Guy Rutenberg » Ubuntu

Disable Touchpad Tapping in Kubuntu

Guy — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:13:50 +0000

In Ubuntu (gnome) there is an easy graphical way to disable tapping on the touchpad. However, KDE lacks such thing. But lacking graphical configuration doesn’t mean this should be difficult. All you need is the gsynaptics package. The package provides a small utility called synclient. Now you can disable tapping by doing

 synclient TapButton1=0

To disable the tapping permanently you should use the following to run the command at the start of every KDE session.

echo "synclient TapButton1=0" > ~/.kde/env/disable-tapping.sh

Blocking IP Range using UFW

Guy — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:19:15 +0000

Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) is one of the greatest frontends to IPTables I’ve encountered. It is very simple to use and I just wish it was also available for Gentoo. Up until recently everything went smoothly for me and ufw, but we hit some rough waters when I’ve tried to block an IP range.

To block an ip or I’p range in ufw you should do

sudo ufw deny from 188.162.67.197/21

But here is the catch. Only the recent versions of ufw (which the version that comes with Ubuntu 8.04 isn’t one of them) support inserting new rules. When you add a rule it gets appended. So if you had a rule before that allows everyone to connect to your server on port 80, it also allows the IP range you’re trying to block, to connect to your machine.

As it’s impossible to foresee all the rules you might use, one has to resort to deleting all the rules he has to override, then re-add them so they will be after the rule that blocks the IP range. However I disliked the idea and looked for a simpler solution.

The easiest method I’ve found was to manully edit ufw’s configurations:

sudo vim /var/lib/ufw/user.rules

And then move the rule I’ve added, which looks like this:

### tuple ### deny any any 0.0.0.0/0 any 188.162.67.197/21
-A ufw-user-input -s 188.162.67.197/21 -j DROP

above any other rules in the configuration file.

Afterward, you’ll have to restart ufw so it will reload its configurations.

sudo ufw disable
sudo ufw enable

Installing Lighttpd-1.4.22 on Ubuntu 8.04

Guy — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:43:19 +0000

I had some problems with the lighttpd-1.4.19 that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, mainly it’s problems of handling the HTTP header Expect: 100-continue (which older versions of Lighttpd return error 417). The problem was fixed in Lighttpd-1.4.21, but 1.4.22 is the newest version so I’ve decided to install it.

As I mentioned before, Ubuntu doesn’t have lighttpd-1.4.22 for 8.04, and it’s also not available in the updates or backports repositories. Fortunately, I’ve found that the package is available from Debuian Sid (unstable). Here are some instructions on how to install it.

Start By downloading the following packages.

wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lighttpd/lighttpd_1.4.22-1_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/pcre3/libpcre3_7.8-2_amd64.deb

You can statisfy using the offical repositories all the dependencies of lighttpd-1.4.22 except the libpcre3, which is also available from Debian Sid. So start by installing it.

sudo dpkg -i libpcre3_7.8-2_amd64.deb
sudo aptitude markauto libpcre3

You statisfy the rest of the dependencies by using apt-get and the official repositories. In case you encounter the following problem when starting lighttpd:

/usr/sbin/lighttpd: Symbol `FamErrlist' has different size in shared object, con
sider re-linking

it can be solved easiliy by installing libfam3.

sudo apt-get install libfam3

(don’t worry if it complains about needing to remove libgamin0). You should be done now, and you can start enjoying your shining lighttpd-1.4.22.