customising life

Around the office I am more often than not turned to as the technology/computer/network/database/website/email expert. I really wish we had an IT tech or something.

Some users in the office recently were given Office 2007 on their PCs. Why some and not all I don’t understand, but already I’ve had many complaints about it. I’ve never used or even seen Office 2007 until this, and quite frankly don’t ever want too.

But sadly, I know that I will have to as part of my extra-employment activities.

I’ve already had one or two on how the interface works and a good discussion on how the new file formats will (or most likely won’t) work in the context of the office. In our case they certainly won’t work as people are creating new documents in Office 2007, which other staff simply can’t read. I don’t want to be around when this blows out.

But the most interesting was one this morning. Office 2007 killed the spelling tool in Outlook Express. One of our staff is using Windows XP (and Outlook-Express) and since someone installed Office 2007 on his PC it has completely borked his Outlook Express spell checker.

It tries to correct almost every word, yet offers no sensible alternative, whilst also denying the ability to add the proper word to the dictionary.

For example, this ordinary sentence;

Dear <Name>,
Please find attached the latest price list … <blah, blah , blah>

The spell check will query the following words;

Please, find, attached, latest, price, list

While this person was fuming over the inability to spell check their emails, without using Word 2007 as an intermediate step, I was quietly laughing (and cringing) in my cup of coffee.

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.

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!

To my great surprise, delight and somewhat shame, it was very easy to set up a PPTP connection to my work VPN, should I ever feel the strange need to do some work of a weekend.

Now to setting up a remote desktop connection so I can actually use my work PC.

I’m gonna need two packages to do this; rdesktop (the client application) and grdesktop (a GUI frontend for rdesktop)

grdesktop came at a cost, in terms of GNOME dependencies, which isn’t such a big problem for my system, but just worth nothing. If GNOME dependencies are an issue, just install rdesktop. I’ll try to figure out how to use it next.

sudo aptitude install rdesktop grdesktop

We can almost fire up the VPN connection, which I’ve already gone through here, but before that there is an intermediate step that is required.

As it turns out, I did need to set up a route to get things working. The instructions were thankfully very straightforward. You can take one of two approaches (as always); the command line or the GUI. I’ll show both.

Adding the route through the command line is achieved by using the route command, specifying the starting address for the network, the netmask and connection to use. In my case it was somewhat like this

sudo route -add 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev ppp0

Adding the route via the GUI is done by clicking the Routing tab for the connection. Then select the routing style most applicable. In my case I am a Client connecting to a LAN, so Client to LAN is the easy choice.

Click Edit Network Routes, then you will be able to enter in the route IP address and the mask bits (netmask).

I now can start the PPTP connection, which should show that the new route is in use.

So now on to the Remote Desktop GUI. After installation a nice little Tux icon appears in the Network menu.

Once opened, all that is left is to correctly identify the local IP address of the computer you wish to take control of, and the username and password to do so.

Some other important settings, that may require some thought, include the size and colours available to the connection.

If everything works out correctly you’ll finally see the Windows desktop of the remote PC.