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

Broadcom Open Sources Linux Wireless Drivers

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but kudos to Broadcom for finally open sourcing their wireless drivers!

Official Announcement:

From: Henry Ptasinski
Subject: [ANN] Full-source Broadcom wireless driver for 11n chips
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general, gmane.linux.drivers.driver-project.devel
Date: 2010-09-09 15:10:06 GMT (5 hours and 42 minutes ago)
Broadcom would like to announce the initial release of a fully-open
Linux driver for it’s latest generation of 11n chipsets. The driver,
while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the
native mac80211 stack. It supports multiple current chips (BCM4313,
BCM43224, BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting
additional chips in the future, including mac80211-aware embedded chips.
The README and TODO files included with the sources provide more
details about the current feature set, known issues, and plans for
improving the driver.

The driver is currently available in staging-next git tree, available at:

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-next-2.6.git

in the drivers/staging/brcm80211 directory.

—
Henry Ptasinski
henryp@…

From: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general/55418

Netcat – The Tcp/Udp Rambo Knife

Netcat
The netcat utility is used for practically anything involving TCP or UDP. It can open TCP connections, send UDP packets, listen on arbitrary TCP and UDP ports, port scan, and is cool with both IPv4 and IPv6 connections.

In this example, open port 6881 using nc command:

nc -l 6881

On a second console or from a second UNIX / Linux machine, connect to the machine and port being listened on:

nc localhost 6881

OR

nc unix.system.ip.here 6881

In this example, send data from one computer to another:

nc -l 6881 > output.txt

Using a second machine, connect to the listening nc process (@ port 6881), feeding it the file which is to be transferred:

nc your.ip.address 6881 < input.txt

You can run netstat command to view open ports:

netstat -a
netstat -nat | grep LISTEN

Sample outputs:

netstat -nat | grep LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:7634 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:631 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:17500 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:55788 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:49198 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp6 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN
tcp6 0 0 ::1:631 :::* LISTEN


How to post on identi.ca from Vim with TwitVim

I recently discovered the TwitVim Twitter/Identi.ca Vim plugin created by Po Shan Cheah, so I thought i’d share it with you all.

Prerequisites: Vim (obviously), Curl and the twitvim.vba

1. Download the latest twitVim plugin from here (Currently version 0.5.5): http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=13653

2. Open Vim and issue these commands (version 0.5.5)

Open the vba file with Vim:

vim twitvim-0.5.5.vba

Now install the vba:

:source %

3. Configure your vimrc to use identi.ca

vim .vimrc

And at the bottom add:

let twitvim_api_root = “http://identi.ca/api”

let twitvim_cert_insecure = 1

let twitvim_login = “yourusername:yourpassword”

**NOTE** You may get an error for the url and the uname password lines, if so, just use a single quote mark [ ‘ ] instead of double quote marks [ ” ]

4. Send a test post:

:PosttoTwitter

Hit Enter (you’ll be prompted to enter a message), Type your message, and hit Enter again, that’s it. You have now sent your first identi.ca message from Vim !! 😉

This is a basic install and post guide, but I recommend you read the documentation as TwitVim has a whole heap of features and options, especially regarding security and secure authentication.

Author – Po Shan Cheah

Shared on identi.ca by –  tante

Documentation – Vim.org, Google Code

Geek Gang Signs

This was one of those funny pics that turned up on the web 🙂

Asterisk PBX on Debian Stable Part 1

What this guide is:

This is basically a step by step reference of an Asterisk PBX quick start setup for anybody who wants to try it out, or if you are going to work for a company which sets up Asterisk PBX telephone systems.

What this guide isn’t:

This is by no means a complete guide, although it is an ongoing reference which I will add to it as I see fit.

Asterisk Docs and Info:

Asterisk is a hugely versatile and complete Open Source telephony system which already has its own documentation, man pages (man asterisk), support forums and wiki.

Debian:

This guide supposes that you have Debian Stable (Currently Lenny) installed, either as your main OS or as a server on the network.

Install and test Asterisk: (Do all the following as root, not with sudo)

apt-get install asterisk asterisk-dev asterisk-dbg asterisk-h323 asterisk-mp3 libasterisk-agi-perl asterisk-doc

We use Perl scripts for automated dialers and other advanced options, so I have added the Perl modules, that’s up to you. You may also like to do an “apt-cache search asterisk” if you need any language-specific files. As I am in Spain, I also add “asterisk-prompt-es”.

Test Asterisk (still as root)

asterisk -vvvvc

As I already have Asterisk installed, it automatically loads at boot, so the message I get is that it is already running:

ricpru:~# asterisk –vvvvc
Asterisk already running on /var/run/asterisk/asterisk.ctl.  Use ‘asterisk -r’ to connect.

So I do as it says:

ricpru:~# asterisk -r
Asterisk 1.4.21.2~dfsg-3+lenny1, Copyright (C) 1999 – 2008 Digium, Inc. and others.
Created by Mark Spencer
Asterisk comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; type ‘core show warranty’ for details.
This is free software, with components licensed under the GNU General Public
License version 2 and other licenses; you are welcome to redistribute it under
certain conditions. Type ‘core show license’ for details.
==============================================
This package has been modified for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution
Please report all bugs to http://bugs.debian.org/asterisk
==============================================
Connected to Asterisk 1.4.21.2~dfsg-3+lenny1 currently running on ricpru (pid = 1844)

And I am left with the Asterisk prompt:

ricpru*CLI>

Asterisk is installed and working!

So now what?

First you need to get used to the config files. Then you need to select a phone. Asterisk works with Softphones , Analogue phones, IP phones, Mobile phones, Fax machines, basically anything that can be connected to a network or has an IP address and can make a call or send data.

Where are the config files?

ls /etc/asterisk

Yup, they all end in .conf and there are loads of them! Don’t panic! We are only going to start with a IAX/SIP Software Phone, which is the most basic to configure.

adsi.conf cdr_odbc.conf  features.conf  logger.conf  phone.conf  skinny.conf adtranvofr.conf  cdr_pgsql.conf   festival.conf  manager.conf  privacy.conf  sla.conf agents.conf         cdr_tds.conf  followme.conf  manager.d  queues.conf  smdi.conf alarmreceiver.conf  codecs.conf  func_odbc.conf  meetme.conf  res_odbc.conf  telcordia-1.adsi alsa.conf           dnsmgr.conf  gtalk.conf  mgcp.conf  res_pgsql.conf   udptl.conf amd.conf  dundi.conf   h323.conf  misdn.conf  res_snmp.conf  users.conf asterisk.adsi enum.conf  http.conf       modules.conf  rpt.conf  voicemail.conf asterisk.conf  esel.conf  iax.conf musiconhold.conf  rtp.conf  vpb.conf cdr.conf  extconfig.conf   iaxprov.conf  muted.conf  say.conf  watchdog.conf cdr_custom.conf  extensions.ael   indications.conf  osp.conf  sip.conf  zapata.conf cdr_manager.conf  extensions.conf  jabber.conf  oss.conf        sip_notify.conf

Software SIP/IAX phones:

Skype, Ekiga, etc etc….. there are loads, Google them and choose what you want. Personally I prefer VoixPhone. It’s easy to install and has a lot of features including IAX and SIP, but it’s all a matter of personal choice. The reason I want a phone with IAX is that we also use those configs for Hard Phones such as the Thomson ST2030 IP phone.

Download VoixPhone from HERE, Unpack it, Chmod -x it, and ./ Install it.

*HINT* I installed VoixPhone to /usr/local/bin as opposed to /usr/local which is the default and created a launcher called voix. This way I can launch the VoixPhone executable as voix from the command line.

Create an empty launcher file:

vim /usr/local/bin/voix

Insert this text:

# cat >/usr/local/bin/voix <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/voixphone/VoixPhone
EOF

Then make it executable:

chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/voix

*64bit Hint* VoixPhone is a 32bit app. If you are running a 64bit system, install the ia32 libs:

apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk

Part 2 – Configuring Asterisk and your new VoixPhone:

PART 2 Coming soon………………………

In the meantime, have a read of this PDF Handbook and My Asterisk Bible 🙂

Asterisk PBX Manager

Monitoring Asterisk and Executing Commands

The manager is a client/server model over TCP. With the manager interface, you’ll be able to control the PBX, originate calls, check mailbox status, monitor channels and queues as well as execute Asterisk commands.

AMI is the standard management interface into your Asterisk server. You configure AMI in manager.conf. By default, AMI is available on TCP port 5038 if you enable it in manager.conf.

Events, Actions and Responses

AMI receive commands, called “actions”. These generate a “response” from Asterisk. Asterisk will also send “Events” containing various information messages about changes within Asterisk. Some actions generate an initial response and data in the form list of events. This format is created to make sure that extensive reports do not block the manager interface fully.

Management users are configured in the configuration file manager.conf and are given permissions for read and write, where write represents their ability to perform this class of “action”, and read represents their ability to receive this class of “event”.

Asterisk Documentation: http://www.asterisk.org/docs

How to redirect old website url to new url including page links

The situation is that you have an old domain with a website or even various websites and sub-domains. You have moved all your files to another server or web address but you don’t want to lose the traffic from all the people who have bookmarked or link to you.

You want http://myoldcrapsite.com/a_post_about_monkeys.html to lead to http://mylovelynewsite.com/a_post_about_nicer_monkeys.html

In fact, you want ALL old links to go to the exact same place on the new server. This is how you redirect everything all in one go permanently with the htaccess file.

Creat a .htaccess file (don’t forget the DOT before it, it’s hidden from public view)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^myoldcrapsite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://mylovelynewsite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Upload it to the root of your website, usually where your index.html or index.php files are and you are all set. Google some of your old links and see where they take you. It should be to the same page on the new website.

One thing to remember is this will only work on a Linux Apache webserver which allows the Mod Rewrite function.

PS: If you are on a Windows Server, try Googling the html redirect method.

That’s it, now all incoming links from any of the old posts/pages will be forwarded to the new site 🙂

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 News, Conky 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.

Starting with Perl

I have started to use Perl regularly at work for network, server and telephony systems. Bearing in mind that before I got into Perl, my only other exposure to code was html/php/css for my websites and forums, configuring Conky and putting a few Bash scripts together.

Getting into Perl

Everybody learns differently, and I found it very difficult to grasp Perl just by reading books, man pages and websites. All of these will explain the history of Perl and give you links to everything it can do. This is all well and good until you need to do something specific.

Perl – Conky example

For me personally, to “get” something, I need to have an aim, and put it into action. It’s a bit like when you decide you want to display the weather on Conky with some fancy images, you Google “conky weather” and look for the code that will get the data, then show it at a certain position. You know what you want to do, then you look up how to achieve the goal. I went about learning Perl this way. Have a goal, and look for the way to do it.

How to create a bootable USB pendrive Debian netinstall

**NOTE 1** There are various ways to create pendrive Linux installs, some work and some fail depending on the pendrive model and also how the computer BIOS boots from USB.
**NOTE 2** This didn’t work with a HP 4Gb pendrive, but did with my Kingston pendrive. Also, it worked with my laptop and netbook but didn’t boot on a RAID Cluster server at work when trying to install Debian Lenny Netinstall.

For other distros with Pendrive Install guides, see the end of this post

1. Insert the USB stick, but do not mount it, yet. If it automounts, unmount it.

2. Get the sid install files (even if you install etch/lenny/squeeze):
a) wget ftp.us.debian.org:/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-i386/\current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/linux
b) wget ftp.us.debian.org:/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-i386/\current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz
c) wget ftp.us.debian.org:/debian/dists/sid/main/installer-i386/\current/images/netboot/mini.iso

3. Insure these packages are installed on your machine:

apt-get install mbr syslinux mtools -y

4. Apply the following commands, replaceing sdb with the propper device name.

install-mbr /dev/sdb
syslinux /dev/sdb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb

cp linux initrd.gz mini.iso /media/usb

*NOTE* These are 3 separate commands, do NOT copy, paste and issue as one command. Hit “Enter” after each line.

echo -e "default linux\nappend priority=low vga=normal "\
"initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=12000 root=/dev/ram rw"\
> /media/usb/syslinux.cfg

Now umount from /media/usb
umount /dev/sdb1

Other Distro Pendrive Guides
Crunchbang Statler (Debian Squeeze) http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/statler_usb_installation
Crunchbang Statler on EeePc http://richs-lxh.com/howto_crunchbang-statler-xfce-on-eeepc/
Debian Installer from USB http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Debian/2008-02/msg02948.html
Debian on USB + Links http://wiki.debian.org/BootUsb

Relevant Perl Man Pages

Man pages are awesome! To find the “Manual” for anything in Linux, just open a terminal and type man with the subject you are looking for. ie:

man perl

What if it’s something less precise? Use the -k switch to get a list of anything containing the subject you are looking for. ie:

man -k network

Once you’ve read what you need, just hit q to quit back to the terminal.

Relevant Perl man pages:

perl - overview               perlfaq - frequently asked questions
perltoc - doc TOC                perldata - data structures
perlsyn - syntax                 perlop - operators and precedence
perlrun - execution              perlfunc - builtin functions
perltrap - traps for the unwary   perlstyle - style guide

"perldoc" and "perldoc -f"

Perl and Elinks Search from script to terminal

I was Googling for some neat things to do with Perl (I have a pile of scripts in /usr/local/bin), when I thought, hey!? Why not use Perl to search Google? I’ve already started to use Elinks terminal web browser,(available in all Linux repos) so obviously any scripts that mean I am just one command away from finding any needed info would be a bonus.

I decided to call this script “goose”, yeah, I know lol! GooSe as in GOOgle SEarch.

sudo vim /usr/local/bin/goose

Add this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# Created by Rich Scadding 02/08/2010

$browser = “/usr/bin/elinks”;

exec $browser, “http://www.google.com/advanced_search&#8221; unless @ARGV;

for ( @ARGV ){ s/.*/%22mce_markeramp;%22/ if y/ /+/; $s .= $s?”+$_”:”$_”; }

# $ENV{LANG} = “en_US.UTF8”;

exec $browser, “http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=$s&btnG=Google+Search&#8221;

#!/usr/bin/perl -w# Created by Rich Scadding 02/08/2010$browser = “/usr/bin/elinks”;
exec $browser, “http://www.google.com/advanced_search&#8221; unless @ARGV;
for ( @ARGV ){ s/.*/%22mce_markeramp;%22/ if y/ /+/; $s .= $s?”+$_”:”$_”; }
# $ENV{LANG} = “en_US.UTF8”;exec $browser, “http://www.google.com/search?num=30&hl=en&as_qdr=all&q=$s&btnG=Google+Search&#8221;

Now take ownership with chown and chmod -x it to run it from the terminal.

EXAMPLE: goose linux-hardcore

Thanks to Ben Okopnik for Perl inspiration ( http://okopnik.com/ ) He has a lot of scripts and articles  floating around the net which are great to learn from. ie. http://linuxgazette.net/134/okopnik.html

Having an online tidy up

Over the last year I have been passing projects over to friends and gradually reducing my online responsibilities. Work and family life have taken priority.

I have spent the day cancelling domains, cancelling the renewal of hosts, and advising users of site close-downs. The only host and domain i’m keeping is linux-hardcore.com which has always been /home for myself and a few close friends.

I’ve been slowly losing interest in the Linux community, and haven’t got the enthusiasm I used to have for setting up sites and trying new ideas. It’s been great fun over the last 5 years and i’ve made some good friends but as hard as I try to find something new or interesting, everything seems to have become “samey”.

So I am going to re-theme my blog and add little more “me” to it as well as Linux related material, and see how it goes.

Asterisk CLI Commands

At work we setup Asterisk PBX phone systems along with our own Perl scripts for various purposes. Asterisk is an open source PBX phone system that works with Soft Phones and Hard Phones. I installed and setup Asterisk on my work laptop with a software VoixPhone (SIP/IAX).

The one thing with Asterisk is that each update introduces a few changes, mainly the choice of CLI commands to debug or find certain information.

This post is basically a quick reference to the current Asterisk CLI commands. If you are interested in taking a look at Asterisk (it’s in the Debian repos) and/or the VoixPhone software SIP/IAX phone, see these links:

VoixPhone – http://www.voixphone.com/

Asterisk – http://www.asterisk.org/

Debian Repo – http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=asterisk

Current CLI Commands: ( Courtesy of: asteriskglobe.blogspot.com )

! – Execute a shell command
abort halt – Cancel a running halt
cdr status – Display the CDR status
feature show – Lists configured features
feature show channels – List status of feature channels
file convert – Convert audio file
group show channels – Display active channels with group(s)
help – Display help list, or specific help on a command
indication add – Add the given indication to the country
indication remove – Remove the given indication from the country
indication show – Display a list of all countries/indications
keys init – Initialize RSA key passcodes
keys show – Displays RSA key information
local show channels – List status of local channels
logger mute – Toggle logging output to a console
logger reload – Reopens the log files
logger rotate – Rotates and reopens the log files
logger show channels – List configured log channels
meetme – Execute a command on a conference or conferee
mixmonitor – Execute a MixMonitor command.
moh reload – Music On Hold
moh show classes – List MOH classes
moh show files – List MOH file-based classes
no debug channel (null)
originate – Originate a call
realtime load – Used to print out RealTime variables.
realtime update – Used to update RealTime variables.
restart gracefully – Restart Asterisk gracefully
restart now – Restart Asterisk immediately
restart when convenient – Restart Asterisk at empty call volume
sla show – Show status of Shared Line Appearances
soft hangup – Request a hangup on a given channel
stop gracefully – Gracefully shut down Asterisk
stop now – Shut down Asterisk immediately
stop when convenient – Shut down Asterisk at empty call volume
stun debug – Enable STUN debugging
stun debug off – Disable STUN debugging
udptl debug – Enable UDPTL debugging
udptl debug ip – Enable UDPTL debugging on IP
udptl debug off – Disable UDPTL debugging

AEL commands

ael debug contexts – Enable AEL contexts debug (does nothing)
ael debug macros – Enable AEL macros debug (does nothing)
ael debug read – Enable AEL read debug (does nothing)
ael debug tokens – Enable AEL tokens debug (does nothing)
ael nodebug – Disable AEL debug messages
ael reload – Reload AEL configuration

Agents commands

agent logoff – Sets an agent offline
agent show – Show status of agents
agent show online – Show all online agents

AGI commands

agi debug – Enable AGI debugging
agi debug off – Disable AGI debugging
agi dumphtml – Dumps a list of agi commands in html format
agi show– List AGI commands or specific help
dnsmgr reload – Reloads the DNS manager configuration
dnsmgr status – Display the DNS manager status
http show status – Display HTTP server status

Console commands

console active – Sets/displays active console
console answer – Answer an incoming console call
console autoanswer – Sets/displays autoanswer
console boost – Sets/displays mic boost in dB
console dial – Dial an extension on the console
console flash – Flash a call on the console
console hangup – Hangup a call on the console
console mute – Disable mic input
console send text – Send text to the remote device
console transfer – Transfer a call to a different extension
console unmute – Enable mic input

Core related commands

core clear profile – Clear profiling info
core set debug channel – Enable/disable debugging on a channel
core set debug – Set level of debug chattiness
core set debug off – Turns off debug chattiness
core set global – Set global dialplan variable
core set verbose – Set level of verboseness
core show applications – Shows registered dialplan applications
core show application – Describe a specific dialplan application
core show audio codecs – Displays a list of audio codecs
core show channels – Display information on channels
core show channel – Display information on a specific channel
core show channeltypes – List available channel types
core show channeltype – Give more details on that channel type
core show codecs – Displays a list of codecs
core show codec – Shows a specific codec
core show config mappings – Display config mappings (file names to config engines)
core show file formats – Displays file formats
core show file version – List versions of files used to build Asterisk
core show functions – Shows registered dialplan functions
core show function – Describe a specific dialplan function
core show globals – Show global dialplan variables
core show hints – Show dialplan hints
core show image codecs – Displays a list of image codecs
core show image formats – Displays image formats
core show license – Show the license(s) for this copy of Asterisk
core show profile – Display profiling info
core show switches – Show alternative switches
core show threads – Show running threads
core show translation – Display translation matrix
core show uptime – Show uptime information
core show version – Display version info
core show video codecs – Displays a list of video codecs
core show warranty – Show the warranty (if any) for this copy of Asterisk

Database commands

database del – Removes database key/value
database deltree – Removes database keytree/values
database get – Gets database value
database put – Adds/updates database value
database show – Shows database contents
database showkey – Shows database contents

Dialplan commands

dialplan add extension – Add new extension into context
dialplan add ignorepat – Add new ignore pattern
dialplan add include – Include context in other context
dialplan reload – Reload extensions and *only* extensions
dialplan remove extension – Remove a specified extension
dialplan remove ignorepat – Remove ignore pattern from context
dialplan remove include – Remove a specified include from context
dialplan save – Save dialplan
dialplan show – Show dialplan

DUNDI commands

dundi debug – Enable DUNDi debugging
dundi flush – Flush DUNDi cache
dundi lookup – Lookup a number in DUNDi
dundi no debug – Disable DUNDi debugging
dundi no store history – Disable DUNDi historic records
dundi precache – Precache a number in DUNDi
dundi query – Query a DUNDi EID
dundi show entityid – Display Global Entity ID
dundi show mappings – Show DUNDi mappings
dundi show peers – Show defined DUNDi peers
dundi show peer – Show info on a specific DUNDi peer
dundi show precache – Show DUNDi precache
dundi show requests – Show DUNDi requests
dundi show trans – Show active DUNDi transactions
dundi store history – Enable DUNDi historic records

GTalk & Jabber commands

gtalk reload – Enable Jabber debugging
gtalk show channels – Show GoogleTalk Channels
jabber debug – Enable Jabber debugging
jabber debug off – Disable Jabber debug
jabber reload – Enable Jabber debugging
jabber show connected – Show state of clients and components
jabber test – Shows roster, but is generally used for mog’s debugging.

IAX2 commands

iax2 provision – Provision an IAX device
iax2 prune realtime – Prune a cached realtime lookup
iax2 reload – Reload IAX configuration
iax2 set debug – Enable IAX debugging
iax2 set debug jb – Enable IAX jitterbuffer debugging
iax2 set debug jb off – Disable IAX jitterbuffer debugging
iax2 set debug off – Disable IAX debugging
iax2 set debug trunk – Enable IAX trunk debugging
iax2 set debug trunk off – Disable IAX trunk debugging
iax2 show cache – Display IAX cached dialplan
iax2 show channels – List active IAX channels
iax2 show firmware – List available IAX firmwares
iax2 show netstats – List active IAX channel netstats
iax2 show peers – List defined IAX peers
iax2 show peer – Show details on specific IAX peer
iax2 show provisioning – Display iax provisioning
iax2 show registry – Display IAX registration status
iax2 show stats – Display IAX statistics
iax2 show threads – Display IAX helper thread info
iax2 show users – List defined IAX users
iax2 test losspct – Set IAX2 incoming frame loss percentage

Manager commands

manager show command – Show a manager interface command
manager show commands – List manager interface commands
manager show connected – List connected manager interface users
manager show eventq – List manager interface queued events
manager show users – List configured manager users
manager show user – Display information on a specific manager user

MGCP commands

mgcp audit endpoint – Audit specified MGCP endpoint
mgcp reload – Reload MGCP configuration
mgcp set debug – Enable MGCP debugging
mgcp set debug off – Disable MGCP debugging
mgcp show endpoints – List defined MGCP endpoints

Module management

module load – Load a module by name
module reload – Reload configuration
module show – List modules and info
module show like – List modules and info
module unload – Unload a module by name

PRI commands

pri debug span – Enables PRI debugging on a span
pri intense debug span – Enables REALLY INTENSE PRI debugging
pri no debug span – Disables PRI debugging on a span
pri set debug file – Sends PRI debug output to the specified file
pri show debug – Displays current PRI debug settings
pri show spans – Displays PRI Information
pri show span – Displays PRI Information
pri unset debug file – Ends PRI debug output to file

Queue commands

queue add member – Add a channel to a specified queue
queue remove member – Removes a channel from a specified queue
queue show – Show status of a specified queue
rtcp debug ip – Enable RTCP debugging on IP
rtcp debug – Enable RTCP debugging
rtcp debug off – Disable RTCP debugging
rtcp stats – Enable RTCP stats
rtcp stats off – Disable RTCP stats
rtp debug ip – Enable RTP debugging on IP
rtp debug – Enable RTP debugging
rtp debug off – Disable RTP debugging
say load – Set/show the say mode
show parkedcalls – Lists parked calls
show queue – Show information for target queue
show queues – Show the queues

SIP commands

sip history – Enable SIP history
sip history off – Disable SIP history
sip notify – Send a notify packet to a SIP peer
sip prune realtime – Prune cached Realtime object(s)
sip prune realtime peer – Prune cached Realtime peer(s)
sip prune realtime user – Prune cached Realtime user(s)
sip reload – Reload SIP configuration
sip set debug – Enable SIP debugging
sip set debug ip – Enable SIP debugging on IP
sip set debug off – Disable SIP debugging
sip set debug peer – Enable SIP debugging on Peername
sip show channels – List active SIP channels
sip show channel – Show detailed SIP channel info
sip show domains – List our local SIP domains.
sip show history – Show SIP dialog history
sip show inuse – List all inuse/limits
sip show objects – List all SIP object allocations
sip show peers – List defined SIP peers
sip show peer – Show details on specific SIP peer
sip show registry – List SIP registration status
sip show settings – Show SIP global settings
sip show subscriptions – List active SIP subscriptions
sip show users – List defined SIP users
sip show user – Show details on specific SIP user

Skinny commands

skinny reset – Reset Skinny device(s)
skinny set debug – Enable Skinny debugging
skinny set debug off – Disable Skinny debugging
skinny show devices – List defined Skinny devices
skinny show lines – List defined Skinny lines per device

Voicemail commands

voicemail show users – List defined voicemail boxes
voicemail show users for – List defined voicemail boxes for target context
voicemail show zones – List zone message formats

Zaptel commands

zap destroy channel – Destroys a channel
zap restart – Fully restart zaptel channels
zap show cadences – List cadences
zap show channels – Show active zapata channels
zap show channel – Show information on a channel
zap show status – Show all Zaptel cards status

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.

Howto – Fix Firefox already running error

This is the error message that tells you Firefox is already running:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

To fix it you can usually just kill Firefox with:

killall firefox-bin

But sometimes it decides to be a bit of a pest and you’ll need to find the Firefox PID and then kill the process:

ps auxwww | grep firefox

Which will give you something like this:

rich      2167  0.0  0.0   3300   764 pts/0    S+   19:36   0:00 grep firefox

Then you just kill the process number:

killall 2167

Still not able to kill Firefox?

1. Find your profile. This page tells you how to find the location of your Firefox profile. Under Linux (e.g. Ubuntu), it will be at ~/.mozilla/firefox/[Profile name]/ .

2. Remove the lock files. This page tells you what the lock files are for Firefox on Windows/Linux/Mac. Under Unix/Linux, you’ll need to remove two files “lock” and “.parentlock” .

IPv6 Time – Less than 10% of IPv4 addresses available

You may have avoided moving your network to IPv6 for years, but you won’t be able to put it off much longer. Here’s why you need to plan for a transition.

Every few years there’s another panic about everyone running out of IP addresses. The terror that the Internet would simply run out of room is finally coming true. It’s not so much that computers are consuming the IP addresses; it’s all those smartphones, iPads, and other devices that require Internet access.

The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the organization that oversees the allocation of all Internet number resources, announced in January 2010 that less than 10% of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

READ MORE: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/ready-or-not-your-network-is-moving-to-ipv6/

CHMOD – Get those File Permissions Right

CHMOD is used to change permissions of a file.

        PERMISSION      COMMAND   

         U   G   W

        rwx rwx rwx     chmod 777 filename      

        rwx rwx r-x     chmod 775 filename

        rwx r-x r-x     chmod 755 filename

        rw- rw- r--     chmod 664 filename

        rw- r-- r--     chmod 644 filename

        U = User 

        G = Group 

        W = World

        r = Readable

        w = writable

        x = executable 

        - = no permission


Here is another way of looking at it:
Permissions:

400     read by owner

040     read by group

004     read by anybody (other)

200     write by owner

020     write by group

002     write by anybody

100     execute by owner

010     execute by group

001     execute by anybody

To get a combination, just add them up. For example, to get read, write, execute by owner, read, execute, by group, and execute by anybody, you would add 400+200+100+040+010+001 to give 751.

Ubuntu Lucid Gui Tool to Configure NotifyOSD

There is a nice gui and a patched notifyOSD available from leolik’s PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:leolik/leolik

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:amandeepgrewal/notifyosdconfig

Update source list

sudo apt-get update

Now install notifyosdconfig using the following command from your terminal

sudo apt-get install notifyosdconfig

Using notifyosdconfig

Open notifyosdconfig from Applications -> Accessories -> NotifyOSD Configuration

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 😉

PGP/GPG Cheat Sheet

**NOTE** (for those who are confused by GPG vs PGP)

GPG (GNU Privacy Guard, GnuPG) is a free software alternative to the PGP suite of cryptographic software. GPG is a part of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU software project, and has received major funding from the German government. It is released under the terms of version 3 of the GNU General Public License.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting e-mails to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Philip Zimmermann in 1991.

This a personal backup of an original cheat sheet here:
http://irtfweb.ifa.hawaii.edu/~lockhart/gpg/gpg-cs.html

to create a key:
gpg –gen-key
generally you can select the defaults.

to export a public key into file public.key:
gpg –export -a “User Name” > public.key
This will create a file called public.key with the ascii representation of the public key for User Name. This is a variation on:
gpg –export
which by itself is basically going to print out a bunch of crap to your screen. I recommend against doing this.
gpg –export -a “User Name”
prints out the public key for User Name to the command line, which is only semi-useful

to export a private key:
gpg –export-secret-key -a “User Name” > private.key
This will create a file called private.key with the ascii representation of the private key for User Name.
It’s pretty much like exporting a public key, but you have to override some default protections. There’s a note (*) at the bottom explaining why you may want to do this.

to import a public key:
gpg –import public.key
This adds the public key in the file “public.key” to your public key ring.

to import a private key:
gpg –allow-secret-key-import –import private.key
This adds the private key in the file “private.key” to your private key ring. There’s a note (*) at the bottom explaining why you may want to do this.

to delete a public key (from your public key ring):
gpg –delete-key “User Name”
This removes the public key from your public key ring.
NOTE! If there is a private key on your private key ring associated with this public key, you will get an error! You must delete your private key for this key pair from your private key ring first.

to delete an private key (a key on your private key ring):
gpg –delete-secret-key “User Name”
This deletes the secret key from your secret key ring.

To list the keys in your public key ring:
gpg –list-keys

To list the keys in your secret key ring:
gpg –list-secret-keys

To generate a short list of numbers that you can use via an alternative method to verify a public key, use:
gpg –fingerprint > fingerprint
This creates the file fingerprint with your fingerprint info.

To encrypt data, use:
gpg -e -u “Sender User Name” -r “Receiver User Name” somefile
There are some useful options here, such as -u to specify the secret key to be used, and -r to specify the public key of the recipient.
As an example: gpg -e -u “Charles Lockhart” -r “A Friend” mydata.tar
This should create a file called “mydata.tar.gpg” that contains the encrypted data. I think you specify the senders username so that the recipient can verify that the contents are from that person (using the fingerprint?).
NOTE!: mydata.tar is not removed, you end up with two files, so if you want to have only the encrypted file in existance, you probably have to delete mydata.tar yourself.
An interesting side note, I encrypted the preemptive kernel patch, a file of 55,247 bytes, and ended up with an encrypted file of 15,276 bytes.

To decrypt data, use:
gpg -d mydata.tar.gpg
If you have multiple secret keys, it’ll choose the correct one, or output an error if the correct one doesn’t exist. You’ll be prompted to enter your passphrase. Afterwards there will exist the file “mydata.tar”, and the encrypted “original,” mydata.tar.gpg.

Ok, so what if you’re a paranoid bastard and want to encrypt some of your own files, so nobody can break into your computer and get them? Simply encrypt them using yourself as the recipient.

I haven’t used the commands:
gpg –edit-key
gpg –gen-revoke

* –gen-revoke creates a revocation certificate, which when distributed to people and keyservers tells them that your key is no longer valid, see http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r721.html
* –edit-key allows you do do an assortment of key tasks, see http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r899.html

How to fix Ubuntu 10.04 Panel Volume Control and other annoyances

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx on our main home computer (wife and kids use it), and Lucid Lynx s LTS which means it should (in theory) be updateable for a long period of time without those nasty 6-monthly dist-upgrade surprises.

Little annoyances
Apart from having window maximize/minimize/close buttons on the left, having to add user permissions for network/wireless/sound….. well, everything basically, I also found that there was no Volume control on the panel.

Here’s the fix:
sudo apt-get install indicator-sound

Now right click on your “envelope” on the panel and choose “Remove From Panel” (Don’t panic, we’ll get it back in a minute)

Next right click on your panel and choose “Add To Panel…“

Now select the “Indicator Applet” (that ‘s the envelope you just removed). Now it will come back, but this time with a Volume Control applet by its side 🙂

Ubuntu seems to get more stupid every release. I chose this for the family computer as once Ubuntu is setup “properly”, it’s low maintenance and has practically everything out of the box. But they really should get back to basics and have the base fixed before adding all this extra fluff and prettiness.

Slow System
To speed up the system I went to “Startup Applications” and shut it all down apart from Network and Sound. Compiz also got switched off. Those effects were cool back in the days of Beryl, but they offer nothing other than a little Bling to show off to Windows/Mac using buddies. Otherwise, just a useless system hog.

Sound – Pulse Audio
I don’t like this Pulse audio much, and will probably return to Alsa, which in my opinion is a very good sound architecture. Why people keep reinventing the wheel i’ll never know.

Canonical/Ubuntu services – 2Gb Storage and Music Store
Nope. That’s it, just nope. My personal data on an Ubuntu server? nuh uh!. Using a credit card online to buy music with an Ubuntu service? nuh uh! X2. Call me paranoid, but i’d currently only risk my cash and privacy on Debian and FreeBSD. You’ve just got to trust the big boys who are security conscious.
I still don’t see Canonical or Ubuntu as competent enough to deal with serious issues such as encryption and security when they can’t even decide which side to put buttons on a GUI. Whatsmore, the community is usually ignored regarding these simple decisions, who would have the last word with security issues?

Anyhoo. System all setup, looks nice and pretty. Runs faster now I removed and shut down all the bloat as well.

Fingers crossed for when it’s time to update and upgrade ^^

Howto Extra Swap without having to repartition

This is a great little trick if for some reason you need a little extra Swap. You may face a situation where your RAM and Swap are being eaten up by a hungry app. Well, no problem, all though not as fast or efficient as extra RAM or a bigger Swap partition, it is still handy in some situations.

How to add more Linux Swap with Swap File

Assuming you want to put it in “/”, Create an empty 500MB file
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap.img bs=1024k count=512

Format it as a swap file
$ sudo mkswap /swap.img

Add it to your running Linux system
$ sudo swapon /swap.img

Optionally you can add /swap.img to fstab for automatic swap activation.

$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add this line at the end of the file
/swap.img none swap sw 0 0

Then Ctrl+X, Y to save and Enter to close Nano

Run “free -m” command to verify that you’ve added the newly created swap to your Linux based operating system.

Howto Easy PGP Key Creation

HOWTO: Quick & Easy GPG Key

---

This HOWTO will take you through a quick & basic PGP Key creation and submission to MIT key servers

First you need to install gnupg and gnupg-agent. In order to create a key, you will also need a real email address.

1. Open a terminal.
2. type in the following code:

gpg --gen-key

3. Then enter a “1” – to create a standard DSA/ElGamal key. Press Enter.
4. Type in 1024. Press Enter.
5. Type in 0. Press Enter.
6. Enter a y. Press Enter.
7. Type in your Real Name. Press Enter.
8. Type in your REAL email address. Press Enter.
9. Type in Your First Name, followed by “‘s PGP Key”. Press Enter. IE Joe Blogg’s PGP key (without the “”)
10. Type O. Press Enter. It will now create your Key.
11. You will have to give it a “Pass Phrase”. Try to use a password with a mixture of upper and lower case letters as well as numbers to make it secure.

When it’s finished creating your Key, follow these steps:
1. Open a terminal.
2. Type in the following code:

gpg --export -a "User Name" > public.key

3. Open a nautilus window.
4. Find the file “public.key” in your home directory.
5. Right click on the file, left click on open in text editor.
6. Press CTRL+A, then CTRL+C (Select All, Copy)
7. Open http://pgp.mit.edu in a browser window.
8. In the box under the label, “Submit a key” – right click in the box and then left click on paste.
9. Click on “Submit this key to the keyserver!”
10. Go back to http://pgp.mit.edu
11. Type in your name in the Search String box.
12. Highlight and Copy the section of the result page under “User ID” (It should be your name, comment, and email address.)

Common Ssh Commands

This isn’t my work, I copied it to my blog for safe keeping. The original is here:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/247/Common+SSH+Commands

Common SSH Commands

• Applies to: All Service Types
• Difficulty: Easy
• Time needed: 5 minutes
• Tools needed: ssh

DETAILS:

Not all of these commands will run on all Hosting Products.

This is a list of Common commands that can be run from root / SSH access.

I. Basic Commands

A. Retrieve Plesk Admin Password

cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow

B. Change Directory (cd)

cd /path/to/directory/

C. Listing Files/SubFolders (ls)

ls -alh

(files and subfolders listed with perms in human-readable sizes)

D. Checking Processes

ps -a top -c

(process viewer – Ctrl+C to exit)

ps -auxf

(process list)

E. Start/Stop Services

/etc/init.d/ start|stop|restart|status

(“/etc/init.d/httpd stop” stops apache)

F. Check Bean Counters (hard and soft limits, failcounts, etc.)

cat /proc/user_beancounters

II. File System Commands (df & du are (dv)-only commands)

A. Check Total Disk Usage

df

(gives physical disk usage report with % used)

B. List Files/Folders +Sizes (du)

du

(lists all filesizes. This will take some time.)

du -sh

(lists all the subfolders/sizes in a dir)

C. Remove/Delete Files (rm /path/to/filename.htm) -DANGER- always verify

rm -vf

(force-deletes file. Dont run unless you know EXACTLY what you’re doing)

rm -vrf

(force deletes folder and all subfolders and files)

To Remove a Directory you can use the following command:

 rmdir  

D. Copy Files (cp)

cp filename.abc /new/path/filename.abc.123

E. Move Files (mv)

mv filename.abc /new/path/filename.abc.123

F. Create Empty File (touch)

touch filename.123

III. File Permissions and Ownership

A. Change Permissions of files (chmod)

chmod 000 filename.abc

(defaults are usually 755 for folders, 644 for files)

TIP:

1st digit=Owner; 2nd=Group; 3rd=Other
(-rwxrwxwrx = 777, -rwxr-xr-x = 755, -rw-r–r– = 644, etc.)
7 = Read + Write + Execute
6 = Read + Write
5 = Read + Execute
4 = Read
3 = Write + Execute
2 = Write
1 = Execute
0 = All access denied

B. Change Ownership of files (chmown)

chown user:group filename.abc

(you can see user and group w/ ls -alh)

TIP:

Anytime a user creates a file, the Ownership of the file matches that user. In Plesk, every domain that has hosting has a different user. So if you are copying files from one domain to another, you must remember to change ownership.

IV. Checking Log Files (dv)

Log files can tell you a lot about whats going on on a (dv). You can use the command:
‘tail -n 100’ before the logfile name to list the last 100 entries of the logfile.

Here are some of the most common:

A. Main Error Log

/var/log/messages

B. Apache Error Log

/var/log/httpd/error_log

(main)

/home/httpd/vhosts/mt-example.com/statistics/logs/error_log

(per-domain) (May also be: /var/www/vhosts on newer dvs)

C. MySQL Logs

/var/log/MySQLd.log

D. Mail Logs

/usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog

NOTE:

Common issues to look out for in log files

• The main error log will not always give you all the information you want for a svc.
• You may see alot of failed SSH and FTP connections, that is generally normal.
• Keep an eye out for MaxClients errors in the Apache logs if a customer is complaining of Apache dying alot. You can check the KB for raising MaxClients settings.
• If a customer does not set up Log Rotation for a domain under Plesk, then Log Files will build up and may take up alot of unneeded space. You can usually delete old log files in Plesk, and change the Log Rotation to Daily instead of by size.
• MailLogs can show you if a customer is spamming, or if mail is coming in or out.
• MySQL Logs should be able to show you general MySQL errors such as bad connections, or corrupted tables. Check the Int. KB for the ‘myisamchk -r’ repair table command.

V. Advanced Commands

A. Find. You can do alot with find. for now lets find all files over 10MB.

cd /
find / -type f -size +10000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $5 ": " $9 }' |sort -n

B. Grep. Another handy tool to get specific information

cat file | grep blah

(only lists the information where the word blah is found)

C. Less/More

less filename.abc 

(displays the content of a file. arrows to scroll, ‘q’ to quit.)

more == same thing basically. You can use the ‘| more’ command to scroll through something page or line at a time.

tail -n 1000 /var/log/httpd/error_log | more

VI. Vi is a basic text editor.

Careful what keys you hit while in vi.

vi /path/to/filename.abc

TIP:

You can learn more about using the VI/VIM text editor by reading the following guide:

Understanding basic vi (visual editor)

Reset Vodafone Router Admin Password

If you live in Spain and use Vodafone as your host provider, you may have seen that they remotely change the “Admin” password which stops you getting access to extra features such as opening specific ports for servers.

The “vodafone” user only has a basic mix of user-end tools for the router.

So, how do you get access to the admin account again, with your own password so they can’t change it?

1. Disconnect the telephone line
2. Clear the cache, cookies and saved vodafone router password from your browser (otherwise it will just automatically log you in with the user  “vodafone” not “admin”
   
3. Press the reset button for between 15-20 seconds and release.
4. Switch the router off then on again.
5. Connect to the router from IE, FireFox, Chrome, etc, using this IP address: 192.168.0.1
6. Log in as admin with the password VF-EShg553 and change the passwords for: vodafone, admin and support.

NimbleX – Kde4 and Koffice on a 400Mb iso

2010 Beta is out!

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: Europe North America 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

WebM and Webkit and Youtube

WebKitGTK+ and WebM

Gustavo Noronha

So you probably heard about WebM, right? It’s the awesome new media format being pushed by Google and a large number of partners, including Collabora, following the release of the VP8 video codec free of royalties and patents, along with a Free Software implementation.

It turns out that if you are a user or developer of applications that use the GStreamer framework, you can start taking advantage of all that freedom right away! Collabora Multimedia has developed, along with Entropy Wave GStreamer support for the new format, and the code has already landed in the public repositories, and is already being packaged for some distributions.

I just couldn’t wait the few days it will take for the support to be properly landed in Debian unstable, so I went ahead and downloaded all of the current packages from the pkg-gstreamer svn repository, built everything after having the libvpx-dev package installed, and went straight to a rather unknown, small video site called Youtube with my GStreamer-powered WebKitGTK+-based browser, Epiphany!:

If you’re running Debian unstable, or any of the other distributions which will be lucky to get the new codecs, and support packages soon, you should be able to get this working out of the box real soon now. Check the tips on WebM’s web site on how to find WebM videos on youtube.

WebM and Html5 vs Adobe Flash

As you probably know, a Google I/O conference was held today and a lot of blogs said they will announce big things. And big it was: Google officially announced the release of an open source, royalty-free video format called WebM which will be using the VP8 codec Google aquired from On2 as well as Vorbis audio.

The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors.

For now, WebM is not part of the HTML5 specifications but support for it will be added by Chrome, Firefox and Opera, as a part of the tag (update: Internet Explorer 9 will also be supporting VP8). Most probably today’s snapshots of Chrome(ium), Opera and Firefox already include this. You can already download patched FFmpeg or DirectShow for Windows (Gstreamer support coming soon) from HERE. There is also a patch for MPlayer.

WebM is already part of the YouTube HTML5 experimental feature – all the 720p or higher videos uploaded to YouTube starting today will be encoded using WebM (but also in H.264). However Google claims (according to Mozilla) to transcode all YouTube existing videos into WebM sometime soon.

How will Adobe handle this? Well, Engadget points out that Adobe is rolling VP8 support into Flash Player, but hopefully websites such as YouTube will start using the HTML5 tag instead of Adobe Flash by default.

Original Source: http://www.webupd8.org

Linux Sis Graphic Card Progress – No More Sisfb

Crunchbang Statler

Well, As my laptop uses a Sis graphics card:

Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter

I have always had to have the “video=sisfb” argument in Grub to load the sisfb (Sis Frame Buffer). Otherwise I fell victim to the “Bad Colour Depth” bug.

I have just installed the latest Sis driver “xserver-xorg-video-sis_0.10.2-3” from the Debian sid repos on Crunchbang Statler (Debian Squeeze) and removed the sisfb argument from Grub2 and have a beautiful shiny desktop with no colour problems whatsoever

For those who are curious, some photos can be seen here: http://sites.google.com/site/superpikmaster/sis

FreeBSD

I have installed FreeBSD alongside Staler on this laptop and have been faced with the same Sis bug, unfortunately, there is no sisfb module available for FreeBSD, so I have been looking for other solutions. Quite a giant leap  into a new OS, not juts trying to fix the bug, but looking into the possibility of porting a new sis driver.

At the moment, my FreeBSD install has the 0.10.2-2 driver, so I am really hoping we get the 0.10.2-3 driver soon. I will be emailing the maintainers to see how that stands as I feel that porting the driver myself is going to be way out of my depth. However, the FreeBSD forum members have been very helpful and provided me links to guides. http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=81906

I have a very, very nice FreeBSD Open Box setup now, all built from the base up (netinstall) from ports which took 5 days to compile and configure everything. I don’t want to have to abandon it for the sake of a Sis driver upgrade.

Fingers crossed.

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……………..

Not Linux, Just wobbly eyes

This illusion will keep you occupied for…………….. um…. minutes. Cool though:

MORE HERE: http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html

Kill Dash Nine Linux Geek Song (kill -9)

I was bored and started Googling to see if there were any Linux related songs on the net. I came across this one, which is quite a cool rap:

LYRICS: From http://www.monzy.com/intro/killdashnine_lyrics.html

I guess I’ll have to shut you down for good this time,
Already tried a SIGQUIT, so now it’s KILL DASH 9.
You gotta learn when it’s time for your thread to yield;
It shoulda slept; instead you stepped and now your fate is sealed.
I’ll take your process off the run queue without even asking
‘Cause my flow is like reentrant and preemptive multitasking.
Your sad rhymes are spinnin’ like you’re in a deadlock,
You’re like a synchronous sock that don’t know when to block;
So I pull out my keyboard and I pull out my glock,
And I dismount your girl and I mount /proc
And I’ve got your fuckin pid and the bottom line
Is that you best not front or else it’s KILL DASH NINE.

KILL DASH NINE,
No more CPU time.
I run KILL DASH NINE,
And your process is mine.
I run KILL DASH NINE,
‘Cause it’s MY time to shine
So don’t step outta line or else it’s
KILL DASH NINE!

See it ain’t about the Benjamins or Pentiums or Athlons,
But you rappin’ 50 meters while I’m spittin’ in decathlons.
Your shit’s old and busted, mine’s the new hotness;
You’re like CLR and I’m like CLRS.
You’re running csh and my shell is bash,
You’re the tertiary storage; I’m the L1 cache.
I’m a web crawling spider; you an Internet mosquito;
You thought the 7-layer model referred to a burrito.
You’re a dialup connection; I’m a gigabit LAN.
I last a mythical man-month; you a one-minute man.
It’s like I’m running Thunderbird and you’re still stuck with Pine,
Which is why I think it’s time for me to KILL DASH NINE.

Yeah it’s KILL DASH NINE
No more CPU time.
‘Cause it’s KILL DASH NINE,
And your process is mine.
I said KILL DASH NINE
‘Cause it’s my time to shine,
So don’t step outta line or else it’s
KILL DASH NINE!

My posse throws down like leaky bucket regulators;
I was coding shit in MIPS while you were playing Space Invaders.
With my finger on the trigger I run ./configure
Yo, this package is big, but MY package is bigger.
I roll my weed with Zig Zag while I zag-zig splay,
And I do a bounds check before I write to an array.
I’m a loc’d out baller writing KLOCS a day,
‘Cause it’s publish or perish, fool, what can I say?
I’m 26 now, will I live to see 28?
Some days I wonder if I’ll survive to graduate.
But hey, that’s just fine, I won’t ever resign,
And if fools try to step then it’s KILL DASH NINE!

Yeah it’s KILL DASH NINE,
From my command line
It’s KILL DASH NINE
Sending chills down your spine,
I said KILL DASH NINE,
‘Cause it’s my time to shine,
So don’t step outta line or else it’s
KILL DASH NINE!

fs sa rlidwka
I’ll chown your home and take your access away
Comin’ straight outta Stanford, ain’t nobody tougher,
Control-X, Control-C, I’ll discard your fuckin’ buffer.
You’re outside your scope, son, close them curly brackets,
‘Cause I drop punk-ass bitches like a modem drops packets.
Dump your motherfucking core, and trace your stack
‘Cause where your ass is going, there won’t be no callback.
See my style is divine and my code is sublime,
My career’s in a climb and yours is in a decline.
I’ll write a pound-define and assign you as mine,
So refine those sad rhymes or remove your plus signs,

Or it’s KILL DASH NINE,
No more CPU time,
‘Cause it’s KILL DASH NINE,
And your process is mine,
I said KILL DASH NINE
‘Cause it’s my time to shine,
Bitch you stepped outta line and now it’s
KILL DASH NINE!

Microsoft gets royalties for Google’s Android on HTC

Original Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/28/microsoft-says-android-infringes-on-its-patents-licenses-htc/

Another Microsoft Vs Google patent war?

The lawyers up in Redmond seem to have been woken from their slumber with the sudden realization that — oh look! — Google’s Android OS infringes on Microsoft’s boatload of software patents. How specifically it does so is not identified, but Microsoft believes that elements from both the user interface and the underlying operating system are in violation of its rights. This is very much in keeping with the Windows maker’s crusade to assert patent claims over Linux, which in the past has garnished it with cross-licensing deals with Amazon and Xandros, as well as a settlement from TomTom. Lawsuits are not yet being discussed here, but lest you think this is a small-time disturbance, HTC has already decided to shorten its list of troubles by ponying up for a license from Microsoft for “running the Android mobile platform.” Yes, that does sound ludicrous, but it’s now an unfortunate fact that a major Android phone manufacturer is having to pay Microsoft royalties to use Google’s operating system.

Youtube on Your desktop – No browser or Flash needed

This is a wicked app from http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

Minitube

There’s life outside the browser!

Minitube is a native YouTube client. With it you can watch YouTube videos in a new way: you type a keyword, Minitube gives you an endless video stream. Minitube does not require the Flash Player.

Minitube is not about cloning the original YouTube web interface, it aims to create a new TV-like experience.

Download

Current version is 0.9, released on January 23, 2010. Here are the main changes since version 0.8:

• Ability to clear recent keywords (by popular demand!)
• Enhanced fullscreen mode with toolbar and playlist (Linux only)
• Fixed buggy toolbar search box (Thanks to Salvatore Benedetto)
• Fixed long queries in the recent keywords list (Thanks to Vadim P.)
• Fixed time formatting bug with videos longer than an hour (Thanks to Rene Bogusch)
• Norwegian translation by Jan W. Skjoldal

Full version history

Choose your platform:

• Linux – 32bit binaries. You need Qt version >= 4.5 and the Phonon libraries. Ubuntu users can get their package from GetDeb or from Christian Mangold’s PPA. Gentoo has an official ebuild ready to be emerged. Also Slackware has an official build. ArchLinux users have their package too. OpenSUSE has user contributed RPMs. The GStreamer Phonon backend is recommended. Minitube strives to integrate well with both GNOME and KDE.
• Mac OS X – Universal binary. You need at least OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) and QuickTime version 7.0.
• Windows – A few people tried to build Minitube on Windows but the results were not releaseable. This is mainly due to the weakness/instability of Phonon on Windows. Let’s wait for Qt 4.6.
• Source code. You’re free to build Minitube by yourself, modify it and redistribute it according to the GNU General Public License.

Mount a remote directory with sshfs

First install the Sshfs module:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Now use modprobe command to load fuse

sudo modprobe fuse

Need to set up some permissions in to access the utilities.

sudo adduser richs fuse

sudo chown root:fuse /dev/fuse

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/fusermount

Note: you might get this error. “chmd: cannot access ‘/dev/fusermount’ : No such file or directory.” I fix it by doing

whereis fusermount

Which gives

/usr/bin/fusermount

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/fusermount

Logout and Log back in again.

Create a Directory called remotedir in you Home Directory (don’t use sudo, it’s YOUR home directory).

mkdir ~/remotedir

Now use this command to mount it. it will prompt to save the server key and for your remote computer password.

sshfs richs@192.168.0.2 :/media/storage ~/remotedir

Now you have full access to the remote directory as if it was physically on your local computer

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

The Pirate Bay Proved A Point

That consumers and downloaders are show more support for pirates and torrent hosters than they do for fat-cat record company bosses and the film industry that fleeces us every day with overinflated prices to keep them rich and us paying through the nose for music and video products.

From Torrent Freak:

Exactly one year ago The Pirate Bay Four were sentenced to a year in prison, and on top of that each ordered to pay $905,000 in damages. The entertainment industries hoped that the ruling would set an example, but today The Pirate Bay is larger than ever before.

Millions of BitTorrent users all around the world followed the Pirate Bay trial with great interest last year. Many had hoped that the court would decide that operating a BitTorrent tracker was no offense and that the defendants would walk free.

The ten day trial started off with a small victory for the accused. On the second day the prosecutor announced that half of the charges against the four defendants had been dropped. The prosecutor couldn’t prove that the .torrent files that were submitted as evidence actually used The Pirate Bay’s tracker and therefore had to drop all charges of ‘assisting copyright infringement’.

What remained was the claim that the Pirate Bay folks were ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. In the days that followed the defendants’ lawyers nullified the ‘assisting’ part by arguing that there was no link between the accused and users who download copyrighted material. The prosecution, on the other hand, argued the opposite and brought in screenshots of websites and torrent files as evidence.

FULL STORY AT Torrent Freak

Howto: Crunchbang Statler Xfce on EeePc

Got the full Crunchbang set

Well today I finally finished my complete collection of Crunchbang installs on all my computers. I had a bit of trouble with the first attempt of the USB install, but it was a Debian Installer formatting problem, not Crunchbang related. It also happened on one of my laptops where after formatting the partitions, the installer threw up a message about an unclean partition with a previous install. This was on a fresh partition.

How to install Crunchbang Statler on an EeePc
First you need to download you Crunchbang Statler of choice; OpenBox or Xfce, i486, i686, amd64bit.
See this post about which one to choose:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/statler_which_version
And the full list of downloads here:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/downloads/statler/alpha-01/

I chose the i686 Xfce Edition for my Netbook as I already have the OpenBox Edition on two laptops, and as the the processor is an Intel, I chose the i686 version.

My EeePc Specs:
Asus EeepPC 900 HD
Intel Celeron 900 MHz Processor
1Gb Ram
Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics
Realtek Semiconductor RTL8187SE Wireless
160Gb HDD

USB Pendrive Preparation, and Transferring the Iso:
I asked for help on the Crunchbang Forums and omns gave me the link to this guide (which I followed to the letter): http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/statler_usb_installation

Getting the EeePc ready:
I plugeed in my Pendrive fired up my EeePc and at boot hit F2 to get into the BIOS setup. My main task was to choose the USB as the main harddrive, then go to the boot order and select it as the first boot device before the harddrive. Hit F10 to save and exit and restart.

Lovely Jubbly! Got the Crunchbang install menu and chose Text Install and went through the motions which are pretty self-explanatory.

There was a very important note on the Crunchbang wiki about Cdrom drivers:

Using the USB stick to perform a HD install
If you are using your newly created CrunchBang USB stick to perform a hard disk installation, the install will prompt you to “Load CD-ROM drivers from removable media?” To workaround this, you should:
1. Select ”” when prompted to “Load CD-ROM drivers from removable media?”
2. Select ”” when prompted to “Manually select a CD-ROM module and device?”
3. Select “none” on the next screen.
4. Enter ”/dev/sdX” when prompted for “Device file for accessing the CD-ROM:“
❗ Replace /dev/sdX with the actual hard disk device learned from the command above.

The installation should now continue as normal.

I did as it said and chose “sda” which is the EeePc main harddrive and the setup continued.

Partitioning and Installing
I just went through the motions as with any other Debian install and the only problem I came up against was that something went wrong with the formatting of my chosen partition. I got an error saying that the partition was unclean, and that there were remnants of a previous install. I remember this happening on one of my laptops before, so I just chose to delete the partition, and then tell the Debian installer to automatically partition the free space. Worked like a charm. I got an Ext3 file system, which I always use on production systems, and a 2Gb Swap partition. I normally only choose 1Gb for Swap, but not really an issue on a 160Gb drive.

The install went perfectly, I shutdown, removed the USB pendrive, reset the boot order to main Harddrive, and fired up my spanking new Crunchbang EeePc.

Everything worked out of the box, including wireless. I still need to dig deeper and investigate further, but on first experiences it’s fast, light, and very well laid out for an EeePc desktop. I had Ubuntu UNR on it before, which had a custom menu that took up the entire screen and all the windows had the top bars removed (No minimize, close buttons) which made for a very bloated hard to manage desktop. Crunchbang on my EeePc looks and feels exactly like my other desktops, but a mini version. Currently very comfoirtably performing my daily tasks.

More to come once I have given everything a full work out for a week.

Computer Geeks don’t get tan lines

Check out the photo:

Easy File Encryption Decryption with CCrypt

CCrypt is in most Linux repos. I use it on Crunchbang Statler (Debian Squeeze) to encrypt and decrypt files quickly with nothing more than two commands and a password.

Firstly install Ccrypt:
sudo apt-get install ccrypt

Now create a test file and add some basic text:(I put encrypt decrypt)
nano encrypt-test.text

Now encrypt the file (it’ll ask for a password twice):
ccrypt encrypt-test.txt

Now open it and it is unreadable:
nano encrypt-test.txt

To decrypt: use the “-d” switch
ccrypt -d encrypt-test.txt

More information:
http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/

Crunchbang Faster Internet – No iPv6

To disable iPv6 system-wide for all connections you can edit the aliases.conf file:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/aliases.conf

Then uncomment iPv6 line and turn it off :
#alias net-pf-10 ipv6

So that the network protocols looks like this:

# network protocols ##########################################################
# alias net-pf-1 unix
# alias net-pf-2 ipv4
# alias net-pf-3 ax25
# alias net-pf-4 ipx
# alias net-pf-5 appletalk
# alias net-pf-6 netrom
# 7 BRIDGE
# alias net-pf-8 atm
# alias net-pf-9 x25
alias net-pf-10 ipv6 off
# alias net-pf-11 rose
# alias net-pf-12 decnet

Now reboot and go super-speed-surfing 😉

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.

WordPress Show Excerpts Instead of Full Posts

WordPress Excerpt or Full post?
If you use different themes on your WordPress blog, you will notice that on the front page you can choose how many posts to show, and whether the reader gets the full post or just an excerpt. This excerpt function is the themer’s choice and not a standard WordPress feature.

So how do you enable it on a theme?
1. You need to go to the “index.php” file of your theme and change the_content() and change it to the_excerpt():

.

.

.

.

.
WordPress will now show only the first 120 words of each post.

This little tip came from: http://lorelle.wordpress.com/

Chatroulette Guy on Linux Penguin = Chicken

I was checking out I Am Bored Dot Com because I was… er… bored, and I cam across this sequence of images from a guy on Chat Roulette. Well I got a giggle out of some of his comments, especially his idea on Linux Penguins being the same as Chickens 😀

Check out his Chat Roulette offerings:

Linux Hardcore Reshuffle

It’s been a busy week. The Linux Hardcore Forum has now been updated but is still a work in progress. What’s been happening?

LxH Frontpage
http://linux-hardcore.com
Instead of having Simple Portal as a front page to the forums, we now have a WordPress front page which allows for more customization and more control over front page content. I have imported all the posts and plugins from this (my personal) blog to have all the howto’s and other specific Linux news on the main LxH front page.

This Blog
The Linux Hardcore Blog will now contain my personal Linux experiences and basic ramblings, whereas all Linux news and howto guides will now be posted on the LxH front page. This keeps things a little more organized (Formal/Informal).

LxH Forum
http://linux-hardcore.com/forum
The forum has a new theme which works well with the front page. I’ve had a few problems with css and html, but both themes only need a little tweaking now. After 4 years the forum is still going strong as an alternative hang out for a “hardcore” of friends from a mixture forums. Current statistics are 15754 Posts in 2207 Topics. We are still distro-testing, solving problems and writing howto guides for various distros, and new members arrive daily. Over the last 4 years I have constantly deleted inactive members as opposed to leaving them listed to make the forum look as if it has thousands of active members. So don’t let the 162 Members fool you, it’s quality over quantity. Whatsmore we are all active members on other forums, so you’ll see some familiar faces.

Planet LxH
http://linux-hardcore.com/planet
A few of us have blogs and I wanted a place to keep them all together, and although I have seen Planet before, I never really played with it. This week I have been pulling my hair out trying to get the them to match with the Forum and Front Page themes, but my css/html skills leave a lot to be desired. At present it is the default Planet theme, but I will be having a fresh look at it this week. Hopefully we’ll get a few more subscriptions to liven it up a bit, but it’s a great script to provide a one-stop rss feed of all current blog posts.
If you have a Linux related blog, contact me on the forum and i’ll add it to our LxH Planet.

If you aren’t an LxH member yet, and you want a second /home to hang out, REGISTER on the forum. There is a lot of Linux discussion for both experts and new users. Sometimes it’s nice to away from the hustle-bustle of distro-specific forums and chat about other distros and applications. Many of us are dual/triple-booters anyway, so there’s always plenty of variety.

Lightweight Hardware Information Gui

LSHW-GTK

Everybody knows about “lshw” and getting hardware information via the Terminal, you can even pipe it to a text document or get specific hardware info:

sudo lshw > hardware.txt
sudo lshw -html > hardware-info.html
sudo lshw -short
sudo lshw -class memory

But, today I also found lshw-gtk gui to go with it. It’s amazing what you find when you dig through the repos, or go searching for something related.
Basically I am running Crunchbang 10 “Statler” and wanted to pipe my harwdare profile to a text file, only to find that lshw isn’t installed by default.
So I did a search for “lshw” and saw “lshw-gtk”, cool methinks, i’ll have a look at that, being as I love Gtk apps if a gui is necessary.

sudo aptitude install lshw lshw-gtk

And run it from the terminal with:
gksudo lshw-gtk

This is what I got:

Nice little app 🙂

http://www.ezix.org/project/wiki/HardwareLiSter

How to BBC iPlayer from outside the UK

If you live outside the UK you will know about GeoBlocking where you will be denied access to certain data depending on your IP address. You can get around this by using FoxyProxy on Firefox with a UK proxy server IP.

1. Download and install FoxyProxy, and restart Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15023

2. Open the FoxyProxy settings and configure a UK proxy:
Go to Tools > Addons > FoxyProxy > Preferences > Add New Proxy

3. Add the Required Data:
In the “General” Tab just add the name of your proxy. I put BBC iPlayer.
In the “Proxy Details” Tab put the IP address 92.52.125.17 with the port address 80
Now Click “Ok” to Save.

4. Optionally you can set the proxy to Auto for the BBC iPlayer url:
Just add the url http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer/* to the Automatic Proxy field and click “Ok” to Save.

5. Activate the BBC iPlayer proxy:
On the bottom right of Firefox you will have a FoxyProxy button. Right-Click it and choose “BBC iPlayer” and make sure it is set as “enabled”.

6. Get yourself something nice to eat!
Click on BBC2 and get yourself something nice from one of Raymond Blanc’s marvelous cookery programmes [/sarcasm]

That’s it, you are good to go. Happy viewing!

At certain points, Proxy servers can get flooded and slow, or even not work at all. If this happens just go and get the IP of a new UK proxy from here: http://www.xroxy.com/proxy-country-GB.htm

#! Crunchbang Set the Time via Terminal CLI

From: http://wiki.debian.org/DateTime

Set the time manually via the terminal cli

When setting the time manually, the time string may be confusing. The command date –set … accepts the date and time in many formats. You can read the ShUtils info document, or use the example below to figure out one possible format. The date is given in ISO 8601 standard format YYYY-MM-DD for Year-Month-DayOfMonth, and time of day using 24 hour clock. Leading zeros are significant.

Set the date
sudo date --set 2010-01-28

Set the time
sudo date --set 21:08:00

Restart Tint2 to see the correct time:
sudo killall tint2
tint2 &

Conky Forecast on #! Crunchbang

Add Kaivalagi’s Lucid repo, and install ConkyForecast:
sudo wget -q http://www.kaivalagi.com/ubuntu/ppa/conkyforecast-lucid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/conkyhardcore-lucid.list

Get the repo Gpg key:
wget -q http://www.kaivalagi.com/ubuntu/ppa/conkyhardcore-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Update APT and install conkeyforecast:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install conkyforecast

Copy the conkyforecast config to your home directory:
cp /usr/share/conkyforecast/conkyForecast.config ~/.conkyForecast.config

Edit it to add your XOAP key: (which you get from ) http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html
nano ~/.conkyForecast.config

//

Install Swiftfox on #! Crunchbang

If you want a bit of speed to your browsing now that Firefox has gone all bloated and slow, try Swiftfox.
http://getswiftfox.com

Just download your desired version, I chose the i686 for my old AMD Mobile Sempron:
http://getswiftfox.com/deb.htm

Now you need to get a dependency: (libxp6)
sudo apt-get install libxp6

Then install the Swiftfox .deb file: (mine was downloaded to my “downloads” directory)
cd downloads

Change the next command to suit your Swiftfox build:
sudo dpkg -i swiftfox_3.6.0-1_i686.deb


That’s it, you can now run Swiftfox with the command:
swiftfox

As it reads from the standard Mozilla directory, all your bookmarks etc for Iceweasel will also be available.

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.

Just added Corenominal’s Twitterzoid script

Corenominal (Philip from #!Crunchbang) has written an awesome script for Twitter.
http://crunchbang.org/archives/2008/02/20/twitterzoid-php-script/

I created a page called Twitter, then edited the link to go to the /twitter directory where I uploaded his script.
Just edit “example.php” and call it “index.php” then edit it to add your Twitter details.

This is Philip’s example template, but i’m going to play with the css and see what I can do. I’m still not completely decided on my theme, but at least you can see how it looks/works.

How to Mount Ubuntu Ext4 on Debian Ext3

As Ext4 was experimental during the release of Lenny, it wasn’t fully implemented. However, you can mount an Ext4 file system on Ext3 with Debian Lenny, but only in “Read Only” mode.

As root
tune2fs -E test_fs /dev/XXX
mount -t ext4dev -o ro /dev/XXX /mnt/ZZZ

I had Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and Windows 7 on two other partitions when I installed Lenny, I now have read access to Ubuntu’s Ext4 and read/write to Windows 7’s ntfs file system.

Debian Lenny on Acer 3004 laptop

I needed a stable, fast environment to get some work done so I decided that as I had a spare partition on my Acer 3004 laptop i’d go back to Debian Lenny.

I installed Debian Lenny Netinstall via a wired connection to my router.

I chose to install to an Ext3 partition, and only selected the base files and laptop files as I am going for a Fluxbox driven rocket box.

This laptop has Broadcom wireless, a Sis graphics card, and a Synaptics touchpad. Everything else is standard

I updated and upgraded after install and then got my wireless drivers and additional wireless necessities (I have a wpa2 tkip wireless connection):
aptitude instal bcm43-fwcutter wireless-tools wpasupplicant
Then as I like to use Wicd which isn’t available in the standard Lenny repos, I added Lenny backports and pinned the standard repos as default:
Lenny Backports:
# Backported packages for Debian Lenny
deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free
Backports key:
apt-get install debian-backports-keyring

Pin Lenny as default:
echo 'APT::Default-Release "lenny";' > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/default
While I was at it, I added “contrib” and “non-free” to the standard repos

Install Xorg Sis driver which automaticall installs Xorg dependencies
aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-sis
Incidentally, I always add video=sisfb after ro quiet splash on the menu.list or grub.cfg to make sure that the sisfb framebuffer gets used. Vesa witll leave you with a blurry desktop with the wrong colour depth. But that’s what you get for buying a laptop with a pile of crap graphics card like Sis. Sis have stated there will never be drivers for Linux, so we just have to put up with it, or buy Ati/Nvidia next time.

Synaptics Touchpad
aptitude install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
(See my xorg.conf to add the relative synaptics section, without it you get no scroll action)

Next up I configured Xorg and copied the new xorg.conf over to /etc/X11
su to root
X -configure
Then copy it over:
cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Next up I had to manually add my Spanish keyboard and the section for my Synaptics touchpad
As a quick fix to get your keyboard keymap correct while you are getting everything setup, you can issue this command with your keymap (mine is “es” for Spain):
setxkbmap es
My Xorg.conf for my laptop with everything working
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/etc/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "GLcore"
Load "dri"
Load "dbe"
Load "record"
Load "glx"
Load "xtrap"
Load "extmod"
Load "synaptics"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "es"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "SpecialScrollAreaRight" "true"
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "true"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "true"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
EndSection

Section "Device"
### Available Driver options are:-
### Values: : integer, : float, : "True"/"False",
### : "String", : " Hz/kHz/MHz"
### [arg]: arg optional
#Option "Accel" # []
#Option "AccelMethod" #
#Option "TurboQueue" # []
#Option "FastVram" # []
#Option "HostBus" # []
#Option "RenderAcceleration" # []
#Option "ForceCRT1Type" #
#Option "ForceCRT2Type" #
#Option "ShadowFB" # []
#Option "DRI" # []
#Option "AGPSize" #
#Option "GARTSize" #
#Option "Vesa" # []
#Option "MaxXFBMem" #
#Option "EnableSiSCtrl" # []
#Option "SWCursor" # []
#Option "HWCursor" # []
#Option "UseColorHWCursor" # []
#Option "Rotate" #
#Option "Reflect" #
#Option "Xvideo" # []
#Option "InternalModes" # []
#Option "OverruleFrequencyRanges" # []
#Option "RestoreBySetMode" # []
#Option "ForceCRT1" # []
#Option "XvOnCRT2" # []
#Option "PanelDelayCompensation" #
#Option "PDC" #
#Option "PanelDelayCompensation2" #
#Option "PDC2" #
#Option "PanelDelayCompensation1" #
#Option "PDC1" #
#Option "EMI" #
#Option "LVDSHL" #
#Option "ForcePanelRGB" #
#Option "SpecialTiming" #
#Option "TVStandard" #
#Option "UseROMData" # []
#Option "UseOEMData" # []
#Option "YV12" # []
#Option "CHTVType" # []
#Option "CHTVOverscan" # []
#Option "CHTVSuperOverscan" # []
#Option "CHTVLumaBandwidthCVBS" #
#Option "CHTVLumaBandwidthSVIDEO" #
#Option "CHTVLumaFlickerFilter" #
#Option "CHTVChromaBandwidth" #
#Option "CHTVChromaFlickerFilter" #
#Option "CHTVCVBSColor" # []
#Option "CHTVTextEnhance" #
#Option "CHTVContrast" #
#Option "SISTVEdgeEnhance" #
#Option "SISTVAntiFlicker" #
#Option "SISTVSaturation" #
#Option "SISTVCFilter" # []
#Option "SISTVYFilter" #
#Option "SISTVColorCalibFine" #
#Option "SISTVColorCalibCoarse" #
#Option "SISTVXScale" #
#Option "SISTVYScale" #
#Option "TVXPosOffset" #
#Option "TVYPosOffset" #
#Option "SIS6326TVAntiFlicker" #
#Option "SIS6326TVEnableYFilter" # []
#Option "SIS6326TVYFilterStrong" # []
#Option "SIS6326TVForcePlug" #
#Option "SIS6326FSCAdjust" #
#Option "YPbPrAspectRatio" #
#Option "TVBlueWorkAround" # []
#Option "ColorHWCursorBlending" # []
#Option "ColorHWCursorBlendThreshold" #
#Option "CRT2Detection" # []
#Option "ForceCRT2ReDetection" # []
#Option "SenseYPbPr" # []
#Option "CRT1Gamma" # []
#Option "CRT2Gamma" # []
#Option "GammaBrightness" #
#Option "GammaBrightnessCRT2" #
#Option "CRT2GammaBrightness" #
#Option "Brightness" #
#Option "NewGammaBrightness" #
#Option "CRT2Brightness" #
#Option "CRT2NewGammaBrightness" #
#Option "Contrast" #
#Option "NewGammaContrast" #
#Option "CRT2Contrast" #
#Option "CRT2NewGammaContrast" #
#Option "CRT1Saturation" #
#Option "XvGamma" # []
#Option "XvDefaultContrast" #
#Option "XvDefaultBrightness" #
#Option "XvDefaultHue" #
#Option "XvDefaultSaturation" #
#Option "XvDefaultDisableGfx" # []
#Option "XvDefaultDisableGfxLR" # []
#Option "XvChromaMin" #
#Option "XvChromaMax" #
#Option "XvUseChromaKey" # []
#Option "XvInsideChromaKey" # []
#Option "XvYUVChromaKey" # []
#Option "XvDisableColorKey" # []
#Option "XvUseMemcpy" # []
#Option "BenchmarkMemcpy" # []
#Option "UseSSE" # []
#Option "XvDefaultAdaptor" #
#Option "ScaleLCD" # []
#Option "CenterLCD" # []
#Option "EnableHotkey" # []
#Option "ForceCRT1VGAAspect" #
#Option "ForceCRT2VGAAspect" #
#Option "MergedFB" # []
#Option "TwinView" # []
#Option "MergedFBAuto" # []
#Option "CRT2HSync" #
#Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" #
#Option "CRT2VRefresh" #
#Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" #
#Option "CRT2Position" #
#Option "TwinViewOrientation" #
#Option "MetaModes" #
#Option "MergedDPI" #
#Option "MergedXinerama" # []
#Option "TwinviewXineramaInfo" # []
#Option "MergedXineramaCRT2IsScreen0" # []
#Option "MergedNonRectangular" # []
#Option "MergedMouseRestriction" # []
#Option "SHMConfig" "true"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "sis"
VendorName "Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]"
BoardName "661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

Once that was all done I installed my desktop and a few apps:
aptitude install fluxbox wicd gdm bbrun fluxconf fbpager xfce4-terminal conky lua50 imlib2 iceweasel scrot imagemagick
No themes, no wallpaper, no frills………….. at the moment 😉

Then reboot, at GDM choose Session > Fluxbox then login to a very sparse but very fast Fluxbox desktop.

Next up was to edit my ~/fluxbox/menu to add my main apps right at the top, and also add wicd and conky as my startup apps on ~/fluxbox/startup

That’s it for the moment for a basic Debian Lenny Acer laptop H4x0r-R0kk3t-B0x.

How to Ubuntu 10.04 Window buttons on the right

The new theme and lay out on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx introduced a new annoyance. When you open an application window, the minimize, maximize and close buttons are now on the left. This is easily fixed with one command in the terminal:

Place just the buttons on the right:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string “:maximize,minimize,close,”

If you also want the menu button on the left:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string “menu:maximize,minimize,close,”

Not sure why the devs decided to go all Mac on us, but there you go, all easy to fix.

Quickest Archlinux install guide ever?

This was posted by willxtreme on the Crunchbang forum:
#! ArchBang
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/50583/#p50583

Setup Arch with OpenBox
He did it in VirtualBox so just add your graphics driver.

1) Boot cd & login as root & type /arch/setup
2) Select Source>CD
3) Set clock UTC
4) Prepare HD>Auto Prepare for now
***5) Select ALL Packages lol & install them***
6) Configure w/ Nano
-rc.conf>check timezone
>MODULES=(!net-pf-10 !snd_pcsp !pcspkr loop) #to disable ipv6 & beep
>change myhost to your desired cpu name (sasoria)
-/etc/hosts>be sure to see your hostname
-/etc/locale.gen>uncomment your locale
-/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist>uncomment for your country (Canada)
-Set your root passwd & click Done
7) Bootloader>Grub (check menu.lst & see if all cool)>select your main HD>Reboot
8) Login as root & ping http://www.google.com to check your network
9) pacman -Syu & reboot if there was a kernel upgrade
10) useradd -m -G users,audio,video,wheel,storage,optical,power -s /bin/bash will
11) passwd will
12) pacman -S powerpill (powerpill -Syu from now on when you do big installs)
13) pacman -S alsa-utils also-oss>alsaconf (detect snd card)
>run alsamixer as normal user to adjust vol(m to unmute) ex:su – will
14) save settings by going back root & run alsactl store
15) #nano /etc/rc.conf to add alsa & hal: DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network crond alsa hal)
16) in the following order:pacman -S libgl>pacman -S xorg>pacman -S mesa
17) # pacman -S xf86-video-vmware
18) # Xorg -configure > cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
19) enable hotplugging # pacman -S hal dbus xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-synaptics
20) pacman -S openbox obconf obmenu
21) Once openbox is installed you will get a message to move menu.xml & rc.xml to ~/.config/openbox/ in your home directory:
# su – yourusername
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/openbox/
$ cp /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml ~/.config/openbox/
$ cp /etc/xdg/openbox/menu.xml ~/.config/openbox/
22)
edit your ~/.xinitrc (as non-root user) and add the following:
exec openbox-session

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.

Ubuntu Kill Xserver – How to get Ctrl Alt Backspace back

Many people were annoyed that Xorg removed the ctrl+alt+backspace function to restart the Xserver. Well, it’s so easy to re-enable it’s unreal.

Go to:
System > Preferences > Keyboard

Choose:
Layout Tab > Options > Check “Key Sequence To Kill Xserver”

Easy!

Back on Ub… #! Crunchbang

**EDIT** – Since Crunchbang changed to a Debian Base, I am now using it as my main distro. I tried to get back into Ubuntu, but neither the forums nor the distro felt the same as when I started using them around 4-5 years ago.

Due to having to restructure my freetime; Work, Family, Study, I have decided to have a rest and a change.

I have spent the last 4-5 years distro-testing, developing, building Linux Forum communities and other Linux related sites.

There was stress, fun times, negative times and also very positive learning experiences, both with distros and people.

I have now decided to focus what little freetime I have on “using” computers and distro related sites to help the Linux community in general as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel with separate projects.

Ubuntu has all of these tools in place; Launchpad, Forums, Wikis, Blogs, and recently Lucid LTS which is proving to be a very nice distro on all of my machines. I have had conflicts with members of the Ubuntu community in the past. But the past is the past and I am hoping to be able to play a small part in helping probably the most prominent Linux distro (in terms of marketing and popularity) to be even more user friendly.

At the moment the most I can do is help new users and provide beta testing and bug reports. Later on I would like to provide English/Spanish/Catalan translations as well (time permitting), but for now, giving something small back to Linux is all I have time for, so it’s just easier to do this with a distro which has the complete collection of tools and community.

I wanted to setup and Admin a large forum community, which I achieved with Dreamlinux Forums, I also wanted to create my own distro, which I achieved with Tota Linux. Finally I ran out of goals and new ideas, as well as freetime.

It took a of thinking about, but in the end I think I have made the right decision. My contact with local Catalan/Spanish Ubuntu LoQuo members has been quite refreshing and I am looking forward to taking part in a few meetings and helping out where I can.

It’s quite nice to be in the background as just another Linux user.

Preston Grall – Lame Author – Firefox 3.6

//

I was looking through some posts about Firefox 3.6 and laughed as I still see that misinformed writers (Preston Gralla) and blog comment posters still blame Linux Operating Systems for 3rd party application developer failings.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/15443/talling_firefox_3_6_one_more_reason_linux_isnt_ready_for_the_prime_time_mass_market

Their idea is:
A: If Firefox developers create a Windows .exe installer for Firefox, then Windows is great.
B: If Firefox developers create a Firefox zip file that has to be compiled for Linux, then Linux still isn’t ready for the masses.

Let’stry this way of thinking on Preston Grall and Joe Bloggs

Ok, I think the Captcha system I had to use to comment on the post by Preston Gralla was unintuitive and hard to see, therefore Preston Gralla’s articles aren’t quite ready for primetime website use.

How does that sound? It’s all Preston’s fault. After all, that Captcha has to be used to comment on Preston’s posts, so Preston is crap.
On another blog by Joe Bloggs, I could just post with an easy to read Captcha, therefore Joe Bloggs is far superior to Preston Grall, all because the 3rd party Captcha wasn’t a problem.

Getting sick of lame not-talent writers deliberately posting misleading titles for digg-hits and troll comments by using anti-linux phrasing.

What’s more, these kind of posts always get jumped on by Windows using retards and Linux zealots who give the rest of us a bad name.

Rant over.

//

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

//

Stepping down as Dreamlinux Forums Owner/Admin

Well, you read it right. After two years of devoting a lot free time along with my fellow LxH Crew members to the support of an amazing distro, I have decided that work and family commitments have to come first and I have to reduce my time online.

It was a hard decision to make as being the founder of Dreamlinux forums has probably been one of my best experiences over the last two years. I made a lot of friends, got to work with some amazing developers and Linux users.

The Dreamlinux community has over 5000 members now, and is a quality community who are always willing to help and give 100% to their distro. A forum is nothing without quality members, no matter how many there are.

We tried to create a place where we personally would like to hang out. No oppressive moderators, no forum councils or 10 page Codes of Conduct, and no pedantic members constantly reporting posts, pointing out the rules, in their quest to become forum staff. A Linux, community should never end up that way.

I feel that we, the LxH Crew, did a great job in contributing to this still growing community, which I am proud to have been a part of. Sadly, all good things come to an end, and I will now dedicate my freetime to LxH which is, has been and always will be /home for me. You see? It’s quality, not quantity that counts. DLF and LxH both have those attributes.

I just want to say thank to the members who have created an amazing environment, my fellow LxH members who all contributed equally to the construction and running of the forum, and last but not least, the Dreamlinux devs for producing an amazing distro and entrusting us, the LxH Crew with the responsibility of supporting their distro.

I have handed over the forum to djsroknrol who will now be the new Administrator.

richs-lxh

Conky with Scripts, Weather, Email and images

Conky by Proto from LxH

Well, I decided that finally I had enough freetime to start playing with Conky. I am ok editing conkyrc, adding different fonts and so forth but i’ve never used scripts or images.

Bruce and the Conky boys who run Conky Hardcore! regularly post their Conky configs on LxH so I decided to have a look for something challenging (for me) and found a Conky config by Proto.

Conky first run
First off I just copied his conkyrc and ran it. Not surprisingly I was faced with a terminal full of errors. Directories not found, image files not found, missing scripts etc. I also had to change references to my Wireless network connection and also add my email details.

Conky and extra directories
I realised that the entire Conky setup was split into 3 main directories inside the .Conky directory. Conky1, Conky2 and Conky3. Each of these directories had image, script and sh directories. I moved everything to its correct location and started to make a bit of progress.

Email config [Solved]
Even though Proto had provided me with an TotalEmails script, I kept getting a “No conkyEmail” error, and a quick Google search led me to Kaivalagi’s python script at Ubuntu Forums. I followed his instructions and added the Karmic Koala repo and installed his conkyEmail script.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869771
However, now I had one email script in my home directory, and another in /usr/share/conkyemail/conkyEmail.py. I looked through the example that he provided, and looked through both scripts, but I thought, ok, this is beyond me. I’m off to LxH Conky Forum to see if the boys can help me on this one.

EDIT: I solved the email problem by also adding the same email details to my conkyrc as are in the totalemails script.

Harddrive Temperature
The next error I was getting was “sh: hddtemp: not found”, I knew about this from before and installed hddtemp with aptitude directly from then terminal.

Conky Sensors:
I solved this by installing lm-sensors.

Vertical and Horizontal Alignment
Finally, after removing the extra HDD and changing afew things, I only had to try to align everything. Basically, I have a laptop with a 1200X800 widescreen and also that removing some sections made things move up and down, leaving it looking a bit skewiff!

Block Obsessive Spam Bots by Redirecting their IP address

//

I had a major problem on two forums with obsessive spam attacks. These are the aggressive spambots which repeatedly attack every two minutes, clogging the forum logs with error messages.

Kaptcha was in place for sign ups, but sometimes human spammers sign up then add the details (login + password)  to a spambot script.

1. You add a ban trigger which stops them from posting – They continually try to post spam

2. You add a ban trigger which stops them from logging in – They continually try to login

3. You delete the account and ban the IP, Email address, User name – They come back with different details

I was at my wit’s end so I decided to try and use an htaccess file with a rewrite permanent redirect.

I Googled and found these two sites: HERE and HERE.

This is the result:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^94\.23\.216\.104$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^94\.23\.216\.103$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^62\.60\.136\.28$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^94\.23\.207\.161$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^61\.145\.121\.124$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^94\.23\.216\.105$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^94\.23\.216\.106$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^212\.117\.162\.244$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^216\.224\.124\.124$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^212\.117\.164\.65$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^91\.121\.109\.65$
RewriteRule .* http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/cyberstalking.htm [R,L]

My domains are hosted at ICDsoft on Linux servers and have the mod rewrite engine turned off by default. So that had to be enabled. Below that are the Rewrite Conditions which basically tell the server to redirect the incoming IP addresses to the Cyberstalking page of usdoj.gov, which is very apt site for the bastards (spambots) to end up.

I basically have a clean error log directory now, and if a new spambot gets through, I just add its IP to htaccess, and redirect it well away from my forums.

Many people who use Linux have Linux forums, mine are Smf hosted at ICDsoft, and I thought that this info may help some of you fight back the ever increasing spam attacks.

Incidentally, the support at ICDsoft is awesome, I have 4 servers and many sites hosted with them and can do nothing but recommend the quality:

Ubuntu Slowdown – Dual Boot Loses Swap UUID [Fix]

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This was reported as an issue before when dual-booting Ubuntu with another distro. Basically the Swap UUID Doesn’t get updated in /etc/fstab when another distro is installed on another partition.

I installed Fedora for a test run on a spare partition, with Grub being installed to MBR.

Later after an Ubuntu update, which included a new kernel and also a newer Grub, Ubuntu took back control of Grub.

I booted into Ubuntu, only to find that everything was a bit sluggish, and having experienced this before, I checked my Swap partition in  readiness to solve this problem which I had a feeling was repeating itself.

Check Swap:

free -m

With the result:

Swap:            0          0          0

Fix with “blkid” to find the real UUID of the Swap Partition:

blkid

/dev/sda1: LABEL="ACER" UUID="320D-180E" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="Fedora-12-i686-L" UUID="3b915b51-c7ce-4077-975d-df2a177b94cb" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda3: UUID="78a42ee0-4d8a-474c-9cd6-b3f3a6dd6449" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda4: UUID="4bfbb29b-78da-4172-ae54-b1bb934de7f5" TYPE="swap"

Then use Nano to Fstab and change the old Swap UUID to the new UUID:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Now just turn Swap on and check used memory again:

sudo swapon -a

with the result:

free -m

   Swap:         1153          0       1153

So there you have it, if you install another Linux distro on a spare partition to dual-boot and use the same Swap partition, you may find that when you boot into Ubuntu that it is a little sluggish than usual.

This is a known problem for dual and triple booters, but easily remedied, as you see above.

//

Sabayon Linux 5.1

Fabio 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

So, 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: Mac – Windows – Linux

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

[Howto] Faster internet with Google DNS

Yet another contribution from Google to help us get what we need over the internet…………… quickly!

Google launched it’s own DNS service, and seeing as their bots crawl practically everything on the net, you will find even new sites will be stored, listed and ready to go. Hopefully this service will be a lot faster than your usual ISP.

How to configure them:
Gui
Every distro has it’s own Network Config Manager Gui, and i’m not going to post screenshots of all of them for Kde, Gnome and Xfce4 etc. The basic theory is that you right-click your netork icon, and edit the IpV4 settings and choose DHCP (addresses only) and then add the two Google DNS server IP’s – 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4.

Geek style
Open /etc/resolv.conf (I use Nano text editor)

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

Then edit the dns servers to the Google ones.

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

Follow our guide on how to stop Network manager overwriting your settings:
http://debianandi.blogspot.com.es/2013/01/stop-resolvconf-being-overwritten-by.html

Now either restart your network connection, or reboot completely and start surfing. You should see a faster domain name resolution.

It looks like OpenDNS has a new rival on the block!

Linux Trojan Discovered in Screensaver

So, there was a trojan infected screensaver uploaded to Gnome-Look.Org (recently removed) that inserted a bash script into /usr/bin/ by using wget and then executing the script. Originally the script’s contents were a ping command but this was later changed to:  rm -f ./*.*

What does this tell us about Linux security? In fact what does this
tell us about any computer operating system’s security?

Right, it tells us that it means absolutely nothing if a stupid user
is prepared to sacrifice his/her security to get something pretty and
fluffy from an untrusted 3rd party web site.

The main security for Linux, apart from being practically crack-proof
is the fact that we get our applications and goodies from verified
secure repositories. That is now history thanks to the Windows mentality
that is infecting the minds of the usually security-conscious Linux
users.

It’s fate. It was bound to happen sooner or later thanks to Linux’
popularity over the last couple of years. Along with it came the 3rd
party apps and goodies sites which generally offer the same stuff which is
available in most distro repos.

My message? Only trust verified Linux distro repos and stay away from these
3rd party sites which are lacking the staff/time to check each upload before
making it available to the general populace.

How to make sudo insult you when you mess up

Found 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

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.

Latest UI suggestion

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

This Wave is going to be bigger than Google Wave

Can this one be bigger than Google Wave?

If you use Facebook, other social sites and forums, copy and paste this Merry Christmas wave and let’s see if how far it reaches!

Just a bit of Xmas fun!

„ø¤MERRYº°¨¨°º¤ø°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø¸CHRISTMAS¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø ø¤º°¨¨¨°º¤ø¸„ø¤MERRYº°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤ø,„CHRISTMAS¤ø ¸„ø¤º°¨¨°º¤øø¤º°…. Copy and paste and keep the wave going!

25 cool Linux terminal commands for Newbies

So you’ve just installed Ubuntu or PcLinuxOS and you’ve decided that all those GUI’s and point ‘n’ click applications are just like Windows. You’ve had Linux for a week or so and you’ve caught the Über-Geek-Hacker bug and have decided to see what you can do via the terminal like the real Geeks do.

How about connecting to a remote server, getting system information, making zip files?. What about listing directories, searching for files, moving files around, creating directories and deleting stuff? Cool huh?

Well, fire up your terminal and work your way from 25 to 1 and get into some real Geekness!

25) host

host is a simple utility for performing DNS lookups. It is normally used to convert names to IP addresses and vice versa. When no arguments or options are given, host prints a short summary of its command line arguments and options.

Example:
$ host mail.yahoo.com
mail.yahoo.com is an alias for login.yahoo.com.
login.yahoo.com is an alias for login-global.yahoo8.akadns.net.
login-global.yahoo8.akadns.net is an alias for login.yahoo.akadns.net.
login.yahoo.akadns.net has address 69.147.112.160

24) dig

dig (domain information groper) is a flexible tool for interrogating DNS name servers. It performs DNS lookups and displays the answers that are returned from the name server(s) that were queried. Most DNS administrators use dig to troubleshoot DNS problems because of its flexibility, ease of use and clarity of output. Other lookup tools tend to have less functionality than dig.

$ dig mail.yahoo.com

; <> DiG 9.4.1-P1 <> mail.yahoo.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 9867
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 8, ADDITIONAL: 8

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mail.yahoo.com.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
mail.yahoo.com.         195     IN      CNAME   login.yahoo.com.
login.yahoo.com.        65      IN      CNAME   login-global.yahoo8.akadns.net.
login-global.yahoo8.akadns.net. 122 IN  CNAME   login.yahoo.akadns.net.
login.yahoo.akadns.net. 51      IN      A       69.147.112.160

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      zc.akadns.org.
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      zd.akadns.org.
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      eur1.akadns.net.
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      use3.akadns.net.
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      usw2.akadns.net.
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      asia9.akadns.net.
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      za.akadns.org.
akadns.net.             84671   IN      NS      zb.akadns.org.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
za.akadns.org.          23366   IN      A       195.219.3.169
zb.akadns.org.          23366   IN      A       206.132.100.105
zc.akadns.org.          23366   IN      A       61.200.81.111
zd.akadns.org.          23366   IN      A       63.209.3.132
eur1.akadns.net.        17773   IN      A       213.254.204.197
use3.akadns.net.        17773   IN      A       204.2.178.133
usw2.akadns.net.        17773   IN      A       208.185.132.166
asia9.akadns.net.       17773   IN      A       220.73.220.4

;; Query time: 27 msec
;; SERVER: 24.92.226.9#53(24.92.226.9)
;; WHEN: Mon Aug 20 13:34:17 2007
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 421

23) mkdir

The mkdir utility creates the directories named as operands, in the order specified, using mode “rwxrwxrwx” (0777) as modified by the current umask(2).

Example:
$ mkdir test
$ ls -l | grep test
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner  group         512 Aug 20 13:35 test

22) rm

The rm utility attempts to remove the non-directory type files specified on the command line. If the permissions of the file do not permit writ- ing, and the standard input device is a terminal, the user is prompted (on the standard error output) for confirmation.

Example (file):

$ rm test2
$ ls -l | grep test2

Example (dir):
what you get when you try to rm a dir is:

$ rm test
rm: test: is a directory

to get around this do:

$ rm -r test
$ ls -l | grep test

21) cp

In the first synopsis form, the cp utility copies the contents of the source_file to the target_file. In the second synopsis form, the con- tents of each named source_file is copied to the destination target_directory. The names of the files themselves are not changed. If cp detects an attempt to copy a file to itself, the copy will fail.

Example:

$ cp test test2
$ ls -l | grep test
-rw-r–r–  1 owner  group           0 Aug 20 13:40 test
-rw-r–r–  1 owner  group           0 Aug 20 13:41 test2

copy a directory do:

$ cp -r test test2
$ ls -l | grep test
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner  group         512 Aug 20 13:42 test
drwxr-xr-x  2 owner  group         512 Aug 20 13:42 test2

20) grep

grep searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or the file name – is given) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN. By default, grep prints the matching lines.

Example:

$ ls
example test    three
$ ls | grep th
three

19) ls

For each operand that names a file of a type other than directory, ls displays its name as well as any requested, associated information. For each operand that names a file of type directory, ls displays the names of files contained within that directory, as well as any requested, asso- ciated information.

Example:

$ ls
example test    three
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r–r–  1 owner  group  0 Aug 20 13:44 example
-rw-r–r–  1 owner  group  0 Aug 20 13:44 test
-rw-r–r–  1 owner  group  0 Aug 20 13:44 three

18) startx

The startx script is a front end to xinit that provides a somewhat nicer user interface for running a single session of the X Window Sys- tem. It is often run with no arguments.

Example:
To use startx user most have .xinitrc file in there home directory. Examples of the file are:

$ cat ~/.xinitrc
exec fluxbox
(this will start fluxbox)
$ cat ~/.xinitrc
exec gnome-session
(this will start gnome)
$ cat ~/.xinitrc
exec startkde
(this will start kde)

17) nano

nano is a small, free and friendly editor which aims to replace Pico, the default editor included in the non-free Pine package. Rather than just copying Pico’s look and feel, nano also implements some missing (or disabled by default) features in Pico, such as “search and replace” and “go to line and column number”.

Example:

$nano test

(will open test file for edit to exit type: Ctrl+X)

*)vi

Vi is a screen oriented text editor. Ex is a line-oriented text edi- tor. Ex and vi are different interfaces to the same program, and it is possible to switch back and forth during an edit session. View is the equivalent of using the -R (read-only) option of vi.

Example:

$vi test

(Added on request)
to start typing on test use: i when your done type (esc)  to save type :wq! to not save use :q!

16) pwd

The pwd utility writes the absolute pathname of the current working directory to the standard output.

Example:

$ pwd
/usr/home/username/test

15) cat

The cat utility reads files sequentially, writing them to the standard output. The file operands are processed in command-line order. If file is a single dash (`-‘) or absent, cat reads from the standard input. If file is a UNIX domain socket, cat connects to it and then reads it until EOF. This complements the UNIX domain binding capability available in inetd(.

Example:

$ cat test
this is the contents of the file test

14) man

The man utility formats and displays the on-line manual pages. This ver- sion knows about the MANPATH and PAGER environment variables, so you can have your own set(s) of personal man pages and choose whatever program you like to display the formatted pages. If section is specified, man only looks in that section of the manual. You may also specify the order to search the sections for entries and which preprocessors to run on the source files via command line options or environment variables. If enabled by the system administrator, formatted man pages will also be compressed with the “/usr/bin/gzip -c” command to save space.

Example:

$ man find

Show information about the command find

13) kill

The kill utility sends a signal to the processes specified by the pid op- erands.

Example:

$ kill 694

(694 is the id of the program running)

12) locate

The locate program searches a database for all pathnames which match the specified pattern. The database is recomputed periodically (usually weekly or daily), and contains the pathnames of all files which are pub- licly accessible.

Example:

#locate Xorg.0.log
/var/log/Xorg.0.log
/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

(you man need to run /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb to update locate listing)

11) ifconfig

The ifconfig utility is used to assign an address to a network interface and/or configure network interface parameters. The ifconfig utility must be used at boot time to define the network address of each interface present on a machine; it may also be used at a later time to redefine an interface’s address or other operating parameters.

Example:
# ifconfig
em0: flags=8843 metric 0 mtu 1500
options=18b
ether 00:16:41:16:28:2a
inet 192.168.1.2 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseTX )
status: active
lo0: flags=8049 metric 0 mtu 16384
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000

10) ssh

ssh (SSH client) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing commands on a remote machine. It is intended to replace rlogin and rsh, and provide secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network. X11 connections and arbitrary TCP ports can also be forwarded over the secure channel.

Example:

#ssh localhost
Password:
Welcome to FreeBSD-World

(you wouldn’t use local host you would use the computer ip or hostname you are connecting to)

9) gzip

The gzip program compresses and decompresses files using Lempel-Ziv cod- ing (LZ77). If no files are specified, gzip will compress from standard input, or decompress to standard output. When in compression mode, each file will be replaced with another file with the suffix, set by the -S suffix option, added, if possible. In decompression mode, each file will be checked for existence, as will the file with the suffix added.

Example:

$ gzip -9 test.tar
test.tar.gz

$ gzip -d test.tar.gz
$ ls | grep test.tar
test.tar

8) bzip2

bzip2 compresses files using the Burrows-Wheeler block sorting text compression algorithm, and Huffman coding. Compression is generally considerably better than that achieved by more conventional LZ77/LZ78-based compressors, and approaches the performance of the PPM family of statistical compressors.

Example:

$ bzip2 -9 test.tar
$ ls | grep test.tar
test.tar.bz2
$ bzip2 -d test.tar.bz2
$ ls | grep test.tar
test.tar

7) zip

zip is a compression and file packaging utility for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, Windows NT, Minix, Atari and Macintosh, Amiga and Acorn RISC OS.

Example:

$ zip test.zip test
adding: test/ (stored 0%)
$ ls | grep test
test
test.zip
$ unzip test.zip
Archive:  test.zip

6) tar

tar creates and manipulates streaming archive files. This implementation can extract from tar, pax, cpio, zip, jar, ar, and ISO 9660 cdrom images and can create tar, pax, cpio, ar, and shar archives.

Example:

$ tar -cf t2.tar example test three
$ ls | grep t2
t2.tar
$ tar -xf t2.tar
(files are now extracted)

5) mount

The mount utility calls the nmount(2) system call to prepare and graft a special device or the remote node (rhost:path) on to the file system tree at the point node. If either special or node are not provided, the appropriate information is taken from the fstab(5) file.

Example:

# cat /etc/fstab
# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/ad4s1b             none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/ad4s1a             /               ufs     rw              1       1
/dev/acd0               /cdrom          cd9660  ro,noauto       0       0
# mount /cdrom
# ls /cdrom
4.1             TRANS.TBL       etc
# umount /cdrom
# ls /cdrom
#

(/cdrom is already listed in the fstab if it was not I would have to do ‘mount /dev/acd0 /cdrom’)

4) passwd

The passwd utility changes the user’s local, Kerberos, or NIS password. If the user is not the super-user, passwd first prompts for the current password and will not continue unless the correct password is entered.

Example:

$ passwd
Changing local password for username
Old Password:
New Password:
Retype New Password:
$

3) ping

The ping utility uses the ICMP protocol’s mandatory ECHO_REQUEST datagram to elicit an ICMP ECHO_RESPONSE from a host or gateway. ECHO_REQUEST datagrams (“pings”) have an IP and ICMP header, followed by a “struct timeval” and then an arbitrary number of “pad” bytes used to fill out the packet.

Example:

$ ping -c 5 www.yahoo.com
PING www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net (69.147.114.210): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 69.147.114.210: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=48.814 ms
64 bytes from 69.147.114.210: icmp_seq=1 ttl=47 time=32.916 ms
64 bytes from 69.147.114.210: icmp_seq=2 ttl=47 time=32.361 ms
64 bytes from 69.147.114.210: icmp_seq=3 ttl=47 time=33.912 ms
64 bytes from 69.147.114.210: icmp_seq=4 ttl=47 time=33.846 ms

— www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 32.361/36.370/48.814/6.249 ms

2) tail

The tail utility displays the contents of file or, by default, its stan- dard input, to the standard output.

# tail /var/log/auth.log
Aug 19 20:38:05 laptop su: username to root on /dev/ttyv0
Aug 20 00:10:38 laptop login: login on ttyv0 as username
Aug 20 00:11:30 laptop su: username to root on /dev/ttyp0
Aug 20 00:56:32 laptop su: username to root on /dev/ttyp1
Aug 20 01:31:26 laptop su: username to root on /dev/ttyv0
Aug 20 10:25:58 laptop login: login on ttyv0 as username
Aug 20 10:26:21 laptop su: username to root on /dev/ttyp0
Aug 20 13:58:06 laptop su: username to root on /dev/ttyp1
Aug 20 14:18:23 laptop su: username to root on /dev/ttyp1
Aug 20 14:27:39 laptop su: useranme to root on /dev/ttyp1

1) top

Top displays the top processes on the system and periodically updates this information.

Example:

last pid:  5327;  load averages:  0.00,  0.00,  0.00                                                                    up 0+04:05:41  14:30:28
44 processes:  1 running, 43 sleeping
CPU states:  0.2% user,  0.0% nice,  1.3% system,  0.0% interrupt, 98.5% idle
Mem: 198M Active, 608M Inact, 128M Wired, 26M Cache, 111M Buf, 31M Free
Swap: 1024M Total, 8K Used, 1024M Free

PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
694 username       1  96    0 53004K 48212K select 1   4:23  0.10% Xorg
10306 username       1  96    0  7496K  4300K select 1   0:04  0.05% xterm

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

Clement 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).

Recover lost photos from a camera card with PhotoRec

So, you saved your photos from your flash disk onto your computer, and thought “Great! They’re safe”, and then proceeded to delete the images from the Flash card.

Next up, something happens. You reinstall Linux, your harddisk gets eaten by a cabbage-shaped computer-eating alien….. it could happen. Either way, you’ve lost the photos and somebody in the family is probably going to want to kill you. Well, Photorec and Testdisk are going to save your life!

Let’s get PhotoRec

Install testdisk which includes a program called PhotoRec 6.11, Data Recovery Utility

Install and use PhotoRec

1. Open up your terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install testdisk

2. Plugin your card or multi-card reader and wait until it is mounted (It will show on your desktop)

3. Now run the command to start PhotoRec

sudo photorec

4. Photorec will start by showing you available partitions, including your Camera Card (1Gb, 2Gb etc). Use your arrow keys to select it and click enter.

The next parts of the sequence are easy (and common sense).

5. Choose the Intel option, Partitioned, Fat 16/32 files system and then Other (fat, ntfs etc) to recover from the Whole Card . Next choose where to save the recovered photos (save them to your computer, NOT the flash drive), just selecting your Home directory is the easiest.

Step by Step Screenshots

Testdisk and PhotoRec have an indepth suite of tools which can offer complete analysis and recovery of different storage media. The above guide is only a basic recovery technique to recover data from an unformatted flash drive. There are far more options and tools for those wishing to look into data recovery a little deeper.

More Info
Christophe GRENIER
http://www.cgsecurity.org

Top 20 Most Popular Social Networking Websites

Here are the 20 Most Popular Social Networking Websites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links and Alexa Rank. I regularly check out http://www.ebizmba.com for stats and top 10’s etc.

I wasn’t surprised that Facebook was top, however I was surprised that Orkut (Google Facebook) was so far down the table. Personally I can’t stomach MySpace and steer well clear of it, but who’d a thunk that Classmates was so high? I must admit that even though I spend a lot of time on the net, I had never heard of Ning, so there ya go, you learn something new every day.

Check out the Top 20 below:

1 | facebook.com
722,434,829 – Inbound Links | 122,220,617 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 4 – Alexa Ranking.


2 | MySpace
345,130,806 – Inbound Links | 55,599,585 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 11 – Alexa Ranking.


3 | twitter
628,750,806 – Inbound Links | 23,579,044 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 13 – Alexa Ranking.


4 | LinkedIn.com
29,370,378 – Inbound Links | 11,228,746 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 113 – Alexa Ranking.


5 | classmates.com
997,666 – Inbound Links | 14,649,224 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 544 – Alexa Ranking.


6 | Ning.com
13,032,000 – Inbound Links | 5,881,943 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 108 – Alexa Ranking.


7 | Bebo.com
14,368,423 – Inbound Links | 3,120,062 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 138 – Alexa Ranking.

8 | HI5.com
8,491,287 – Inbound Links | 2,176,014 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 20 – Alexa Ranking.


9 | Tagged.com
399,111 – Inbound Links | 3,731,972 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 74 – Alexa Ranking.


10 | myyearbook.com
921,983 – Inbound Links | 3,025,772 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 483 – Alexa Ranking.


11 | Multiply.com
16,629,000 – Inbound Links | 1,442,885 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 165 – Alexa Ranking.


12 | friendster.com
6,896,127 – Inbound Links | 1,454,029 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 47 – Alexa Ranking.


13 | Meetup
1,764,287 – Inbound Links | 2,533,191 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 688 – Alexa Ranking.


14 | BlackPlanet
418,032 – Inbound Links | 1,473,081 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,338 – Alexa Ranking.


15 | Gaia Online
528,287 – Inbound Links | 1,000,070 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 892 – Alexa Ranking.


16 | Piczo
4,676,287 – Inbound Links | 444,457 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 1,360 – Alexa Ranking.


17 | orkut.com
9,396,000 – Inbound Links | 494,781 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 102 – Alexa Ranking.


18 | FotoLog.com
6,382,000 – Inbound Links | 199,838 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 124 – Alexa Ranking.


19 | Skyrock.com
8,185,000 – Inbound Links | 154,991 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 43 – Alexa Ranking.


20 | badoo.com
228,287 – Inbound Links | 106,885 – Compete Monthly Visitors | 161 – Alexa Ranking.

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.

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?

Basically, 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..

Wireless IEEE 802.XX Standards – What are they?

Practically everybody has at least one Wireless enabled laptop or desktop, so what do all those IEEE specifications mean?

Here is a list and explanation of the more common IEEE 802.XX Standards:

IEEE 802.XX Glossary:

802.11 – This early wireless standard provides speeds of up to 2 Mbps. Because 802.11 supports two entirely different methods of encoding – Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) – there is often incompatibility between equipment. 802.11 has also had problems dealing with collisions and with signals reflected back from surfaces such as walls.

802.11a – This is an extension of the 802.11 standard and uses a different band than 802.11b and 802.11g – the 5.8-GHz band called Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) in the United States. Because the U-NII band has a higher frequency and a larger bandwidth allotment than the 2.4-GHz band, the 802.11a standard achieves speeds of up to 54 Mbps.

802.11b – This extension of the original 802.11 standard boosts wireless throughput from 2 Mbps to 11 Mbps. It can transmit up to 100 m under good conditions, although this distance may be reduced considerably by obstacles such as walls. This upgrade has dropped FHSS

in favor of the more reliable DSSS. Settling on one method of encoding eliminates the problem of having a single standard that includes two kinds of equipment that aren’t compatible with each other. 802.11b devices are compatible with older 802.11 DSSS devices but are not compatible with 802.11 FHSS devices. 802.11b is currently the most widely used wireless standard.

802.11g – 802.11g is an extension to 802.11b and operates in the same 2.4-GHz band. It brings data rates up to 54 Mbps using Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology. Because 802.11g is backward compatible with 802.11b, an 802.11b device can interface directly with an 802.11g access point. You may even be able to upgrade some newer 802.11b access points to be 802.11g compliant via relatively easy firmware upgrades

802.11i – 802.11i addresses many of the security concerns that come with a wireless network by adding Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Robust Security Network (RSN) to 802.11a and 802.11b standards. WPA uses Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) to improve the security of keys used with WEP, changing the way keys are derived and adding a message-integrity check function to prevent packet forgeries. RSN adds a layer of dynamic negotiation of authentication and encryption algorithms between access points and mobile devices. 802.11i is backwards compatible with most 802.11a and 802.11b devices, but loses security if used with non-802.11i devices.

802.11n – The next standard in development is IEEE 802.11n. This new standard offers far higher speeds than current standards. Speed projections are at least 100 Mbps, but they could go up to 320 Mbps. The standard isn’t expected to be ratified until November 2006.

802.11X – This refers to the general 802.11 wireless standard – b, g, or i. It is not to be confused with 802.1X, a security standard.

802.15 – This specification covers how information is conveyed over short distances among a Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). This type of network usually consists of a small networked group with little direct connectivity to the outside world. It is compatible with Bluetooth 1.1.

802.16 – IEEE 802.16, was ratified in January 2001. It enables a single base station to support many fixed and mobile wireless users. It is also called the Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) standard. 802.16 aims to combine the long ranges of the cellular standards with the high speeds of local wireless networks. Intended as a – last-mile – solution, this standard could someday provide competition for hard-wired broadband services such as DSL and cable modem. 802.16 operates in the 10- to 66-GHz range and has many descendants.

802.16d – This recent standard – also called the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard or WiMax – can cover distances of up to 30 miles. Theoretically, a single base station can transmit hundreds of Mbps with each customer being allotted a portion of the bandwidth. 802.16d may use either the licensed 2.6- and 3.5-GHz bands or the unlicensed 2.4- and 5-GHz bands.

802.16e – This is based on the 802.16a standard and specifies mobile air interfaces for wireless broadband in the licensed bands ranging from 2 to 6 GHz.

802.20 – Specifies mobile air interfaces for wireless broadband in licensed bands below 3.5 GHz.

802.1X – 802.1X is not part of the 802.11 standard. It is a sub-standard designed to enhance the security of an 802.11 network. It provides an authentication framework that uses a challenge/response method to determine if a user is authorized.

[Video] ChromeOS Vs Windows Vs Mac Vs Linux – Hilarious

This spoof is very funny as it shows Mac as the typically stroppy “I was first!”, Unix as the grumpy old guy and Google as the big fat guy who just stomps in and nonchalantly takes all their glory. Linux as the nerd with a lisp is not a common representation of us Linux users, everybody knows that Linux geeks are hunks who are constantly surrounded by chicks. 😛

Chromium OS – Open Source Chrome OS is here

So 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/

[Howto] Manage a Group Project on Google Wave

I suppose a few of you have gotten your invites from friends and co-workers, I got one from a generous member of Chrome-OS Forums. When you first login to Wave, you see something similar to the Google Contacts layout page with a window for Waves, and another for Contacts (Your buddies/colleagues on Gmail).

The coolest part of your first experience is Doctor Wave who will pop up in the video box on the bottom right hand corner and start explaining and pointing to everything, I think every online app should have this.

So you make your first Wave, which looks just like a chat message. Then your buddies comment and it ends up looking like Gmail!! Ok, so, now what. Well, there’s a lot more to Google Wave than just using it as an IRC chat room.

Doctor Wave:

When to use Google \/\/ave

Go back to Welcome wave

There are tons of ways to use Google Wave–here are just a few examples to get you thinking and an overview video that shows Google Wave in action.

Organizing events

Keep a single copy of ideas, suggested itinerary, menu and RSVPs, rather than using many different tools. Use gadgets to add weather, maps and more to the event.

Sample event planning wave

Meeting notes

Prepare a meeting agenda together, share the burden of taking notes and record decisions so you all leave on the same page (we call it being on the same wave). Team members can follow the minutes in real time, or review the history using Playback. The conversation can continue in the wave long after the meeting is over.

Sample meeting notes

Group reports and writing projects

Collaboratively work in real time to draft content, discuss and solicit feedback all in one place rather than sending email attachments and creating multiple copies that get out of sync.

Sample project

Brainstorming

Bring lots of people into a wave to brainstorm – live concurrent editing makes the quantity of ideas grow quickly! It is easy to add rich content like videos, images, URLs or even links to other waves. Discussion ensues. Etiquettes form. Then work together to distill down to the good ideas.

Sample brainstorm

Photo sharing

Drag and drop photos from your desktop into a wave. Share with others. Use the slideshow viewer. Everyone on the wave can add their photos, too. It is easy to make a group photo album in Google Wave.

After searching the net for a half decent guide, I found a pretty good example at Life Hacker:

http://lifehacker.com/5407183/how-to-manage-a-group-project-in-google-wave

To chat with other Google Wave sufers, head over to the Wave board on ChromeOS Forums, you never know, there may even be some invites up for grabs, they’re a friendly bunch at COF.

Google’s New Music Search

Google has launched a new music search feature, which helps you search and discover millions of songs with a simple Google search. When you search for an artist, song, album or even a few lyrics, you’ll find links to their partner sites — putting you just one click away from listening to and purchasing the music you’re looking for.

To celebrate the launch, MySpace and Lala are hosting exclusive, never-before-heard tracks from a variety of artists — and they’re helping people to find those tracks through a simple Google search. So if you’re a Lady Gaga fan looking for a new remix, in love with the Arctic Monkeys and looking for something extra or hunting for a new acoustic track from YouTube sensation Zee Avi, just search for it. You’ll find links to these tracks right in your regular search results. And when you click the links, you’ll be able to hear the songs directly from MySpace and Lala.

Google knows how much you care about music, and they’re excited to partner with Lala and MySpace to help you discover more music from artists you love, using Google. To see the full list of tracks and read more, check out the blogposts on Lala and MySpace. We hope you enjoy the music.

http://www.google.com/landing/music/

Can Google’s SPDY make the web twice as fast?

Google has announced it’s new html-killer protocol SPDY, pronounced “Speedy”. It has only been tested in lab conditions so far and awaits real world tests to see if it can indeed increase on the 55% faster download speeds that they encountered.

Today we’d like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced “SPeeDY”, an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

Read the full article at: http://blog.chromium.org/2009/11/2x-faster-web.html

Stunning Breakthrough in Wireless Reception Technology

Helios’ writing style makes this one of my favourite posts so far this year! Relating his friend’s “Skip “skipsjunk.net” Guenter’s” state of the art Wireless Booster. I have created many wireless “enhancers” over the years, from the wireless hackers’ favourite, the “Cantenna” to small USB dongle enhancers, but this one really is a gem.

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2009/11/stunning-breakthrough-in-wireless.html

Note the surgical precision by which Guenter cut and splayed the metal mesh to insert the highly developed usb wireless adaptor extension.

Yes, I know…it’s breath-taking. Drink in the precision of its placement. Understandably overwhelming, I know.

Besides the giant black zip ties don’t show up so well at night and nobody has a lens that’ll show the nail jammed between the sheet metal roof and the 2×4 beam it’s hanging from.

Well, you get the idea. A hacked together botch job described with an over-flamboyant artistic freedom which made this post hilarious to me.

Screenshot:

[Video] How to pronounce Linux – From Linus Torvalds himself!

watch?v=qAEsoKiZTvk

 

L-ih-nucks…. lainooks, lainix, leenooks, Lie-nux………………… pfft! Lets ask Linux Torvalds, the man who created it!

[Video] Linux vs Pc & Mac – Commercial

Linux sure looks good from here!

What about the unknown Linux distros?

Practically 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:

• LinVDR (submitted on 2004-04-08)
• cdlinux.pl (submitted on 2005-01-19)
• FeniX (submitted on 2005-03-02)
• BOSS (BSI OSS Security Suite) (submitted on 2005-06-21)
• Proxmox Mail Gateway (submitted on 2005-08-30)
• Bio-Linux (submitted on 2005-11-12)
• Movitos USB Linux (submitted on 2005-11-30)
• IPFire (submitted on 2006-02-08)
• Tomahawk Desktop (submitted on 2006-03-06)
• KNOPPIX-NSM (submitted on 2006-05-06)
• Tmxxine (submitted on 2006-06-25)
• Metasys (submitted on 2006-08-08)
• Majilux (submitted on 2006-10-26)
• URLI OS (submitted on 2006-11-01)
• LernTux (submitted on 2006-11-07)
• Kids Without (submitted on 2006-11-14)
• YaKa (submitted on 2006-11-16)
• mEDUXa (submitted on 2006-11-23)
• deepOfix Messaging Server (submitted on 2006-12-09)
• Kuliax (submitted on 2006-12-15)
• Linkat GNU/Linux (submitted on 2006-12-29)
• CosmoPBX Live CD (submitted on 2007-02-15)
• Sflack (submitted on 2007-02-17)
• MADbox Live (submitted on 2007-03-17)
• KcPenTrix (submitted on 2007-04-04)
• Univention (submitted on 2007-05-03)
• cl33n (submitted on 2007-05-04)
• Cytrun Linux (submitted on 2007-05-14)
• VDRLive (submitted on 2007-05-29)
• Linux For Clinics (submitted on 2007-06-09)
• DetaolB (submitted on 2007-06-15)
• FrogLinux (submitted on 2007-06-29)
• CPX mini (submitted on 2007-07-17)
• S-M-S (submitted on 2007-08-09)
• Embun (submitted on 2007-08-25)
• BlackRoute (submitted on 2007-08-27)
• LivEPICS (submitted on 2007-09-15)
• Kinux (submitted on 2007-10-08)
• Arktur (submitted on 2007-10-30)
• PCFluxboxOS (submitted on 2007-11-06)
• OS Desktop (submitted on 2007-11-14)
• KarachiOS (submitted on 2007-11-15)
• Pendrive Linux (submitted on 2007-11-28)
• ChurchPup (submitted on 2007-12-12)
• Evoke (submitted on 2007-12-20)
• VAFEO (submitted on 2008-01-14)
• iloog (submitted on 2008-01-20)
• Aloofix (submitted on 2008-01-28)
• Piren (submitted on 2008-02-04)
• VicidialNOW (submitted on 2008-02-10)
• Tartuga (submitted on 2008-02-12)
• NuFW (submitted on 2008-02-15)
• AltimatOS (submitted on 2008-04-10)
• Turtle Kevux (submitted on 2008-04-16)
• ForLex (submitted on 2008-04-26)
• Hrat GNU/Linux (submitted on 2008-04-28)
• Phoronix Test Suite LiveCD (submitted on 2008-05-23)
• PING (submitted on 2008-06-03)
• BoliviaOS (submitted on 2008-06-20)
• F-Secure Rescue CD (submitted on 2008-06-26)
• DAVIX (submitted on 2008-07-03)
• Asterisk on IPCop (submitted on 2008-07-11)
• Excelixis (submitted on 2008-07-17)
• Tin Hat (submitted on 2008-07-30)
• GUFI (submitted on 2008-08-09)
• Linux Black Wolf (submitted on 2008-08-27)
• ScratchLinux (submitted on 2008-08-27)
• TITAN LEV (submitted on 2008-09-02)
• K-Rune Velo (submitted on 2008-09-24)
• Cooperation-iws (submitted on 2008-09-27)
• Zonbu (submitted on 2008-10-07)
• Bardinux (submitted on 2008-10-14)
• RsLive (submitted on 2008-11-11)
• Suriyan Linux (submitted on 2008-11-14)
• WeakNet Linux (submitted on 2008-11-15)
• SecurPC (submitted on 2008-11-20)
• 4bak (submitted on 2008-11-27)
• Zorin OS (submitted on 2008-11-27)
• CentServer (submitted on 2008-12-02)
• Jaris (submitted on 2008-12-10)
• CacheGuard (submitted on 2008-12-19)
• pure:dyne (submitted on 2009-01-06)
• Incognito LiveCD (submitted on 2009-01-07)
• 4Biblen (submitted on 2009-01-10)
• Amahi (submitted on 2009-01-17)
• Galinux (submitted on 2009-01-17)
• PocketPC (submitted on 2009-02-03)
• Dotsch/UX (submitted on 2009-02-10)
• pupitup (submitted on 2009-02-16)
• flexxxpup (submitted on 2009-02-17)
• Ubuntu Extras Remix (submitted on 2009-02-17)
• Linux4One (submitted on 2009-02-19)
• Bio-Linux (submitted on 2009-02-20)
• Hag GNU/Linux (submitted on 2009-02-23)
• Elementary OS (submitted on 2009-02-25)
• Guara Linux OS (submitted on 2009-02-26)
• dvd::rip Cluster Live CD (submitted on 2009-02-28)
• VoIP on CD (submitted on 2009-03-02)
• Ultra X Linux (submitted on 2009-03-06)
• ARAnyM/AFROS Live CD (submitted on 2009-03-09)
• Livre S.O. (submitted on 2009-03-09)
• FuguIta (submitted on 2009-03-10)
• Jarro Negro Linux (submitted on 2009-03-12)
• FAN: Fully Automated Nagios (submitted on 2009-03-18)
• JUX (submitted on 2009-03-18)
• Denix (submitted on 2009-03-21)
• cp6Linux (submitted on 2009-03-21)
• Linux DaVinci (submitted on 2009-03-22)
• Noys (submitted on 2009-03-23)
• Unity Linux (submitted on 2009-03-29)
• Omnia XP (submitted on 2009-03-31)
• Turnkey Linux (submitted on 2009-04-06)
• ayuOS (submitted on 2009-04-11)
• Desktop Paraná (submitted on 2009-04-17)
• Lihuen (submitted on 2009-04-19)
• TOSS (submitted on 2009-04-20)
• Chaox (submitted on 2009-04-23)
• Lin-X (submitted on 2009-04-26)
• Xange (submitted on 2009-05-13)
• OWASP Live CD (submitted on 2009-05-13)
• Taneu OS (submitted on 2009-05-24)
• Foxy Linux (submitted on 2009-05-25)
• Digital Forensic Live CD (submitted on 2009-06-03)
• StormOS (submitted on 2009-06-05)
• InfraLinux (submitted on 2009-06-07)
• LinuxAdvanced (submitted on 2009-06-12)
• Eden Live (submitted on 2009-06-12)
• Linux Mangaka (submitted on 2009-06-15)
• Intuitive (submitted on 2009-06-18)
• Wires Cut Linux (submitted on 2009-06-19)
• Anubis-Linux (submitted on 2009-06-19)
• AuroraUX (submitted on 2009-06-19)
• AV Linux (submitted on 2009-06-20)
• VINUX (submitted on 2009-06-21)
• openArtist (submitted on 2009-06-23)
• VESTA (submitted on 2009-06-29)
• Sugar on a Stick (submitted on 2009-06-30)
• Milnix (submitted on 2009-07-01)
• Mundus OS (submitted on 2009-07-04)
• BSD Router Project (submitted on 2009-07-04)
• Element GNU/Linux (submitted on 2009-07-09)
• 8ix Zenith CE (submitted on 2009-07-10)
• BrowserLinux (submitted on 2009-07-14)
• pcubuntoo (submitted on 2009-07-19)
• Ice-Z Linux (submitted on 2009-07-19)
• Photo Artists Workshop Live CD (submitted on 2009-07-23)
• sEEcher OS (submitted on 2009-07-23)
• Xin Yang Linux (submitted on 2009-07-24)
• Omega (submitted on 2009-07-28)
• Live Android (submitted on 2009-07-28)
• Mesk Linux (submitted on 2009-07-28)
• ArchOne (submitted on 2009-07-31)
• Nexradix (submitted on 2009-08-02)
• Grusha Linux (submitted on 2009-08-03)
• Scentlinux (submitted on 2009-08-04)
• PTS Desktop Live (submitted on 2009-08-06)
• Zencafe GNU/Linux (submitted on 2009-08-08)
• PenaOS (submitted on 2009-08-14)
• juntaDados (submitted on 2009-08-18)
• VENENUX GNU/Linux (submitted on 2009-08-19)
• Gordux GNU/Linux (submitted on 2009-08-20)
• ÆrieBSD (submitted on 2009-08-24)
• Spri Linux (submitted on 2009-08-30)
• Masonux (submitted on 2009-08-31)
• Lighthouse Pup (submitted on 2009-08-31)
• Torinux (submitted on 2009-09-06)
• Oxinus Linux (submitted on 2009-09-06)
• Kahel OS (submitted on 2009-09-15)
• Succi Linux (submitted on 2009-09-17)
• KDuXP (submitted on 2009-09-23)
• VIPER VAST Live (submitted on 2009-09-28)
• DigAnTel (submitted on 2009-09-29)
• EsiTux (submitted on 2009-10-01)
• Portable Linux (submitted on 2009-10-02)
• MyXbmc Passion (submitted on 2009-10-03)
• Pandorga GNU/Linux (submitted on 2009-10-03)
• Business Linux (submitted on 2009-10-13)
• Slax Router (submitted on 2009-10-16)
• JULinux (submitted on 2009-10-17)
• Simplix Linux (submitted on 2009-10-22)
• Leeenux (submitted on 2009-10-22)
• Phoenix OS (submitted on 2009-10-28)
• GhostBSD (submitted on 2009-11-10)
• ABC GNU/Linux (submitted on 2009-11-12)

RSS Feed Readers for Linux

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 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/

GNOME 3.0 In September 2010 – Cool but needs 3D graphics drivers

New Gnome – No Open Sourced drivers

The new Ubuntu release, Ubuntu Karmic Koala has seen reports of Nvidia graphics problems,

Nvidia has said they won’t open source their drivers. The “New” Xorg has been adding to the borkage on many a major distro. Other graphics cards such as Sis don’t even offer 3D acceleration, whatsmore, they need a sisfb workaround just to produce a usable desktop [[Howto] Ubuntu 9.10 Sis graphic card wrong colour depth problem]. So why would the next Gnome release require such graphics capabilities from a slowly worsening scenario?

In first tests by users at the Linux-Hardcore, it was revealed that Gnome-Shell, the currently available “will become Gnome 3.0” will not run on non-3D accelerated graphics cards such as Sis.

A quote from the Gnome blog:

“The GNOME release team has decided (and then announced) that GNOME 3.0 will come in September. GNOME 2.30 will still happen in March and will feature the GNOME 3.0 packages that are ready in time, while September will be the first full-blown release of this overhauled desktop environment. GNOME 2.30 is still being considered a stable desktop release.”

The official announcement HERE

Maybe Ati have some leverage with the Gnome 3.0 devs, because this new desktop will certainly go in their favour when Linux users need to choose a 3D accelerated graphics card with (up to now) increasingly improving graphics drivers.