My ‘holiday’ just wasn’t long enough.
After the stress of moving out, getting ready for Christmas, going to Coffs Harbour, celebrating New Years, and Kat’s birthday, I’m straight back to work.
Work’s even been so busy as to delay me from posting this for over a week.
Christmas is over for another year. I had quite some fun this time around, and got some well-thought out gifts, as well as giving some 
Work is out until the 3rd of January, so to enjoy my break, Kat and I are heading to Coffs Harbour till the 30th.
Nyssa and I had a little scrap over which car we could scab from our parents, as she is going to Byron, and neither of us wanted to use our own cars. Fortunately for me, she and her friends are camping, while I’m only hotelling. She got the 4WD, while I got the Mazda 6. Should be a pleasant trip up.
Except for the 4am start, if I want to beat the Boxing Day traffic on the freeway.
I made the big move to Kayee’s apartment on the weekend.
I spent most of Friday afternoon/evening/night packing as much of my stuff as I could. I was originally planning to a bit Friday and the rest Saturday, but as it turned out; I didn’t actually have that much stuff. Apart from my clothes and computer, I filled five 40×80x20 tubs of stuff. I’m sure I could throw out a good proportion of that too.
The folks were a bit sad about the whole thing, but I think Dad was worst. Mum was happy that I felt it was time to move out. She thinks that it reflects well on them, besides which she thinks it will help me to really grow up to have to take care of myself completely. Dad kept trying to talk me out of it. It was a bit sad, but I’m only 15-20 mins away, and in the last year or so I was hardly ever home anyway. When I was, I was watching DVDs or mucking around on my PC.
My room is quite small, but I think I can live with it. Everything is compact, and all my stuff fits nicely under my bed. I spent quite a bit of time setting up my PC and arranging all the cables, so it’s quite tidy now. We also took the old sofa bed from my parents which fits quite nicely in the living space. With a Christmas tree and some lights, it looks much more like a home that it did before.
I’ve already got a growing list of things I want to do around the place to make it nicer, and I can already sense that making time for it will not be easy.
I think this will definitely test me.
Not much new on the Xubuntu front I am afraid to say at the moment. My life is in a bit of an upheaval, and will probably stay that way until the new year.
We had our work Christmas party last Friday, which was quite a nice night. A lot bigger this year than last year, which in turn was bigger than the year before, with 70 guests (we know have over 20 staff, compared with 12 last year, and 7 the year before). We ate and stayed at the Sebel hotel in the city, right under the bridge at Pier 1.
Spent all of the Friday morning assembling our exhaust fan prototype to display on the evening. It was a mad rush, and some bits were assembled quite haphazardly. It was annoying that in the end the display was hardly even noticed or used. I could have spent those hours writing some more VB.NET code.
Still we had an awesome seafood buffet and plenty of booze available. I even ‘borrowed’ one of the GPS units, that our service electricians use. Kat and I had plenty of fun using ‘Jason’ to direct us all over the city.
The rest of the weekend was spent assembling furniture for my new room. It’s starting to really look like an IKEA showroom now. I got a bed frame, work desk, wardrobe and chest of drawers. My hands are quite blistered from all the assembling. I should have ‘borrowed’ a power drill set from work too.
I’m planning to be moved out of the house by the weekend, all I really need to do is sort out my clothes and general crap, then finally move my computer … All I really need to do, is putting it quite blithely, it’s gonna be quite some task.
Hopefully all will go well. And I definitely have a Xubuntu project on the horizon; getting my wireless ethernet card to work.
When I was using Xubuntu Dapper, I was able to set up a PPTP connection to my workplace VPN. Overall it was a pretty easy exercise.
Unfortunately in Xubuntu Edgy, it’s been more troublesome.
I initially installed and ran pptpconfig (as I did for Dapper), which was configured in the same way. However when I tried to make the PPTP connection I was greeted with the unhappy error
Using interface ppp0
pptpconfig: monitoring interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 /dev/pts/1
CHAP authentication succeeded
MPPE 128-bit stateless compression enabled
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP
In the end I was able to figure this out; by installing the network-manager framework. Unfortunately this requires some amount of GNOME dependencies. The sort of dependecies that I’m quite prepared to pay, especially since most have been already installed for other applications. On lower end machines, this may not the way you want to go.
The packages you need are in both the main and universe repositories; network-manager, network-manager-pptp and network-manager-gnome.
Once you have them installed, simply run nm-applet (if it’s not already running) from the command line, and the applet should appear in the system tray of your panel.
From there it is quite simple to setup the VPN connection.
First click the applet and then VPN connections and Configure VPN.
When the dialog opens, choose to Add a new connection, and follow the prompts.
Next simply enter in the name you wish to call the connection, and the IP address of the VPN.
In the authentication tab, check the Refuse EAP checkbox and then you are done.
To connect to the VPN click on the applet and choose the connection.
Finally enter in the username and password required to make the connection.
If the connection is successful the network-manager applet should have a little lock over it. Then you are away!
