How to solve JungleDisk's "Background Service Error" under Ubuntu 11.04 Unity

JungleDisk Desktop is great cloud backup and sync service run by RackSpace Hosting that offers unlimited online storage at the afforable rate of .15 USD per stored GB. While not as consumer-oriented and user friendly as its competitor Carbonite, I've gone cold turkey and am now using it exclusively on all my systems. Contrary to Carbonite, Jungle Disk is fully cross-platform with support for Windows (desktop and server editions), Mac OS X 10.5+ and Linux (DEB, RPM and TAR).

Linux support is becoming more important to me because I'm currently evaluating whether Ubuntu 11.04 could become by main operating system (I'll most likely stay in a dual-boot environment). In the light of these evaluations, I installed JungleDisk Desktop on all my Ubuntu-based systems. Installation went smoothly thanks to the pre-compiled .DEB packages, so did the initial setup wizard. Great. So I put the JungleDisk Desktop icon in my Unity dock for easy access..

Problem

However, clicking the icon causes the following error dialog to pop-up consistently:

Background Service Error

Jungle Disk Desktop is running in standalone mode and has detected the service is already running, or the service network port is in use. 

Please stop the service, or run Jungle Disk Desktop in non-standalone mode.

I tried running it from the terminal, and looked into JungleDisk's CLI parameters with the --help switch, to no avail. After searching high and low, I decided to contact JungleDisk support, as there was no mention of this behavior anywhere on the net.

Cause

It turns out this behavior is specific to Ubuntu 11.04's new UI shell 'Unity'. Normally, JungleDisk puts an icon in the system tray in the top right. Clicking on this icon opens the Jungle Disk Monitor app, which in this case, can't be accessed because Unity hides the tray icon for some reason. 

Workaround

The workaround to this issue is to install dconf-tools and use it to allow the junglediskdesktop app to install itself into the tray.

First off, fetch and install dconf-tools by firing up a Terminal and entering:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

Then, open dconf-editor using the same terminal (don't sudo!). 
In this dialog, drill down the tree to: / > desktop > unity > panel

Here, append the string 'junglediskdesktop' to the systray-whitelist enumeration (see screenshot). You may need to end any existing junglediskdesktop process and restart it to get the tray icon.

That should remedy the situation! I hope I've saved someone some time by documenting this, it wasn't at all obvious to me that the hidden tray icon was the culprit, as I was assuming that using the application shortcut would bring up the JungleDisk Activity monitor. 

I'd like to thank JungleDisk for their speedy, friendly and to-the-point support on the matter. They helped me find the solution to this problem in a day's time. Good job.

Disable Password After Sleep in Ubuntu 11.04

With the default account settings, Ubuntu 11.04 requires the user to enter a password when the system comes out of sleep or screensaver mode. The latter setting is easily disabled by navigating to System Settings > Screensaver and unchecking the box Lock screen when screensaver is active.

Disabling the password prompt after sleep (suspend) is not clearly surfaced in the settings pane, however. It can easily be disabled by use of gconf-editor. Here's how to go about it: 

1. Open a Terminal and enter gconf-editor
   
2. In gconf-editor (Configuration Editor), drill down the directory tree on the left: / > desktop > gnome > lockdown 
3. Uncheck the box with label disable_lock_screen

That's it. I wonder why this setting wasn't exposed in the regular settings UI. It's a potential security/privacy issue, but a valid option to set in case your computer is in a safe environment with no risk of being accessed maliciously when left alone.

Note: Using the disable_lock_screen option will also grey out the checkbox in the Screensaver settings dialog.

Set up keyboard layout switching in Lubuntu

While playing around with Lubuntu in a virtual machine I came across an annoying UX flaw. There is absolutely no way to set up keyboard layout switching in Lubuntu. I use this feature all the time on Windows and Mac to switch between QWERTY and AZERTY layouts. On Windows, this is done with a keyboard shortcut: ALT+SHIFT. On Mac there's a little switch on the menu bar. To make this work on Linux, however, we'll need to hop into a Terminal:

setxkbmap -option grp:ctrl_shift_toggle us,be

This causes CTRL+SHIFT to switch between US and Belgian keyboard layouts. Admittedly not extremely user friendly, but if you're setting up Linux in a virtual machine, you're probably not a novice user.

Back to work now ;-).