Alors pour les curieux, la méthode n’est au final pas si compliquée que celà !

Etape 1 : Installer l’addon SANE sur le ReadyNas (lien ici). Cet addon installe tout l’environnement SANE sur le NAS, élément qui permet de rendre le scanner accessible sur le réseau pour les postes qui le voudront.
Etape 2 : Configurer son poste Ubuntu pour effectivement scanner le NAS. En effet par défaut l’outil de scan (XSane) ne regarde qu’en local ! Il faut donc éditer le fichier /etc/sane.d/net.conf pour y ajouter une ligne avec l’adresse IP du ReadyNAS
Etape 3 : Démarrer son XSane … et Tadam ! Le scanner est bien découvert

Pas si compliqué non ? Alors bon courage pour ceux qui tomberont ici !

I started to look for some info on the Internet, and found this first Howto about the subject. The idea is to install and configure a different Xserver than the one used by default in Ubuntu, configure GDM (the default window manager) to enable remote access as well as remote login, and finally use a simple VNC viewer on the client side to access the beauty. Unfortunately it’s only after a few tests that I discovered that it was addressing a rather old version of Ubuntu, and that Gutsy definitely needed some different configuration … But after already a few hours of work, I was on the good track.
I continued looking for info, and found the official help page for VNC, which I though would directly give me the good configuration to apply … This was to good to be true First let me say about this tutorial is that I do not really understand their server/client differentiation since all the GDM configuration actually happens on the server side … or at least that’s were I did it ! But since the first tutorial was pretty clear, I took it that on was on the right page. Anyhow this help page gave me some few extra pointers but I still could not get the connection from the client working and still got the “connection refused” message. At that point, I was really getting annoyed and close to letting everything go.
Fortunately I finally found this post which doesn’t say much, but made my day ! It helped me tuneup the last configuration problem I had ! And I was up and running with my new hardware from my old system !
With all that, you don’t know what configuration I made … Don’t worry here it comes !

• First I installed xinetd via the traditional

  sudo apt-get install xinetd

• Then I configured the vnc service by creating a vnc file in the /etc/xinetd.d/ directory :

  sudo nano /etc/xinetd.d/vnc

  and adding the folowing data into it

  service vnc
  {
  	disable = no
  	socket_type = stream
  	protocol = tcp
  	wait = no
  	user = nobody
  	server = /usr/bin/Xvnc
  	server_args = -inetd :1 -query ::1 -broadcast -once -fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/ -securitytypes=none -desktop=Server -extension XFIXES -geometry 1152x864
  }

  Note that the final parameter (geometry) is actually the size of the old machine, so the one I’ll be connecting from with the VNC client.

• I modified the /etc/services file to add this line:

  	vnc             5901/tcp                        # VNC with GDM

• I modified the gdm.conf (/etc/gdm/gdm.conf) file to have the following lines in the sections :

  ....
  Greeter=/usr/lib/gdm/gdmgreeter
  ....
  DisallowTCP=false
  ....
  [xdmcp]
  Enable=true
  ....
  

• Finally restarting the xinetd and gdm services (sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart) should do the trick, but I did so many reboots, that a last one did not hurt so that’s what I did !
• And after all that, I used TightVnc client to connect to my mew machine on port 5901 ( you can actually also use xxx:1 instead of xxx:5901) and I saw the beautiful GDM login screen !

It is a warrior’s road, but there is an end to it … Keep faith, and result will come boys ! That’s always what I’m telling myself when dealing with Ubuntu’s tricky configuration problems

Right after that, insert your DVD in your drive, and you should be on the road for some classic DVD watching on your favorite free open-source OS !
For the record, I even successfully played the DVD from french comic Jean Marie Bigard, which was impossible on Windows XP !
PS: Sorry Vince, you were right, it IS simple to play DVD … Once you know the correct configuration

It is actually a pretty simple action, but no one seems to remember how it’s actually being done ! So just go in the System/Administration/Language Support. A window will open, and you can here select the languages that you want your OS to support, and which one you want to make the default one.

The actual pretty slick thing about this, is that all the applications (actually the one supported, but that’s most of them) will reflect this change. So if you made the mistake of installing Ubuntu in French and you’re wife is not happy with it … You have a two clicks exit

Oh and by the way if the “Connect To server..” function works somewhat great in Gutsy, forget about the “Shared Folders” one : it imply does not work and makes you loose your time !

So now my network is up and running perfectly !

It is due to the fact that, by default, the history is saved when a terminal is closed. But more than saved I should say replaced ! Meaning that the history is actually the one of the current terminal plus the one of the last terminal you closed.

If you want to have your history saved across multiple terminal, then I found this link here to guide you. Basically, you need to add

shopt -s histappend

to your .basrc file.

Only thing I’d like to do now, is to have the history file being saved every time I enter a command, not only when the terminal is closed, so that I could easily share information across multiple terminals … But I have not yet found the answer ! If you have it, talk to me !

First thing firt, you need to install the standard Windows codec, because they don’t come defacto with the Gutsy installation. A really good tutorial on the official site here, and look for “Playing Restricted Formats”.

For TVAnts the installation is straight forward. You need to install Wine, the windows emulator. Then you download the regular Windows setup file and run it with the previously installed Wine. Apparently it needs a rebbot for Wine to add the shortcut to the faked “Windows Programs”. After that you just need to add a channel or select one from the list, and open MPlayer or VLC on the url given by the program, which is usually something like http://localhost:8900/1.asf.

For SopCast, it’s not as simple. Unfortunately the gui does not really seem to work at the moment. So you need to install the command line util. You can download it from their website, and unzip it on your machine. It has a dependency over libstdc++5 which you can install from the package manager. Once this is done, you need to issue a command line of the like :

./sp-sc-auth sop://myserver/mychannel 3908 6908 >/dev/null &

3908 is the port that will connect to the server, 6908 is the port that will have the video, >/dev/null is to prevent the verbose output, and & to make the process run standalone which is obviously optional. Once this is done, you need to wait a little bit for the data to buffer (look at you systray and the network monitor), and then start your preferred player on the http://localhost:6908/tv.asf URL.

And there you go ! P2P Television enabled on your delighted Gutsy Ubuntu box !

If you have any problems, or need more information, don’t hesitate to ask !

Here is a really good link that says how to do that !

And now just need to solve the last problem : Video suttering when playing files over the network .. But this one seems a tricky one

Of course I first thought I was not using the right player, or not having the right codec. So I tried Totem, VLC, MPlayer … No result. So I installed all the codecs I could find … No result. So I decided to run from the command line, and got the fllowing message :

The program 'totem' received an X Window System error.This probably reflects a bug in the program.The error was 'BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)'.(Details: serial 86 error_code 11 request_code 140 minor_code 19)(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful    backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

Simply GREAT !

Some more googling took me to this page, where they tell you to add two more lines to your Xorg.conf file … But I was still in no luck, with the same problem.

At last, I found the following page in the netherlands, where they suggested to use the 16 bits default depth instead of 24 in the Xorg.conf file. So I did, and after a restart of the X server … YATTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ! There was
Hiro Nakamura !

Now I just need to catch up on 6 episodes

After digging a lot of google, I was not able to get it to work correctly, and found out that it was not supported by Xorg anymore here.
I went to use another crap old graphic card, a Cirrus, this one. I got this one to almost work, but only for a resolution of 800×600. It took me some time, and if you need I can give you the adequate Xorg.conf file. But this resolution was too small for any relevant usage.
I then got to wonder whether Xorg was really supporting old PCI graphic cards ? It turned out with more google searches that the legitimate answer to the question is NO.
So I decided to order some old AGP cards on PriceMinister (Ebay did not get me what I needed ), and got them two days later.
After that, a clean install of Gutsy, aka Ubuntu 7.10, gave me a working machine, with a decent resolution (1280 wide).

The conclusion of all that ? As Clowny said “With X, if it works, it works … If not, then there is no magic !”. And I would add, that if you want to use an old PCI card… Don’t expect it to be a smooth road !!!