June 19, 2006 by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, Email Client, HowTo

How To: Configure Evolution

Well if you already know it, don’t waste your time. But if you don’t know just go through it. Today I started using evolution mail for viewing my mails at the students mail server. Its very attractive as you have vast variety of options for making contact list and its fast and easy way to have your mails at hand. Filters are provided with different specifications. You have your calendar to schedule your jobs and much more to explore. Following are the configuration steps.

1. Start evolution mail by clicking this icon on you panel or in start menu go to internet and click Email or evolution mail or run command “evolution” from the terminal.

2. A window like this will appear

Evolution Startup

click forward to have this …

Evolution Mail Account

after adding user yourname@students.iiit.ac.in click forward ….

Evolution Mail Account Preferences

choose imap as server type and fill other required information and click forward ….

Evolutoin Mail Server Preferences

fill information accordingly as it suits you and click forward …

Evolution Account Name

name the account and click forward …

Evolution Finish

click apply and it will ask your password for the account give the password.

Now enjoy the facilities provided in the evolution mail browser.

June 5, 2006 by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, GTalk, HowTo, Kopete, Messenger

How To: Configure Kopete Messenger

Kopete is one of the Instant Messengers available for linux and is an alternate for gaim for kde. Though the older versions were not good enough to use but the recent versions are just awesome with a good gui. Its very easy to use and it also goes to the system tray when you close it. You can logon on to yahoo, msn, google talk etc. in just one widnow, minimizing the memory usage bye the application. It asks to view or ignore whenever a new message comes from a user with you were not chatting already.

Installing/Upgrading

1. You have to get the latest kopete package from the sourceforge or kde official site.

Unzip the bz2 package with command…

[saini@localhost]# bunzip2 -d package.bz2

change directory to package and then issue these command

[saini@localhost]# ./configure
[saini@localhost]# make
[saini@localhost]# make check
[saini@localhost]# make install

These should not give any errors, make and make install normally takes 15-20 minutes on an average machine.

Now you are ready to use kopete if it gives any problem try to have a reboot because I faced some problem which rectified itself after a reboot.

2. Adding accounts

Now go to k-menu -> internet -> kopete and that it.

When kopete opens go to settings -$gt; configure…

Click new and select new

Select yahoo and add your account…

Go to account preferences and browse your photograph

Just click next and finish and you are done with yahoo account.

Similar is for the MSN Messenger, No special settings.

If you want google talk also. Then you have to install some support for tls

Download the source package qca-tls-1.0.tar.bz2 from here.

If it gives no errors and got install without any errors. Then go to add account and select jabber in the add acount wizard menu and do as shown

and in connection tab do

click next and finish and now you can connect to Google as well.

If you have further suggestion, please leave a comment.

May 25, 2006 by Kulbir Saini on Configuration, Drivers, Fedora, Hacks, Hardware, HowTo, Installation, Internet, Ndiswrapper, Wireless

How To: Configure Wireless with Ralink (RT2500) Level One WNC 0301 in Fedora Core 4

Yesterday after a lot of trials with Fedora Core 5 to activate my wireless LAN card, I switched to Fedora Core 4, which looked much more stable than FC5. Actually with FC5, I mainly faced problems with gui , my mouse which is Microsoft USB mouse and my wlan card which is level one Ralink RT2500. In FC5, I tried both with ndiswrapper and madwifi but nothing worked out for me. Also my mouse was not working well. I can click things but the pointer was not visible like microsoft gave me a invisible mouse or this microsoft mouse don’t want to work with Linux. After installing FC4, I felt very comfortable with guis and my mouse. They worked fine. But now there were two problems. One is that FC4 was not able to detect my soundcard and the wlan was not working again. Anyway soundcard is not a big problem, as it worked in FC5, I’ll make it work with some up-gradation or things like that. But the major problem is wlan. And here goes the methods which I tried to activate my wlan card.

Method 1. With rpms

I downloaded these rpms

1
2
3

madwifi-0.9.4.12-16.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm
madwifi-kmdl-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-0.9.4.12-16.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm
madwifi-hal-kmdl-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4smp-0.9.6.0-20.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm

from the site atrpms and tried installing them but they failed the dependency /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4 , then i tried to find this rpm everywhere on google , rpmfind etc …. but I could not find it. Then I installed it with –nodeps option and configured according to the data given here .
But in vain.

Method 2. With ndiswrapper using Microsoft Windows XP drivers

I downloaded the ndiswrapper-1.16 from sourceforge.
I untarred it and used these commands.

1
2
3

make uninstall
make
make install

Please don’t forget to the read the INSTALL and README files in the ndiswrapper-1.* directory. Then I inserted my LAN card driver cd for XP and copied the drivers directory which contains .inf and .sys files to my root directory. Then I used the commands .

ndiswrapper -i Rt2500.INF
ndiswrapper -l
modprobe ndiswrapper
iwconfig "wlan0" key open "wep 128 bit hex key" ESSID "IIIT WLAN"
dhclient wlan0

I ran all this command and I am very happy to say that wireless LAN did not work. 🙂 Then I ran this command

touch /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

and then edited this file. I entered all the data suggested here except that second line I wrote

DEVICE=wlan0

OK. Then i ran

neat

and edited the properties of wlan device by double clicking it and gave the 26 letters wlan key there and activated the device and it worked 😀

February 2, 2006 by Kulbir Saini on Hacks, HowTo, Linux, Shell, Tips - Tricks

How To: Troubleshoot SCP Command

Some times we face problems in transferring the data from one machine to other machine using scp. Actually the scp command is executed successfully but the data is not transferred. As the .bashrc and not the .bash_profile file of the system to which the data is being transferred is executed. If the .bashrc of the remote system contains any command or executable which output some data to the standard output then that command is executed and the output is flushed on the local machine and the scp command is terminated and data is not transferred.

For example if the remote machine has any ‘echo’ or ‘nfrm’ command in .bashrc file, the scp of the data will not be possible.
Also suppose the remote machine has a lines in .bashrc like this

./test.sh

where test.sh contains the data as below:-

1 2	#/usr/bin/sh echo "Kulbir Saini"

Then also the scp will not be possible.

So if you are facing such problems please try to remove such lines from your .bashrc file and scp the data you want.
Anyway you can keep those lines in your .bash_profile because it is not executed while transferring the data.

Please report any other cases in which scp is not possible.

December 8, 2005 by Kulbir Saini on Hacks, HowTo, Linux, Shell, SSH

How To: RSA Key Generation for Remote Host

Using RSA key of a remote machine you can authenticate for SSH for that machine without entering a password. Generating RSA key is very easy and simple. Follow the procedure below to generate keys for two machine. Machies: 1) mirage (192.168.36.205) and students (192.168.36.200).

Step 1
use this command on mirage server

[kulbir@mirage ~] ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/root/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
32:30:af:c6:0b:e2:c0:60:92:fd:62:da:37:32:f2:ce root@LocalHost

You should get the result as above and if it asks to overwrite something then overwrite it.

Step 2

1 2	[kulbir@mirage ~] scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@192.168.36.200:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 user@192.168.36.200''s password:

Now if the above operation was successful, then you can login from your mirage account to your students account without a password. Try it, and if it is successful then do the same for your students server. Now you don’t need type your password again and again to login from one server to the other.

If the above worked for you, then there is one more thing you can try out. Go to .ssh/ directory in your home directory and create a file named ‘config’. Now write in that file

host students
hostname 192.168.36.200
port 22
user kulbirsaini

and save the file. You have to specify the port on which SSH is listening. Save this file and now you can login by just typing

[kulbir@mirage ~] ssh students [Enter]

You can write whatever you want in place of ‘students’ in the file and then login typing ssh ‘word’ that you have written against the host in file.

Tech Stuff

How Tos, Tutorials, Tips and Tricks

HowTo