Ubuntu Configuration Guide for Imperial College London

This is an unofficial and unsanctioned guide for configuring an Ubuntu GNU/Linux system at Imperial College London, based on my personal experiences getting my Vaio notebook playing well with the network and its services. Pretty much everything you'd want to work, works once given appropriate configuration. Imperial is fairly GNU/Linux-friendly, as you'd hope from a College that prides itself on its strengths in science and technology. The officially-supported distribution is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), despite the massive shift in public interest away from Red Hat / Fedora since mid 2005.

Basic Set Up

I'm using a 64-bit installation of Ubuntu Hardy. Gutsy worked OK, but since Hardy is an LTS release, I'm targeting these instructions to it, and they assume that you have an otherwise working install.

Setting up VPN for Off-Campus Access

To access Imperial network resources when off campus, you have to use VPN. VPN is installed by default on Ubuntu. Please follow the instructions on Imperial's site.

Getting on the Wireless LAN on Campus (Imperial-WPA)

Imperial-WPA is the name of the authenticated wireless network that is available whenever you are within range of a campus access point (AP). When logged on to Imperial-WPA, your machine is effectively on the Imperial internal network so you don't need VPN to access your H drive or make a remote desktop connection. Select it with the Network Manager Applet.nm-applet icon

WiFi Selection

Then enter your Imperial username in the Identity field and your Imperial password in the Password field, then hit Connect. Ignore the other fields, they're not required.

WiFi Logon

Making a Remote Desktop Connection

Once on the Imperial network either by VPN or Imperial-WPA you can connect to your desktop computer with rdesktop, replacing myusername and my-asset-tag with your own values.

]$ rdesktop -u myusername my-asset-tag.ic.ac.uk

If you want to use Imperial's authentication server and your local keyboard has an American layout, use the following command:

]$ rdesktop -d IC -u myusername -k en-us my-asset-tag.ic.ac.uk

rdesktop has lots of options (like full-screen, -f), so check them out.

]$ man rdesktop

Setting up Printing

Printing is well supported and pretty slick. The official documentation is located here. The important details to note are:

Hostname: ictprintservice.cc.ic.ac.uk
LPD print queue name: ICTprintservice_mono

And you also need to download the PrintServce PPD file.

Then go System->Administration->Printing->New Printer. Select/enter the following (where username is your Imperial username) :

Hit forward and select 'Provide PPD file', then locate the PPD file you just downloaded. Hit Forward and enter a human-readable printer name, description and location. Hit Apply. Printing is now installed!

Connecting to Your H Drive

First, go to this page to find the address of the server that contains your H drive. Copy the contents of the fields directly beneath

Windows NT, 2000 or XP users, your home directory can be found at:

which should look something like

\\icfs16.cc.ic.ac.uk\username

Now go Places->Connect to Server and enter your server (between the \\ and \) and username (after the last \).

H Drive

Hit Connect, enter your Imperial password and you are done. 'Imperial H' is now a bookmark that you can find under Places->Bookmarks.

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This file last modified 1121hrs 30 April 2010 © Michael Doube 2004-2010 :: Designed to be interoperable and standards-compliant. Looks best with Mozilla Firefox.