Dyna|on|Rails

I recently started seriously trying to use Ubuntu Linux on my main computer. It’s been a fun experience so far, however there have been some glitches. For example, while getting the proprietory codecs to work right wasn’t that hard, there was a definite static when playing most mp3 files.

To fix this I had to do the following:
1. Go into System - Preferences - Sound
2. Change the Sound Events to ‘ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture’ (Be sure to hit ‘Test’ to make sure)
3. Change the Music and Movies to ‘ESD - Enlightened Sound Daemon’ (Be sure to hit ‘Test’ to make sure)

Restart your music player of choice, and everything should be better.

Rebuilding one of my server machines that also acts as a server where I work today, I jumped over to the newly released Ubuntu 7.04 on the virtue that I didn’t have a DVD drive around and the task of switching CD’s for also the newly released CentOS 5 seemed “daunting”.

One of the first things that’s different is no SSH server by default. This however is easily remedied on Ubuntu and all you need to do is follow the following steps to have SSH access to your brand new Ubuntu/Debian server.

# sudo -s
# apt-get install openssh-server

This will install the actual server and create the basic configuration files. You’re close to being done!

I don’t like to leave SSH on the default port, or allow root logins, instead relying on sudo from local accounts, so:

# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Change the port variable to some number >1024, for example ‘Port 12345′.
Change the PermitRootLogin variable to no, for example ‘PermitRootLogin no’.

Now just restart the SSH server to read in the new config.

# /etc/init.d/ssh restart

You should now be able to connect to your server with any SSH client on the specified port and login using any of the local users available on the machine.