hardy proposed)
Synaptic > Settings > Repositories
Go to the updates Tab and select Pre-released updates ( hardy proposed)
And reload the package lists.

That should fix the problem, all this is described in the bug report check https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/188226. It also includes instructions on how to compile the kernel form source with the correct options. For more advanced users. This would probable save people form having to download a whole new kernel, and graphics card drivers.