At the beginning it appeared as a no-solved mystery because in all the many posts I read, there were no effective solutions. On my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS I was no able to use the external hard disk I had connected to the LAN and every time I tried to mount it I only received this message: Unable to mount location – Failed to retrieve share list from server
In few words it was not possible to use the Windows Network and all the people with the same problem (which is specific for the Ubuntu 10.04) suggested to reconfigure Samba but all the configuration and scripts I tried were no effective to let me use the external hard disk.
At the end I found someone who talked about a possible firewall misconfiguration and I tried in many ways to bypass the situation using ufw commands and opening ports and services over the LAN:
$ sudo ufw status
[sudo] password for *****:
Status: active
To Action From
— —— —-
135,139,445/tcp ALLOW Anywhere (log)
137,138/udp ALLOW Anywhere (log)
Samba ALLOW Anywhere
192.168.0.3 Samba ALLOW 10.0.0.0/8
10.0.0.0/8 ALLOW 192.168.0.3 Samba
Unfortunately, every new permission I granted to Samba on my Firewall was not a real solution but when I tried to stop the Firewall (System –> Administration –> Firewall Configuration) using the default firewall manager, Ubuntu was able to find and work on the external hard disk.
For this reason I made some tests and found this solution:
1 – enter your router settings and find the list of the attached device
2 – find the name and the MAC address of the LAN device you want to connect to your PC
3 – find the menu for the Lan Setup and add an Address Reservation for the above device. Now you are sure that the router will always assign the same address to the device
4 – back to Ubuntu, install and launch Firestarter (for some incomprehensible reasons the default firewall manager is not able to create rules for Samba services and ports)
5 – on Firestarter, go to Preferences —> Policy Editor and click on “Apply policy changes immediately”
6 – try to connect again to Windows Network, obviously (sic) it will not work but then go to Firestarter —> Events and you will notice that the last line is the “missing” external disk which has an “unknown” service
7 – right-click the mouse on this line and “Allow connections from source”. Now the external hard disk is visible from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and it is possible to work on it!
8 – to be sure that your LAN device will be rightly connected to Ubuntu 10.04 every time you boot up it: go to System –> Preferences –> Startup Applications
9 – add a new Firestarter rule typing the following command: sudo firestarter
That’s all! I hope you can find this post useful!
After upgrading my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS I had an error window at every boot up session. The message advised me about:
Could not update ICEauthority file /home/username/.ICEauthority
ICEauthority is the Inter-Client Exchange (ICE) Protocol that allows authentication, negotiation, setting up and taking down connections between programs. In few words, if two programs have the same cookies, they will talk and exchange data through ICEauthority.
To fix this matter open the Terminal and type:
ls -al
Then you find a line similar to this:
-rw——- 1 root root 35226 2011-10-06 00:24 .ICEauthority
This means that your profile (username on a Linux OS) is not allowed to manage ICEauthority and you have to gain full permission to solve the boot up problem:
sudo chown username:username ~/.ICEauthority
Where username is your user profile on Linux.
Then type:
sudo chmod u+rw ~/.ICEauthority
To check if you succeeded, type again:
ls -al
and this time you will find a line like this:
-rw——- 1 username username 35226 2011-10-06 00:24 .ICEauthority
That’s all!
At the end I decided! I want to uninstall OpenOffice on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and substitute it with an always updated LibreOffice. After some researches on the web I decide to develop my own procedure to be sure that LibreOffice will be always updated with the last available edition.
First of all it is necessary to remove OpenOffice:
– go to System –> Administration –> Synaptic Package Manager –> Quick Search and type OpenOffice
– Mark for Complete Removal all the installed OpenOffice software and Apply your choice, then exit the program
Now, open Terminal and add the PPA repository:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
Update the system:
sudo apt-get update Last but not least, go back to Synaptic Package Manager –> Quick Search and type LibreOffice
Select the LibreOffice software and all the add-ons you prefer then Apply your choice.
That’s all! You have the last version of LibreOffice installed on your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and you are also sure that Synaptic will update the packages when a new version is available!
If you installed Ubuntu and Windows at the same time, you probably noticed that when you start your computer you can choose what operating system to launch. The responsible software for this is usually the GRUB loader and its menu. Obviously, after you install Ubuntu, it is placed as the first option and if you do not explicitly choose Windows in a few seconds, Ubuntu will be started. But what if you want Windows as your default option? Here is how you change the order:
1. Launch a new Ubuntu Terminal (Applications, Accessories). Type in the following command:
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst_backup
This will create a backup of the GRUB configuration file.
2. Now open the file. We’ll do it with a new command:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
You will be prompted for a password, after which a text editor will be launched. In most of the situations, the menu.lst file contains many comments. You have to search for a line that says
default 0
This should not be very far from the end of file. Here you will have to intervene. After a few lines you will the variable called ‘timeout’ and its value (10 by default). If you want to have more or less time available for choosing your operating system, change the 10 with what number you want.
So back to the boot sequence. Scroll through the file again until you find:
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-generic
There will be more titles. Count the order number of Windows, but start from 0. The value you choose should overwrite the default one. For example, if Windows is the 4th title in the list, you will need to type
default 4
instead of ‘default 0’, which was described above. All you need to do at this point is to save the file and restart your computer.
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