My little exercise tonight was attempt to get a freeswan client to connect to my RVS4000. I couldn’t do it, at least not with my patience level. I did, however, manager to get the Linksys QuickVPN software to work under wine without any trouble.

1. Install wine
2. Download the latest version of QuickVPN from LinksysInfo
3. Run the QuickVPN installer (e.g. wine VPN_Client_xxyy.exe)
4. Login to your router,
   1. Setup a VPN user for yourself
   2. Generate a new certficate
   3. Export the client certificate to your desktop
5. Move the client certificate (in the screenshot you’ll see this as RVS4000_Client.pem) to “~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Linksys/Linksys VPN Client”
6. Fire up the client and put in your login and connection details.
7. Enjoy!

The good folks over at ZaReason have pulled out a great holiday present for your favourite geek: The Ubuntu Keyboard.

One of the annoyances with my desktop system is that sound in Flashplayer 9 does not work. Or rather, did not work until today. My setup requires OSS and for whatever reason the normal libflashsupport.c code does not work. I also use PulseAudio (fantastic system, you should try it) and noticed they have experimental support but for a more recent release than what is in Gutsy. I stumbled across an older copy which is compatible with the version in Gutsy (deb packaged by CJ van den Berg). The result: sound from flash using Pulseaudio and OSS in Gutsy! Happiness abounds!

For grins, I built Gnome’s Online Desktop on my i686 computer running Gutsy. My reaction was one of mild interest. I certainly like the idea but the current alpha is, by definition, not very polished.

I think this project has a lot of potential so I’ll be monitoring it’s progress over the coming months. Building this is not for the feint of heart: it requires many undocumented dependencies and a big pipe to grab the 164 branches needed to build. If you are interested, I highly recommend you create a new userid and build it there (it messes with your gconf settings). I was not able to get a successful build on my 64-bit system.

Enjoy the screen shot.

I had the pleasure of meeting Randall Munroe today for a few hours. Randall is best known for his comic strip, xkcd.  During this time he had sketched out several funny Ubuntu-themed “outtakes” on a whiteboard.  Under pain of being placed in the center of a 20m equilateral triangle with a raptor in each corner, I am obliged not to post the content of the sketches.  However, I am happy to report that Randall is quite fond of Ubuntu and I hope he has been sufficiently encouraged to do a public comic with an Ubuntu theme in the near future.