Install Spotify on Crunchbang 11

Installing Spotify
Next up was to install Spotify, and as I thought, there would be a hiccup due to a missing dependency. When this happens, a simple “apt-get -f install”” usually fixes it, but it turns out I needed an extra file from squeeze as Crunchbang 11 is based on Wheezy the new Debian Stable and Spotify Linux is old.

First I needed to download libssl0.9.8 from HERE and install it:

cd downloads
sudo dpkg -i libssl0.9.8_0.9.8o-4squeeze14_i386.deb

Then I had to add the Spotify Linux repo to my sources list:

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

And add these lines:

## SPOTIFY
deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

Next I imported the gpg key:

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 94558F59

Now I just needed to update and install Spotify

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install spotify-client

Synchronizing Google Calendar on Linux with Thunderbird Mail

Business needs and Google services
Currently setting up my desktop for business use and decided that i’d make as much use of Google’s free online services as possible (Mail, Drive, Calendar).

Web or desktop apps?
I usually do everything via web, but am looking for a company solution as well, which will mean that I can use Linux desktops with access to Gmail, Gcalendar by simply creating a company related email address.

What do you need?
Ok, so first you need to install Mozilla Thunderbird as the email application. Available in all repos (Icedove in Debian).

Addons
The first add-on is “Lightning” calendar.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar

Then “Provider for Google Calendar” to be able to synch with your Calendar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/provider-for-google-calendar/

These can both be install inside of Thunderbird via its built-in “Addon-Manager”

Setting up your Calender Synch
Now just restart Thunderbird for the add-ons to be activated. Then add you just need a few simple steps.

1. Open your Google Calendar in your browser
2. Click on the Settings link located in the box at the right of the page.
3. Click on the calendar you want to use with Thunderbird Lightning or Sunbird.
4. Click on XML button shown at the bottom which says “Private”.
5. Copy that link

Now in your Thunderbird Lightning Calendar, click “Add Calendar”, Choose “Network Calendar”, then paste that xml URL as the destination.

All done! You now have bi-directional functionality with your Google Calendar.

 

The disk drive for uuid= is not ready yet or not present, Continue to wait; or Press S to skip

So you just saw this message at boot: 
The disk drive for uuid=[long string of numbers and letters]…. is not ready yet or not present, Continue to wait; or Press S to skip

Why did this happen?
A couple of reasons. One of your hard-drives is knackered, You’ve been messing around and accidentally unplugged a hard-drive, a partition has been formatted or is unreadable.

Most Probable Cause:
You installed another Linux distro to dual-boot with, and it has renumbered your SWAP partition, and now your old Linux doesn’t recognize it.

How do I fix it?
1. Open your Terminal with 3 tabs (Ctrl+T) on Terminator, Gnome-Terminal etc. Or just open 3 terminals if you prefer that.


2. In terminal One, list your discs and partitions to find SWAP

sudo fdisk -l

Mine are:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 * 1859031040 3907028991 1023998976 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sda2 2048 1859031039 929514496 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sdb1 * 2048 488476671 244237312 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdb2 488476672 976773119 244148224 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sdc1 2048 256008191 128003072 83 Linux

/dev/sdc2 * 512007615 623081024 55536705 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sdc3 623081472 625141759 1030144 82 Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/sdc4 256008192 512006143 127998976 83 Linux

3. In Terminal Two, get the UUIDs for each partition:

sudo blkid

Mine are:

/dev/sda1: UUID=”5A81E99E5D0E4BEC” TYPE=”ntfs”

/dev/sda2: UUID=”2ED785F62B8C2905″ TYPE=”ntfs”

/dev/sdb1: UUID=”AC84B67484B6409E” TYPE=”ntfs”

/dev/sdb2: UUID=”6E5D895444E6C134″ TYPE=”ntfs”

/dev/sdc1: UUID=”fb9b8f73-8755-41d7-9c86-a721fd354bad” TYPE=”ext4″

/dev/sdc2: UUID=”22B0AAE8B0AAC1A1″ TYPE=”ntfs”

/dev/sdc3: UUID=”a90dd59c-cba2-4275-8fc0-23cf097675a2″ TYPE=”swap”

/dev/sdc4: UUID=”cb69c289-170b-4b37-8d8f-970707ec0fd0″ TYPE=”ext4″

4. We are going to turn SWAP off before we edit anything.

sudo swapoff -a

5. In Terminal 3 we will edit fstab and change the UUID for SWAP which we can see is wrong.

sudo vim /etc/fstab

Mine looks like this:

proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0

# / was on /dev/sdb1 during installation

UUID=fb9b8f73-8755-41d7-9c86-a721fd354bad / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1

# swap was on /dev/sdb3 during installation

UUID=8389288c-0a99-40c7-8d56-4c9333e458dc none swap sw 0 0

# Storage Partition 1 on /dev/sda1

UUID=5A81E99E5D0E4BEC /storage1 ntfs-3g auto,users,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=027,fmask=137,utf8 0

# Storage Partition 2 on /dev/sda2

UUID=2ED785F62B8C2905 /storage2 ntfs-3g auto,users,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=027,fmask=137,utf8 0

# Storage Partition 3 on /dev/sdb2

UUID=6E5D895444E6C134 /storage3 ntfs-3g auto,users,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=027,fmask=137,utf8 0

6. Now we are going to remove the UUID from the SWAP line, and leave the cursor just after the “=”

# swap was on /dev/sdb3 during installationUUID= none swap sw 0 0

7. Now look at Terminal Two and copy that UUID from SWAP, and paste it into the fstab file so it looks like this:

# swap was on /dev/sdb3 during installationUUID=a90dd59c-cba2-4275-8fc0-23cf097675a2 none swap sw 0 0

8. Save and Quit vim with “:wq + Enter”
9. Turn SWAP on again

sudo swapon -a

That’s it, all done, you now have the correct UUID for your SWAP partition.

A beginners guide to getting started with Linux

So you’ve made it here
Great, that means you have heard about Linux, and you have made the first step by doing a seach for “A beginners guide to getting started with Linux”. Well done! Let’s get started 🙂

How User Friendly is Linux for beginners?
Most Linux distros are available as a Live CD, which means you can start your computer with the CD in the CDROM drive and run it from there to try it for a while and have a play with your new chosen distro without having to install it, also it will NOT change anything at all on your computer whatsoever. So your Windows is completely SAFE.
Any good Linux suggestions for beginners?There are so many Linux distributions, and so many tastes, that it is impossible to tell somebody which is best for them and their computers. However, you can begin with the most popular which are easy for beginners to run and install. It’s like choosing a car for yourself, your partner, and your mother, each person has different needs and knowledge about cars. Distrowatch is a long established Linux website, and can give you a taste of what’s available from it’s Top 100, and also which are the most popular based on page-views. The current Top 5 as of Sept 2012 are:

Top 5 on Distrowatch.com:
1 Mint
2 Mageia
3 Ubuntu
4 Fedora
5 openSUSE

Other new-user-friendly distributions are:


Getting Information About Linux Distributions
Many new users have forgotten this skill. Go to the main website of your distro and also
the support forum and USE-THE-SEARCH-BOX. They all have them, and remember Google is your friend.
Be prepared to take notes, print information and sign up on a support forum.
Social networks are also teaming with experienced Linux users, go to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and do a search for “Linux”. make friends with Linux users, ask questions to everybody using the #linux tag.

A Few Extra Notes Before The Impatient Ones Dive In Feet First

a) Linux Distros are downloaded as an iso file and will need to be burned to a cd or dvd as an image NOT data. Most CD/Dvd burners have the option to burn as an “image”.
b) Linux images should be burned at the slowest possible speed. Each burner will vary, try with 4X to start with.
c) Not ALL distros work on ALL hardware, although Linux comes with 1000’s of hardware drivers preinstalled or easily available. So you may have a problem with you 8 year-old “no-brand” USB webcam you bought at the market 🙂
d) Use Google or a Forum Search for a “How to Install [Distro] Guide”, most distros will now offer you a step-by-step installation program that will do it all for you anyway, all you have to do is answer a few questions on the application by clicking Yes or No.
e) If in doubt at any stage whatsoever, ask on the forum, or friends on Google+ Twitter or Facebook.

Linux Forum Do’s and Don’ts
There is a little netiquette involved on many forums, and each has their own way of doing things to keep the forum friendly, helpful, organised and easy to use. Forum communities are like little towns; everybody knows eachother, you will always be welcomed with open arms, there will be hepful and not so helpful advice, young and old, novices and experts, and probably a village idiot too! 😀

Forums will be run by a team of Administrators and Moderators, some are friendly and blend in as members, others are like the Gestapo on a power trip with their new found position. In general they are all there to help maintain order and support with different degrees of efficiency.
DO

DO try and find an “introduction thread” and post a “Hello everybody, i’m new to Linux”. See what kind of welcome you get from staff as well as members.

DO read the forum rules. Some are long winded while others are short and to the point.

DO use the forum Help button which will provide a guide on forum use and features.

DO look at the various sections and post in the right place.

DO use the Forum Search, your question may already have been asked and solved and even have a Howto guide.

DO be prepared to help yourself, you get far more respect and quicker help if you can show that you have tried.

DON’T 

DON’T expect an answer within 5 seconds. Forums are run by volunteers with jobs, families and lives outside of the forum.

DON’T whine and complain. Stick to the point and stay positive, you will have everybody jumping in to help you.

DON’T double post your problem a second time or in different sections, you will not get helped any faster.

DON’T post useless information. “My screen is black”. State what your hardware is, and try to remember any error messages.

DON’T post attention-seeking exagerated titles. “[Distro] broke my computer!!!!!!!!! going back to Windows!!!!! AAaaaaah!”.

Linux Checklist
Ok, so, you have got a list of possible Linux distros, you know how to look for information and help. What now?

  • Go and buy a pack of good quality blank cd’s/dvd’s.
  • Head over to Distrowatch.com and read up on the Top 10 distros.
  • Start downloading your chosen Linux distro images.
  • Burn the images to cd’s
  • Insert in one into the CDROM drive and reboot the computer.
Nine out of Ten times, you will wait about 2 minutes and will be at a Linux desktop. You will be able to play and experiment without having to worry about any adverse effects whatsoever on your already installed Windows system.

That’s it !! Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux

How to install the Ati proprietary driver on Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint

I usually install my Ati drivers like this on Debian 64bit, and have just found out today that it’s the same for Kubuntu 64bit as well

1. Download Ati driver:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx

2. Get all needed files and headers

sudo apt-get install module-assistant

sudo m-a prepare

3. Remove (completely) fglrx drivers (If you have them installed):
sudo apt-get remove –purge fglrx

4. Reboot

5. Go to console

Ctrl + Alt + F1

6. Login as Root and kill X

/etc/init.d/kdm stop

7. Unzip and run the Ati driver installer

unzip amd-driver-installer-12-8-x86.x86_64.zip
sh amd-driver-installer-8.982-x86.x86_64.run

*NOTE* You can also run the installer from desktop terminal as well, but I always do graphic driver installs from the console with no X.

 8. Configure X as root

X -configure
cp xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

9. Reboot

Thar she blows !!!!!

How to install Picasa 3.9 on Debian Squeeze 64bit

Picasa on Debian Squeeze 64bit
I recently found that Picasa for Linux** no longer exists in the Google/Linux repository, so I had a Google around and  found a few guides on how to install it with Wine. There were a few different guides, but I got errors as my machine is 64bit and didn’t have all the necessary Wine/Windows libs etc..

**Just to be clear, Picasa was always a Windows package, but the Google/Linux download came prepackaged with Wine.


Wine and Winetricks
First you need to install Wine, and then download Winetricks

Wine

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

Winetricks

wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks
sudo mv winetricks /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/winetricks

**NOTE on Debian Wheezy (Testing)
Artur posted in the comments that you may need to install libwine-cms as mscms.dll is needed.

sudo apt-get install libwine-cms

Download Picasa 3.9 for Windows

cd && wget http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa39-setup.exe

Download Internet Explorer 7 64bit as There is no 64bit IE6
http://www.oldversion.com/windows/download/internet-explorer-7-0-x64

Without it, you won’t be able to login to your Google account.

**Note To Install ie7
You may have to symlink “wineserver” to /usr/local/bin, as suggested by Simon in the comments.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/wine/wineserver /usr/local/bin/wineserver

Place it in your Winetricks IE7 cache directory:

 mkdir -p /home/YOU/.cache/winetricks/ie7

cp /home/YOU/Downloads/IE7-WindowsServer2003-x64-enu.exe /home/YOU/.cache/winetricks/ie7

Download Cabextract
It is needed to extract Windows Cab files.

sudo apt-get install cabextract

Run the Winetricks script:

winetricks ie7

64bit Dependency

Before running Picasa setup with Wine you need an extra lib:

sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns

Finally Run the Picasa setup

wine picasa39-setup.exe

That’s it, now you’re good to go with Picasa!

Convert to and split flash video (flv) files for Youtube

I recently got asked about uploading videos to Youtube by a friend, and decided to look at the best way to first convert them to Flash (.flv) and then split them into chunks to get round the Youtube video size restrictions.

Winff
If you’ve never used Winff before, then you’ll love it. It allows you to choose your video file and convert into various formats, including Flash for Websites (.flv) It’s available in most Linux repos, and you can find more info here: http://winff.org/html_new/

sudo apt-get install winff

Ffmpeg
Ffmpeg is the tool for everything video and audio. It’s available in all Linux repos and you can find more info here: http://ffmpeg.org/

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

VLC Media Player:
I would also recommend installing vlc which is probably the most complete lightweight Video/Audio player available. It’s also available in all Linux repositories, more info here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Basically you just convert and split.
1. Open Winff, open the file you want to convert, and choose Flash/Website
2. Let it convert then open your terminal ready for some ffmpeg-foo

Ok, so, case scenario: 
You have a video file called “bacon” that is 30 minutes long and you want to create two 15 minute files. To get file number 1 you split from 0min for a duration of 15 minutes, and then for file number 2 you split from 15min for another duration of 15 minutes like this:

ffmpeg  split originalbacon.flv from [startpoint 0] [for duration 15] to newbacon1.flv
ffmpeg  split originalbacon.flv from [startpoint 15] [for duration 15] to newbacon2.flv

Which in the Terminal is like this:

ffmpeg -i input.flv -sameq -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:15:00 file1.flv

then:

ffmpeg -i input.flv -sameq -ss 00:15:00 -t 00:15:00 file2.flv

Happy splitting and uploading 🙂

Broadcom BCM4311 problem on Debian, Mint, Ubuntu

The STA driver does not work properly for the BCM4311 in Mint/Ubuntu/Debian.
The Restricted Driver Manager only gives you the Broadcom STA driver as an option.

Yesterday got asked by a friend to remove Ubuntu from his 5-year-old laptop. It’s a 64bit, 1Gb Ram machine, with an Nvidia graphics card and Broadcom wireless.

I was pretty certain that the 64bit Linux Mint 12 would just work out of the box, even though i’ve had problems with the Broadcom firmware on other machines (wireless cutting out and needing to be restarted)
The install went fine, and I went straight to the “Restricted Drivers manager” for Nvidia and Broadcom. The STA driver was recommended so I installed it. Only to find it would work.

My laptop at home works ok with the older B43 module, so I went the traditional route and installed that instead.

Install:

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer b43-fwcutter

Then unload both modules:

sudo modprobe -r b43 wl

Now reload the B43 module:

sudo modprobe b43

If when you reboot, the B43 module doesn’t get loaded:, just add it to “modules”:

sudo vim /etc/modules

and add b43 at the end of the list. Now it’ll load at boot.

The STA module may also load at boot, so just blacklist it by adding it to the blacklist:

sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and it like this:

blacklist wl

Now reboot, and you’ll have Broadcom 4311 wireless working.

Getting Java Console on HP ILO to work with Iceweasel on Debian 64bit

Remote HP Server Administration via ILO
If you ever have to connect to remote servers, especially HP which have ILO (Integrated Lights Out) technology, you’ll probably have come across the problem where you can get to the Administration page, but the Console won’t open.

Using Windows
I used to just fire up Virtual Box with Windows Xp (32bit) installed an do everything from there. ILO allows you to connect with Java install and on windows the .NET framework.

Linux and 64bit Java
One of he main issues with Linux and Java was that you could get the (Sun) 32bit Java to work, but the 64bit Java would fail miserably.

Java Versions
Java can be a real pain if you don’t have the latest version installed, and if you run Debian “Stable” (Currently Squeeze) you will have to install the Sun Java package from their website if you need the latest version as Debian is no longer going to have it in the repos: http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2011/15/#javarm

Java (64bit) Version/Package Experiments
One of my work colleagues recently called me over and showed me the ILO Java console open and working with Iceweasel on his Debian Squeeze box. I was amazed and asked how he did it.
He’d basically installed a specific version (jdk1.6.0_17) of the sun-java6-jdk package, and symlinked to it.

Howto:

  • 1. Download the sun-jdk1.6.0_17 source (i’ll post a link later)
  • 2. Unpack it to /opt
  • 3. Cd to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
  • 4. Symlink these two files
libjavaplugin_jni.so -> /opt/java/jdk1.6.0_17/jre/lib/amd64/libjavaplugin_jni.so
libnpjp2.so -> /opt/java/jdk1.6.0_17/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

Howto Quick n Easy Manual Wireless Wpa2 PSK

Manual Commandline Network setup:

So this guide is for those of you who only connect to the same router via Wpa2/Psk encrypted wireless. Although if you want to, you can scan and connect to any wireless connection manually using the wireless-tools suite of scripts.

Wireless setup via a Gui:

If you regularly roam and need to search for and connect to different wireless connections, i’d suggest you install wicd-gtk, it’s in most Linux distro repositories. There’s also network-manager-gnome which provides the nm-applet gui. I prefer the manual method as the gui apps tend to write over system config files. For example, nm-applet removes your dns configs in /etc/resolv.conf.

Wireless Firmware:

Ok, you need to have your wireless drivers installed and working. I’m using a Broadcom BCM4138, whose drivers are supplied via the “firmware-b43-installer” which fetches the firmware from openwrt.

More on B43 herehttp://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#b43_and_b43legacy

Next up you need to authenticate with Wpa using PSK TKIP, this is accomplished by installing wpasupplicant:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant

Now you need to edit a couple of files:

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

Supposing your wireless card is called wlan0, and you want a static IP address you add this:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.0.3
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1
wpa-ssid youressid
wpa-psk yourpassword

Just to make sure you can surf the net, check your dns config. I put my router IP and the Google Open DNS IP as well.

sudo vim /etc/resolv.conf

And add:

nameserver 192.168.0.1
nameserver 8.8.8.8

Now to connect, you only have to issue one command, then every time you login after that you will automatically be connected:

sudo ifup wlan0

That’s it, no need for Gui applications sucking resources and overwriting important files. Just a quick and easy auto-connected wireless every time you bootup.

Crunchbang Linux Right Mouse Click Gpg Encrypt/Decrypt scripts

Thunar Right-Click Menu Encryption/Decryption
This was a script inspired by machiner on the LxH Forum who showed me a cool Encrypt/Decrypt script a while ago.

Gpg and Password Protection
I decided to add a password dialogue box as well, which is launched in an xterm. I tried a Zenity diaogue box, but it caused a few problems with input and output, so my work colleague Eduardo stepped in and suggested doing it with an xterm pop-up instead. Edu is a far better coder than me.

Pgp/Gpg Key Creation
Obviously you need to have created pgp-keypair, I used Gpg (Gnu Privacy Guard) frontend, and you can find a Howto HERE You will also need “xterm” installed, but should come as default.

The Encrypt/Decrypt Scripts
You need to create two bash scripts in either /usr/local/bin or your home ~/bin, I chose the latter as I always backup my personal scripts. I called them RMCencrypt and RMCdecrypt. “RMC” means Right Mouse Click 🙂

ENCRYPT

#!/bin/bash
# Handy Encryption Action ##

encrypt ()
{
#PASSWD=`zenity –entry –title “Password” –text “Enter password”`
#if [ “z$PASSWD” != “z” ]; then
# gpg -ac –no-options –passphrase $PASSWD “$1” || \
# zenity –error –text “Decryption failed: $?”
#else
# zenity –error –text “No password: Aborted”
#fi
xterm -e “gpg -ac –no-options ${1+\”$@\”}; echo -n \”Press \”; read”
}

## End Handy Encryption Action ##

encrypt ${1+”$@”}

DECRYPT

#!/bin/bash
## Handy Decryption Action ##
decrypt ()
{
#PASSWD=`zenity –entry –title “Password” –text “Enter password”`
#if [ “z$PASSWD” != “z” ]; then
# gpg –no-options –passphrase $PASSWD “$1” || \
# zenity –error –text “Encryption failed: $?”
#else
# zenity –error –text “No password: Aborted”
#fi
xterm -e “gpg –no-options ${1+\”$@\”}; echo -n \”Press \”; read”
}
## End Handy Encryption Action ##

decrypt ${1+”$@”}

Now just place those two scripts in ~/bin and make them executable (chmod +x).

Next up, open Thunar file manager, click the “edit” then “Configure custom file actions..” and add both scripts with a name and icon of your choice. I chose RMCencrypt and RMCdecrypt like the scripts, which Thunar Actions manager adds an %n after to encrypt the selected file.

You will now be able to encrypt and decrypt any file at the click of a (right) mouse button.


Complete Debian Linux Guide – On Your Desktop

There are guides that can be installed and accessed from your desktop, so no need for searching the internet to learn about Debian linux.

These multilingual guides can be installed with Synaptic or the command line:

debian-reference - metapackage to install (all) translations of Debian Reference
debian-reference-common - Debian system administration guide, common examples
debian-reference-de - Debian system administration guide, German translation
debian-reference-en - Debian system administration guide, English original
debian-reference-es - Debian system administration guide, Spanish translation
debian-reference-fr - Debian system administration guide, French translation
debian-reference-it - Debian system administration guide, Italian translation
debian-reference-ja - Debian system administration guide, Japanese translation
debian-reference-pl - Debian system administration guide, Polish translation
debian-reference-pt-br - Debian system administration guide, Portuguese translation
debian-reference-zh-cn - Debian system administration guide, Chinese(CN) translation
debian-reference-zh-tw - Debian system administration guide, Chinese(TW) translation

For example, I typed this in the terminal (and hit “enter”):
sudo apt-get install debian-reference-common debian-reference-en

Then once it was installed, I typed this in the terminal (and hit “enter”)
debian-reference

Then the complete Debian Reference Guide opened in my Chrome webbrowser. How cool is that ?!

Shopt for Bash – Cdspell for cd dir change mistypes

What is shopt? A marvellous BASH builtin command, that’s what it is!

I’ve added the whole shopt list to my .bashrc below, but i’m only going to talk about CDSPELL for cd dir change mistypes. One thing to remember is that if you issue a shopt command manually as a user or root, then close your terminal, it will revert back to OFF. I have added the shopt options to my .bashrc so that I can enable and disable the specific options i need. There are a few that are enabled by default, so if you decide you want them disabled permanently you just add a -u switch before them.
See the syntax below for enabling and disabling shopt options.

Issuing shopt SET or UNSET commands: From http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt-Builtin.html

Syntax
shopt [-pqsu] [-o] [optname …]

Options
-s Enable (set) each optname

-u Disable (unset) each optname.

-p Display a list of all settable options, with an indication of
whether or not each is set. The output is displayed in a form
that may be reused as input. (-p is the default action)

-q Suppresses normal output; the return status indicates whether the optname
is set or unset. If multiple optname arguments are given with `-q’,
the return status is zero if all optnames are enabled; non-zero otherwise.

-o Restricts the values of optname to be those defined for the `-o’ option to
the set builtin.

The cdspell bash builtin:
As you can see below, apart from the autoset options, I have manually set cdspell. If you spend a lot of time navigating directories via the terminal, you will often make spelling mistakes like “/ect”or “/Etc” instead of “/etc”, with cdspell enabled, bash will autocorrect the mistake and allow you to hit enter and still get to your destination. This saves a lot of time having to keep going back back and correcting directory paths.

My .bashrc shopt section:
############################
#
# SHOPT AUTOSTARTS
#
############################
# autocd
# cdable_vars
shopt -s cdspell # on MANUAL
#checkhash off
#checkjobs off
#checkwinsize on AUTO
#cmdhist on AUTO
#compat31 off
#compat32 off
#compat40 off
#dirspell off
#dotglob off
#execfail off
#expand_aliases on AUTO
#extdebug off
#extglob on AUTO
#extquote on AUTO
#failglob off
#force_fignore on AUTO
#globstar off
#gnu_errfmt off
#histappend on AUTO
#histreedit off
#histverify off
#hostcomplete off
#huponexit off
#interactive_comments on AUTO
#lithist off
#login_shell off
#mailwarn off
#no_empty_cmd_completion off
#nocaseglob off
#nocasematch off
#nullglob off
#progcomp on AUTO
#promptvars on AUTO
#restricted_shell off
#shift_verbose off
#sourcepath on AUTO
#xpg_echo off
############################

Squeeze and IpV6 mean a fun 2011 for Debian server admins

Bye bye IpV4
Well, it looks like our good old fashioned, 4-digited IP addresses are about to meet their maker and go to the digit matrix in the sky for good. There has been a lot of talk about the v4 to v6 doomsday, but everybody was hanging on until the last minute before making any changes.

I for one have spent years removing IpV6 from the network settings on my Debian desktop as there was a notable speed difference. But that was only because there was slowdown caused by a search for non-existent IpV6 addresses before the IpV4 search. Now it seems this will no longer be necessary as everybody slowly converts to IpV6.

2011 – Big year for Debian server admins
I work as a Debian server Admin, and 2011 is going to be a memorable year for my colleagues and I. Firstly, Debian Squeeze (6.0) was released as “Stable” yesterday (Feb 6th), which means we will start upgrading all our clients’ servers pretty soon, although we do still have a year of Security updates. And now we are facing more future changes with the changeover to IpV6.

Google and World IpV6 Day

In the same way your phone is associated with a unique number, your computer is assigned a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address when you connect to the Internet. The current protocol, IPv4, allows for approximately 4 billion unique addresses—and that number is about to run out.

This morning the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced (PDF) that it has distributed the last batch of its remaining IPv4 addresses to the world’s five Regional Internet Registries, the organizations that manage IP addresses in different regions. These Registries will begin assigning the final IPv4 addresses within their regions until they run out completely, which could come as soon as early 2012.

As the last blocks of IPv4 addresses are assigned, adoption of a new protocol—IPv6—is essential to the continued growth of the open Internet. IPv6 will expand Internet address space to 128 bits, making room for approximately 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses (enough to last us for the foreseeable future).

Google, along with others, has been working for years to implement the larger IPv6 format. They’re also participating in the planned World IPv6 Day, scheduled for June 8, 2011. On this day, all of the participating organizations will enable access to as many services as possible via IPv6.

Today’s ICANN announcement marks a major milestone in the history of the Internet. IPv6, the next chapter, is now under way.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/ipv6-marks-next-chapter-in-history-of.html

Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" Released – New Stable

Great news for Desktop users, the fun begins for Debian server admins

Desktop Users
Well the day all Debian and Debian derivative users (Crunchbang Linux) have been waiting for has finally arrived, a shiny new Debian Stable release. Desktop users get to dist-upgrade to a plethora of updates, but what about all the Linux Sysadmins out there.

Server Administrators
I work for a company in Barcelona, Spain (Eurogaran Informatica) who supply Debian servers with everything from MySQL Clusters, RAID, Asterisk PBX systems with Automated dialing, running our clients’ Java based web applications, firewalls, mail servers, web-servers, the list goes on, and we have obviously been talking about the impending upgrades.

Debian Security Updates
The good news is, that anybody running Lenny still has a year of security updates which allows plenty of time to make the transition. The only thing I am worried about is if our clients’ applications will bee 100% forward compatible with the new versions that have arrived with Squeeze, or if we will have to downgrade anything.

New Version Problems (Php5.3)
I’ve already noticed a few php websites which aren’t compatible with php-5.3, ie PHPmotion. This was only a testsite I was playing with last week, and obviously won’t be offering to any of our clients, but it is a valid example of how even minor upgrades can effect a company.

I’ll be posting any major Upgrade headaches in the weeks to come, and i’ll certainly be keeping my eye on the Debian mailing lists for Apache/Mysql/Cluster/Asterisk problems.

Any way, it was great news to wake up and read this today 🙂

—————————————————————————————————————-

Debian 6.0 Squeeze released

February 6th, 2011

After 24 months of constant development, the Debian Project is proud to present its new stable version 6.0 (code name Squeeze). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours. Alongside Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced with this version as a technology preview.

Debian 6.0 includes the KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, the GNOME, Xfce, and LXDE desktop environments as well as all kinds of server applications. It also features compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.2 of the LSB.

Debian runs on computers ranging from palmtops and handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of nine architectures are supported by Debian GNU/Linux: 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (s390), and ARM EABI (armel).

Debian 6.0 Squeeze introduces technical previews of two new ports to the kernel of the FreeBSD project using the known Debian/GNU userland: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for the 32-bit PC (kfreebsd-i386) and the 64-bit PC (kfreebsd-amd64). These ports are the first ones ever to be included in a Debian release which are not based on the Linux kernel. The support of common server software is strong and combines the existing features of Linux-based Debian versions with the unique features known from the BSD world. However, for this release these new ports are limited; for example, some advanced desktop features are not yet supported.

Another first is the completely free Linux kernel, which no longer contains problematic firmware files. These were split out into separate packages and moved out of the Debian main archive into the non-free area of our archive, which is not enabled by default. In this way Debian users have the possibility of running a completely free operating system, but may still choose to use non-free firmware files if necessary. Firmware files needed during installation may be loaded by the installation system; special CD images and tarballs for USB based installations are available too. More information about this may be found in the Debian Firmware wiki page.

Furthermore, Debian 6.0 introduces a dependency based boot system, making system start-up faster and more robust due to parallel execution of boot scripts and correct dependency tracking between them. Various other changes make Debian more suitable for small form factor notebooks, like the introduction of the KDE Plasma Netbook shell.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:

KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.4.5
an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 2.30
the Xfce 4.6 desktop environment
LXDE 0.5.0
X.Org 7.5
OpenOffice.org 3.2.1
GIMP 2.6.11
Iceweasel 3.5.16 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)
Icedove 3.0.11 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)
PostgreSQL 8.4.6
MySQL 5.1.49
GNU Compiler Collection 4.4.5
Linux 2.6.32
Apache 2.2.16
Samba 3.5.6
Python 2.6.6, 2.5.5 and 3.1.3
Perl 5.10.1
PHP 5.3.3
Asterisk 1.6.2.9
Nagios 3.2.3
Xen Hypervisor 4.0.1 (dom0 as well as domU support)
OpenJDK 6b18
Tomcat 6.0.18
more than 29,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 15,000 source packages.
Debian 6.0 includes over 10,000 new packages like the browser Chromium, the monitoring solution Icinga, the package management frontend Software Center, the network manager wicd, the Linux container tools lxc and the cluster framework Corosync.

With this broad selection of packages, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian’s archive ensure that Debian 6.0 fulfils the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release. It is rock solid and rigorously tested.

Starting from Debian 6.0, the Custom Debian Distributions are renamed to Debian Pure Blends. Their coverage has increased as Debian 6.0 adds Debian Accessibility, DebiChem, Debian EzGo, Debian GIS and Debian Multimedia to the already existing Debian Edu, Debian Med and Debian Science pure blends. The full content of all the blends can be browsed, including prospective packages that users are welcome to nominate for addition to the next release.

Debian may be installed from various installation media such as Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks or from the network. GNOME is the default desktop environment and is contained on the first CD. Other desktop environments — KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, Xfce, or LXDE — may be installed through two alternative CD images. The desired desktop environment may also be chosen from the boot menus of the CDs/DVDs. Again available with Debian 6.0 are multi-architecture CDs and DVDs which support installation of multiple architectures from a single disc. The creation of bootable USB installation media has also been greatly simplified; see the Installation Guide for more details.

In addition to the regular installation media, Debian GNU/Linux may also be directly used without prior installation. The special images used, known as live images, are available for CDs, USB sticks and netboot setups. Initially, these are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only. It is also possible to use these live images to install Debian GNU/Linux.

The installation process for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 has been improved in various ways, including easier selection of language and keyboard settings, and partitioning of logical volumes, RAID and encrypted systems. Support has also been added for the ext4 and Btrfs filesystems and — on the kFreeBSD architecture — the Zettabyte filesystem (ZFS). The installation system for Debian GNU/Linux is now available in 70 languages.

Debian installation images may be downloaded right now via BitTorrent (the recommended method), jigdo or HTTP; see Debian on CDs for further information. It will soon be available on physical DVD, CD-ROM and Blu-ray Discs from numerous vendors, too.

Upgrades to Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 from the previous release, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codenamed Lenny), are automatically handled by the apt-get package management tool for most configurations, and to a certain degree also by the aptitude package management tool. As always, Debian GNU/Linux systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes as well as the installation guide for possible issues, and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The release notes will be further improved and translated to additional languages in the weeks after the release.

About Debian

Debian is a free operating system, developed by thousands of volunteers from all over the world who collaborate via the Internet. The Debian project’s key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to the Debian Social Contract and Free Software, and its commitment to provide the best operating system possible. Debian 6.0 is another important step in that direction.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at http://www.debian.org/ or send mail to .

Adding Windows guides to my Linux blog

I k now it may seem strange to to start seeing Windows based Howto guides on a predominantly Linux blog, but the truth is after so long without having to fix Windows machines I am gradually forgetting all the old tweaks and fixes that come part and parcel with running a slow, inconsistent, unreliable operating system 🙂

I work as a Debian server IT admin for a company with various international clients, and although we provide and maintain Debian based clusters and servers, we also occasionally offer general support for certain clients. It’s not the norm (thankfully), but we do also get requests to help out with Windows desktop and server problems.

Hence the reason I will be adding a few tweaks and guides to my blog for safe-keeping and quick reference.

Up until about 2000/2001 I had Windows (Xp) on my laptop and a few other machines, and I constantly strived for better performance and security. Talking of performance, I managed to get Xp to run quite well on an old Toshiba Satellite that came with Windows ME installed. It only had a 650hz processor and 64Mb RAM, and somebody made the mistake of commenting that it would be “impossible” to run Xp on that laptop. Well, it only stands to reason that I would eventually end-up running and working with Linux, as the tweaking/hacking bug took hold.

Funnily enough that little Toshiba Satellite survived 6 years of Linux Distro-Tests and finally met it’s demise in 2007 *lump in throat, tear in eye* It survived Mandrake, Suse, Debian and from 2004 (Hoary) to 2007 (Dapper) was running nicely on Ubuntu, although it had multiple partitions on its little 6Gb hard-drive for distro tests.

Before changing to Linux, I used to tweak the hell out of Windows and regularly had to reinstall or create partitioned test installs, and it’s amazing the little tricks you learn with scripts, apps, editing the registry and tweaking the Windows default services. I used to know most of them by heart, but unfortunately (?), over the years I have forgotten many of those little Gems and have decided I need to have a little storage area on my blog to provide support for the uncleaned masses who still use this poor excuse for an operating system.

Incidentally, I do have an Xp install at home that is only used as a gaming machine, it does NOT have an internet connection, and only serves one purpose 😉

So there you go, an explanation as to why Windows material will be cropping up on my Linux blog,

Debian 6.0 Squeeze to be released with complete free Linux Kernel

Debian finally provides a Stallman/Fsf friendly kernel

The Debian project has been working in removing non-free firmware from the Linux kernel shipped with Debian for the past two release cycles. At the time of the releases of Debian 4.0 Etch and 5.0Lenny, however, it was not yet possible to ship Linux kernels stripped of all non-free firmware bits. Back then we had to acknowledge that freedom issues concerning Linux firmware were not completelysorted out.

We have nonetheless kept on working on splitting away non-free bits from the Linux kernel, thanks to the work of the Debian Kernel team and various Linux upstream developers. We are proud to announce that, to the best of our knowledge, all issues are solved and that we will be able to deliver a Linux kernel which is completely Free, according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), with Debian Squeeze. We hereby reaffirm Free Software as one of our priorities, as documented in the Debian Social Contract.

In accordance with the Debian Social Contract, we acknowledge that some users require the use of works that do not conform to the DFSG and that those works might include non-free firmware bits. For the time being, we have added to the non-free area of our archives alternative installation images and additional packages for Debian Squeeze, that include non-free firmware bits needed to enable specific pieces of hardware. They are not part of Debian, they should be looked for explicitly by interested users, and we cannot support them to the same extent of Free firmware as we do not have access to the corresponding source code. We encourage hardware manufacturers to release only DFSG-free firmware and we cannot accept other kind of firmware as part of Debian.

From: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20101215

Tribler decentralized P2P Torrent App on Debian Squeeze

Tribler means no more central servers or tracker downtime. You ARE the Network.

From: TorrentFreak

BitTorrent is a great technology to share files both quickly and efficiently, but like all other P2P-technologies it has an Achilles’ heel. The download process relies in part on central servers that can crash or go offline for a variety of reasons. To address this vulnerability the first truly decentralized BitTorrent/P2P client has been developed, meaning that no central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines are required to download movies, software and music.

BitTorrent is branded as a peer-to-peer technology, but despite this label the downloading process still relies heavily on central servers. In the first place there are the BitTorrent search engines and indexes such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. These are needed to search for content and to grab the .torrent file one needs to download a file.

Tribler install on Debian Squeeze
I decided to give it a go on Debian Squeeze. Even though they say they are still working on the Linux version, there are some Ubuntu related .deb files available for download.

So I downloaded this file from http://tribler.org:
http://www.tribler.org/download/tribler_5.2.1-1ubuntu1_all.deb

A “dpkg -i tribler_5.2.1-1ubuntu1_all.deb” threw up dependency errors, so i issued an “apt-get -f install” to install any dependencies.

Vlc and Python-vlc
Tribler relies on VLC media player to play music and video, and as such also needs the VLC python bindings.
Unfortunately an “apt-cache search” showed me that there is no python-vlc package in the Debian Squeeze repos, so I searched Google and found an Ubuntu version here:
http://code.google.com/p/vlc-python-bindings/downloads/list
I downloaded the latest i386 version (HERE) and installed it via dpkg and then reinstalled Tribler. Everything installed nicely and I now have it up and running on my Debian Squeeze laptop.

Screenie of Trible on Debian Squeeze with OpenBox desktop


The Linux directory structure – What lives where?

Just open up a terminal and have a browse through these directories to get an idea of where everything is.

To Change to a Directory use:
cd
To LiSt what’s in it use:
ls
To LiSt even the hidden files, ask for All:
ls -a

What directories are there and what do they contain?

/ – This is the root directory. Under windows, DOS, OS/2, and cousins, there’s a seperate root directory for each drive or partition. Linux and other Unix variants put everything in one directory tree, and this is at the base. There’s generally not much in here other than directories, although kernel images might be stored here too.

/boot – Some distros store kernel images and other miscellaneous files needed to boot here.

/tmp – Generally only temporary files needed at boot. Things that need temporary storage after boot generally use /var/tmp, but this isn’t universal by any means.

/mnt – This is where directories go for mounting various miscellaneous filesystems. Sometimes, /cdrom and /floppy are used for mounting cdrom and floppy devices, but I’m not sure how many distros other than Debian do this. /mnt is also sometimes called /mount.

/lib – Libraries needed at bootup. Libraries not needed at bootup but needed after the system is running should go in /usr/lib. Kernel modules generally go in /lib/modules/.

/dev – Device files go here. These are special files created by the Linux kernel that can be used by programs to control hardware devices. Note that network interfaces (eth0, ppp0, etc) don’t exist here.

/proc – This filesystem doesn’t actually exist on disk. It contains files that provide information about the state of the computer, including info on running processes, hardware states, and memory usage. Most of the files aren’t easily read by humans, though.

/var – Contains data changed when the system is running normally. /var/tmp, for example, should be used for storing temporary files. Various processes and daemons dump logs here, and some important subdirectores are:

/var/lock – Lock files. These are created by programs when accessing a specific resource. They don’t actually prevent access, so respecting a lock file is more of a politeness thing. Most programs do respect them, and thus you don’t have to worry about them unless you’re writing a program.

/var/log – Log files are generally written here. This directory may grow quite large, and so may require regular cleaning.

/var/run – Contains various bits of runtime information.

/var/lib – Contains various files needed while the system is running. One that will almost definitely be of interest to laptop users is /var/lib/pcmcia/stab, which contains some information about PCMCIA devices.

/var/spool – Mail, news, and printer queues get stored here.

/root – Home directory of the root user. Shouldn’t be much stored here at all, as you should be using normal, unprivilaged users for anything that doesn’t require root privilages.

/home – This contains the home directories of most of the users on the system. You can type cd to return to your home directory, and you can use ~/ as a shortcut to refer to your home directory. Personal config and data files for normal users go here.

/etc – Probably where you’ll spend most of your time as root, this is where most system-wide configuration files are stored. Files for specific users are almost always stored in the user’s home directory. The contents will vary depending on what you’ve got installed, but some subdirectories that are probably of interest are listed below.

/etc/X11 – This is where system-wide X11 configuration files are stored. XF86Config stores data used by the server to set up the environment. /etc/X11/fonts is where the fonts used by the server are stored, and window managers generally create subdirectories for their config files.

Boot related stuff for Debian:

/etc/init.d – Debian stores the actual scripts for starting daemons and services here. Not all of these are necessarily started at boot time, so don’t remove any unless you’re absolutely sure its safe. Most are created and removed by their associated packages, so you’ll rarely have to do anything here.

/etc/rcS.d – These are soft links to scripts in /etc/init.d that are run during startup no matter what runlevel the system’s booting into. The files start with an S followed by two digits – services are started in an order determined by these two digits. For example, S24foo is started before S42bar. The rest of the filename should be the name of the file in /etc/init.d the file is linked to.

/etc/rc0.d through /etc/rc6.d – These are soft links, just like in /etc/rcS.d, except they’re only executed when entering the specified runlevel. 0 is shutdown and 6 is reboot. Anything starting with a K shuts down a process, and anything starting with an S starts one. Other than that, they follow the same rules as /etc/rcS.d. By default, as far as I can tell, Debian boots into runlevel 2.

/bin and /sbin – Programs and system programs needed when the system is booting, respectively. Most are also useful after the system boots up, but they’re put here because they’re generally needed before any other programs.

/usr – Unix System Resources. This is the really big directory. Almost everything goes under here, unless I mentioned it above, so I’m going to go into quite a bit of detail about subdirectories and so on.

usr/X11 – These are files used by X11, and the files under them are structured like the /usr directory.

/usr/bin – Binary files (program executables) that aren’t needed during boot go here. This is probably where most of the programs you use during normal system operation reside.

/usr/sbin – These are system programs not needed during boot.

/usr/games – Game programs and (sometimes) data files and configuration stuff.

/usr/include – C and C++ header files. Probably not of much interest to you unless you’re into programming with C and/or C++.

/usr/lib – Library and shared library files not needed at bootup.

/usr/info – Data files needed by the GNU info program.

/usr/man – Data files needed by the man program.

/usr/src – Source code files. The linux kernel source is usually in /usr/src/linux.

/usr/doc – Documentation files go under here. There’s probably quite a lot here, and there are quite a few programs that just put copyright and changelog files here and document themselves through man or info. Of particular interest is the HOWTO directory where (probably) your distribution has placed a collection of HOWTOs from http://www.linuxdoc.org. These aren’t quite as simplified as NHFs, but they’re still quite good.

(The perceptive will notice that most directories in /usr/doc are actually links to the real location of the documentation…)

/usr/local – This directory contains things that are specific to the local system. Really only takes on any meaning if /usr is being mounted from a remote machine, VIA smb or nfs or some other networking filesystem. In that case, /usr/local would be a partition on the local machine, and the machine’s user would put their programs there. This directory is usually structured like the /usr tree is.

/usr/shared – Shared files for programs go here. What a program puts here is, as far as I can tell, pretty much arbitrary, but sound files seem to be a fairly common thing to put here.

That’s all the major directories I could pick out of my filesystem. If I’ve made any mistakes, left anything out, or whatever E-Mail me at the above address and I’ll be glad to try and include it.

Start or Stop Iptables Firewall on Debian Linux

I have been given the task at work of configuring the firewalls for a client with a large network and various servers. The system has a lot of security implemented which requires specific control of users, subnetworks, and who has access rights to certain network and internet resources.

Configuring a single computer is relatively easy, and you can find many guides on the net, but I was curious to see that on some Ubuntu/Debian based forums and blogs, people were treating iptables as a service which it most certainly isn’t. There appears to be some confusion between Debian, Redhat, and derivatives (Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS etc).

Difference between Redhat and Debian
Redhat, Fedora, CentOS do have a script in /etc/init.d which allows you to {save|stop} the iptables configuration, and I believe some people were mistakenly trying to apply it to Debian based systems. That’s not to say that you couldn’t create a Start/Stop script, but it doesn’t come as standard.

Iptables is a command, not a service
Iptables is a command to manipulate the netfilter kernel firewall. Just as modprobe will allow you to load a kernel module, but you can’t /etc/init.d/modprobe start, or service modprobe start. Iptables works the same. It issues, saves, removes commands.

To get Iptables:
sudo apt-get install iptables

Or see if it is already installed:
dpkg -l | grep iptables

How to Enable/Start/Configure Iptables (as root):
Create an empty firewall.rules file that can be manually configured by issuing commands via the terminal and then saving again.
iptables-save > /root/firewall.rules
and/or
iptables-restore < /root/firewall.rules

Now issue these commands as root sequentially:
iptables -X
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t nat -X
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t mangle -X
iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT

Save your config:
Once you have issued them, save them to firewall.rules with the same command you used to create the file.
iptables-save > /root/firewall.rules

Now you can check to see if the rules file is no longer empty:
vim /root/firewall.rules

Which should give you something like this:(A completely open Firewall)
# Generated by iptables-save v1.4.8 on Wed Oct 27 09:40:48 2010
*mangle
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [106:16689]
:INPUT ACCEPT [79:11460]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [59:9812]
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [65:10676]
COMMIT
# Completed on Wed Oct 27 09:40:48 2010
# Generated by iptables-save v1.4.8 on Wed Oct 27 09:40:48 2010
*nat
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [46:8205]
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [14:1382]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [14:1382]
COMMIT
# Completed on Wed Oct 27 09:40:48 2010
# Generated by iptables-save v1.4.8 on Wed Oct 27 09:40:48 2010
*filter
:INPUT ACCEPT [30:6110]
:FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [24:4552]
COMMIT
# Completed on Wed Oct 27 09:40:48 2010

This is just a basic first step to setting up iptables manually. At work we have a template firewall script that runs from RC2.d at boot on our clients’ and our office servers, and is approximately 250 lines long.

Documentation on the web:
http://www.netfilter.org/
http://www.netfilter.org/projects/iptables/index.html
http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/index.html#documentation-howto

Mysql Cluster Quick Start Guide

MySQL Cluster Quick Start Guide – LINUX
This guide is intended to help the reader get a simple MySQL Cluster database up and running on a single LINUX server. Note that for a live deployment multiple hosts should be used to provide redundancy but a single host can be used to gain familiarity with MySQL Cluster; please refer to the final section for links to material that will help turn this into a production system.

1 Get the software
For Generally Available (GA), supported versions of the software, download from
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/
Make sure that you select the correct platform – in this case, “Linux – Generic”
and then the correct architecture (for LINUX this means x86 32 or 64 bit).
If you want to try out a pre-GA version then check
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/
Note: Only use MySQL Server executables (mysqlds) that come with the MySQL
Cluster installation.

2 Install
Locate the tar ball that you’ve downloaded, extract it and then create a link to it:
tar xvf Downloads/mysql-cluster-gpl-7.1.3-linux-x86_64-glibc23.tar.gz
ln -s mysql-cluster-gpl-7.1.3-linux-x86_64-glibc23 mysqlc
Optionally, you could add ~/mysqlc/bin to your path to avoid needing the full path when running the processes.

3 Configure
For a first Cluster, start with a single MySQL Server (mysqld), a pair of Data Nodes (ndbd) and a single management node (ndb_mgmd) – all running on the same server.

Create folders to store the configuration files and the data files:
mkdir my_cluster my_cluster/ndb_data my_cluster/mysqld_data my_cluster/conf
In the conf folder, create 2 files (note that “/home/user1” should be replaced with your home directory).

my.cnf:
[mysqld]
ndbcluster
datadir=/home/user1/my_cluster/mysqld_data
basedir=/home/user1/mysqlc
port=5000

config.ini:
[ndb_mgmd]
hostname=localhost
datadir=/home/user1/my_cluster/ndb_data
id=1
[ndbd default]
noofreplicas=2
datadir=/home/user1/my_cluster/ndb_data
[ndbd]
hostname=localhost
id=3
[ndbd]
hostname=localhost
id=4
[mysqld]
id=50

Note that in a production system there are other parameters that you would set to tune the configuration.
Just like any other MySQL Server, the mysqld process requires a ‘mysql’ database to be created and populated with essential system data:
cd mysqlc
scripts/mysql_install_db --no-defaults --datadir=$HOME/my_cluster/mysqld_data/

4 Run
The processes should be started in the order of management node, data nodes & then MySQL Server:
mysqlc]$ cd ../my_cluster/
my_cluster]$ $HOME/mysqlc/bin/ndb_mgmd -f conf/config.ini --initial --configdir=$HOME/my_cluster/conf/
$HOME/mysqlc/bin/ndbd -c localhost:1186
$HOME/mysqlc/bin/ndbd -c localhost:1186

Check the status of the Cluster and wait for the Data Nodes to finish starting before starting the MySQL Server:
$HOME/mysqlc/bin/ndb_mgm -e show
Connected to Management Server at: localhost:1186
Cluster Configuration
---------------------
[ndbd(NDB)] 2 node(s)
id=3 @127.0.0.1 (mysql-5.1.44 ndb-7.1.3, Nodegroup: 0, Master)
id=4 @127.0.0.1 (mysql-5.1.44 ndb-7.1.3, Nodegroup: 0)
[ndb_mgmd(MGM)] 1 node(s)
id=1 @127.0.0.1 (mysql-5.1.44 ndb-7.1.3)
[mysqld(API)] 1 node(s)
id=50 (not connected, accepting connect from any host)

$HOME/mysqlc/bin/mysqld --defaults-file=conf/my.cnf &

5 Test
Connect to the MySQL Server and confirm that a table can be created that uses the ndb (MySQL Cluster) storage engine:
$HOME/mysqlc/bin/mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 5000 -u root
mysql> create database clusterdb;use clusterdb;
mysql> create table simples (id int not null primary key) engine=ndb;
mysql> insert into simples values (1),(2),(3),(4);
mysql> select * from simples;
+----+
| id |
+----+
| 3 |
| 1 |
| 2 |
| 4 |
+----+

6 Safely shut down
The MySQL Server must be shut down manually but then the other Cluster nodes can be stopped using the ndb_mgm tool:
$HOME/mysqlc/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h 127.0.0.1 -P 5000 shutdown
$HOME/mysqlc/bin/ndb_mgm -e shutdown

How to Linux quick, easy, file sharing server with one command

Don’t install a server, just issue one command!

So, you want to share a file with a friend. It could be a document, a song, a directory of photos, anything.

Do you want to install and set up a server? NO!

Do you want to go to a directory and issue one command? YES!

Open your terminal and cd to the directory where you want to share the file(s) from:

cd /home/rich/shared

Now start the Python Simple HTTP Server:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

That’s it! Open your browser and go to this url:

http://localhost:8000 or http://127.0.0.1:8000

Now you will see the files that you want to share. All you need to do is send a message to your friend with your IP address and port :8000 and he/she can download anything from your /shared directory.

You can get your external IP address by going to:

http://www.whatsmyip.org/

Once you have finished, go back to your terminal and hit Ctrl+C and the server will stop.

LxH is closing down

Goodbye Linux-Hardcore

After a lot of thinking, humming and hahing (is that how you spell it?), I have decided to finally shutdown my linux-hardcore.com domain. I have spent the last few months handing other sites to friends who offered to take them over, and i’ve just shutdown the other sites which no longer served a purpose or weren’t getting any interest.

Samey Linux Community

There must be millions of Linux blogs and forums now, and whatsmore they all seem to have the same stuff. The newest theme for Ubuntu YAY! [/sarcasm], How to burn an iso [/yawn]….. but not much else. It just got so hard to find anything interesting, or to find a blog/forum with character or soul. Most forums now inflict so many rules that they just beat the members into submission, and blog after blog just repeat the news from everybody else, sometimes just blatantly copy ‘n’ pasting. I just lost interest completely.

Crunchbang Linux & Community

This is probably the only place you’ll find me posting occasionally as Crunchbang Statler is an awesome distro, and the community is great. Not too big, not too small but always interesting, helpful and fun.

Thanks to the LxH Crew

It’s been a great 5 (ish) years and we’ve seen a lot of changes in the Linux community as well as formed part of many changes ourselves. Linux projects need a good team, and I was lucky enough to be a part of something that kept me learning and meeting new people practically every day over 5 years.

Thanks go out to djsroknrol, resa, machiner, palemoon, ch@dfluegge who stuck it out through thick and thin both on LxH and Dreamlinux Forums, thanks guys, it’s been a pleasure.

Bit of LxH History 2006 – 2010

LxH  started out as a small community forum hosted at Forumer in 2006, then went to it’s own Godaddy server in 2007. A year later it was moved to ICDSoft where it remains until the end of September 2010. It has had 3 domain names, but has settled on the LxH name, even though home and work-based firewall filters sometimes block the site for having the word “Hardcore” in the title. (I should have thought that one through a little better).

Why Create Yet Another Linux Support Forum?

We are/were all members of larger Linux distro support forums, and noticed that as forums become bigger, the community becomes more impersonal. Larger communities need stricter moderation, more rules and therefore more control. A smaller community needs practically no (people) moderation, only (site) administration. As we aren’t the public image for a company, we don’t have to censor what people post, and therefore the discussions are more “real life”, and permit free speech to a certain extent.

Forum Software

The forum has almost exclusively been run on the SMF forum script, apart from a short-lived experiment with PhPBB in 2007. There have been various designs, layouts and ideas, but basically has now gone with the easier route of having WordPress as a Frontpage due to it’s flexibility and custom plugins.

I tried various SMF portals, Joomla, Drupal cms’s, but none seemed to provide what we were looking for.  I even looked at vBulletin as an option until I realized that using proprietary forum software would be pretty hypocritical for a Linux/Foss based forum. Planet was also recently added to keep everybody updated with LxH members’ and friends’ blogs.

Statistics

LxH currently has over 16,000 Posts in over 2,000 Topics. The Member List is “spring cleaned” regularly and any zero posters, or members who haven’t logged in for a while get removed. Many forums leave all members intact to look “busy” or “popular”, I prefer to keep things clean. It’s quality, not quantity that counts. Whatsmore, LxH is /home for a few “hardcore” friends and was never meant to be the size of Ubuntu Forums for example. LxH Distro-Tests, Howto Guides and Articles regularly attracted over 200,000 hits per month.

Other LxH Founded Sites

We set up and manage: Dreamlinux Forums, Fossunet (Facebook for Foss/Linux users), Linux Gaming NewsConky Hardcore!, LxH Clan Wars (A Travian style MORPG).

Max has moved Linux Gaming News to wordpress.com while he decides what to do with it. Good luck Max! It’s an awesome site.

Conky Hardcore! was taken over by machiner and is already back on its feet again. That is going to be another great site for Conky fans. Thanks for taking it on machiner, i’m sure you will make it a success!

I have moved my blog here to wordpress.com as well, as my final server and domain is laid to rest.

So that’s it, the end of an era for me.

Howto Create a Custom Debian Installer Netinstall iso

Remote server installations or Custom distro:

This is handy if you need to have preconfigured netinstall isos for remote installations of servers. Or maybe you just want to create a custom Debian based distro. At work I create these isos tailor made to suit our customers needs (more or less) then perform an automated remote installation.

The basic steps:

The basics are that you download a Debian Netinstall iso : http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

We mount the iso to a temporary directory, where we insert a “Preseed” file which has our custom settings configured. Then we recreate the iso.

Custom preseed file:

Before doing anything you need to get the example Preseed and edit it to your liking:

http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/example-preseed.txt

**All of these commands are performed as Root in the /root home directory.**

You know the risks of running as root, and I will take for granted that you are an experienced Linux user who respects the responsibility of being root.

Lets create a custom iso:

Create a temporary direcory to mount the iso:

mkdir -p loopdir

Mount the Debian netinstall iso:

mount -o loop debian_netinstall_iso.iso loopdir

Remove the cd dircetory

rm -rf cd

Recreate a new cd directory:

mkdir cd

Now we Rsync everything over from the loopdir to our new cd directory:

rsync -a -H –exclude=TRANS.TBL loopdir/ cd

Unmount the netinstall iso from loopdir:

umount loopdir

Make a new directory to extract the initrd.gz, change to that directory and extract:

mkdir irmod

cd irmod

**Note**

The initrd.gz for the 64bit Netinstall iso is in /install.amd/. If this command fails it’s becuase it is somewhere else. Just have a look for it and change the command accordingly.

*One command at a time, don’t copy and paste both lines* (arguments are two dashes not one ” – -“)

gzip -d < ../cd/install.amd/initrd.gz | \

cpio –extract –verbose –make-directories –no-absolute-filenames

Now we copy over our custom Preseed file to initrd:

cp ../my_preseed.cfg preseed.cfg

*One command at a time, don’t copy and paste both lines*

find . | cpio -H newc –create –verbose | \

gzip -9 > ../cd/install.amd/initrd.gz

Now we go back to the /root directory and remove the irmod directory:

cd ../

rm -fr irmod/

Change to the cd directory and create an Md5sum:

cd cd

md5sum `find -follow -type f` > md5sum.txt

Back to /root again to create your new iso:

cd ..

*One command at a time, don’t copy and paste both lines*

genisoimage -o name_of_you_iso.iso -r -J -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \

-boot-info-table -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat ./cd

Now you have your own custom iso which you can burn to CD or run in VirtualBox or a chosen Emulator. Have a good read of the Preseed documentation as you can configure practically everything on the Netinstall iso, including adding your own custom Debian applications, themes, etc. basically you can go from automated basic netinstall to full blown distro. It’s up to you.

Crunchbang Statler Alpha 2 Release – User input implimented

One of the things that drew me to Crunchbang was the fact that it has a pretty tight community as well as frequent participation by the head developer Phillip Newborough. Even his wife Becky is a regular participant. The new Crunchbang Statler Alpha2 is a testimony to team work.

http://crunchbanglinux.org/blog/2010/06/25/development-release-crunchbang-10-statler-alpha-2/

Devs, Staff and Users working together

Many distros suffer with a lack of communication between the community and developers, frequently resulting in bugs not being fixed, requests being ignored. Not so with Crunchbang. The Crunchbang community is included in decision making, bug crunching and feature suggestions, and although there is only one “official” developer, you actually get a sense of being a part of the team.

Check out the latest changes for Alpha2 on the Crunchbang wiki and then consult the forums, and you will noticed that practically all the changes originated from user/staff input: http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/release-notes/10-alpha-02

International Languages and Keyboards

While testing the first Alpha on my laptop which has a Spanish keyboard, I had a few configuration problems, so I went through a bit of trial and error and posted my fix. The same day, more international users jumped on the thread and started adding a whole load of information regarding keyboard configuration and language support. I edited my original “basic” post, and added the other suggestions. That’s what the Crunchbang community is like: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/6926/howto-international-keyboards-keybindingsaltgrkeymapsoptions/

Crunchbang is Debian minus the politics

My laptops have Broadcom wireless and I have two desktops with Atheros which used to require Madwifi drivers before the ath5k and ath9k were updated and now work. As such, I need non-free firmware from the get-go. This is also something I advocated on Dreamlinux when I was part of the team, and hence Dreamlinux also comes with all wireless out of the box.

One of my first posts on the Crunchbang forums was to ask about the inclusion of Madwifi, and if there was any political policy regarding  non-free firmware. Here was the reply which put Crunchbang on all my computers:

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/7379/#p7379

The latest release notes for the Alpha2 also include this line which cheered me up:

Additional firmware for improved support of Broadcom wireless network cards.

I’m not the only Broadcom user, and a few of us provided input to hep other users to get their cards working:

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/6872/howto-broadcom-on-statler-alpha1/

So all in all Crunchbang and its community are ticking along nicely, and I am pretty sure that Crucnhbang is certainly going to be one of the regular Top 10 distros on Distrowatch in the near future.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=crunchbang

Posted by a very happy  Crunchbanger 😉

NimbleX – Kde4 and Koffice on a 400Mb iso

2010 Beta is out!

E-mail

After a long wait a new NimbleX version is finally out. First of all keep in mind this is a Beta so many things will still have to be polished but nevertheless it has to be eventually released because your feedback is what will make it better.

Many things have changed hopefully for the better in the long run. First of all, after about 5 years, the ideea of keeping it limited to less than 200MB was dropped. There is a lot more in the distro right now so in the end it should make the user experience better.

Even though almost everything is new, we can still say the major changes include:

  • Kernel 2.6.33 with the latest squashfs and aufs2

As some of you notices NimbleX 2008 was quite stable but the aging kernel meant new hardware was unsupported. Now we should have a pretty good hardware support with good power management and some other interesting features most of which would just work out of the box behind the scenes.

  • XServer 1.7.5

Probably the most significant feature this new component brings for the end user is the possibility to run without a configuration file. In the previous version we used to generate the configuration file every boot but now the XServer does it automatically for us. Also I think it’s pretty significant that the new Intel chips which are found in most laptops should work well so 3D will be available on more machines than before. The new version of X starts faster than the previous one and brings several other advantages.

  • Many fresh libs where included

Besides the required dependencies, many other common libs where included because we all know one of the biggest problems when adding a new piece of software is satisfying dependencies. Users will have to worry about libs a little less now.

  • New applications

The bigger NimbleX 2010 now comes with OpenOffice insted of KOffice. A lot more of the KDE Games where added in this realease. Gimp, VirtualBox, Firefox, Transmission, GParted and others where updated to the latest versions.

  • New Desktop Environment

NimbleX was always based on KDE3 but that finally changed. KDE4 is now mature enough to provide an overall better user experience and it has a lot of nice features that will demonstrate it was time for a change. KDE4 is still far from being what it can be but i’m sure in time more good things will come.

On modern computers NimbleX 2010 Beta with the more demanding KDE4 will boot just as fast as before and for the older computers out there a much lighter Desktop Environment will be included in the final realease.

For final realease of NimbleX 2010 there are still many things to be done and those will most likely be posted on the forum where everybody could interract.

If you want to give it a spin get your copy from:

The screenshots of the NimbleX 2010 Beta can be found on the new website which is also Beta 🙂

Google Chrome 5 Released for Linux

From the Official Google Chrome Blog:

In our most recent beta release, we fired up all engines to bring to life our fastest version of Chrome to date.

Today, we’re bringing all this beta goodness to the stable channel so that it’s available to all Chrome users. We’re particularly excited to bring Chrome for Mac and Linux out of beta, and introduce Chrome’s first stable release for Mac and Linux users. You can read more about the Mac and Linux stable releases on the Google Mac and Chromium blogs respectively.

Today’s stable release also comes with a host of new features. You’ll be able to synchronize not only bookmarks across multiple computers, but also browser preferences — including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings. Meanwhile, for avid extensions users, you can enable each extension to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager.

Our stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop. For a taste of HTML5’s powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We’ve also given Chrome’s bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5:

In recent weeks, we’ve been beta-testing Adobe Flash Player integration into Chrome. While Flash Player integration in the browser is not included by default in today’s stable release, we’re excited to enable this feature with the full release of Flash Player (version 10.1) soon.

If you’re already using Chrome for Windows, Mac or Linux, you’ll be auto-updated to this latest release soon. You can also try out these new features on our speedy browser now, by downloading Chrome from google.com/chrome.

See the original post here: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-chrome-stable-release-welcome-mac.html

Dual-Booting FreeBSD with Linux

Well, my other post outlined my first experiences with FreeBSD installation and setup. This post regards my dual-boot setup with Crunchbang Linux. If you run Linux and want to also try FreeBSD, this post may provide you with some insites and some basic information. I am very new to BSD and have relied heavily on the feedback from other BSD users.

Also, with Linux/Unix there is always more than one way to skin a cat. They way I have done things may not be the best way, but they work for me. I have learned a lot in the last week, and am very comfortable using a BSD system now. There is a learning curve, but nothing a Linux user can’t handle without the help of Google, The FreeBSD forms and the BSD users on Fossunet.

What system am I using?

Acer  Aspire 3004
AMD Mobile Athlon 32bit 3000+ (1.8Gb)
1Gb RAM
Sis Graphics card (64Mb)
Broadcom Wireless Network Card
1280X800 Widescreen Monitor

It has an 80Gb harddrive which is split into two partitions.

Partition 1: Has Crunchbang Statler installed on Ext3 inside an Extended partition which also has 1Gb Swap.

Partition 2: Has a single slice with FreeBSD 8 installed and also has its own Swap partition.

The Installation

Partitions and Grub2 Bootlader

Linux on the first partition with Grub2 installed to MBR. FreeBSD on the second partition with no Boot Loader as we will just add it to Grub2 from Linux.

I booted to Linux, opened Gparted, and deleted the spare 40Gb partition to leave 40Gb of free space. This will be used by FreeBSD as it asks you where to install itself.

Install FreeBSD from the PcBsd netinstall iso, see my other post for more info: HERE but the only thing you need to make sure of is that you choose FreeBSD, No PcBsd Bootloader and only install BSD-Ports as an extra package.

Add FreeBSD to Grub2

Grub2 has special files that you can add “Custom” additions such as un detected Linux OS’s and Unix based systems such as FreeBSD.

sudo nano /etc/grub.d/40_custom

And add this (remember I have only two partitions)

menuentry "freebsd 8.0" {
set root=(hd0,2)
chainloader +1
}

Now you have to update Grub2 so that it retrieves that info and you can now boot to FreeBSD

sudo update-grub

First Steps With Your FreeBSD system

More to come………

Linux to FreeBSD – Experiences

Linux to Unix

So I decided to checkout a BSD. After starting up fossunet and joining identi.ca I got drawn to BSD by Klanger and regexorcist, who have been a great help with links and advice y the way, thanks guys.

Previous BSD Experience

I have experimented with various bsd’s before, but my experience lies with Linux, and  a few multiboot setups were borked due to bsd’s windows-like mentalitiy (ie “The-Entire-Partition-Table-is-MINE!)…. well the first partition anyway. 🙂

Minimal over Easy

After listening to advice and checking out various links, I decided to get the PCBSD netinstall iso, to install FreeBSD 8 to be precise. I knew that even if I took the easy route and got the Full install dvd iso, I wouldn’t be happy with a chunky desktop environment, and i’d be sure to do a minimal install. With Linux I like minimal. This means Linux base, Gnu tools, X and a window manager. My current distro of choice is Crunchbang Statler, Debian Squeeze + OpenBox. Previous disros all ended up with Fluxbox.

Deeper Linux

In the past I have built an LFS (Linux From Scratch), it took me 3 months of trial and error, a lot of reading and a few headaches, but I did it. It was a great learning experience, but I will never repeat it.

I installed Gentoo, Slackware, Debian Netinstall, Archlinux, all from the base up. Again, all great experience and fun, but once you have completed the challenge, you just go back to the distro that does what YOU need on YOUR hardware.

I helped out as a backroom dev on Dreamlinux, and also built Tota Linux with the LxH Crew, both of which I have now stepped down from.

At this present moment, my distro choice is Crunchbang Statler. It’s a mix of Debian + WM + Great Community. Crunchbang already has what I was trying to achieve with Tota Linux.

I was going to just stick with CB, but the distro-junkie in me, just wouldn’t let it lie! 😛

Hardware

I have decided to wipe my 64bit lappie, and sacrifice it to the BSD cause 🙂

eMachines
AMD Mobile Athlon 64bit 3000+ (1.8Gb)
1Gb RAM
Ati Mobility Radeon 9600 (128Mb)
Broadcom Wireless Network Card
1280X800 Widescreen Monitor

BSD Install

Using the PCBSD installer to install FreeBSD via ftp netinstall.

As soon as you boot the cd.iso, after a series of file-system integrity checks, you are presented with a gui installer which has 10 stages. Language, Keyboard, System, Disk, Users, Time, Components, Summary, Installation, Finished.

Each one is self explanatory, I chose to install FreeBSD with netinstall the dhcp configuration as I have the laptop plugged directly into the router. I also chose the default freebsd ftp repo mirror location. English + US keyboard, Use entire harddisk, add the PcBSD bootloader, added myself as a user. I have chosen to only install BSD Ports and BSD Source, even though you can add OpenOffice, Firefox and other apps etc. As I said, minimal base to get what I need via the commandline.

Installation Finished

Boot, hit F1, login as root, start installing.

Base Packages

Necessities: Xorg, Gdm, OpenBox, Wireless/Wpa, Ssh/Sshfs, Ftp, GnuGPG, Nano, Findutils/Locate.

Desktop + Net: Browser, Email, IM, IRC, Wicd, Tint2, Conky, Scrot, various network tools.

Package Installation

I was going to do my usual Arch/Debian routine and go Xorg minimal, package by package, but I have to admit that I am impatient to get to a desktop, soooooo…. installed the entire xorg set with all dependencies:

pkg_add -r -v xorg

pkg_add -r openbox

pkg_add -r gdm

Now I need to do a web serach for other apps to see if BSD has them in the repos, then i’ll try to login to the desktop.

*HINT* Synaptics Touchpad: Before spending an hour with xorg.conf, adding packages, copying other xorg.confs etc etc: READ THIS: http://wiki.freebsd.org/SynapticsTouchpad

/me says “DOH!”

Synaptics Touchpad Howto

1. Create a xorg.conf.new file

X -configure

2. Move it from root to X11

cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

3. Add this line to the end of the ServerLayout or ServerFlags section

Option “AutoAddDevices” “false”

READ MORE on Xorg:http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-config.htm

Desktops Environments

As I have plenty of space and am curious to see what FreeBSD has to offer, I have decided to install Xfce4 (The only DE I really like) and Kde4. Basically to try something new/different while i’m at it. I have tried Kde4, and no, I don’t like Kde in general, but as I have said, i’m curious. Gnome is a no go as It has become too bloated for my liking, and it is reported to be a bit “iffy” on BSD.

How to Make KDE start with “startx”

After KDE has been installed, the X server must be told to launch this application instead of the default window manager. This is accomplished by editing the .xinitrc file:

For KDE3:

echo "exec startkde" > ~/.xinitrc

For KDE4:

echo "exec /usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde" > ~/.xinitrc

Now, whenever the X Window System is invoked with startx, KDE will be the desktop.

How to Make Xfce4 start with “startx”

echo "/usr/local/bin/startxfce4" > ~/.xinitrc

Now, whenever the X Window System is invoked with startx,XFCE4 will be the desktop.

READ MORE on Desktops: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11-wm.html

To be continued……………..

Remotely connect to another Linux desktop

Adept Linux users would already be thinking about the System > Preferences > Remote Desktop menu entry. Of course we will use that. However, it lets you configure your computer to allow/disallow remote desktop access. It doesn’t let you connect to a remote computer. Extra software is required for that, which we now look into.

Allow Remote Desktop Connections

First off, you would need to enable remote desktop on the Linux computer that you want to access via remote desktop. Doing so is easy by using the System > Preferences > Remote Desktop option. In the dialog that shows up – check “Allow other users to view your desktop”. You can also configure additional options like requiring password for remote access and notification icons. It is advisable to use a password for remote access, so that only trusted users may be able to establish a connection.

How do i connect to a remote desktop

With all that set up, its time to connect to it from another Linux machine, Here’s how.

Connecting From Another Linux Machine

Linux uses Virtual Networking Connections for remote desktop. Your best bet would be to use a VNC viewer to access the remote desktop. Use the command sudo apt-get install xvnc4viewer to install VNC viewer. Now all you have to do is to issue the vncviewer command. You will be asked for a password (if it is configured on the remote machine) and you can then view and interact with the remote desktop.

vncviewer 192.168.0.3

Howto – Linux – install Google Earth

Google Earth seems to throw up error messages lately:
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty

^
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Start tag expected, '<' not found

^
Couldn't load 'setup.data/setup.xml'

So here is the cure:

1. First install “lsb-core”
sudo apt-get install lsb-core

2. Download and extract Google Earth to a temporary dIrectory:
wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin && chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin && ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin --target /tmp/ge

3. Change to the temp directory and change setupgtk to setupgtk2:
cd /tmp/ge/setup.data/bin/Linux/x86/
sudo mv setup.gtk setup.gtk2
cd /tmp/ge

4. Run the installer:
./setup.sh

Now the Google Gui installer will open.

If you have an Nvidia card, Google Earth may tell you it doesn’t recognise your card, just remove it and reinstall it. This worked for me with an Nvidia Geforce fx 5200 using the official Linux driver from the Nvidia website.

Happy Globe-trotting 😉

Chrome + Html5 – Bye Bye Adobe Flash

Flash and Linux
Well, as a Linux user, I have always had problems with Flash on any browser, especially with Firefox as it has gone from a lightweight browser to a bloated behemoth.

After hearing about Html5 and it’s being a possible replacement for flash video, my heart leapt. I thought pleeease let this be true. I Googled Youtube + Html5 and came across this video and also the Youtube html5 Beta sign up page. I already have Chrome installed on my #!Crunchbang-driven laptop so no problem there.

Html5 in action

Flash still needed
Apparently, videos which contain ads will revert back to Flash, but this is most certainly a great step forward.

Adobe Vs Apple
I am aware of the Adobe Vs Apple conflict at the moment, and as a Linux user I am right behind Apple. All I know about from Adobe are Photoshop, Reader (pdf) and Flash, none of which either work or are needed on Linux. Gimp will do most of what the average user needs with images, we have Pdf readers, and hopefully Html5 will take over and push Flash out.

So, for the moment I am watching as many videos as possible on Youtube with Chrome and Html5.

Crunchbang 10 Statler Review


Distrowatch: http://distrowatch.com/crunchbang
Homepage: http://crunchbanglinux.org
Wiki: http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki
Forums: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums
Download location: http://crunchbanglinux.org/downloads/statler/alpha-01/

|IT-0| Install/Live Test BOTH
Time to Boot/Install: 10 Minutes
The text based installer didn’t show up probably as I installed on a Sis based Laptop. I solved this by adding the vga=791 to the installer commandline:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/6853/fix-statler-alpha-text-installer-black-screen/

|N-5| Network (router/modem/wireless)
Wifi: See Notes
Nic: Eth0 connected with Network Manager and DHCP with no problem at all
Modem: N/A
As of yet, the Alpha does not have wireless tools or Broadcom drivers/firmware installed, so I just manually installed them and fired up wirless without a problem.

|U-0| USB periferals NOT TESTED
Periferals:
Problems?

|G-5| Graphics Card
Make and Model: Sis Graphics Card (No proprietary Linux Drivers/Firmware)
Always problems with this card on any Linux distro. The sisfb framebuffer has to be added to Grub:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/6854/fix-laptops-with-sis-graphic-cards-and-wrong-colour-depth/

|S-5| Speed+ DM
Desktop: OpenBox
Slow or Fast? Very fast !

|F-5| Forum Support

URL: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/

The Crunchbang forums and community in general are awesome. I mean really. The Crunchbang community is a mixed batch of experienced users and newbies all working together to make the best of their distro. User feedback and support is amazing, probably the best Linux distro forums I know (obviously I won’t comment on Dreamlinux Forums or LxH, bias etc Tongue ) Everybody gets involved with support, chat, scripts, apps. Whatsmore the head developer and forum Admin (corenominal) plays a very big part in the community, which is something that many other forums lack.

Points Guide
0. Didn’t Work
1. Unsatisfactory
2. Satisfactory
3. Good
4. Very Good
5. Excellent

General observations:
I spoke to omns and corenominal about putting together a FluxBang Fluxbox edition, but as soon as I installed the Crunchbang Debian OpenBox edition (I also have the Ubuntu version), I decided that there is nothing i can do with Fluxbox that would even come close to competing with (or offering anything new) to this already amazing distro.

This version has blown me away and rekindled my desire to distro-test and help support a distro. I tried OpenBox before, but as a Fluxbox fan, I always went back to Fluxbox (Dreamlinux and Tota). But Crunchbang has done something special with it, and I will be leaving it as it is.

Crunchbang goes Debian – Statler Alpha1

I have just installed Crunchbang 10 Statler which is the first of Crunchbang’s move to Debian, Squeeze to be precise.
Here is the release announcement:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/6843/crunchbang-10-statler-alpha-1-released/

The first alpha of CrunchBang 10 “Statler” is now available. Download it at your own risk!

If you do decide to give it a try, please do not forget to provide feedback. Your comments and suggestions are really important to the future development of the project, so please warm-up your digits and get ready to type-up your notes.

For anyone who might be interested, I have written up some release notes on the wiki. Apologies about the lack of details, but this is a new start to the project and I am not sure I could reasonably detail every change.

P.S. Please do not break the new download servers. Captain Link Hogthrob, Dr. Julius Strangepork & First Mate Piggy are all new to the job, so take it easy on them!

I have always liked Crunchbang, but even though I do have Ubuntu installed on two of my computers, I just couldn’t get into it. And in my quest for a Debian based Window Manager run desktop, myself and the guys at LxH built Tota Linux

I have always been a Fluxbox freak, and basically end up Fluxbox-izing everything. I am currently working on the Tota Fluxbox Edition as well as building a Fluxbox desktop for the upcoming Dreamlinux 4.0.

I PM’d omns and corenominal about creating a FluxBang Community Edition, but after installing the latest Debian based Crunchbang Alpha I just fell in love with what has been done with OpenBox.
Therefore I decided to abandon all hope of doing anything with Fluxbox that hasn’t already been done with OpenBox:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/6850/fluxbang-idea-abandoned/

As soon as I had installed and had a good play with Crunchbang Statler I decided to write a Distro Test over at LxH, something that for a long time, no distro has given me any incentive to do:
http://linux-hardcore.com/index.php?topic=2706.0

So far so good, I am really enjoying the simplicity and speed. Whatsmore, as it is Debian and not Ubuntu, you also get a psychological impression of stability. I use Ubuntu and it’s good, but it always leaves you feeling scared that the next update or reboot will break something. Debian Squeeze did that to me a couple of times on Tota and also a Vanilla install but it was always due to third party apps or a small (fixable) bug.

Hopefully Crunchbang on Debian has started as it means to go on, because it is absolutely rockin’ at the moment.

Early Userspace in Arch Linux

This is an extract and a link to a very informative post by brain0’s Archlinux Blog:

There have been some major changes in Arch’s early userspace tools recently. So I thought I’d take the time to sit down and explain to everyone what these changes are about.
Booting Linux Systems: Why do we need Early Userspace?

Traditionally, booting a Linux system was simple: Your bootloader loaded the kernel. The kernel was extracted and initialized your hardware. The kernel initialized your hard disk controller, found your hard drive, found the root file system, mounted it and started /sbin/init.

Nowadays, there is a shitload of different controllers out there, a huge number of file systems and we are a good distro and want so support them all. So we build them all into one big monolithic kernel image which is now several megabytes big and supports everything and the kitchensink. But then someone comes along and has two SATA controllers, three IDE controller, seven hard drives, plus three external USB drives and who knows what. The Linux kernel will now detect all those asynchronously – and where is the root file system now? Is it on the first drive? Or the third? What is “the first drive” anyway? And how do I mount my root file system on the LVM volume group inside the encrypted container residing on a software RAID array? You see, this is all getting a bit ugly, and the kernel likes to pretend it is stupid – or it simply doesn’t care about your pesky needs, especially now that it has become so fat after we built every imaginable driver in the world into it.

What now? Simple: We pass control to userspace, handle hardware detection there, set up all the complicated stuff that people want, mount the root file system and launch /sbin/init ourselves. You are probably asking yourself “How do I execute userspace applications when the root file system is not mounted?”. The answer is: magic!

READ MORE From original source.

Howto Splashy on Debian

Tired of watching screens full of hardware releated info scrolling past during Startup and shutdown.

Welcome to the world of Splash Screen, Screenshots Here

In earlier stage bootsplash screen was configured throught a lot of kernel hacking and using it has a hell lot of hardwork including recompilling of kernel.

But the newest form SPLASHY in a userspace implementation of kernel so that it provides all the necessary features right at userspace.

In debian installing splashy is just a matter of few commands

1) IF you don’t have unstable repo’s in your source list then follow it otherwise skip to step 3

echo "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo “deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free” >> /etc/apt/sources.list



2) then apt-get update

3) last apt-get install splashy splashy-themes

After this what you need to is just one thing

open your menu.lst (/boot/grub/menu.lst)
and in the line with kernel value add these words at the end of that line

"vga=791 splash quiet"

Ex : – kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hda8 ro vga=791 splash quiet

4)THIS STEP IS OPTIONAL
To run Splashy from initramfs you need to create a new initramfs image. An initramfs image is a little system that is

launched during the kernel’s initalization, before the system starts.

During Splashy’s installation Splashy sets everything up so you can get it integrated into initramfs whenever you wish by

just running a single command.

But first you must edit /etc/default/splashy and set ENABLE_INITRAMFS=1 so that Splashy will integrate itself into future initramfs images.

update-initramfs -u -t -k `uname -r`

then reboot and you will have a slashy desktop

ADVANCE SETTINGS

All the themes are by defaults installed in /etc/splashy/themes

configuration for splashy is in/etc/splashy/config.xml

and configuration for respective themes is available in /etc/splash/themes/ in XML file format

some of the configuration’s that can be done include changing the colour theme as well as the progress bar size color

direction and image shown.

TO CHANGE THEME

Once the theme is installed, just run splashy_config -s where name is the name of the theme

To get the complete list of all the splashy themes installed just type in

splashy_config --info

I hope this article will help you all.

Original Source HERE

//

Sabayon Linux 5.1

sabayonFabio Erculiani has announced the release of Sabayon Linux 5.1, a Gentoo-based desktop distribution with GNOME or KDE desktops: “The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges, is eventually here. Features: based on the new GCC 4.4.1 and glibc 2.10; ships with a desktop-optimized Linux kernel 2.6.31; provides extra server-optimized and OpenVZ-enabled kernels in repositories; installer now available in multiple languages; complete ext4 file system support; features X.Org 7.5 and up-to-date FLOSS, NVIDIA, AMD video drivers; containing GNOME 2.28 (with GNOME Shell) and KDE 4.3.4; outstanding 3D desktop applications (Compiz, Compiz Fusion and KWin)….” See the release announcement for a complete list of new features and changes. Download the KDE (K) or GNOME (G) edition for your preferred architecture: Sabayon_Linux_5.1-r1_x86_K.iso (1,936MB, MD5, torrent), Sabayon_Linux_5.1-r1_x86_G.iso (1,734MB, MD5, torrent). Sabayon_Linux_5.1-r1_amd64_K.iso (2,032MB, MD5, torrent), Sabayon_Linux_5.1-r1_amd64_G.iso (1,882MB, MD5, torrent).

Stay up to date with all the latest distro releases at http://distrowatch.com

Ready to run ChromeOS available – ChromiumOS Cherry

chromiumcherrySo, after all the hype about ChromeOS, we were all pretty narked when we found that Google had only released the source code, and we would have to manually compile the distro.

Fear not! Hexxeh to the rescue. Hexxeh decided that he would be the one to give ChromeOS to the masses via a ready made USB pendrive image that anybody can download, and boot directly into ChromeOS on any machine (which can boot from USB). There are instructions for: MacWindowsLinux

I first picked up on Hexxeh on Twitter and then followed the project to his blog which outlines plans and also offers various mirrors and a torrent to obtain the image. On his blog’s FAQ he says that he is “a student who occasionally pretends he’s a Web Developer/Programmer and works on various websites with people” and he started this project “Because I think Chromium OS is a cool idea, and I thought I’d fill a gap that hadn’t been filled”.

It’s great that somebody has taken the time to provide the masses with something which we first saw as a bit of a let-down after all the hype. Could this be the first ever ChromeOS derivative? I hope so, and this weekend I will be providing a full write up.

Go to his blogs to get the full details and also follow him on Twitter:

Hexxeh’s Blog:- http://blog.hexxeh.net/

ChromiumOS Cherry: – http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/

Hexxeh on Twitter:- http://twitter.com/hexxeh

How to make sudo insult you when you mess up

tuxFound at: http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/

I recently found a fun feature available within the sudo program that will insult you when you do the wrong thing such as enter your password incorrectly. I’ll tell you how you can activate the feature for a few laughs and also give a few examples of what insults you might get.

To turn the feature on you’ll need to use the following command:

sudo visudo

(always use visudo when you need to edit your sudoers file as it has a self-check system that won’t let you screw it up.)

Find the line that begins with Default and append insults to the end. (Any addition to that line is comma separated.) Your entry will then look like this:

Defaults !lecture,tty_tickets,!fqdn,insults

Save the file and you’ll notice the next time you screw up your sudo password you’ll get an insult.

Note: to clear your sudo session and be required to enter the password again try:

sudo -K

A few examples below:

Maybe if you used more than just two fingers…

I have been called worse.

Listen, burrito brains, I don’t have time to listen to this trash.

Good luck!

Ubuntu 10.04 Will Have Simple Scan

scanner

Posted on: http://anotherubuntu.blogspot.com

Robert Ancell is working on making scanning on Ubuntu “just work”. Currently scanning is performed using the default installed Xsane. Xsane has many options, has a style that does not integrate into the current Ubuntu desktop and does not allow scanning from within applications. In Karmic it was proposed to peplaced Xsane with the application Gnome-Scan, but Gnome-Scan was not found to be stable enough.
Robert Ancell’s application titled Simple Scan is basically a frontend for SANE – which is the same backend as XSANE uses. This means that all existing scanners will work and the interface is well tested. However, this does not rule out changing the backend in the future. Besides a much cleaner interface, Simple Scan will also have a GTK+ interface that integrates nicely with the Ubuntu desktop.

Simple Scan is under heavy development, but hopefully Robert will have something solid, slick and intuitive to ship in Ubuntu 10.04.

http://people.ubuntu.com/~robert-ancell/simple-scan/
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Lucid/DocumentScanning

Debian Squeeze freeze and Ubuntu Dev Syncing

The Debian GNU/Linux project is looking at a development freeze in March next year for its next release, Squeeze, the project leader Steve McIntyre says.

A freeze means that no new features are incorporated and only bug fixes are done. The release does not take place until all RC (release critical) bugs are squashed.

McIntyre was hopeful that this would translate into a release sometime by the middle of the Northern summer.

“It would be nice to have things done before we head off to New York for DebConf in July, so that we’re free of the release work while we discuss future plans,” he told iTWire, in response to a query.

Debian’s last release, Lenny, hit the download servers on February 14 this year.

Earlier this year, the owner of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, had proposed that Debian sync releases with Ubuntu so that the work could be spread. Ubuntu releases every six months as it is tied to the GNOME release schedule.

Said McIntyre: “In terms of the discussions with Mark and the Ubuntu team, those are still happening here and there. As the major components of both our releases are shared, we’re hoping to be able to sync up on the same or similar upstream versions and spread some of the work.

“Exactly if and how that will happen depends on the teams involved, but we should be able to help each other. Maybe in future we’ll be able to sync more tightly, but that’s going to take time.”

He said things were fairly quiet in the project right now. “That’s what typically happens in the middle of a release cycle. We’ve got some Bug Squashing Parties coming up in the next few weeks to help us kill off some of the release critical bugs in Squeeze, and I’ll be hosting one of those at my place in Cambridge next weekend.”

McIntyre said the process of organising the next Debian conference had begun. “We’re now looking for sponsors to aid us in paying for the conference. It will be quite exciting to hold DebConf in the US for the first time – we’re expecting a much bigger audience from our US-based developers and users than normal, and I can’t wait to meet more of them.”

McIntyre is in his second term as leader and said he would not be running for election again. “After two years of being nominally ‘in charge’ I’ll be happy to pass the reins over to somebody else.

“There are plenty of other qualified folks around who could do the job, and in my increasingly-tight spare time it would would be nice to do more technical stuff again,” he said.

Debian, which was set up in 1993, provides ports for more architectures than any other GNU/Linux distribution. The distribution is highly regarded, especially for its software management capabilities.

Linux Mint 8 Released

mintClement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 8, a beginner-friendly, Ubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution: “The team is proud to announce the stable release of Linux Mint 8, code name ‘Helena’. The 8th release of Linux Mint comes with numerous bug fixes and a lot of improvements. In particular, Linux Mint 8 comes with support for OEM installs, a brand new Upload Manager, the menu now allows you to configure custom places, the update manager now lets you define packages for which you don’t want to receive updates,the software manager now features multiple installation and removal of software and many of the tools’ graphical interfaces were enhanced.” Read the release announcement and visit the what’s new page (with screenshots) to find out more about the new release. Download (mirrors) the installable live CD image from here: LinuxMint-8.iso (688MB, MD5, torrent).

Linux Easy Printer Setup Guide

Setting up a printer is a doddle
People seem to have major issues with printer installation and setup. I don’t know why because it’s easy when you avoid all the guis and go for the cups web interface.

I have a HP Deskjet 845C, it works on every linux distro using the cups browser method.

On most Linux distros, cups is available in the repository, if not already installed and activated at boot. So just do a search for cups or printer and install Cups if needed.

Then get your HP/Other make drivers
I always install Foomatic Hpijs.

Next start the cups server
Debian/Ubuntu based boxes: sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
Archlinux and others: sudo /etc/rc.d/cups start

Configure your printer from your web browser
Next, open your web browser and type the address http://localhost:631 which is your print server port. You will be greeted with the cups html printer setup page similar to the image below.

Cups-Printer-Config

Now you just hit “Add Printer” and go through the motions of selecting your printer and driver etc.

Just click all the links and check out what’s on offer, you can add users to the printer and change the default settings, all much easier than some desktop printer config utilities.

When you are done, print a test page.

How to Urban Terror 1st person Shooter on Linux

What is Urban Terror?
Urban Terror is a great 1st person online team shooter with great graphics, and a whole heap of maps. Whatsmore, the online community is very active, I had no problem at all connecting to a server.

From http://urbanterror.net

Urban Terror is a free multiplayer first person shooter developed by FrozenSand, that (thanks to the ioquake3-code) does not require Quake III Arena anymore. It is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh. The current version is 4.1.

Urban Terror can be described as a Hollywood tactical shooter; somewhat realism based, but the motto is “fun over realism”. This results in a very unique, enjoyable and addictive game.

No registration required: Download, install, play!

The best thing? It works out-of-the-box on Linux

Howto install and run Urban Terror
I tested it on a laptop with Ati graphics, Broadcom wireless connection and it was flawless.

Download Urban Terror
I used this torrent as I believe in sharing bandwidth, whatsmore the torrent is very fast and I had a 40 seeders. You can also get Urban Terror direct from their mirrors:
Netherlands
UK
USA

Installation
Just unzip UrbanTerror_41_FULL.zip
Enter the new directory and choose the correct executable for your architecture
Linux 32bits executable: ioUrbanTerror.i386
Linux 64bits executable: ioUrbanTerror.x86_64

In linux, you need to make it executable first: right click it, properties and tick the ‘allow execution’ box.

You’re done!

Now double click the executable and get ready to frag some ass!

First impressions
As it loaded I waited for slowdown or even a crash, nada, was running as smooth as a baby’s bum. It automatically offers you a training tutorial which I accepted.

Next I chose my username “richs-lxh” and proceeded to check all the settings; Control, graphics, sound, team options etc.

Then I decided to check out the online servers, hit refresh and a whole heap of them filled the list. I clicked on PING to get the best for me at the top and clicked “join”. There was already a battle in progress between a blue and red team, so I chose to be a spectator  ;)

Follow Mode – Really Cool
Urban Terror has a f”ollow mode” when you are a spectator. This means that if you are new to the game (or too scared to join in like me) you can hit “follow” and suddenly you get a first person view of one of the players. It’s great as you run around shooting and being shot at. Helps you get used to the game play.

I did that for a while, then hiot escape, and joined the game. I lasted about er…….. 3 minutes Lol!  ;D

Gimme a break, I am used to playing N64 and PSII with a joypad, I need to get used to the keyboard controls.

This is a very good game, I like what I see. I know most shooters on Linux are the same, if you’ve played Alien Arena, Nexuiz, Quake, Doom etc, you’ll know what I mean. But this one had slightly brighter maps, and whereas other games have these space age futuristic arenas, Urban Terror has real houses and places that feel familiar. I prefer that.

Definitely worth downloading if you like shooters.

Will My Ati Graphics card work with Linux?

amd_ati-graphicsBasically, yes. Ati have been working hard to produce graphic card drivers for newer cards and have also helped Linux developers with Open Source projects. They are currently in talks with several package maintainers to provide drivers from various distro repositories.

Common questions and answers:

Q1: What features are provided by the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver?
A1: The ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently provides hardware acceleration for 3D graphics and video playback. It also includes support for dual displays and TV Output.
Q2: Which ATI graphics cards can use this driver?
A2: The ATI Proprietary Linux driver currently supports Radeon 8500 and later AGP or PCI Express graphics products, as well as ATI FireGL 8700 and later products. We do not currently plan to include support for any products earlier than this. Drivers for earlier products should already be available from the DRI Project or Utah-GLX project.
Q3: What computer architectures are supported by this driver?
A3: Systems using 32-bit processors from Intel (Pentium III and later) and AMD (Athlon and later) are currently supported. 64-bit drivers are available for EM64T/AMD64 based systems. PowerPC, Alpha, and others are not currently supported.
Q4: Is complete driver source code available?
A4: Some of the technologies supported in our driver are protected by non-disclosure agreements with third parties, so we cannot legally release the complete source code to our driver. It is NOT open source. We do, however, include source code for the control panel and certain other public segments. We also actively assist developers in the Open Source community with their work, so if you absolutely require an open source driver for your graphics card, we can recommend using drivers from the DRI project, Utah-GLX project, or others.
Q5: In which formats is the ATI Proprietary Linux driver available?
A5: The Linux drivers available from our website are available in RPM format as well as a Graphical User Interface installer (operates in both text and X-windows modes). We are also in discussions with various distribution maintainers to provide our drivers in their formats using their repositories and delivery systems in the future.
Q6: What Linux kernel version is needed for this driver?
A6: Version 2.4 of the Linux kernel is required for this driver. This kernel version is installed as standard in many current Linux distributions. Support for the newer version 2.6 kernel is also included.
Q7: What X-Windows versions are supported in this driver?
A7: Driver packages are available for XFree86 versions 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3, as well as X.Org 6.8.
Q8: Is v4l video capture supported for ALL IN WONDER cards?
A8: The ATI Proprietary Linux driver does not currently provide video capture functionality. Video capture support for most ALL IN WONDER cards should be available from the GATOS project.
Q9: What colour modes are currently supported?
A9: 24-bit True Colour is currently the only native colour mode for the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver. 8-bit colour can be achieved using the pseudo-colour visuals feature, but may not work in all applications. 16-bit colour is not supported; if any of your critical applications require 16-bit colour, you should not install the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver.
Q10: Where can I get more information about ATI hardware support in Linux?
A10: Please check the Linux and XFree86 FAQ on the ATI website for more information about third party programming projects involving ATI hardware in Linux..

Chromium OS – Open Source Chrome OS is here

chromium_osSo here we go, finally, we can all get our hands on ChromeOS, well, the open source version called Chromium OS. And……… it’s a D.I.Y distro folks. Google didn’t even provide a ready made iso, VM or .image!

Basically you need to be running Linux, they recommend building it using the Git repos. Then you can create a USB Pendrive, a Vmware image or install it straight to a partition on your harddrive.

Soooooo……….. who is going to be the first to post a distributable iso? Get hacking folks!

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/

What about the unknown Linux distros?

linuxmixPractically the entire planet has heard of Ubuntu due to it’s colossal marketing machine, free CD’s, huge online community and related user blogs. Not to mention the now renamed DiggBuntu, which used to be the Digg Linux section. Ubuntu has topped the charts at Distrowatch since it’s release, closely followed by the likes of the other Top 10 distros like Debian (the father of Ubuntu), Mint, Fedora, Suse, Mandriva et al.

But what about all the other distros that haven’t made it to Distrowatch yet?

I visit Distrowatch everyday, and also have an RSS feed here at Total Linux listing the latest releases, and only recently did I see the long waiting list of new projects who are hoping that a spot on Distrowatch will launch them to ÜberStardom, or even ÜbuStardom 😉

Check out the waiting list below, you never know, you may find a hidden little gem of a distro that hasn’t got the backing of the likes of Canonical or Novell, so remains unknown. (Take into account that the list goes back to 2004 and some projects have been discontinued)

(List courtesy of Distrowatch.Com)

The current list of to-be-included distributions:

RSS Feed Readers for Linux

rss

RSS readers allow users to view information contained in rss feeds in a specific location in an intuitive way.

Straw
Straw is a desktop news aggregator for Gnome environment. A faster easier way to read RSS news feeds and blogs.

Bottom Feeder
BottomFeeder is a news aggregator client (RSS and Atom) written in VisualWorks Smalltalk. BottomFeeder runs on x86 Linux (also FreeBSD), PowerPC linux, Sparc Linux, Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP), Mac OS8/9, Mac OS X, AIX, SGI Irix, Compaq UNIX, HP-UX, and Solaris.

Liferea
an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader. It is a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports a number of different feed formats including RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML.

Syndigator
Syndigator is an RSS feed reader based on Gtk2 and is targeted primarily at those people using Linux (since this is the platform that the developers are using).

Composite
It’s a simple app. It has a page where you enter feeds, and a page where it displays the aggregated content.

Eclipse RSS Reader
The Eclipse RSS Reader allows the user to create RSS channels, connected to on-line RSS feeds, and view the items they contain in several workbench views. Each channel can be updated from its source at regular intervals.

K.R.S.S.
K.R.S.S. is a Linux-based application that downloads Rich Site Summary feeds and displays them on your desktop, in HTML. It quickly downloads any number of pre-selected RSS feeds that you have chosen, and displays them when and how you want in a ticker-tape fashion.

Rol
Rol is a simple application for reading RSS or RDF feeds such as those produced by many news sites or weblogs. It is not intended to do anything more than display the headlines and allow you to choose which to read in your web browser.

Chandler Project (Linux) PIM – Calendar, Email

chandler_logo

Chandler Project PIM

Many moons ago, I set out on a quest to find a good calendar app for Linux. At the time, my choices were limited. At least for what I wanted / needed to accomplish. During my quest, I came upon a neat little app called Chandler. The screenshots caught my eye and I decided to download it and see if it lived up to expectations. The short answer is, YES! Since then, I’ve used this app on a daily basis. It helps keep all my crap organized, readable, and shareable. Chandler supports iCal, Lightning, Sunbird, Evolution, etc. Share your data via the Chandler Hub. It also works with Google.

Chandler does everything I need it to do, and more. Sure, there are probably better apps out now. But, I’ve used this one too long to switch. Not to mention, this one is Desktop independent. So, on Linux, it doesn’t matter if I’m running KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc. It just works OOTB. On the rare chance it doesn’t work with your distro, the source is available for you to compile yourself. I know, who wants to compile stuff in this day and age of Linux? Well, a lot of us still do and for various reasons. It sounds difficult, but seriously, it’s like 3 commands.

So, what do I use Chandler for? Everything! I keep track of my various projects, my kids activities, upcoming appointments, tasks lists, etc. The list of things I use it for is almost endless as the features Chandler has. I consider it one of the most important tools on my system.

Some have complained about the size of Chandler (it packs a lot of features) and some have complained about Chandler being slow. It seems that some have problems when using Chandler with large amounts of data (i.e. business amounts). However, I’ve never experienced this issue. Although, I’ve only used Chandler for personal use. To me, I may have a ton of data in use. But, compared to a business, my data might be small. So, it may not be great for large scale business use, it does work great for personal use.

Check out the Chandler site for more details and screenshots at: http://chandlerproject.org/

How Google uses Linux

google_logo-smallKS2009: How Google uses Linux

By Jonathan Corbet
October 21, 2009


LWN’s 2009 Kernel Summit coverage

There may be no single organization which runs more Linux systems than Google. But the kernel development community knows little about how Google uses Linux and what sort of problems are encountered there. Google’s Mike Waychison traveled to Tokyo to help shed some light on this situation; the result was an interesting view on what it takes to run Linux in this extremely demanding setting.

READ MORE……………….

Smokin’ Guns

The tagline for smokin-guns.net reads, “With cordite in the air, splintered steel, shell casings and powder burns, there’s only one explanation…. Smokin’ Guns.” I don’t know about you, but I like watching movies based on the Old West, so it was a real treat when I came across this particular game a month or so back.

smokin-guns

I honestly didn’t have very high expectations for this game, so when I did finally take it for a test run, I was pleasantly surprised. This game, which can be run natively in Windows, as well as in Linux, is an open source game based on the Quake 3 engine. You may have noticed that I did not mention Mac: it is true, that SG is not officially supported on a Mac, but according to SG forum post, somebody has ported it to the Mac.

Although this game can be played in Single Player mode, it is really geared toward Multiplayer over your LAN or the internet. Besides the usual Death Match and Team Death Match modes, there are also Bank Robbery, Duel and Round Teamplay. If you have ever watched “The Quick and the Dead” then you will love the thrill of the Duel mode.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the Death Match mode, but the folks at SG more than make up for it by throwing Bank Robbery, Duel and Round Teamplay into the mix. The only thing that might prevent others – read avid gamers – from liking this game – in my estimation – would be the graphics. That being said, I do believe that the genre of this MP FPS is what will draw the fans, not the graphics.

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Top 10 Linux Distros

tuxTop 10 Distributions
Leading distributions have usually been around for a while and are well-established. They will support several architectures from low-end x86 versions to high-end versions for IBM mainframes and the latest 64-bit technology. Some come from companies that supply service and support contracts for their products, others are community projects. Leading distributions usually support many languages.

Debian GNU/Linux

http://www.debian.org/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/debian/

The Debian Project is one of the oldest distributions and is currently the largest volunteer based distribution provider. The distribution supports many languages and hardware platforms, for example the lenny release supports i386, amd64, powerpc, alpha, arm, arm64, hppa, ia64, mips/mipsel, sparc and s390. The old stable version 4.0 (etch) was released April 8, 2007 – now at revision 8 released April 8, 2009. The current stable version 5.0 (lenny) was released February 14, 2009 – the third revision, v5.0.3 was released September 5, 2009. Debian users who want a more current desktop distribution are encouraged to use the testing branch, which is where the next stable release (currently codenamed Squeeze) is prepared and which should normally be quite stable. Debian Developers and users who want to live on the bleeding edge can run the unstable branch (Sid) or even try packages from experimental.

Fedora

http://fedoraproject.org/
Fedora Project wiki
http://freshmeat.net/projects/fedora_project/

The Fedora Project is Red Hat’s community distribution. It is intended to be a fast-paced distribution for those that like to stay on the leading edge of technology. It is also a test-bed for Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux products. The Fedora contains all the packages necessary to run a functional desktop or small server. The first Fedora Core release was dated November 5, 2003. Fedora strives for a new release every 6 months and releases will be supported for 13 months. Still supported: Fedora 10, released November 25, 2008 and Fedora 11, released June 9, 2009. Fedora 12 Beta was released October 20, 2009.

Gentoo Linux

http://www.gentoo.org/

Gentoo Linux is a source-based distribution that can be optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Gentoo offers extreme performance, configurability and a top-notch user and developer community. Users keep their systems up-to-date using Portage, which is based on BSD Ports. Gentoo is a meta-distribution with a large number of packages available (nearly 11,000 as of April 2006). Gentoo Linux 2005.1 is currently available for Alpha, AMD64, PPC, PPC64, SPARC, X86, IA64 and SPARC32. Gentoo Linux 2006.0 was released February 27, 2006. Gentoo Linux 2006.1 was released August 30, 2006. Gentoo Linux 2007.0 was released May 7, 2007. Gentoo Linux 2008.0 was released July 6, 2008. Gentoo 2008.0-r1 fixes some live CD issues. Sets of weekly stage3 tarballs and minimal CDs were released December 20, 2008. Gentoo Ten LiveDVD 10.1 was released October 10, 2009.

Mandriva Linux

http://www.mandrivalinux.com/

Mandriva
Mandriva Brazil
Mandriva is a new name for two popular distribution companies resulting from the merger of the French company Mandrakesoft and the Brazilian company Conectiva. Mandriva has also acquired Lycoris assets and hired Lycoris founder and CEO, Joesph Cheek on June 15, 2005. Mandriva Linux 2006.0 merged technology from MandrakeSoft, Conectiva and Lycoris. This version became generally available on October 13, 2005 and reached an end of support on April 13, 2007. Mandriva Linux One is a combined live and install CD, first released in March 2006. The Mandriva Corporate Server 4.0 was released September 19, 2006. Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0 was released June 21, 2007. Mandriva Linux 2008 was released October 9, 2007. ML 2008.1 was released April 9, 2008. ML 2008.1 Xfce edition was released May 1, 2008. Mandriva Linux 2009 was released October 9, 2008. XFCE One 2009.0 was released November 20, 2008. Mandriva Linux 2009.1 was released April 29, 2009. Mandriva Linux 2010 RC2 was released October 10, 2009.

Red Hat Enterprise

http://www.redhat.com/

Red Hat, Inc. provides one of the the best known distributions in the world. In 2003 the company announced its decision to drop its popular Red Hat Linux in order to concentrate on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux line. The Fedora Project (see above) has replaced the Red Hat Linux line for the home user or small business. Red Hat Linux 9 was released April 7, 2003, and official Red Hat support ended on May 1, 2004. Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes with service and support contracts for those Red Hat customers who require a stable, supported system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 was released October 22, 2003. The seventh update for RHEL 3 was released March 15, 2006. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (Nahant) was released February 15, 2005. RHEL 4.8 was released May 19, 2009. RHEL 5 was released March 14, 2007. Version 5.3 was released January 20, 2009. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 was released September 2, 2009.

Slackware Linux

http://www.slackware.com/
Slackware Linux for ARM
Slackware German forum
http://freshmeat.net/projects/slackware/

The Slackware project is headed by Patrick J. Volkerding, with a cast of volunteers and a loyal following. It is the oldest active Linux distribution with the first release dated July 16, 1993. For a very long time the official Slackware project only supported x86 platforms, however others have made ports to other platforms. In 2009 the x86_64 port and the ARM port were offically accepted into Slackware. Slackware 12.2 was released December 11, 2008. Slackware 13.0 was released August 28, 2009.

SuSE Linux

http://www.novell.com/linux/

openSUSE
Nuremberg based SuSE Linux AG is one of the older Linux distributions. It became the the European UnitedLinux partner, and supplied much of the code base for UnitedLinux and for Sun’s Java Desktop System (both now unsupported). SuSE was later acquired by US company Novell (finalized January 12, 2004). SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) supports x86, x86-64, IPF (ia64), POWER (32 & 64bit, ppc & ppc64) and Mainframes (32 & 64bit, s390 & s390x). OpenSUSE is the community distribution beginning with SUSE Linux 10.0, released October 6, 2005. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) are available for enterprise customers. SLES/SLED 10 became generally available July 17, 2006, now at Service Pack 2, released May 21, 2008. openSUSE 10.3 was released October 4, 2007. The 10.3 Live edition is also available. SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 was released November 27, 2007. openSUSE 11.0 was released June 19, 2008. openSUSE 11.1 was released December 18, 2008. SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (SLES/SLED/JeOS) was released February 28, 2009, generally available March 24, 2009. openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 remix, released September 10, 2009, comes with KDE 4.3.1 and all online updates. openSUSE 11.2 RC1 was released October 15, 2009.

Ubuntu

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio
Ubuntu and its close cousins are freely available distributions, supported by Canonical Ltd. Ubuntu takes a snapshot of Debian unstable and then creates a small fork, recompiling and stabilizing the code to get a final stable release. It usually takes 6 months between the snapshot and the release. Ubuntu comes with the GNOME desktop, Kubuntu with the KDE desktop, Xubuntu features XFCE and Edubuntu comes with educational packages. Mythbuntu integrates the MythTV package. Ubuntu Studio integrates packages for multimedia creation. The first Ubuntu release (4.10 Preview released September 15, 2004) supported Intel x86 (IBM-compatible PC), AMD64 (Hammer) and PowerPC (Apple iBook and Powerbook, G4 and G5) architectures. SPARC64 support was added for v6.06 LTS. Supported versions: 6.06 LTS Server “Dapper Drake”, 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron”, 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” and 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”. V6.06.2 LTS (the second maintenance release) was made available January 21, 2008. “Hardy Heron” aka v8.04 LTS was released April 24, 2008, available in desktop and server editions. Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS was released July 16, 2009. Kubuntu 8.04 is available with KDE 3 or KDE 4. Kubuntu 8.04.2 was released February 21, 2009. Other available 8.04 variants include Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio and Mythbuntu. Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” was released October 30, 2008. Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) was released April 23, 2009. Additional Jaunty varients include Netbook Remix, MID and ARM. Currently in development: Karmic Koala (9.10) Beta was released October 1, 2009.

Arch Linux

http://www.archlinux.org/

Arch Linux is an i686-optimized Linux distribution. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades. Arch is designed to be streamlined while allowing for a customized configuration, with newer features such as reiserfs/ext3 and devfs. Arch uses the internally developed Pacman package manager. The inital version, 0.1, was released March 11, 2002. x86_64 support was added in April 2006. Arch Linux 2009.08 was released August 9, 2009.

Dreamlinux

http://dreamlinux.com.brDreamlinux aims to be a light, modern and functional free OS that runs as a live CD or installed to a hard drive. Dreamlinux Works edition includes plenty of desktop applications and the XGL Edition provides additional eye candy for people with Nvidia cards. It comes with the XFCE desktop environment. The MkDistro tool is included to help people create their own specialized distribution. Dreamlinux Works Edition 2.1 was released September 19, 2006. Dreamlinux 2.2 is the current release. Dreamlinux 2.2 Multimedia GL Edition, with BERYL-AIGLX, was released June 29, 2007. Dreamlinux 3.1 was released April 5, 2008. Dreamlinux 3.5 was released February 28, 2009. Dreamlinux 4.0 – XFCE 4.6 – ALPHA was released October 9, 2009.

Linux Wireless Card Command Line Help

wireless

Here is a list of Cli commands which provide valuable information when trying to configure    your wireless connection

sudo iwlist scanning – shows wireless networks that are available in the area with basic encryption information

sudo lshw -C network – Shows Details of Interface card and drivers of each networking device

sudo lspci -nn – Shows PCI vendor and device codes as both numbers and names of hardware connected to the pci bus

lsusb – Shows USB connected hardware

lshw -C usb – Additional info on USB related hardware (good for USB dongles)

route -n – Lists kernel IP routing table — Good for troubleshooting problems with the gateway

sudo route add default gw 192.168.1.1 – Example of how to set the default gateway to 192.168.1.1

sudo route del default gw 192.168.1.1 – Example of how to delete the default gateway setting

sudo modprobe ***** – Loads the kernel module **** . (Example usage – sudo modprobe ndiswrapper, sudo modprobe r818x, sudo modprobe ath_pci)

sudo modprobe -r **** – Unloads the kernel module ****. (Example usage – sudo modprobe -r ath_pci)

sudo ifconfig – lists IP address

sudo ifup/ifdown – Brings up/down the interface and clears the routing table for the specified interface

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up/down – Brings up/down the interface for the specified interface

sudo dhclient – Request IP address from DNS server for specified interface

sudo dhclient -r – Release IP address associated with specified interface

sudo iptables -L – Lists firewall rules

sudo iptables -F – Flush all firewall rules

dmesg | more – Lists boot log — good for troubleshooting problems with modules/drivers not being loaded

uname -r – Displays kernel version

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules – File which assigns logical names (eth0, wlan0, etc) to MAC addresses

cat /etc/resolv.conf – Lists DNS servers associated with network connections (Network Manager)

/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf – File which sets or modifies dns (domain name servers) settings

Chakra Linux 64bit Review

chakra

Posted on the Distro Review section at Linux-Hardcore.Com


Distrowatch: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=chakra
Homepage: http://chakra-project.org/
Wiki: http://chakra-project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Forums: http://chakra-project.org/bbs/
Download location: http://chakra-project.org/download.html


|IT-4| Install/Live Test Install
Time to Boot/Install: Boots quick, Installed in about 15-20minutes
Problems?
The installer (Tribe) offers to update itself prior to install. Selecting this option will download the update, but then the installer will freeze. Others have reported this issue as well. Selecting not to update the install will allow you to install it just fine. The GUI installer is of the typical, enter data and click next, installers and it works well. At this time there is no command line installer for Chakra for those used to the Arch way of doing things.

|N-5| Network (router/modem/wireless)
Wifi: N/A
Nic: Not sure on my NIC, but wired worked OOTB
Modem: N/A
Problems?
None. Worked OOTB in the Live and Install environments.

|U-5| USB peripherals
Peripherals: Keyboard, mouse
Problems?
None, again all worked OOTB. And as a bonus, the multimedia keys on my keyboard worked OOTB…sweet!

|G-5| Graphics Card
Make and Model: Nvidia 9600 GSO SLI
Problems?
Live CD recognized my card and loaded the proper drivers…which later transferred to my install. Works great! Although, occasionally I will see some font flicker…but it only happens in KDE4 apps, so it may be KDE.

|S-4| Speed+ DM
Desktop: KDE4.3.1
Slow or Fast?
The system boots quick and runs quick as well. However, once in a blue moon, (very rare) the desktop seems to get stuck for about 5 secs and then resumes. It seems to happen after automatic updates.

|F-4| Forum Support
URL: http://chakra-project.org/bbs/
Seems to have good forum support and it’s well laid out. Staff seems friendly enough as well.

Points Guide
0. Didn’t Work
1. Unsatisfactory
2. Satisfactory
3. Good
4. Very Good
5. Excellent

NOTES:

I would like to point out that this is still an Alpha release so it should carry all the usual Alpha software warnings with it. However, for an Alpha release it exceeded my expectations. I tested the 64 bit version and the Live CD is fast, as is the install. I did hit a few bumps in the road. One was after an update, all my KDE4 apps would seg fault. A quick restart of KDE solved it. Cups was not started by default, and thus gave me grief when trying to set up my printer. After starting Cups my printer installed without a hitch! In SystemSettings there are some apps that require root access and most (KDE)distros will either ask for the root password first, or when the app requires it. Chakra did neither. Instead I got an invalid password error. Starting SystemSettings as root OR changing some permissions on your default user account will solve the problem. Another issue…well not really an issue, but…during boot you are presented with the “old school” display of text scrolling up the screen like crazy. However, a graphical boot screen is in the works. The last issue I see is when shutting down. The system will FAIL to shutdown several apps/services. But, Chakra continues to shutdown. Once the PC is off, I guess you could consider the apps/services shutdown.  Grin

Overall, I was very impressed with Chakra! Everything worked OOTB! Although, the 64 bit version was lacking the usual apps by default (Gimp, Firefox, etc.) but all are available in the repos. It was also missing a lot of KDE4 apps and add-ons by default, but again…all available in the repos. Like Arch, the 64 bit version tries to stick to a true 64bit setup (i.e. no 32 bit apps). Attempting to install XAMPP (LAMPP) prompted a error stating the 32bit compatibility layer was required. Again, a quick stop at the repos for a couple of 32 bit libs and all was well.

Chakra has some neat tools as well. Such as; Tribe, the installer works well… Shaman the package manager performs well and is fast, and easy to use.

If you’ve wanted to try Arch but didn’t want to deal with all the manual labor of setting things up, then this could be the distro for you. I will be running it as my main distro while awaiting DL4.0, so if I come across anything else I’ll be sure to post it here.

Ed

DesktopBSD Project Closed

This is the last and final release of the DesktopBSD project. I find myself having less and less time to spare lately and no longer desire to keep developing and maintaining this project. However, because DesktopBSD is based entirely on FreeBSD, further support for the operating system and availability of up-to-date software for DesktopBSD 1.7 is ensured.


FINAL RELEASE and full details at http://desktopbsd.net

Howto: Wireless Cheat Sheet – Cli Commands

Linux Wireless Help

Here is a list of Cli commands which provide valuable information when trying to configure your wireless connection

sudo iwlist scanning – shows wireless networks that are available in the area with basic encryption information

sudo lshw -C network – Shows Details of Interface card and drivers of each networking device

sudo lspci -nn – Shows PCI vendor and device codes as both numbers and names of hardware connected to the pci bus

lsusb – Shows USB connected hardware

lshw -C usb – Additional info on USB related hardware (good for USB dongles)

route -n – Lists kernel IP routing table — Good for troubleshooting problems with the gateway

sudo route add default gw 192.168.1.1 – Example of how to set the default gateway to 192.168.1.1

sudo route del default gw 192.168.1.1 – Example of how to delete the default gateway setting

sudo modprobe ***** – Loads the kernel module **** . (Example usage – sudo modprobe ndiswrapper, sudo modprobe r818x, sudo modprobe ath_pci)

sudo modprobe -r **** – Unloads the kernel module ****. (Example usage – sudo modprobe -r ath_pci)

sudo ifconfig – lists IP address

sudo ifup/ifdown – Brings up/down the interface and clears the routing table for the specified interface

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up/down – Brings up/down the interface for the specified interface

sudo dhclient – Request IP address from DNS server for specified interface

sudo dhclient -r – Release IP address associated with specified interface

sudo iptables -L – Lists firewall rules

sudo iptables -F – Flush all firewall rules

dmesg | more – Lists boot log — good for troubleshooting problems with modules/drivers not being loaded

uname -r – Displays kernel version

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules – File which assigns logical names (eth0, wlan0, etc) to MAC addresses

cat /etc/resolv.conf – Lists DNS servers associated with network connections (Network Manager)

/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf – File which sets or modifies dns (domain name servers) settings

sidux non-free firmware removal alienating users

Well, you all know how much I rant about this, but there you go. Even sidux users are ranting about non-free firmware being removed from the .30 kernel by slh.

The OFTC irc network on the #sidux and #smxi channels are producing quite a lot of discussion regarding these removals, and I think that sidux will alienate a lot of its userbase because of this. Just the same as Debian is doing.

I’ll say it again, it’s 2009, leave the politics out of Linux!

Just build a system that works out-of-the-box.

It used to be that there were excuses for leaving out non-free firmware/modules/drivers etc, based on performance. Well now it has flipped as users are reporting poor hardware performance with the non-free firmware removed.

I’ll be following this closely, as I am happy that it’s not just me who has a problem with this philosophy. I tried to explain my point to a Debian user once, and just got a condescending reply basically hinting that I know little about Debian and its philosophy. Now more and more Debian/sidux users feel the same as I do.
http://gnuski.blogspot.com/2009/06/2630-kernel-and-sidux.html

On top of this, the average sidux user knows Linux, we aren’t talking Ubuntu newbies here.

By the way, if you want Debian, but with all firmware out of the box, get Dreamlinux. Its current release (3.5) uses the Lenny “stable” repos, but the new DL 4.0 will again be based on “Testing” (Squeeze).

Linux – Slow Internet Browsing

Slow Internet Support Posts
It appears that there have been a few posts on Linux support forums regarding a slow internet connection. There are several reasons that this could occur and possibly hundreds of fixes ranging from:

Poor Hardware (Nic card, Router, Cables)
Incorrect Drivers
Misconfigured Network Settings (DNS, IP Address, Hosts file etc)
The Avahi Daemon Bug
IPv6 as default instead of IPv4
etc etc

Here are some solutions to a few problems:

1. Hardware
Check that your hardware is ok. If you dual boot, does it work ok with Windows or another “non-Debian” distro?

2. The Debian Avahi (nss-mdns) Bug
There is a known bug doing the rounds in Debian based distros, this includes Dreamlinux and Ubuntu.
The problem is in the nsswitch.conf file where wins mdns causes a slowdown of DNS resolution on some machines.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/avahi/+bug/94940

A simple workaround for this problem is to remove mdns4_minimal entry from the nsswitch.conf file, or change mdns4_minimal to just mdns4 (whichever works best for you):

gksudo scite /etc/nsswitch.conf

Scroll down to the entry which says:

hosts: files dns wins mdns4_minimal

and delete the mdns4_minimal entry. (I removed wins as well), s it looks like this:

hosts: files dns

3. Ssh Connections to Servers
I had to ssh into a server from a friends Ubuntu machine and the connection took about 45 seconds. I disabled Avahi and the delay wasn’t even 1 second. If you have no need for Avahi style connections (multicast dns etc) try:

Disabling the Avahi Daemon Temporarily:

sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon stop

Disable Avahi Permanently:

gksudo scite /etc/default/avahi-daemon

And make sure it is set to =1

# 1 = Try to detect unicast dns servers that serve .local and disable avahi in
# that case, 0 = Don’t try to detect .local unicast dns servers, can cause
# troubles on misconfigured networks
AVAHI_DAEMON_DETECT_LOCAL=1

4. Check your DNS in resolv.conf
You should only have two entries (usually) which are your Internet Service Provider’s DNS servers.
Check and/or edit your dns servers:

gksudo scite /etc/resolv.conf

It should look something like this:

search my.isp.com

nameserver 4.4.2.2
nameserver 4.4.2.4

You may have an extra IP address there, possibly your router (192.168.1.1), and if you haven’t got dns servers configured in your router config, this may cause a problem/slowdown as well. EG:

search my.isp.com

nameserver 192.168.1.1
nameserver 4.4.2.2
nameserver 4.4.2.4

Just remove the first one and leave the two ISP DNS server IP’s.

5. Disabling IPv6 to only use IPv4
[Howto] Speed Up Internet: Iceweasel, Google Earth (No IpV6)

There are many reasons how network problems can arise, depending on whether you are using a modem (Dial-Up/USB), Router (Wired/Wireless), Bluetooth, Mobile Phone. The above are just a few of the more common problems.

rich

Backtrack 3 (Slackware) and Staying

Whoppix, Whax and Backtrack
Well, as well as using Dreamlinux and a few other distros, one live cd/pen-drive I always carry around is Backtrack. I have always messed with networks as a little hobby ever since I started using Linux, especially after the advent of wireless. There are a load of distros that provided the tools to analyze network traffic, security etc.

Of my favourites were Whoppix/Whax, Grml (Debian), and then with the merger of Auditor and Whax – Backtrack.

Using Slackware
As a mainly Debian/Arch user, the appeal for me was that Backtrack was Slackware or Slax. There was a bit of a learning curve doing things the “Slackware Way” but it always felt robust and fast even running as a Live cd. I’m not a Kde fan so I always used the Fluxbox version.

Backtrack goes Ubuntu
Recently after hearing the news that Backtrack 4 will be Ubuntu based, I decided to install Backtrack 3 on my main laptop, as sadly, it will be my last download and first install of this remarkable distro. I’m not sure why they changed to Ubuntu, but to go from one of the fathers of Linux, skip Debian and go straight for a newbie derivative, especially a distro which suffers from a lot of breakage, is madness in my eyes.

Backtrack Forums
The Backtrack forums have always advocated learning, and doing things the hard way to find out the where, what, why and how of analysis, hacking and cracking. The Ubuntu forums have always been full of newbies looking for immediate point and click results with no intention of learning or giving back to the community. Well, this is a high percentage of Ubuntu users anyway. There are some knowledgeable guys there, but the “takers” far outweigh them.
Backtrack forums will now be flooded with this type of user, which will be a shame. Just wannabe crackers asking basic questions about how to point and click to crack wpa. I can see it now.

Forum Lurker
As a forum Admin myself, I always use Google then the forum search of any distro before posting, and as it happens, both have always served me well with Backtrack and Slackware. I signed up yesterday to ask “Why Ubuntu?”. Then I decided that it doesn’t matter, and the devs obviously have a good reason for their choice. I just hope it’s for the right reasons and not just publicity.

Sticking with Slackware
I have Backtrack 3 (Slackware 12 Upgrade) installed. I get all my updates from the Slackware repos, all the Backtrack-centric scripts do what I need them to do, and i’ll manually install any updates.
I’m not sure what the Backtrack masses feel about the swap, i for one won’t be using HackBuntu 4.

Upgrade Linux Safely – Outside Of Graphical Desktop

One thing I have noticed after using various Linux distros over the years is the amount of breakage you see after an Upgrade or Dist-Upgrade.

People lose their Xorg configuration settings, their graphics card drivers don’t work, and they lose 3D acceleration which means no Compiz, no Games, no eye-candy and usually eye-ache as you search Google over and over again trying to find a fix.

Xorg has changed a lot, and so have the graphics card drivers over the last year, which hasn’t helped, but the main problems are caused by upgrading Xorg and your graphics card drivers while logged in to a graphical desktop. If you are an (ex)Ubuntu user you will see how Synaptic is always recommended to upgrade, well, with the way Xorg has been behaving, it is not a good idea.

[b]To Safely Upgrade:[/b]

1. Hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to the Console (you may have to hit enter a couple of times to see the login prompt)
2. Login with your username and password.
3. Stop the other graphical desktop (Gnome or Xfce) that you have just switched out of with:

sudo killall gdm

4. Update your system

sudo apt-get update

5. Upgrade your system

sudo apt-get upgrade

See a whole heap of Xorg related updates there?. Install them all.

You are now up to date.

To get back to your desktop:

startx

[b]*IMPORTANT NOTE*[/b] This method doesn’t guarantee that you will not get a borked system. Nor does upgrading with Synaptic mean you will. It’s just that avoiding trouble “just in case” is better than taking risks and getting a headache trying to solve this stuff.

I have just performed an upgrade with DL 3.5 Xfce edition, and started Compiz to prove it works. In the past I have upgraded in the graphical environment and lost 3D acceleration, Compiz and got the Google headache. Hence this post to save you some Aspirins  😉

Rich

Easy Printer Setup on Linux

Setting up a printer is a doddle
People seem to have major issues with printer installation and setup. I don’t know why because it’s easy when you avoid all the guis and go for the cups web interface.

I have a HP Deskjet 845C, it works on every linux distro using the cups browser method.

On most Linux distros, cups is available in the repository. So just do a search for cups or printer and install Cups.

Then get your HP drivers
I always install Foomatic Hpijs.

Next start the cups server
Debian based boxes: sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
Archlinux and others: sudo /etc/rc.d/cups start

Configure your printer from your web browser
Next, open your web browser and type the address http://localhost:631 which is your print server port. You will be greeted with the cups html printer setup page.

Cups-Printer-Config

Now you just hit “Add Printer” and go through the motions of selecting your printer and driver etc.

Just click all the links and check out what’s on offer, you can add users to the printer and change the default settings, all much easier than some desktop printer config utilities.

When you are done, print a test page.

richs-lxh

Debian 5.0 Lenny Released as Stable

Well this is great news for Debian users and Dreamlinux users alike, as Dreamlinux is built on the Debian Lenny base.

Debian “lenny” Release Information

Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.0 was
released February 14th, 2009. The release included many major
changes, described in
our press release and
the Release Notes.

To obtain and install Debian GNU/Linux, see
the installation information page and the
Installation Guide. To upgrade from an older
Debian release, see the instructions in the
Release Notes.

Contrary to our wishes, there may be some problems that exist in the
release, even though it is declared stable. We’ve made
a list of the major known problems, and you can always
report other issues to us.

Last but not least, we have a list of people who take
credit
for making this release happen.

How To Linux Enable DMA for dvdrw cdrw (eg K3b says no DMA)

K3b is known to to do this if you have the DMA bug or not.

You can check by first doing a search for your dvd/cd writer with:(I have put dvdrw)

sudo ls -l /dev/dvdrw

[i]Example:[/i](It tells me that my DVD Writer is /dev/hdd)

richs@lxh:~$ sudo ls -l /dev/dvdrw<br />lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2008-04-26 16:49 /dev/dvdrw -&gt; hdd<br />richs@lxh:~$<br />

[b]
Then seeing if it has DMA enabled for /dev/hdd:[/b]

sudo hdparm -d /dev/hdd

[b]
And I get this result:[/b]

richs@lxh:~$ sudo hdparm -d /dev/hdd<br /><br />/dev/hdd:<br /> using_dma     =  1 (on)

[b]If yours says DMA is off:[/b]

/dev/hdd:<br />using_dma = 0 (off)

[b]
Turn it on with:[/b]

sudo hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdd

and it should look like this:

/dev/hdd:<br />setting using_dma to 1 (on)<br />using_dma = 1 (on)

How to List and Print a Backup Copy of your Drivers

How do you see all the drivers you have installed on a LInux system?
There is a website called kmuto.jp that will translate the output of a command, and tell you which drivers you have installed on your Debian/Debian-Based box.

All you have to do is type this command in your terminal:

lspci -n

You will get something like this:

richs@DL:~$ lspci -n
00:00.0 0600: 1106:3189 (rev 80)
00:01.0 0604: 1106:b198
00:0f.0 0104: 1106:3149 (rev 80)
00:0f.1 0101: 1106:0571 (rev 06)
00:10.0 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.1 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.2 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.3 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 81)
00:10.4 0c03: 1106:3104 (rev 86)
00:11.0 0601: 1106:3227
00:11.5 0401: 1106:3059 (rev 60)
00:11.6 0780: 1106:3068 (rev 80)
00:12.0 0200: 1106:3065 (rev 78)
01:00.0 0300: 10de:0322 (rev a1)
richs@DL:~$

Now go to the website and copy and paste the output into their paste-box and click “Check”
HERE

You will be given the details of what drivers you are using. Cool huh?

If you are using Firefox/Iceweasel, click your “File” button at the top left and choose “Print Preview”, if it all looks good, print out the details for safe keeping.

Linux Commands for Beginners – Cheat Sheet

Hello Linux Beginners:
If you have just started with Linux, you will find that sooner or later you will have to copy and paste commands into the terminal/console. Don’t be afraid, it’s easy…… and fun.

For example, type sudo apt-get moo in your terminal and hit “enter” 🙂

Here are a few of the more common commands and what they do:

pwd : show path of present working dir
ls : list contents of pwd
cd : change to a directory
rm : to delete files, to delete dir use the -r flag with rm
nano : text editor to open file
su : + passord (switch user) become root
sudo : execute a command with temporary root privileges
chmod : change privileges for a file, value 777 specifies r,w,x for root,group and others
ps : list current processes
killall : stop processes that are not responding
killall -9 : stop processes that won’t stop with killall
shutdown : shutdown system eg. sudo shutdown -h now
reboot : reboot system eg. sudo reboot
init : switch between run levels, 5 is the default run level for multi-user, networking and gui
/etc/init.d/gdm stop : to stop the gnome desktop manager and enter shell mode
/etc/init.d/kdm stop : to stop kde desktop manager
startx : start the xserver after you have booted to console
ifconfig : configure network adapter eg. sudo ifconfig eth0
iwconfig : configure a wireless card eg. sudo iwconfig wlan0
All services are in the /etc/init.d directory eg sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
mount : to mount hard drives, cds
mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media/new : will mount a cd in the new folder in media dir
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/c : will mount ntfs partition 1 in c folder in mnt dir
umount : to unmount a mounted drive, if device busy error comes use -l option for lazy unmount
To automount a partition on boot : add the mount entry to fstab file in /etc directory
cp : copy
mv : move
man : this is the most useful command, typing man command will give you the manual pages for that command which describe the command in detail and how to use it
ctrl+alt+(F1-F6) : enters any of the six available terminals
ctrl+alt+F7 : switch back to gui mode from the terminal
sudo dpkg -i : to install a Debian .deb package

To manually compile a binary executable with a make file, execute the following sequentially

./configure
make
sudo make install

More to come later 😉

Linux Easy Printer Setup

Setting up a printer is a doddle
People seem to have major issues with printer installation and setup. I don’t know why because it’s easy when you avoid all the guis and go for the cups web interface.

I have a HP Deskjet 845C, it works on every linux distro using the cups browser method.

On most Linux distros, cups is available in the repository. So just do a search for cups or printer and install Cups.

Then get your HP drivers
I always install Foomatic Hpijs.

Next start the cups server
Debian based boxes: sudo /etc/init.d/cups restart
Archlinux and others: sudo /etc/rc.d/cups start

Configure your printer from your web browser
Next, open your web browser and type the address http://localhost:631 which is your print server port. You will be greeted with the cups html printer setup page.

Cups-Printer-Config

Now you just hit “Add Printer” and go through the motions of selecting your printer and driver etc.

Just click all the links and check out what’s on offer, you can add users to the printer and change the default settings, all much easier than some desktop printer config utilities.

When you are done, print a test page.

richs-lxh

Valentines Day – Debian Lenny 5.0 Released

Excellent news, after the long wait, Debian Lenny finally goes stable on the 14th February.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/02/msg00000.html

The weekend of February 14th is going to be our tentative target for
release. We’ve checked with all the involved teams (which are many!),
and the date works for all of them.

Howto Install and use custom TTF fonts on Linux

Everybody likes and sometimes need a variety of fonts. I use them for my Conky System Monitor to show charts and logos for Disk Space and Wireless Signal Strength.
Here is the easy straight-forward way to install fonts, and update the font cache so that you can start using them.

To use custom fonts:
If you have a .ttf file (lets call it your_font.ttf) that you have downloaded and want to install it as an available font you should follow these steps:

1. Create somewhere to keep your .ttf fonts:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/custom

2. Copy your font there:

sudo cp your_font.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/custom
(If you prefer to use your file browser to do this, just open it as root and navigate to the directory and copy and paste the fonts there)
**Remember that you never open graphical applications as root, nor with a straight “sudo”, you should always use Graphical Sudo:**

Gnomegksudo nautilus
Xfcegksudo thunar
Kdekdesu konqueror
3. Run the following command to rebuild your font cache:

sudo fc-cache -f -v

Some Free Font Resources:

What is the easiest Linux for beginners?

What is the Easiest Linux for Beginners ?
That question is a matter of preference, personal tasks and hardware.

Ok, so how do I choose a Linux distro for me?
At the end of the day, the best way is to try a few, and be prepared to experiment.
For a quick Q and A test to narrow it down a little, the guys over at Zegenie Studios
have prepared a Linux Chooser for newbies:
Linux Distribution Chooser

The test only includes a fraction of the Linux distros which are avaiable, but many new distros are
based on the ones you will have suggested at the end of the test.

Ok, the Linux Distribution Chooser told me to try [Distro], what now?

Head over to the most comprehensive Linux distro site on the net, which not only lists practically every distro, but has reviews, news, distro profile pages, a distro searcher, and a top 100 ranking which shows the most popular distros that are being used around the world. Distrowatch.Com    If you scroll down a bit, to the right you will see the distro rankings.

The Current Top 10 are:
Rank Distribution  
1 Ubuntu  
2 openSUSE  
3 Mint  
4 Fedora  
5 PCLinuxOS  
6 Debian  
7 Mandriva  
8 Dreamlinux  
9 Sabayon  
10 Damn Small

What now?, Good News !! Linux is easier than ever
1. Most Linux distros are available as a Live CD, which means you can try for a while and have a play
with your new chosen distro without having to install it, nor will it change anything at all on your
computer. So your Windows is completely safe.

2. READ!!!! Many new users have forgotten this skill. Go to the main website of your distro and also 
the support forum and USE-THE-SEARCH-BOX. They all have them, and remember Google is your friend.
Be prepared to take notes, print information and sign up on a support forum.

A Few Extra Notes Before The Impatient Ones Dive In Feet First
a) Linux Distros are downloaded as an iso file and will need to be burned to a cd or dvd as an image NOT data.
b) Linux images should be burned at the slowest possible speed. Each burner will vary, try with 4X to start with.
c) Not ALL distros work on ALL hardware, although Linux comes with 1000’s of hardware drivers preinstalled or easily available.
d) Use Google or a Forum Search for a “How to Install [Distro] Guide”, most distros will now offer you a step-by-step installation 
program that will do it all for you anyway, all you have to do is answer a few questions on the application by clicking Yes or No.
e) If in doubt at any stage whatsoever, ask on the forum.

Linux Forum Do’s and Don’ts

There is a little netiquette involved on many forums, and each has their own way of doing things to keep the forum friendly, helpful, 

organised and easy to use. Forum communities are like little towns; everybody knows eachother, you will always be welcomed with
open arms, there will be hepful and not so helpful advice, young and old, novices and experts, and probably a village idiot  
Forums will be run by a team of Administrators and Moderators, some are friendly and blend in as members, others are like the Gestapo on a power trip with their new found position. In general they are all there to help maintain order and support with different degrees of efficiency.

DO try and find an introduction thread and post a “Hello everybody, i’m new to Linux”. See what kind of welcome you get from staff as well as members.
DO read the forum rules. Some are long winded while others are short and to the point.
DO use the forum Help button which will provide a guide on forum use and features.
DO look at the various sections and post in the right place.
DO use the Forum Search, your question may already have been asked and solved and even have a Howto guide.
DO be prepared to help yourself, you get far more respect and quicker help if you can show that you have tried.

DON’T expect an answer within 5 seconds. Forums are run by volunteers with jobs, families and lives outside of the forum.
DON’T whine and complain. Stick to the point and stay positive, you will have everybody jumping in to help you.
DON’T double post your problem a second time or in different sections, you will not get helped any faster.
DON’T post useless information. “My screen is black”. State what your hardware is, and try to remember any error messages.
DON’T post attention-seeking exagerated titles. “[Distro] broke my computer!!!!!!!!! going back to Windows!!!!! AAaaaaah!”.

Ok, so, you have got a list of possible Linux distros, you know how to look for information and help. What now?
Go and buy a pack of good quality blank cd’s.
Head over to Distrowatch and read up on the Top 10 distros.
Start downloading your chosen Linux distro images.
Burn the images to cd’s
Insert in CDROM drive and reboot the computer.
Nine out of Ten times, you will wait about 5 to 10 minutes and will be at a Linux desktop. You will be able to play and experiment
without having to worry about any adverse effects whatsoever on your already installed Windows system.

That’s it !! Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux