Android FOSS Market

I'm always in the market for free Android software (free as in beer and/or speech). Today I came across F-Droid which is a new market catering solely to FOSS software. They have an app as well as a convenient mobile interface for downloading packages. androidVNC is already listed as well as a number of other very useful applications. I'm sure this resource will only grow with time.

Remotely enable RDP

This morning I was stuck in what seemed to be a precarious catch22. I needed to make a remote desktop connection to a computer, but RDP was disabled. My first search of the web turned up a remote registry solution. Unfortunately remote administration of the registry was disabled by policy. Luckily it is possible to remotely enable "terminal services" without remote registry hacking as I learned in this blog post. You'll need a copy of psexec which you can download here, and you need to be logged in with an account which has local admin (at least) on the target. Then run the following command:

psexec \\machinename reg add "hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server" /f /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0

Then fire up mstsc and you're in.

Install gmote on 64 bit linux

It appears that gmote and vlc may not play nicely together on 64 bit systems (specifically Ubuntu 11.10). Gmote consistently complained that it was unable to load libvlc.so even though vlc was correctly installed and working. I found this tip here to issue the following command to fix the problem:

sudo apt-get install libvlc-dev

One command, and 20 seconds of patience, and now gmote works like a charm.