Access Microsoft VPN using PPTP

I think it’s just a little sad that I would even want to attempt this, but here goes.

EDIT: This was for Xubuntu Dapper (6.06), as far as I can tell using pptpconfig (the GUI) will not work to setup and connect to a VPN on Xubuntu Edgy (6.10).

Installing the network-manager applet will.

In very ‘rare’ cases I often connect to my work’s VPN and then connect to my work PC’s using the Windows Remote Desktop function. It’s pretty straightfoward to set up from Windows, but I wanted to do it from Xubuntu, seeing as I seldom ever use Windows these days.

I tried to do this a while ago and had absolutely no luck. Fortunes was smiling on me this time, as it was almost as easy to set things up in Xubuntu as it was Windows.

As it turns out, PPTP support is, and has been for almost a year, part of the Linux kernel. The neccessary PPTP client package is available from the main Ubuntu repository, which is always nice. You could go right ahead and install and configure the PPTP connection using the command line, but I wussed out and installed a GUI for PPTP.

You can grab it by editing your sources.list to include the following repository

# James Cameron’s PPTP GUI
deb http://quozl.netrek.org/pptp/pptpconfig ./

Then you can install the PPTP client and the GUI with,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pptp-linux pptpconfig

Then finally you can run the GUI (as root) with

gksudo pptpconfig &

I used gksudo and ‘&’ so that the process is started without being bound (for lack of a better word) to the terminal it is started from. Alternatively use Alt-F2.

To set up the connection, you will need the IP address of the VPN, and a username and password for connecting. Just enter in the information and click Add.

It also helps to ensure that the user is allowed to make incoming connections to the VPN; this had me scratching my head for days (this before even considering using Xubuntu)

If all goes well you should be able to connect to the server and ping it.

Looking good.

There are other options that you may need; encryption or tunnels, if you want certain traffice to go through certain routes. More than I think I need for this stage, but more detailed instructions are easily found.

So all went according to plan, next step is to remote desktop to my work PC.

PDF Printing in Xubuntu using CUPS

Printing to PDF in Windows is a royal pain at best.

I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to install the cups-pdf printer on Xubuntu.

First thing is to install the cups-pdf printer (it’s in the universe repository)

sudo apt-get cups-pdf

Next thing is to set the permissions of the cups-pdf printer to set user id. This allows the person/process that executes the file to have access to system resources, as if they were the owner of the file (which in this case is root).

sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf

The next part comes from the Xubuntu documentation section on printing…

First you need to open the User and Groups interface from the System menu, and add the user cupsys to the group shadow. Once done you can restart the cupsys daemon

sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Then open an internet browser to http://localhost:631/admin. You’ll need to enter in your username and sudo password. From there you can click the Administration tab, and you should be able to see the PDF-Printer, ready to be added.

Firstly the ‘make/manufacturer’ of the printer must be set: generic. Then you can move on to choose the ‘model/driver’ for the printer: Generic Postscript Printer Foomatic/Postscript.

(After reading the CUPS Documentation it seems that there is a .ppd file you can use to install a colour postscript printer, but the Generic one seems to be working fine at the moment).

So finally, you should have the printer displayed in the web browser, and be able to print from applications.

The PDF’s are saved (by default) in a folder in your home folder : /home/user/PDF

Results seems good to me …

Poor Cech

Xubuntu Dapper

Finally backed and copied all my files from my hard disc intended for Xubuntu to other discs. I was still put off by certain ‘features’ of the LiveCD (really don’t like the name Desktop CD), but fired it up anyway to use GParted to partition my hard disc.

Unfortuntely the partition editor didn’t want to work nicely, and after several attempts and several failed partitions, decided to download and burnt the GParted LiveCD. The download is only about 30MB and provides a simple environment to use GParted.

This worked wonders and I soon had my desired partition setup created.

The next step was to use the Install CD (Alternate CD) to chuck Xubuntu on there. Originally I had intended to install a server then install the latest XFCE, so I could really customise my own Xubuntu install.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do enough reading before hand, and really should have tried it aswell. The instructions were a little confusing, all the more so because I was reading them from inside Lynx at the command line.

Which is another story in itself, the network was apparently detected during the installation, but once I logged in I couldn’t ping my router. Very annoying. Fortunately it was a simple fix of taking the network interface down, and then bringing it back up

sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifup eth0

I hope I don’t need to do this again.

Anyway it became clear after multiple pkg-config errors (I have no idea what that’s about) that XFCE was going to cause me more trouble than it was worth, so I backed off and decided to just install Xubuntu in the normal text mode installation.

The text installer was old reliable and was no problems, formatting and mounting my partitions. I would have used the LiveCD Expresso installer, if only I could find out more information about where GRUB is installed. I know its to the MBR, but which one? The MBR of the first master? The BIOS first priority? The MBR of the disc that Ubuntu is installed on? Maybe I’ll discover this later on.

Finally Xubuntu is up!