External Display / Projector Setup Instructions

x120e, s10e, & R61 laptop models

The Tech Department has had a number of people call us with problems connecting their Ubuntu laptops with an external display or projector and Mr. DiGiulio has developed this helpful documentation. To bookmark these instructions, right-click on the title above it. 

x120e

1. Turn on projector
2. Plug projector cord into laptop. If no image appears on board...
3. Press Fn button and F7 button at same time. Wait 5-10 seconds for new settings to apply. If no image appears on board...
4. Press Fn and F7 again. Wait 5-10 seconds for new settings to apply. If no image appears on board, repeat this step until the image appears and looks correct.
5. If internet sites look strange, press CNTRL and + or - buttons to adjust the view
6. If apps look strange, play with ZOOM settings on their VIEW menus

s10e

1. Turn on projector
2. Plug projector cord into laptop. If no image appears on board...
3. Press Fn button and F3 button at same time. Wait 5-10 seconds for new settings to apply. If no image appears on board...
4. Press Fn and F3 again. Wait 5-10 seconds for new settings to apply. If no image appears on board, repeat this step until the image appears and looks correct
5. If internet sites look strange, press CNTRL and + or - buttons to adjust the view
6. If apps look strange, play with ZOOM settings on their VIEW menus

R61

1. Turn on projector
2. Plug projector cord into laptop. If no image appears on board...
3. On the computer, click on: Main Menu icon (upper left) > System > Administration > NVIDIA X Server Settings
4. On the left side of the NVIDIA window, select “X Server Display Configuration”
5. On the right side of the NVIDIA window, select the DISPLAY tab if not already selected
6. On the right side of the NVIDIA window, click the “Detect Dislays” button
7. In the MODEL dropdown menu, select the projector/external display (not “LEN” …that’s your laptop... if “LEN” is your only option, leave cord plugged in, log off, log back in and begin at STEP THREE above)
8. Click the CONFIGURE button
9. Select TWINVIEW
10. In the RESOLUTION dropdown menu, select the highest resolution (or 1440x900 if that is a choice, which is the same resolution as your laptop/LEN)
11. In the POSITION dropdown menu, select CLONES
12. Click the APPLY button
13. Confirm your APPLY in the popup window
14. Click QUIT
15. Confirm your QUIT in the popup menu

If you have any problems concerning this issue or any others, please call the Technology Department at the following numbers:

Matt Kuppinger(1235)
Marena Lewis(1233)
Matt DiGiulio(1261)
Mark Payton(1298)

or email us at helpdesk@whitfieldschool.org and we will be glad to help you.

Is my Linux laptop secure?

The way you answer this question may change depending on the type of security you are talking about. There are many aspects to laptop security and I’m going to address a few of them here.
1) Physical – This is the type of security which requires the most attention for students at school as well as in the outside world. Whitfield is known for the safe environment which we all know and appreciate. However, there are times when people visit our campus and even though we expect them to adapt to our culture, we could be surprised by individuals who are not in keeping with our moral and ethical standards. Okay, when our campus is open to everyone, anyone could take advantage of our openness. Since we don’t exactly employ an army of security guards, they cannot be everywhere all the time. They are very good, but they are not omnipresent. This is why you need to keep all your valuables, including your laptop in a secure place such as your locker or the shelves in the IC.
2) Passwords – I like to think of a password as the key to your computer. Just like a key to your home, you wouldn’t go around handing a copy of it to all your friends or leaving it lay around where just about anyone could pick it up, right? Okay, maybe some of you do that, but if I were you, I’d be more careful than that. If you want to keep your key (password) secure, you won’t share it with anyone. Anyone! In the event that your computer needs to be serviced you may be required to divulge the password to myself or one of the other technical staff, but when you get the computer back, you should change your password. You ask, “How do I change my password?” Well, temporarily you will need to do that when you are picking up your computer from us but that will change to make it more convenient sometime in the spring. When you do change your password it will need to be at least 8 characters long and it would be a good idea to mix numbers with both upper and lowercase letters.
3) Malware and Viruses – Have you ever wondered why you don’t see an antivirus or antimalware program running on your Ubuntu laptop? You don't really need antivirus software in  Ubuntu. To install on your computer a virus needs your password. Did I tell you not to share your password with anyone? Also, if you happen to click on and/or receive a link to a program with the .exe or .zip extensions (as most viruses are sent) Linux will try to handle this with Wine and will fail. Now if the file has an extension like .rpm, .deb or .bin you will be looking at a linux file but only one of these will be used on an Ubuntu laptop like yours. Therefore, when the program asks you for your root or sudo or admin password, you should not give it unless your certain that the program is safe and trustworthy. For further information please visit the Linux.com website.
4) Firewalls and Network Security – A firewall is a program which runs on your computer to keep hackers from accessing your laptop over the internet. Since we have a firewall in place between the outside world the only hackers you need to be concerned with are the ones who are on Whitfield’s campus (see paragraphs 1 & 2 above) and we haven’t really had many instances of student’s hacking into their peers’ computers. You should also know that there is an easily configurable firewall available from the Ubuntu Software Center called gufw if you want to add some additional protection. You can get more details from Linux.com.

For more tips on Security in Ubuntu please visit --->  Easy Linux Tips Project
Technological Security is a hot buzzword recently but I think I’ve covered most of the important items here. For further reading you might want to visit the following website in order to Avoid nine fatal mistakes.

How to get the latest Linux updates.

By now, most of us are aware of the Update manager in Ubuntu which can be found from the Main menu by selecting System | Administration | Update Manager but some of our updates are applied by use of a script which runs hourly on each Linux laptop. If something has caused those updates to be interrupted, you may find that your computer is not up to date. It is not a bad idea to manually run these updates once a week and even necessary when you find that something is not working or if your X120 (which seniors and juniors have) keeps locking up randomly to force you to power it off.  Here is how you can manually run the BCFG2 updates in order to help your computer provide you with the best service possible. 
From the Main Menu go to Accessories and then Terminal.




A text window will pop up on your desktop. At the command prompt in this window type in the command between these arrows ---> sudo bcfg2 –vdq <--- and press enter.
You may be prompted for your password but you will see nothing on your screen when you type it so type carefully.



Finally, when you see the end of the script, your screen will look something like this:



When you see the prompt with the $ at the end of it, you can type “exit” (without the quotes) to close the terminal window.
Congratulations, you have successfully updated your Linux laptop.

Automatically backup your LibreOffice Files

To setup LibreOffice to keep a backup copy of your working document, follow these steps:
1) Open the Tools menu and click on the “Options…” choice, at the bottom of the menu:

2) From the Options window, expand “Load/Save” and select “General”:

 

3) Check the box in front of “Always create backup copy” (circled above). Click the “OK” button to close this dialog box.
Once this is done, LibreOffice will save the previous version of your document every time you save a new one. If the current version gets corrupted for any reason, the previous version will generally be safe. You should probably change the AutoRecovery field to 3-5 minutes.
To locate the backup version of your file should you need to recover a file:

1) From the Linux system menu, select “Places” then “Home folder” to open your documents folder:

2) From the menu in this window, select “View” and then “Show Hidden Files” (or press CTRL-H) to display a number of files and folders normally hidden from view:

Your screen should now look something like this:

3) To navigate to the location where LibreOffice stores its backup versions, select the following folders in sequence: “.LibreOffice” (highlighted above), “3”, “user” and “backup”.

4) If you have already made the changes to the LibreOffice settings and have saved any documents, then there should be files in this folder. These files will have the same name as your documents, but will end with “.bak”. Copy the file to your desktop. Make sure you do not actually move the file or you risk losing your backup version. You can do this by holding down the “Ctrl” key on the keyboard while dragging the document to your desktop (or another location of your preference) or by right-clicking on the file and selecting copy, the right-clicking where you want to put it and selecting paste.

5) When the file is on your desktop, replace the “.bak” extension with “.doc” to allow LibreOffice to edit this file. It is also advisable to change the name of the document itself, not just the extension, to prevent anything from happening to your original backup. If you keep the same name, LibreOffice will overwrite the backup when you next save this document. While this should be okay, it is safer if you name it something else and preserve the original backup.

6) Once the extension (and the filename) has been changed, you can open the document in LibreOffice and continue working at the point of your previous save.
Last, for this to be most effective, you must save frequently!

Help! I was editing a file and my computer froze

This is a common problem this year with the laptops used by the Juniors and Seniors.

Symptoms: You are typing a research paper (or any document) and the keyboard and mouse completely lock up and stop working. This could happen even when you aren’t doing anything or anytime the computer is running. At this point the only way to unlock your computer is to press the power button until it turns off. When you turn the computer back on and log in you will want to open any application you were using to edit a file. This does not apply to Google Docs or any web application. LibreOffice seems to be the application which gives us the most trouble here. When you open LibreOffice after your reboot, the application will attempt to recover any files which were open when the computer locked up. If you are lucky the file recovers to the last point where it was when auto-save executed. If you are not lucky, the recovery fails and you are left with an empty file even if you had 5 or 6 pages already saved.

Advice: Currently there is no solution for this scenario. However, there are a couple things you can do to minimize your vulnerability. First, make a backup of your files often. This can be done by following my earlier post How can I backup my files to the Whitfield Network? Secondly, within LibreOffice select Tools/Options from the top menu. Under Load/Save choose General and check Always create backup copy. While you are in there, also make sure Save AutoRecovery information is checked and set for 3 or 5 minutes.

Now for the good news: We have known about the problem with this model freezing up since early in the school year and we, along with our partners at Lenovo and Revolution Linux have been trying to find a solution since then. This past Wednesday (November 2) we started testing a possible solution. If all goes well, we will be making that solution available to everyone on Monday, November 7th. We know that this has been a very stressful situation for our students and we are anxious to get a resolution in place. Thank you for your patience and cooperation, especially those kind teachers who voluntarily extended deadlines to students who were affected by this unfortunate problem.

Please continue to watch Kupp's Korner often for more helpful hints in the future.

A word about Linux, Ubuntu, servers and iFolder

Linux – Linux is an operating system designed after the venerable UNIX operating system. We all know what Windows is, and Apple has it’s MAC OSX, but Linux is open source, which means there are no restrictions on who can develop enhancements or features to the operating system. Linux, which includes Google’s Android, runs on a wide variety of computer hardware, including mobile phones, tablet computers, routers, televisions and many other devices including supercomputers. Most websites in the world run on a Linux or UNIX server.

Ubuntu – Since Linux is open source, there are many different companies which publish their own distribution of the operating system. Novell has their version which is called OpenSUSE. Canonical works with the open source community to develop Ubuntu which is the most widely used version of Linux.

iFolder – iFolder is a system that allows people to easily share folders of any type of files with other users, whether they use the same or different operating systems. Thus, Linux, Windows and Macintosh users can all use iFolder to share files. Although iFolder is easy and in some cases almost seamless to use, supporting it is not easy since there are several components in the iFolder system. The first part is the server software which runs on a Linux.. The second part is the Linux server itself which must run on hardware with a large disk  drive (300GB in our case) to hold the users’ files. The next part of the iFolder system is the client software which runs on user’s computers running Linux, Windows or MAC operating systems. Unfortunately, there is no client software which was designed specifically to run on the Ubuntu OS. the system we use at Whitfield for our computers. There is an iFolder client which was designed for a different Linux distribution and the engineers at the consulting company we use, Revolution Linux*, have gone to great pains to get that client working for the past 2 years. This was the first year that this task proved too much for Revolution Linux and we had to abandon iFolder at the beginning of the school year. We will re-address the iFolder issue at a later date.

*Revolution Linux is a Canadian based firm which has helped us configure our Ubuntu desktop environment for the past 3 years.

Please DO NOT upgrade to Oneiric Ocelot

Ubuntu publishes a new release of their operating system every April and October. Their latest release, "Oneiric Ocelot",  came out yesterday and was made available to the public. Anyone who is already using Ubuntu (including every laptop at Whitfield) will be prompted to upgrade their system as soon as they log in. Since Whitfield's linux environment is highly customized this upgrade will essentially disable the existing software and make it unusable. Please do not upgrade your laptops to Oneiric Ocelot. However, normal updates are still encouraged and advisable. 

In the event you upgrade your Ubuntu laptop or for any other reason it becomes unusable, please bring it to Glassman so we can repair it. 

How can I backup my files to the Whitfield Network?

Although there are many ways to backup your files such as a thumb drive, or services like Dropbox, Ubuntu One and SpiderOak there is another way to make your files accessible from any computer on Whitfield's network and Citrix. Every student and faculty member has a home directory on the network where they can store files. Here is brief video of how to copy your files from you desktop to your home directory on the network.

My computer won't print...

Several people have told me that they have problems printing to our Toshiba and Canon Printers. Here are some steps to help you troubleshoot the problem.

1. Do you see the Papercut application on your desktop? It should look like this
2. If you don't see this application, it might be minimized or you can restart it by logging off your computer and then logging back on. (Rebooting is not necessary.) If you have a Windows or Mac based computer, you can just restart the application.
3. Try printing again. In a few seconds you should be prompted to login to the PaperCut application. After doing so, you should see a message saying that your print job has been sent to the printer queue.
4. If you don't receive a login prompt for PaperCut or the message saying that your job was sent to the queue, please refer to the instructions for setting up printing on the Aeneid or come to Glassman for assistance. 

Introducing Kupp's Korner

Technology at Whitfield has undergone some changes in our environment this year and it seems that now would be a good time to help people learn about the changes.

• First of all we have a new Director of Technology who is full of excitement for the potential of Whitfield Technology. 
• Secondly, we have a new printing system which will allow better tracking and reduce the amount of waste from printing unnecessary duplicates.   
• Some of the changes were not expected such as the loss of personnel, tsunamis and hurricanes which force our shipment of computers and hardware to be delayed by several weeks. 

Now we are looking forward to the possibilities this year brings. As I thought about this long and hard in September, I decided on a couple things which could help Faculty, Students and the Technology department to make improvements in how we address technological issues.

The first idea I had was to start this blog so that on a regular basis, I could post some helpful articles such as you might find in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) website. 

The second idea was to promote the use of helpdesk@whitfieldschool.org which some of you are already using. Sending an email to this address will have a two-fold affect. First, it will open a ticket in our help desk tracking software so that we can track the progress of the problem/issue/resolution. It will also provide a level of visibility in the Technology department which doesn't exist when an email is sent to only one person since the whole department has access to our Webhelpdesk software.

Finally, I would just like to offer my appreciation for the support, assistance and patience which our Whitfield community has offered to the Technology Department.

Please continue to watch Kupp's Korner often for more helpful hints in the future.