Linux Operating System

http://garron.me/mac/icloud-beta-available.html

Varnish Logs Varnish is a powerful reverse proxy that can balance the load of multiple web servers, and cache the required pages at the same time. You can read more about it at its home page Now we all know that debugging is an important part of installing, configuring and fine tuning any piece of software, and that goes to varnish too, and varnishlog is a great utility to help you while debugging varnish. varnishlog As the name says, it display Varnish logs, but if you have a very busy site, and your run it with no parameters you will...

I've been using this line to remove spaces from file names in Linux. Usually Windows users like to add spaces in the file names, I prefer dashes (-) or under scores (_) instead, they are easy to manage in the console. I've found this command a long time ago in a forum, and still have it on my personal notes. Here posted for everybody: for file in *; do mv "$file" `echo $file | sed -e 's/ */_/g' -e 's/_-_/-/g'`; done

Introduction Hot Linking From Wikipedia we have: The technology behind the World Wide Web, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), does not make any distinction of types of links—all links are functionally equal. Resources may be located on any server at any location. When a web site is visited, the browser first downloads the textual content in the form of an HTML document. The downloaded HTML document may call for other HTML files, images, scripts and/or stylesheet files to be processed. These files may contain <img> tags which supply the URLs which allow images to display on the page. The HTML...

Introduction You may be concerned about security on your LAMP server, and you should hackers are always trying to break into your or anyone’s else system. After finding this in slashdot, I have decided to show you how to to stop Apache and PHP sending their versions and other valuable info for hackers. Hide Apache version To make Apache stop sending its version number to any visitor do as follow: Edit the file http.conf or apache2.conf and add the following lines. ServerSignature Off ServerTokens Prod Restart Apache Hide PHP version Now the turn of PHP, we do not want those...

Introduction Whenever you need to work with PDF documents, like when you need to merge documents, rotate them or put a lot of documents together in a single PDF file, you may need to work with PDF Mod, this great tool will let you do those things and more. This is going to be just an introduction to its capabilities, you will then learn a lot more by yourself while working with it. Installation If you are using one of the major Linux distribution you will find it in the repositories of your distribution, or you can download from the...

I'm thinking about letting go2linux as a place only for tutorials and how to. All my opinions editorials may be moving to my personal blog. I think that will may easier to anyone only interested in my tips and tutorials not to be messed with my opinion posts. What do you think? Find my personal blog at http://garron.me If I finally decide to do that I'll let you know. Thanks.

Well, I now have two sites, this one and http://garron.me. This one is using Drupal, and the other is with Wordpress, I'll write about them later, but my first impressions are: Wordpress is easier...

If you blog on drupal, you'll really love this module and drupad app for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Introduction I'm still kind of playing with http://garron.me and for the last three days I've been switching from Movable Type to Wordpress, but I have faced a weird problem. And while searching in the forums and using Google to solve it, I've found that a lot of people is facing somehow the same problem, and in all forum's threads people is guiding them to the same possible solutions time after time and lots of them have not found the real solution. Well, I hope this post may help anybody who may face this issue, like me. Dashboard Ajax / CSS/...

Introduction If you want to share you iTunes library with your family or maybe (for private use) in you office, you can set up a Linux server with mt-daap, it uses the DAAP protocol to share music within your network. As far as I know the music can not be downloaded by the clients, only streamed, if this is not true please let me know. Be aware that according to Apple the music you buy in iTunes can only be shared with your family. Install mt-daap in Slackware I have a printer server in my office and have decided to...

Introduction Dropbox is according to Wikipedia: Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. that uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization. It was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a Y Combinator startup. It is really useful, at it has clients for iPhones, Blackberries, Android and others, as well as Windows and Macs, so Debian is a must. How to install Dropbox in Debian Linux Thanks to my friend Raphael Hertzog, we now have Debian dropbox packages. So,...

If you are new to Mac like me, you may find it hard to do a simple task like burning an ISO image. To do it in a Mac, just follow these steps. Insert a blank disc. Start Disk Utility. (Under Applications/Utitilities) [img_assist|nid=1111|title=Mac disk utility|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=145|height=128] From the File menu, choose Open Disk Image and select the ISO to be burned. In the list of volumes, you will now see an item representing the ISO file. Select it. Click the Burn button and follow the instructions. You should see something like this: [img_assist|nid=1112|title=Disk utility|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=440]

Introduction A Perl module is a discrete component of software for the Perl programming language. Technically, it is a particular set of conventions for using Perl's package mechanism that has become universally adopted.[discuss] A module defines its source code to be in a package (much like a Java package), the Perl mechanism for defining namespaces, e.g. CGI or Net::FTP or XML::Parser; the file structure mirrors the namespace structure (e.g. the source code for Net::FTP is in Net/FTP.pm). Furthermore, a module is the Perl equivalent of the class when object-oriented programming is employed Now we'll see an easy way to manage...

If you are new to Varnish, here is what Wikipedia says about ti: Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache, which is primarily an origin server, Varnish was designed from the ground up as an HTTP accelerator. You can also read Varnish Cache homepage, and here is what I've written about varnish. Well today I want to show you how to purge all the cache without the need to restart the daemon. varnishadm -T 127.0.0.1:6082 url.purge . That...

I just wanted to test how auto post from Posterous to both Drupal and Movable Type works. This short post should appear at: http://g.garron.me http://www.go2linux.org/blogs/guillermo.html http://garron.me/blog/ How good or bad crossposting is to SEO? well there is a lot of debate about that out there. One more thing, I’m using Markdown on this email/post

Introduction Yesterday, while upgrading Perl in Arch Linux to host my Personal Blog, I run into some errors. While installing I've got this warning. - The directories /usr/lib/perl5/current, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/current, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1, and /usr/share/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1 have been removed from @INC. - The script/binary directories are now /usr/bin/*_perl instead of /usr/lib/perl5/*_perl/bin which will be eventually removed. And after the upgrade, no perl script was able to run in my server. Here some of the error I found in the logs: [Tue Jul 05 22:50:42 2011] [error] [client 97.107.133.237] Premature end of script headers: mt-check.cgi [Tue Jul 05 22:57:55 2011] [error] [client 97.107.133.237] /usr/bin/perl: symbol...

Introduction We all know that one of the biggest problems with equipments that work with batteries is the need to charge them usually more often that we would like to do it, this applies to smartphones and laptops. The problem is more or less the same with them both, and it is the display, in the case of laptops the more powerful your graphics card is, the faster you'll need to recharge your laptop's battery. We also know that we do not need all that power all the time, we may need it if we are using our laptop to...

Introduction What do you do first time in the morning?. Let me guess, no, I'm not going to go into your private life, I mean what do you do first time in the morning technologically speaking. I think you check your tweeter stream, and check your RSS list to find the news of the day. Now, If you are using some Apple device, let's say your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad or your Mac, you might want to know about this. Reeder Reeder is not a free app, but it really worth the price, Reeder is a newsreader application available for...

[img_assist|nid=1100|title=Holly Bligh|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=282] We all remember how just a simple difference in our clothes or look may be such a big problem in school. Kids tend to put aside anyone who is a little bit different from the group. Now imagine how hard it is for a nine year old girl with albinism to go to school everyday, also imagine how could it be if that little girl also needs the teachers to magnify all text in the photocopy for to be able to read with the rest of the class, just because albinism affected her eyes. Well that girl is...

Disclaimer: This is based on my own experience, and your needs and experiences may vary [img_assist|nid=1097|title=good bye microsoft|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=375] Introduction I have been using Microsoft Operating Systems since 1990, first exclusively, and later as a dual boot with Linux, I hope today to be the day I will finally be able to say "Good by for ever Windows, please stay out of my life". Some review of my experience with computers I started my computer life with DOS, PC-DOC and MS-DOS back in 1990, I used Word Perfect and Lotus 123 or Quattro Pro to work my documents and my spread...

Introduction If you want to use Varnish with Virtual Hosts, you may face the problem of Varnish showing only the default site and not all other virtual sites. Do not try to fix it tweaking Varnish, as this is something you need to solve in Apache or Nginx configuration, depending on which of them is behind varnish. In this post I'll show you how to configure both of them Nginx and Apache. How to configure Varnish I'll not cover the complete instructions about Varnish configuration in this post, but the basics are: backend default { .host = "127.0.0.1"; .port =...

Introduction A lot of people is saying that maybe RSS is dying, but what it seems to be happening is that maybe, while more and more people come on-line the majority of them are not that "geek" guy that knows how to use RSS. Well I'm sure that most of the readers of this blog uses RSS, actually, there are 1800+ RSS readers of this blog. I want now to introduce you with Newsbeuter, that according to its home page is: Newsbeuter is an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and...

Introduction If you are starting with a Mac you may be missing some keyboard keys, some like... "Home", "End", Page Up" and "Page Down" right? Well they are all there, but they are hidden, :), no really, you need some short cuts to get them. Home key Mac The Home key in a Mac is "fn + left arrow" End key Mac The End key in a Mac is "fn + right arrow" Other home and end keys Now, how is that of other Home and End keys?, well if you are surfing the web on Safari, and you click...

Introduction Being a Linux user and starting now with Mac, I am constantly looking for equivalent ways to do the same job. One of those things I need is to copy large amounts of output in the console (terminal window) to the clipboard for later use. In Linux I use xclip, and in Mac I'll use pbcopy and pbpaste Copy from terminal window to clipboard To copy the output of a command to clipboard just enter something like this: ls -al | pbcopy Now we have the output of the command ls -al (that is the contents of the current...

Unity and GNOME 3: What Is Good And What Is Evil? With two recent releases of Linux operating systems, Ubuntu and Fedora, new age of desktop environments began. These two operating systems bring you new user interfaces: Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 and GNOME 3 in Fedora. Are these new interfaces good or evil for Linux community? Let's try to analyse. If you ever used Unity and GNOME 3, or seen any screenshot of them, you see it is very different from anything you have ever seen before on desktop and laptop computers. Interface of these DEs is very different. There...

Introduction The other day while trying to install freeradius on a Linux server I stepped into an error. It could just not start, and while using radiusd -X to start freeradius in debug mode, it let me know what the problem was, but I was just not able to understand it. Finally found the solution. Freeradius error These are the most important lines that radiusd -X put on the screen. rlm_eap: SSL error error:00000000:lib(0):func(0):reason(0) rlm_eap_tls: Error loading randomness rlm_eap: Failed to initialize type tls /etc/raddb/eap.conf[17]: Instantiation failed for module "eap" /etc/raddb/sites-enabled/inner-tunnel[236]: Failed to load module "eap". /etc/raddb/sites-enabled/inner-tunnel[189]: Errors parsing authenticate...

Introduction Today I have installed a new server at linode, and I put Arch Linux on it. I've also installed LAMP on it, but as soon as I tried to start Apache I run into some errors. LCCTYPE: cannot change locale (enUS.utf8): No such file or directory These are the errors I found while trying to start Apache. /etc/rc.d/functions: line 43: warning: setlocale: LC_CTYPE: cannot change locale (en_US.utf8): No such file or directory /etc/rc.d/functions: line 43: warning: setlocale: LC_NUMERIC: cannot change locale (en_US.utf8): No such file or directory /etc/rc.d/functions: line 43: warning: setlocale: LC_TIME: cannot change locale (en_US.utf8): No such...

Introduction If you have just installed your LAMP server on your favorite Linux distribution, you may want to test a few things, one of the them is PHP running. To me the best way to do it is creating a small php script that will display the info about PHP running on my server, using the statement phpinfo. How to create a phpinfo php script This is very simple and maybe all of you already know about it, but I think it is good to list it here in case it may help someone in the future -maybe me ;)-...

[Edit 06/12/2011] Sorry for not giving you new content, but was a difficult week on a trip. So I'm re-editing this old post. I'm also using this option to give you the link of this other way to spell check your documents on Linux. Use vim to spell check your documents.[/Edit]. To check the spell of a text file, maybe written with vi/vim, emacs, or any other text editor even sed, awk or a here-document, you may use aspell. From the man page: aspell is a utility program that connects to the Aspell library so that it can function as...

Introduction Yesterday Go2Linux was down, and all the problem was disk full, but how that happened? Well, it was MySQL fault, the files like mysql-bin.000001 mysql-bin.000002 mysql-bin.000003 mysql-bin.000004 mysql-bin.000005 .... mysql-bin.00000n They were taking thousands of megas of disk space, let's see now why they are there, and how you can avoid running out of disk. The binary log The binary log contains events that describe database changes such as table creation operations or changes to table data. As of MySQL 4.1.3, it also contains events for statements that potentially could have made changes (for example, a DELETE which matched...

Introduction I'll start saying that I actually do not own an iPhone, but I do have an iPod Touch 4th generation, and owned before one of the third generation, so I'll use my experiences with it for this comparison. I know that might not be a fair comparison, also with the Android, I own a Sony Ericsson Mini Pro, with Android 2.1, not the last version. On the blackberry side (my latest gadget) I've a Blackberry Bold III 9780 with Blackberry OS 6.0. I'll based my experiences with these equipments as tools for job, and as "playing" devices. Using iPhone,...

Introduction D.O.S. or (denial of service) attack is according to Wikipedia: A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and...

If you type fast, you know that it is easy to miss type some commands in Linux, that usually gives you an error like this: bash: asdfaf: command not found but there are always developers with good sense of humor, that create commands to be executed when you miss type the real command. ls is one of the most used command in Linux, and it is used to list all files and folders in a given folder, but what if you type sl instead of ls. Well if you have sl installed (should be in your package manager). You will...

Introduction Some weeks ago Microsoft acquired Skype, and a lot of blogs (including this) started to talk about skype support for Linux, we all know that even when Skype was not a Microsoft product, the support for Linux was far behind the support for Mac or Windows, so you may expect this will not be improved and it may even be worse. Problems logging in your Skype account Two days ago a lot of users of Skype have seem some problems logging to their accounts, it seems that the most of them were Windows users, maybe some Mac or Linux...

Introduction This is a compendium of five good bash prompts I've found all over the web in a long time frame, and have been archiving them and using one and other though the time. I want now to share them with you, you may probably know some of them as they are taken all over the web. Two lines bash prompt with full path info This is one of my favorites, I like minimalism, so this one only have the full path info, and then a minimal prompt in the next line, showing your username PS1="[\[\033[32m\]\w]\[\033[0m\]\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;33m\]-> \[\033[0m\]" Here is how...

Introduction wget is a wonderful tool, specially when you need to download files on remote servers / machines. On remote computers you do not have access to the GUI, and if you want to download a file in the remote filesystem from the Internet your best option is: The command line, and there you have two nice options curl and wget. Today we'll see how to use wget when you need provide username and password to download a file. How to use wget with username and password There are some sites that ask you to provide a login identity in...

By Default iWeb tries to upload your sites created on iWeb to the mobileMe site, using your account, but what if you do not have and do not want an account after all you may already have your own server. So, you can save your site to a local folder and then upload it to your server using FTP or other method you normally use. [img_assist|nid=1076|title=|desc=iWeb save to a local folder|link=none|align=center|width=500|height=306] Click on "site" in the upper right corner, and you will see something like the image above, from there, select your preferred saving method which could be, FTP, Local...

Introduction Taking screenshots is something you will need sooner or later, is is mostly used to show an error dialog you may find, or to prepare some guide for someone who you need to explain how to perform some task. Or just for something as simple as to show how beautiful your Desktop looks So, If you are sitting on a Mac, here is how to take a screenshot. Take a screenshot on a Mac Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of...

Introduction If for some reason while using a Mac, you may want to download a file using the terminal, you'll really have to love the terminal to it, but let's assume you want to it that way. Mac as a Unix based system has a lot of resources to accomplish a lot of tasks from the terminal. How to download a file in a Mac from the terminal The best tool you can use with a Mac to download a file is curl, so first go to the folder you want to download the file to and issue this command:...

Introduction The Gnome project is making a lot of noise in the Internet these days, because it seems like they are planning to become a whole new Linux distribution, or maybe we are just not fully understanding things. Gnome a new OS? Let's see what some important sites are saying about this topic, first let's see at some articles in OMGUbuntu: “The future of GNOME is as a Linux based OS. It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels, user space subsystem combinations, and core libraries. That said,...

Aren't Netbooks good at anything? [img_assist|nid=1075|title=Jobs gates netbook|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=454|height=865] Source: Reddit

The MacBook Air 11" is a great Laptop, it shows us how fast the technology advances I can still remember my Atari Computer, I had to buy an externa floppy disk drive and it was a 5 1/4" one, I liked to write basic programs for it. Usually simple ones, like math ones, I was in school at that time, so I usually created programs to make the computer solve school problems. Now, while writing this, in this small computer, maybe a thousand times as powerful as my old Atari it is almost impossible to guess where the technology will...

This is the very first time in my 37 years living on this big rock (the earth), that I use a Mac, in and the lucky one in my hands now is the Apple MacBook Air 11". God, what a great computer, I'm loving it, and I've just spend two hours playing with it. As I said before I was thinking about buying a Lenovo X220, now I'm not so sure about it. I think now I'm thinking about which Mac should I get?, the MacBook Pro 13" or the MacBook Air 11" that I'm using at this very moment...

Introduction This is an easy one, but anyway if someone, sometime need it, I'll write here how to restart the ssh service or the sshd daemon First, sshd is: Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices.[1] The two major versions of the protocol are referred to as SSH1 or SSH-1 and SSH2 or SSH-2. Used primarily on Linux and Unix based systems to access shell accounts, SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and other insecure remote shells, which send information, notably passwords, in...

Introduction If you open a lot of terminal screens at once while working on Linux, you may have noticed that the commands you type in one terminal are not available in the other, and usually once you close all terminals, and open another again, you will see that only the commands written in one of them (The first one opened before I think) are available in history. That is not good if you need that command written in the terminal that got not saved in the History file, so, how to solve that? Linux history file united You will prefer...

Clear bash history If you want for some reason (Actually I can't find a real good reason to do it), clear your bash history in Linux, just enter this command: history -c Voila, your bash history is history :).

Introduction Your Web Server Identification is on the headers of every page server by it, so anyone can know which server and what version you are running, in an ideal world this may in no way harm you, but we know we are not in an ideal world, so publishing it is something like putting an ad in your front door, saying what kind and brand of alarm system you have. Anyone with the right knowledge will know how to exploit your server's security holes if there is any, probably some you don't even know it is there. So maybe...

Introduction By the time you are reading this, you may have already hear that Microsoft acquired Skype for 8.5 Thousand million dollars (8.5 billion for U.S. citizens) a lot about the future of Skype for Linux have been written and after reading some of those articles I would like to write something about what I think. Skype for Linux Skype is a great way to communicate via voice with your contacts all around the world, being them your family or co-workers or customers, I've done in the past even small training courses via Skype. To me the key of its...

After reading a pair of post from Jeff Hoogland (Author of bodhi Linux) I've started to ask myself if freenode or specifically #Fedora in freenode is really that bad. Here are some parts of those posts: I discovered this evening much to my dismay that the year and a half old western digital hard drive in my main laptop is dieing. All three of the Linux installs on the system failed in various ways (typically a sign of a hardware issue) so I grabbed the closest live CD and popped it in. Now, it's been awhile since I've burned a...

Introduction While trying to install purge module, in my Drupal site, I got this error while trying to enable the module. Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/modules/curl.so' That was in my /var/log/messages file. Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/modules/curl.so' | How to solve it First install the php-curl package, (This is only meant for Arch Linux) pacman -S php-curl Then enable the module in the /etc/php/php.ini configuration file, by uncommenting this line. extension=curl.so Finally restart apache /etc/rc.d/httpd restart Now, you have solved your problem.

This is an old post, but I would like to share it. http://m.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/oct/05/free-online-content-cory-doctorow?cat=technology&type=article

Url redirects With URL redirects, incoming links to an outdated URL can be sent to the correct location. These links might be from other sites that have not realized that there is a change or from bookmarks/favorites that users have saved in their browsers. The same applies to search engines. They often have the older/outdated domain names and links in their database and will send search users to these old URLs. By using a "moved permanently" redirect to the new URL, visitors will still end up at the correct page. Also, in the next search engine pass, the search engine...

Introduction I Have been writing about Linux for almost 4 years now, but I have never wrote an article about Linux itself, I mean the Linux Story and some stuff like that. I think it is time to dedicate some space in this blog to the great operating system Linux is. Linux Kernel or GNU/Linux One of first things we need to have clear here, is what we are calling Linux is it the GNU/Linux or the just the Linux Kernel. Well usually when people talk about Linux they are referring to GNU/Linux, but what is the difference? Well first...

Introduction There are a lot of ways to perform url redirects, one of them is the HTML redirect it is maybe not the best one, but it certainly is one of the easiest. How to do a HTML redirect Here is a simple example of a HTML redirect: <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="2;URL=http://www.example.com/example.html"> This code should be between <head> and </head>. According to Wikipedia: This method is considered by the W3C to be a poor method of redirection, since it does not communicate any information about either the original or new resource, to the browser (or search engine)

Introduction Firefox Profiles are specially useful when you need to open two Google accounts at once, or when you want to have some privacy. You can have as many profiles as you want or need, so you can have one for your Google Apps account, and another for your personal Gmail account. Of course you can use the principle for Twitter or Facebook account in case you have two or more of them, or to see how your Drupal or Wordpress site looks like for not logged users, so you have one Profile logged to your blog, and other one...

I have found this in the Ubuntu forums, and the original source is not longer online. So, I'll put it here to me and anyone. Howto Recover Grub2 After Windows Installation Posted by Binbash on Jun 21, 2009 Labels: grub2, Howto, jackalope, jaunty, karmic, koala, linux, recover, ubuntu, windows Today i destroyed my Grub2 via installing windows on my notebook which i write blog posts.(I quit smoking , so i have to play some games : ) No rush). It may be hard to recover it since there are not much (i did not find anything) howtos around the net...

I was almost sure about buying an iPad, I was going to use it mainly for my trips. I need mainly email, office apps, and blogging tools, I also need twitter apps to read and follow news. But because I need to blog about Linux, and I need to test the commands I'm blogging about, and because I also need to carry files, I realized I was going to need to travel with my ipad and my laptop. So, I decided to go for a better laptop that cost almost the same (maybe even less) that the ipad. Plus, I...

Introduction V.P.S. stands for (Virtual Private Server), from Wikipedia we have: Virtual private server (VPS) is a marketing term used by Internet hosting services to refer to a virtual machine for use exclusively by an individual customer of the service. The term is used to emphasize that the virtual machine, although running in software on the same physical computer as other customers' virtual machines, is functionally equivalent to a separate physical computer, is dedicated to the individual customer's needs, has the privacy of a separate physical computer, and can be configured to run as a server computer (i.e. to run...

CPU defition I'm sure you all know, but just in case, here is the definition of CPU in Wikipedia: The central processing unit (CPU) is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer's functions. The central processing unit carries out each instruction of the program in sequence, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. This term has been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s. The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed...

If you want to support the Slackware project, you can order this T-shirt, from the slackware store Here is an example of the Slackware T-shirt. [img_assist|nid=1044|title=|desc=slackware t-shirt|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=235] And here a zoom of the back of it [img_assist|nid=1045|title=|desc=slackware t-shirt zoom|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=375] Support the project get yours.

If you use drupal and have an android phone, go to the market and look for the drupal app. It is great, I'm happy I have found it, now I can blog from any place.

Introduction Cron jobs are added tasks to the cron daemon, for it to run them periodically, at specific times. You usually want your jobs or tasks executed every, Monday, or every day at 5 pm, etc. Cron is very powerful and flexible, so you can tweak it a lot. Let's see what cron is. Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration, though its general-purpose nature means that it...

My article about Arch Linux was translated to Persian ( Farsi ) and published here: http://linuxreview.ir/1390/02/arch-quick-overview/ here is the original: http://www.go2linux.org/mt/linux-ht/2010/10/arch-linux-review-1.html

[img_assist|nid=1040|title=ipad unboxing|desc=Unboxing the ipad|link=none|align=right|width=500|height=316] I'm reading, and reading and reading about iPad to be sure that it is what I need to increase my productivity. I'm pretty convinced now, but still reading about it, until I buy mine, today I've found an article about why it is great for bussiness, here the relevant parts: Who is it for? ...I think business users are the unseen force driving a large proportion of the iPad’s bullish sales numbers. Nearly everyone I know that has an iPad is a business user who bought the tablet for business meetings, answering emails from the couch...

The fact is, I actively contribute in some fashion or other in several open source projects. But I still feel very much like an outsider, as my contributions aren’t typically code-related. ...I would like to share some objections that I feel may cause new(ish) devs to shy away from contributing to open source software. There’s no certification, ceremony, or merit badge It’s not obvious where to start. Guidelines often make a maintainer’s life easier, and mine harder. Open source is for people who are better at this than me. Trying to contribute and failing makes me feel stupid. There’s no...

If you want to list on the screen a lot of files at once in Linux, you just run: cat *.txt That will list all files with txt extension in your screen, but if you enter this command: unzip *.zip You will have this error: Archive: CoolWater11.zip caution: filename not matched: total-anabolism.zip In my case I had two files CoolWater11.zip and total-anabolism.zip. But if you enter this command: unzip '*.zip' It will work.

Ubuntu and Slackware Some days ago on April 28th Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, was released with all the bells and whistles that we are used to see every six months. And that it has to be, Ubuntu is the most popular distribution, and it has contributed a lot to Linux, a lot of people may not agree with that, but in my opinion it is that way. Just one day before that Slackware Linux, also released a new version, this time 13.37 (Leet), another great contributor to Linux, Slackware was once as popular (At least in the Linux world) as...

Microsoft is not the answer Microsoft is the question No (or Linux) is the answer.

Linux: the operating system with a CLUE Command Line User Environment

Over the past 25 years the Internet has experienced astronomical growth – far more than the original architects imagined. As a result, the pools of unallocated IPv4 blocks have been accelerating toward exhaustion. In fact, on February 3rd, 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the remaining pool of addresses equally among the five Regional Internet Registries thereby completely depleting the source of IPs available under IPv4. Consequently, it has become vital for all Internet stakeholders to get serious about migrating to IPv6. ... Linode – part of the solution While this industry-wide problem has been challenging, Linode has...

Testing Dragon dictating as a tool for blogging, from iPhone / iPod / iPad.

Declaring “justice has been done,” President Obama announced late Sunday that Usama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, marking the end of the worldwide manhunt that began nearly a decade ago on Sept. 11, 2001. This is the shocking news we found on TV today since we wake up. Well, is never a good thing that a person is killed, as Christian, this is never good for me, this guy caused so much pain to so many, those many may feel better now, or not. But certainly New York city is celebrating. ...a “small team” of Americans...

“Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.” Blaise Pascal A real true.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. — Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC-43 BC), Pro Plancio (54 BC)

Introduction If you want to search for multiple expressions while using grep you can do it, grep will use all expressions you pass to it, and will apply a logic or to them. So, if any of them is present the line with that occurrence will be printed. Specify multiple expressions / patterns to search for to grep The option that will help use doing this is -e. grep -e pattern1 -e pattern2 -e pattern3 /folder/file Easy as you can see.

Introduction You may have already heard about Firefox NoScript extension, you may have even tested it. Well you may also know that what it does is to blog scripts from executing in your browser. Well, now we have also the option to install something similar in Google Chrome, but this time it is called Notscript. NotScript According to its site: NotScripts gives you a high degree of "NoScript" like control over what javascript, iframes, and plugins runs in your browser to increase security and lower the CPU usage. It is useful to help mitigate some attacks like certain cross-site scripting...

Introduction If you ever happen to open a window, and it is oversized so, the Title bar of the window itself is not reachable, you will not be able to pick it with the mouse and move it, so one way that works on KDE, GNOME, Fluxbox and others is: Moving a window with the help of the keyboard First you need to press the ALT key, then click the left button of the mouse while you have the mouse over the window, now you can move it. If you use the right button, you will be able to resize...

I will really have to start using Linux Mint, I'm reading everyday more and more favorable reviews of Linux Mint, all over the Internet. This time I would like to share with you this one: Two years ago to the day was the first time I installed Linux on my computer. Sure, I had seen other people use it and had used it on other people's computers (though not so frequently), but I had never before put an OS other than Microsoft Windows on my own computer until that day. I had talked to a friend of mine about it...

Introduction You can use sshfs, to mount a remote file system on your local computer over ssh, then you can work with it as it were your local file system (provided you have enough bandwidth :) ). But you may run into permissions problems, to solve that, use the option idmap Mounting remote file system over ssh, and mapping users From the man page: -o idmap=TYPE user/group ID mapping, possible types are: none: no translation of the ID space (default) user: only translate UID of connecting user So, if you want to map the user UID between the two PCs,...

With so many people thinking that Unity is not yet ready for the public, Ubuntu fans may give Kubuntu a try. Kubuntu is Back! Kubuntu used to be my main distribution for a long time, until I found Arch. Kubuntu has generally been a disappointment since the debut of KDE 4, as the distribution had little to no polish and features other than what KDE itself provided. The Kubuntu releases over the past several years have been lacking and were not able to compare to other KDE distributions released at the same time. However, this has finally changed. Kubuntu 11.04...

I've been working out for 3+ years now, I've started with Spinning, then Spinning and weight lifting, then weight lifting and jogging. During these three years I have had a wrist surgery that let me out for five months. Now because of the job, I've almost left the gym, but I manage to go at least two days a week, I try to work Chest, back and legs on those days. If you ever find yourself in this situation, of having too few time to hit the iron, try to at least work chest, back and legs one time per...

This video shows you how to use scribefire, this is really a great tool for bloggers, you will be able to blog to Drupal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous, and others from your browsers, without having to log or go to your blog page. You may want to check this out: http://www.scribefire.com/help/getting-started/  

If you have a multi session CD and you want to read some specific session of it, mount it with this command: mount /dev/cdrom /mnt -t iso9660 -o session=0 From the man page session option is used for: Select the CDROM session to mount. Defaults to leaving that decision to the CDROM driver. This option will fail with anything but a CDROM as underlying device.

If you are compiling something from sources in Debian, and you see something like this: error: somefile.so No such file or directory You will have to look for a package that contain that library, the best way to do it in Debian is using apt-file, so let's install it: apt-get install apt-file And then look for the file: apt-file update && apt-file search somefile.so This will give you a list of packages containing that file, which you can then install using apt-get this time you should be able to finish your compilation.

Introduction OK, you now have varnish installed on your server and you started to catch the pages on it, so your webserver is now missing the hits to your pages. Well, that is great for your webserver load, but not too good for your statistics analysis, because /var/log/apache/access_log will miss the hit. In case you don’t know yet about Varnish, here is something about it from Wikipedia: Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache, which is primarily an...

If you found this error while running Drupal behind a proxy or HTTP accelerator. Only variables should be passed by reference You will need to check this part of your settings.php file. 'reverse_proxy' => TRUE, 'reverse_proxy_addresses' => array('127.0.0.1'), Be sure to have 127.0.0.1 with IP of where your HTTP accelerator or reverse proxy like (Squid or Varnish) is installed, otherwise you will see errors, and boost will not save the page.

I have just changed the layout of go2linux from three columns to two columns, and took out some widgets. I hope you may see an improvement in the page load time, also those reading the blog from an iPhone or Android phone should get a better result with all the important info in the left side of the screen. Let me know if you think there is more room for improvement, I would like to hear your suggestions.

OK, I have one more thing in my wish list. I do not why, but suddenly I realized I need a Led TV :) I'm thinking about a Sony one. [img_assist|nid=1010|title=sony led tv|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=470|height=300]

[img_assist|nid=1008|title=illimani|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=395]

The Kubuntu team is proud to announce the release of 11.04 - codename Natty Narwhal: the latest version of our popular Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu and KDE's Plasma and Applications 4.6. With the combination of it's Ubuntu backbone, the amazing KDE Software Compilation, and a few unique extras, 11.04 aims to provide the best fusion of stability, beauty, and up-to-date software. Whether working, browsing the web, playing your music, composing an email or connecting with your friends on social networks, Kubuntu brings you a powerful, innovative and attractive platform for all your desktop needs! [img_assist|nid=1006|title=kubuntu-11.04|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=313] With Ubuntu now being...

Which one do you prefer? [img_assist|nid=1002|title=white-and-black-iphone|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=334|height=252]

I'm seriously thinking about buying an iPad. Why should I buy one?. Well I was trying to answer that question and give myself a reason about why I need the iPad. Here are some of my reasons, and this may help you decide too: I travel a lot, and need to be always connected I use to give power point presentations I like to travel light. I will still have to travel with my loved Linux drive Lenovo T60, but once I have the iPad, it will stay at the Hotel, and will the iPad the one that will be...

[img_assist|nid=998|title=Sony-s1-s2-android|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=264] Sony will release two new Android Tablets, they are the S1 and S2, and they will be coming with Android 3.0 From Wikipedia: 3.0 (Honeycomb), a tablet-oriented release which supports larger screen devices and introduces many new user interface features, and supports multicore processors and hardware acceleration for graphics.= The Honeycomb SDK has been released and the first device featuring this version, the Motorola Xoom tablet, went on sale in February 2011. Google has chosen to withhold the development source code, which calls into question the "open-ness" of this Android release. Rubin however has stated that the source code...

The Illimani mountain in La Paz, Bolivia [img_assist|nid=994|title=Illimani-La Paz|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=375]

Another small how-to today, let’s learn how to rename a file or folder (directory) in Linux. The command you will need to rename is mv. It is used the same in files or folders: mv actual-file-name new-file-name This will change the name from “actual-file-name” to “new-file-name” It is the same with folders. mv actual-folder-name new-folder-name You of course need to be the owner of have permissions over the files and/or folders you are trying to rename.

[img_assist|nid=991|title=Go2Linux in the iPod|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=750]

Conky is a free software system monitor for the X Window System. It is available for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD I like Conky and use it a lot, I mainly use it to monitor my CPU, RAM, Disk and Eth. But some others use it with Xmms to check which tune is being played, to check the weather and a lot more things. Here is an example of how a Desktop may see with Conky enabled. [img_assist|nid=992|title=conky-screenshot|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=313] Learn how to do this @ Make Tech easier

[img_assist|nid=996|title=ipod-family|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=500|height=212] It seems that Apple is not longer interested in the iPod name. At least that can be seen from the Apple abandonment of the iPod name. That means that from now, you can use the word "ipod" in your products. Is this reflecting a bigger interest in the iTouch, iPhone and iPad over the pure iPods, like the shuffle, nano and the classic? We'll see.

The beautiful Taylor Swift, I like her songs a lot.

Reading Linuxaria today I've found this: Tesseract-ocr: how to convert scanned documents into editable text on Ubuntu or Debian It is a nice tutorial that will guide you through the steps to scan a document and be able to edit it and work with. This can save you hours of copying. [img_assist|nid=982|title=gimagereader|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=375] read the rest

[img_assist|nid=1000|title=jessica-alba|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=771]

When the iPad appeared for the first time, I remembered the thechcrunch tablet and as soon as I saw that tablet prototype, I realized I needed something like that. Now, I'm almost sure I must own the iPad 2 I now know that you can give Power Point presentations with it, which is great for my job, and of course I can blog from it, I can read my emails anywhere (I plan to buy the 3G version). In fact, to me it is like a Laptop replacement for travels, I mean, I will get my laptop while traveling but it...

Introduction We’re one more time talking about security, this time it will about how to secure sshd a little bit more, and we will do it by changing the default port where sshd listens. This way the attacker needs to guess your user (I’m sure you have disabled root access right?), your password, and now … yes, the port number where ssh daemon is listening. Change the default ssh port Edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config and search for the world Port it will say 22, change it to something like 4000 or better, 3756 :). Then save the file, and restart...

Here is other of my favorite Country Music singers, not only beautiful, but also has a great voice (Carrie Underwood)

How to use rsync to backup over ssh? rsync is a great tool to back up your work, this is the way I use it the most. rsync -avz --delete /source/folder [email protected]:/destination/folder This way it creates a copy of the /source/folder to the /destination/folder in the remote server, and if a file has been deleted in the source server, it will be deleted from the remote one. Now, if you want to run rsync over a different por of ssh, (I usually change the port where ssh listens, for security reasons). rsync -avz -e 'ssh -p 4000' /source/folder [email protected]:/destination/folder Change...

Among the R&D projects Toyota Motor is exploring to further lower fuel consumption and emissions are two concepts on a pathway to deliver gasoline engines featuring more than 45% thermal efficiency for application in its future hybrid vehicles, according to Koichi Nakata of Toyota in his presentation today at SAE 2011 High Efficiency IC Engines Symposium in Detroit. The engine used in the first- and second-generation Prius (the 1.5L 1NZ-FXE) had a thermal efficiency of about 37%; the thermal efficiency of the new 1.8L unit in the third-generation Prius (2ZR-FXE) has a thermal efficiency of about 38%. Toyota is targeting...

This is a test

[img_assist|nid=968|title=Mint logo|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=100|height=100] Today while visiting tuxmachines, I’ve found a nice article about Linux Mint XFCE, which is based on Debian Testing instead of Ubuntu. The advantages of this, is yes, you Debian instead of Ubuntu :), well now seriously. You do not have to upgrade every six months, as Mint Debian Editions are rolling releases, so, constantly evolving instead of upgrading every six months. The disadvantages are that you have a slightly less stable distribution, I have never used Mint, but I have used Debian testing for years and never faced problems, well almost never. If you want to know...

Amsterdam wants to eliminate Internal Combustion cars by 2040 [img_assist|nid=972|title=electric-car-1|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=333] It all started with 200 charging stations, and now they want 750 more. Dutch energy utility Essent, a wholly-owned subsidiary of RWE AG, has been asked to install at least 125 charging stations by mid-2011 and possibly up to 750 charging points sometime in the future. The press release RWE Equips Amsterdam With Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles DORTMUND, Germany, April 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Amsterdam City Council Awards Major Contract to set up City-wide Charging Facilities Initial Delivery of 125 Charging Stations The Dutch energy utility Essent, a wholly...

Heading 2 List 1 List 2

My friend at nocturnal slacker, have posted this shell basics You may want to pay hime a visit.

Guillermo @ 1

My son, at the park: He's three years old :) My-son

Hi, This is my "Hello world" post.

Jimena @ 7

I'm Thinking about switching from posterous, to this blog, as my personal blog. I would rather prefer having control of my content

I’ve post some days ago Ubuntu, Unity, Mint and other stuff, where I’ve stated that: And to conclude it, let?s say that no matter how mad people could be at Ubuntu, the improvements they are doing are going to benefit the whole Linux community, yes Unity may seem hard to work with at the beginning but if not widely adopted it will certainly guide other project in a new direction. In the conclusion of the post, today I’ve stumbled upon this My thoughts on Unity Where the author writes about some problems that in his opinion Unity has, he specially...

[img_assist|nid=963|title=Little bird at the door|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=500|height=400]

Introduction I had some problems while working with image assist module with Drupal. When selecting [img_assist] tag instead of html in the insert menu, I could see the tags in the post but not the image itself. [img_assist|nid=22|title=photo|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=75] Solution What you need to do, is to go to: /admin/settings/filters/1 And select to configure filtered html, then look for the option inline images and select it, that is all, now when posting something using img_assist module, select filtered html, if you want to use full html be sure to also select the option inline images in it. Hope this may help...

guembe: Guembe (Santa Cruz, Bolivia)

This photo was taken in Guembe, near Santa Cruz, Bolivia. There a lot of orchids there. flower portrait

lunch at Cafe ciudad A big lunch some weeks ago while in La Paz. 250 grs of tenderloin with muzzarella cheese, rice and french fries, oh! some vegetables too.

Introduction Security, always a concern in these days, yes, it may be your house, your car even yourself, we are all in danger, and so are our servers and computers. Well, to protect you Linux computer you can take a lot of actions, and one of them is to know which ports is your Linux listening to, this way if some of them are not needed you can shut the service down. Which ports is my Linux listening to? We’ll use netstat to find out which ports is our computer listening to. netstat -t --listening The output could look like...

Introduction Today I’ve posted about testing NGINGX and Varnish, after that I have also read about G-Wan vs Varnish. Actually not a test of one vs the other, but more about articles talking about tests. Creating the scenario for the tests This is maybe the most difficult part, because you need to be sure you will be fair enough with the software you are testing, from the article I’ve read I can see: Looking closer I realized that the real bottleneck was in fact httperf. With Varnish, it was able to keep more connections open and busy at the same...

Introduction While checking the referrals to my page, I have found that one visitor came through google with the “why use varnish with nginx” keyword, these days I’ve been experimenting with both Nginx and Varnish, in front of my Apache server with a Drupal application. So, I decided to write a little about what I’ve found. If you do not know about Nginx or Varnish, here is a small introduction: From Wikipedia: Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites. In contrast to other HTTP accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or...

Introduction If you want to know which servers or hosts are alive and responding to ping in your local network, you can use nmap Using nmap to discover ‘alive’ machines on a Network To use this command and get an effective response, the servers or hosts you are pinging need to respond to it, today a lot of hosts by default have a firewall, and will not respond to pings, so be aware of that. The command is: nmap -sP 10.1.1.* This will have a response like this: Nmap scan report for 10.1.1.1 Host is up (0.0060s latency). Nmap scan...

Introduction I’ve been trying to see if I may find some improvement using varnish in front of Nginx to serve static content, well I’ve not finished the test yet, and will be publishing my results here later. But, in case you decide to run Nginx in front of a proxy, you will find that all lines in access.log file, will have the IP of the proxy, and not the client IP itself. To solve that, you need to compile Nginx with Real IP module Using Real IP module with NGINX The Real IP module in Nginx will do somehow the...

configure: error: The pkg-config script could not be found or is too old Today while trying to install …Do not remember what software… in a new computer with Arch Linux on it, and after installed pkgtools I’ve found this error: checking for pkg-config... no checking for IFT... configure: error: The pkg-config script could not be found or is too old. Make sure it is in your PATH or set the PKG_CONFIG environment variable to the full path to pkg-config. So, the obvious solution is to install pkg-config, but that lead me to some minutes lost until I realized that was...

Introduction If you have a laptop with Linux, and would like to check the battery level, and temperature of the CPU, you may use acpi If you find that acpi is not installed, on your system, use your package manager to install it Using acpi to check battery level and CPU temperature Once you have acpi installed on your system, you can use it to check different physical parameters on your Linux Laptop. acpi -V Will show you all available information, in my case I get this: Battery 0: Discharging, 67%, 01:50:36 remaining Battery 0: design capacity 4866 mAh, last...

Introduction If you wan to find files or directories, that were last modified in the last n days or just today, it is really easy to do in Linux. How to find files last modifies today Use the find command to do this find -maxdepth 1 -type f -mtime 1 maxdepth: will tell find to only search in the current folder type: will tell find to only list files and not directories mtime: will tell find to only list the files modified in the last 24 hours So, you can modify this command to accomplish another tasks. Find files modified...

Wordpress, Themes, htaccess and me by Riccardo Capecchi First, thanks to Guillermo for 2 things, his nice review about Linuxaria And second for the opportunity he gave to me to make a guest post in go2linux, a site that i personally consider really interesting and that i know has many fans. In this article we'll see how to use the .htaccess to check the user-agent of the browser that is connecting to our site and set a cookie based on that value. First, what's the .htaccess file ? .htaccess file are part of the configuration of apache web server, most...

Introduction The truth must be said, I’ve not tested Linux Mint yet, I’m somehow too comfortable with my two main OSs Slackware Linux and Arch Linux, using Debian from time to time. But I’m reading good reviews about it all time, just like this one, what caught my attention on that reading was not only how good the author consider Linux Mint, but also how bad he consider Ubuntu. It is also a long time since I do not try Ubuntu, but I’m looking forward to test ‘11.04’ with unity, I’ve run it in a Netbook some time ago, and...

Introduction Well, this is once again one of my post reviewing other sites/blogs, about Linux, this time I will review a shiny new blog, you may say “How can you review something that new?” well the blog is new because it is moving from another location. I was reading it in its old location, and now I also know that this blogger was also a reader of this blog :). So, I want you to know about this new/old blog. Nocturnal Slacker According to himself I’m a worker bee living in sunny Florida. I was born and raised here in...

This is a VST (Very small tip) :). How to run xterm with white letters on a black background, opposite to the default black on white. This should (IMHO) increase the duration of your laptop battery as less bright is used. xterm -ls -fg white -bg black You can create an alias for this command, like this: alias xtermblack="xterm -ls -fg white -bg black" And add that line to your .bashrc file, so it can be set each time you boot up your computer.

Introduction This post goes specially to the subscribers/followers/fans of the site, I would like to know your opinion about this topic, so please use the comments section to make your voice be heard. KDE and Gnome Well, KDE and Gnome are the most famous window managers for Linux, well maybe Unity will be a good chalenger for them, specially considering that Ubuntu/Canonical are behind it. What Wikipedia says about KDE: KDE (play /?ke?di??i?/) is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X systems....

Introduction After trying to upgrade my Arch Linux today running pacman -Syu I got this error: error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) python2-distribute: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.pyo exists in filesystem Solving the “python2-distribute: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.pyo exists in filesystem” error First check which package is using python2-distribute pacman -Qi python2-distribute Here is my output Name : python2-distribute Version : 0.6.14-2 URL : http://packages.python.org/distribute Licenses : PSF Groups : None Provides : setuptools=0.6c11 Depends On : python2 Optional Deps : None Required By : None Conflicts With : setuptools Replaces : setuptools Installed Size : 1288.00 K Packager : Stéphane Gaudreault Architecture : any Build...

Introduction There is one task that is more and more needed by the computer user these days, and that is the avility to mount external disk drives. With distributions like Arch Linux, where you configure almost everything, that may or may not always work, and you may get some errors while trying to mount external devices automaticall by using the Window Manager. org.freedesktop.UDisk.Error.PermissionDenied If you get that error, be sure you have done these steps. Your user is listed in these groups: disk optical storage hal And in your .xinitrc file, you have this line exec ck-launch-session openbox instead of...

Introduction Battery duration is a concern to all smart phone users, well maybe the Nokia E Series and the Black Berry users are less concerned about this, I do not know if it is becase Symbian and Black Berry OS are better in saving the battery juice, or becase they have less applications running in the background. But, for the iPhone users and of course for the Android users, battery duration is a concern. Talking about Android, there are some programs that try to give you more battery hours (juice). And the most famous are: Advance Task Manager Advance Task...

Introduction There are times, when sharing files using email as attachment is not possible, and then one of the best ways is to put those files in a FTP server, of course, it is even better to put all of them in a zip file, but the other end does not usually do that. So, if you have a full folder structure you need to download using some recursive download tool, you have some options, one of them is gftp which is a graphic ftp client, but I’ll show you how to do this using the command line of Linux....

Introduction Last year, the Document Foundation forked OpenOffice, and created LibreOffice. From Wikipedia: LibreOffice is a free software office suite developed by The Document Foundation that is compatible with other major office suites and available on a variety of platforms. Its developers’ goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and without any copyright assignment requirements. The name is a hybrid word with the first part Libre, which means free (as in freedom) in both Spanish and French, and the English word Office. On 28 September 2010, some members of the OpenOffice.org Project formed a new group...

Introduction Grayscale pictures have that je ne sais quoi that usually makes them better than the color ones, at least in my humble opinion, so I usually convert color pictures to grayscale. We can use convert or mogrify to make this transition from color to grayscale. Use convert to make a color image a grayscale one convert -type Grayscale input-picture.png output-picture.png This will keep your original picture “input-picture.png” in color, and create a new one in grayscale “output-picture.png” Use mogrify to convert an image to grayscale mogrify -type Grayscale input-picture.png I prefer this one, as you can use it to...

Introduction I was in a situation the other day, where I needed to connect my iPod Touch to the internet but there was no wifi available so I think about using my 3G data plan. I have a data plan with my Laptop, I use a Huawei E156 B, to connect my laptop with the 3G network. Of course I have a wifi network in my Laptop too, so what I needed to do was: Connect my laptop to the 3G network Enable my wifi network in Ad-Hoc mode Configure DHCP server to give IP to my iPod Touch Enable...

Introduction I’m starting with Android, I only own an Android device for one month now, and because some weeks ago I asked to the facebook fans, some ideas to write about, they suggested me to start posting about Android. Well, Android is based on Linux so I think is not off topic for this blog. Android For those also new to Android, let me copy the definition of it from Wikipedia: Android is an open-source software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. Google Inc. purchased the initial developer of the software, Android Inc.,...

Introduction For all Linux users, work with usb drives, is really easy, and share data with Windows users through it, is also easy. At least before you need to format the usb drive for any reason, if you format it using Linux ext3 or any other Linux mode, you will not be able (at least not easily) to share data with Windows users. What you need is to format the usb drive using FAT32 file system. Install dosfstools package The package you need to install in your Linux PC to be able to format disk using FAT32 file system is:...

Introduction There are lots of situations when you need to save a web page locally, for example, if you want to read it while you are in the plane, or if the information is too valuable and the website is too young, so it might go off-line in the future. And if there are lots of situations when you need to save the pages, there are also, lots of ways to do it, but today we’ll focus only on one of them: Which is, ScrapBook. Download web pages to your disk with ScrapBook Well, this is really easy, all you...

Introduction Resuming interrupted downloads is too important in some areas where the internet is not as stable as it could be in U.S. or Europe. I find myself usually having interrupted downloads in the Hotels, usually wifi hot spots radios in hotels, are not well installed, I have found some of them with the radiation lobe parallel to the walls and not to the floor of the building, go figure!. Well, so it is really frustrating to be 40% or 70% of a 300 MByte file downloaded, and that suddenly the Internet goes, even for 2 or 3 minutes, and...

Introduction This is an Italian blog talking about Linux Operating System, but before you say “I do not speak (or read) Italian” let me tell you that there is an English version. I have thinking about presenting you with this blog for long time, but never found the time to write about it. Now is that time. Audience In my opinion, even though the articles on this blog, are easily followed by Linux newcomers, the intended audience is from intermediate to advanced users. It teach you a lot of command line tips, and tricks, and goes usually deep on each...

Introduction It’s been a long time since my last blog review, I’ve been busy creating content for this blog, and less time review other blogs, now I will review Linux Notes Age This blog is really young, it has been started in October 2010, if I’m not wrong, unlike other blogs it does not post a lot of articles per month, but each of them is done with quality in mind. Quality As soon as you start reading you realize that DarkDuck (The author) puts a lot of effort in writing each article, as an example, you can see this...

Introduction If you have a big collection of music, you can’t have in all your computers, so you’d better have it only in one of them and share it with the others. There are a lot of ways to do that, you can use Samba, NFS, or other means to share you drive with others, and thus your music collection, but a better way IMHO, is to share it using a streaming server. Streaming media According to Wikipedia: Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider. The...

Introduction Today I’ll give you five nice ssh tricks, well actually three ssh, and one scp tricks. Let’s first define ssh and scp ssh Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices. The two major versions of the protocol are referred to as SSH1 or SSH-1 and SSH2 or SSH-2. Used primarily on Linux and Unix based systems to access shell accounts, SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and other insecure remote shells, which send information, notably passwords, in plaintext, rendering them susceptible to...

Introduction The latency of DNS is usually an important factor in the Internet speed perception the user has. The faster the DNS respond to you the better browsing experience you will have. But usually all DNS servers are fast enough, the only problem you will have is how far you are from them, and how much the round trip takes. You may know that your query needs to travel all the way to the server, and then back to you. Today I have stumbled upon a nice one line script to find out which DNS server has the smallest query...

Introduction From Wikipedia: The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is an auto configuration protocol used on IP networks. Computers that are connected to IP networks must be configured before they can communicate with other computers on the network. DHCP allows a computer to be configured automatically, eliminating the need for intervention by a network administrator. It also provides a central database for keeping track of computers that have been connected to the network. This prevents two computers from accidentally being configured with the same IP address. It is really easy to install and configure a DHCP server: We will cover...

dhcpd.conf(5) dhcpd.conf(5) NAME dhcpd.conf - dhcpd configuration file DESCRIPTION The dhcpd.conf file contains configuration information for dhcpd, the Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Server. The dhcpd.conf file is a free-form ASCII text file. It is parsed by the recursive-descent parser built into dhcpd. The file may contain extra tabs and newlines for formatting purposes. Keywords in the file are case-insensitive. Comments may be placed anywhere within the file (except within quotes). Comments begin with the # character and end at the end of the line. The file essentially consists of a list of statements. Statements fall into two broad categories -...

dhcpd-options(5) dhcpd-options(5) NAME dhcp-options - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol options DESCRIPTION The Dynamic Host Configuration protocol allows the client to receive options from the DHCP server describing the network configuration and various services that are available on the network. When configuring dhcpd(8) or dhclient(8) , options must often be declared. The syntax for declaring options, and the names and formats of the options that can be declared, are documented here. REFERENCE: OPTION STATEMENTS DHCP option statements always start with the option keyword, followed by an option name, followed by option data. The option names and data formats are described below....

Introduction Maybe Huawei 3G modems are the most famous 3G modems, at least they are in Latin America. I’ve one from Tigo here in my country, and I’m using Slackware Linux in my Laptop, so here I’ll show you how to connect your Linux computer to the 3G network via a Huawei modem, I’m sure that this will work with other brands of modems, but I can not verify as I do not have them. How to connect Slacware Linux to Internet via 3G modem This is really easy, we only need to install wvdial, so I went to slackbuilds...

This is a small tip, I like to use, as normally in recently installed Linux, vi is used as the default editor instead of vim or nano. So, How to change the default crontab editor to vim or nano? To change to vim or nano just run: export EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim" ; crontab -e that is for vim, or. export EDITOR="/usr/bin/nano" ; crontab -e OK, you are now ready to work with your favorite text editor, instead of the default.

Introduction This is really a very small how-to, actually more than a how-to is a self note, so I can remember how to setup mysql on a recently installed Slackware server. You may need to do this if you want to run KDE’s Akonadi on your Slackware, I’ve seen that I needed to do something similar in my Arch Linux PC. First steps to setup MySQL server on Slackware Install MySQL on Slackware You may have MySQL already installed, as it was my case, (I recommend you to install the full Slackware DVD), but in case you do not have...

Introduction From Wikipedia: rsync is a software application for Unix and Windows systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate. An important feature of rsync not found in most similar programs/protocols is that the mirroring takes place with only one transmission in each direction. rsync can copy or display directory contents and copy files, optionally using compression and recursion. In daemon mode, rsync listens on the default TCP port of 873, serving files in the native rsync protocol or via a remote shell such as RSH or SSH....

Introduction While constantly testing new Linux distributions, or just installing new versions of already tested I’m always in the need of burning new CDs or DVDs with the ISOs I download from the Internet. Here is a small and simple guide of three steps to burn an ISO to a CD or DVD using Linux. How to burn an ISO to a CD or DVD with Linux Install cdrecord software I’ll use cdrecord to burn the ISO images to CDs, I’ve it already installed in my Slackware Linux, but you may need to use your package manager to install it,...

Introduction There are a lot of ways to share files between Linux and Windows, one of them and maybe the fastest one is using python simple HTTP server, another one might be to use WinSCP client on the windows computers, but that require to give the Linux password to the Windows users, thus compromising the security. So, today we’ll see how to make a simple samba share, so with no password needed, no account creation needed you’ll be able to share files between Linux and Windows. How to configure Samba to share files with windows using no passwords First be...

Introduction Since the appearance of Ubuntu, sudo became more famous than ever, I do not use Ubuntu but certainly use sudo since my first meet with Ubuntu. But, if you need to issue more than just one simple command in the shell, you’d better switch to root work there and then go back to your account. This can be done with su - And then entering the root password, but what if you are using Ubuntu, where you can not switch to root account, or what your users can do if you do not want to give all of them...

Introduction In these days when disk are everyday bigger and bigger as well as cheaper, you will find yourself storing everything, we almost never delete a file anymore, we just store it. But, I do not know about yourself, but sometimes it happens to me, that I can’t just remember where a given file, picture, or song was archived. So, I know I have it, somewhere in my disk, but not know where. You you might think I am not too organized, and you will be right with that statement, :). What I do, is to use find to locate...

Introduction In every document editing software search and replace is a desirable function or feature, that is also true in text editor software. If you are programing, editing lists, or CVS files, you will need almost for sure, some search and replace tool, I use vim for almost all text editing work I need to do. Search and replace on vim is pretty similar to what you do we you use sed to find and replace words in text files. Search and replace in vim Search and replace on the current line only To act only in the current line...

Introduction One of the best security advice is to keep strong passwords, but what happens if even if your users have the strongest passwords, they leave their ssh session open, and unattended. This means that anyone can approach to the PC and just using the passwd command, may change the password, and thus gain access to the server. So, how to solve this, the best way is to disconnect any idle ssh connection, we’ll use ClientAliveInterval and ClientAliveCountMax to accomplish that. From the man page: ClientAliveCountMax: Sets the number of client alive messages (see below) which may be sent without...

Introduction Let’s first define what sysctl is, and I usually go to Wikipedia for some great definitions, so, from Wikipedia we have: Sysctl is an interface for examining and dynamically changing parameters in the BSD and Linux operating systems. The implementation mechanism in these two systems is very different. In BSD these parameters are generally objects in a management information base (MIB) that describe tunable limits such as the size of a shared memory segment, the number of threads the operating system will use as an NFS client, or the maximum number of processes on the system; or describe, enable...

This is a guest post written by DarkDuck. He is author and owner of blog Linux Notes from DarkDuck, dedicated to Linux operating systems and everything around it. Open Source Office applications comparison. Do you use Linux? Have you ever heard of OpenOffice.org? If you answered “yes” to first question and “no” to second, you are really rare individual! That is because OpenOffice.org (OOo) is one of the first software packages installed in Linux. Many Linux distributions include OOo into their standard installation. When I ran my tests with different distributives, I was very much surprised that some of them...

Introduction As Telnet was the most common way to access a Linux server years ago, now a days it is ssh, it is secure, it is encrypted, but anyway you can improve the security even more, and today we’ll see one tip to do this. If you have a server with a lot of users that have access to it, maybe, by the console, or using a terminal, but only some of them really need to access the server via ssh. Well a good idea is to allow ssh login only to those specific users. Enable ssh access / login...

SIP - A Multimedia Communications Protocol This is a guest post from the guys over at TestFreaks, a website that collects product information and reviews of different categories of products from thousands of sources. Due to Globalization, video conference, Internet telephonic calls and other multimedia connection are basic requirement to everyone, at that time VoIP comes into picture. VoIP make an effort to deliver the wide range of applications wanted by customers and service providers while increasing conductibility and simplifying fundamental design to ease development and deployment. One protocol which has fit is Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP is very...

Introduction Sometimes you remember a phrase or a given word or words, you put in a document, but you do not remember the name of the document. How to find it?, well do a search of all your documents, looking for that word or words or sentence, in other words, look for a string or strings. Now, thanks to computers this is easier now, than it was in our parents' days. If you are using Linux, you have grep to help on this job. Look for a document, containing a given string First the easy case, you know the exact...

Introduction If you want to use a Linux Operating System driven box, to act as a router or gateway, you need IP packets to pass through your Linux box. By default packets not directly addressed to a Linux powered PC will be discarded, so you need to enable IP Forwarding. This can be done in different ways, and we’ll check here some of the most common. Use procfs This is maybe the most used way, it is a temporary change, and you need to enable it after every reboot. echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward You can add this line to /etc/rc.local...

Introduction This is somehow my personal classification, of Linux distributions. And maybe at the same time of the Linux users. I’m going to classify only those I have used more than just a few hours in a virtual machine. [Update: 01/23/2011]. I’m adding a new section, Special Mentions with some distributions suggested by the readers, but not used by me Linux for the newbies This are distributions for newbies, or Linux newcomers as well as for users who do not have too much time to tweak and configure their PCs. Ubuntu Maybe the most famous Linux distribution, and usually the...

Introduction There a lot of ways to protect access to Linux Operating System driven servers trough ssh ports, this is just another one. This is somehow, like covering your house’s front door with bricks and enabling another door, where only you and your family knows. That way the first thing a burglar needs to do, is to find the door, only after that he will be able to try to open it. ssh listen to port 22 by default, but you can change that behaviour, and the bots will not be able to attack your Linux server as they usually...

Introduction Updated 02/15/2011 Please be sure to read the release notes for your architecture: i386: http://l.g2lx.co/emCgUD x64bit PC: http://l.g2lx.co/hjJzam I've used the method below to upgrade my Debian Lenny to Squeeze and had not problems at all, but in the release notes are considerations you should follow depending on your configuration. Be sure to read those, specially if your Debian PC is mission critical. Updated 01/21/2011 As with the post of How to upgrade Debian Etch to Lenny, I actually know this may be know by a lot of people already, but here is how I did it, and if...

Introduction Google Chrome is becoming more and more popular, for example, the last month for this site, here are some statistics. So it represent the 25% of the visitors to this site. I’m using Slackware a lot, so I decided to install Chrome on Slackware. Some notes, before going to the how-to. I’ve installed Slackware from the CD, and did a full installation My version is 13.1 My Slackware is up to date, (01-19-2010) Prepare Slackware to install Chrome We’ll need to install ORBit and GConf. Installing ORBit from slackbuilds Download the slackbuild from here, then run: tar xvzf ORBit2.tar.gz...

Introduction Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” is about to be released, in fact some days ago, the Release Candidate 1, has been published, you can read about that here. Debian, as you may already know does not have a tied release schedule, and the Debian team is famous for his “It will be release when it is read” philosophy, this surely makes Debian one of the most stable Linux distribution, and a great option for servers. But specially (at least in my opinion) since Etch, Debian is also a great option for the Desktop, in fact I started using Sarge as my...

Introduction VirtualBox is according to developers: VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction. And according to Wikipedia: Oracle VM VirtualBox is an x86 virtualization software package, originally created by software company innotek GmbH, purchased by Sun Microsystems, and now developed by Oracle Corporation as part of...

Different Desktop Environments on Linux All computers are nothing without Operating Systems, much the same as the principle that power is nothing without control. Lamborghini could make the fastest car in the world next year, nothing coming even relatively close to it. However if they weld the doors closed and fill the whole cabin with cement, so there is no way to ever drive or operate the car, the whole entire thing is worthless. Think of this as a computer without an operating system, it’s a wild beast, waiting to be tamed. When you choose an OS not only are...

Introduction You never stop learning Linux, joining commands with pipes, let’s create somehow an infinite number of new “commands” and applications. Some of them really useful. This time let’s see how we can convert a man page to a pdf file, so you can freely distribute that pdf. This way everybody may read, print or store it, no matter which OS she is using. Create a pdf man page We’ll use man and ps2pdf to achieve this goal. First, be sure the output of man, is in postscript, so that output can then be converted into pdf, by ps2pdf. man...

Introduction cloc stands for Count Lines of Code, and that is what it does, it counts lines, but not just like wc may do, cloc makes that and some more. You can count lines, blank lines, comments lines, and code lines, cloc will give you a summary of the files. cloc works on files and on folders, when on folders, it will give you a nice summary of all files in that folder, you can also use it among other things to strip out the comments and blank lines. Installation Chances are that you can find it on your package...

Introduction When you are working in the Linux command line, you often need to type several commands in a succession, you can type one, wait until it finishes and then type the next one, or you can type all of them in a line, and they will execute in order. There are various ways to execute commands in a line, I mean one after the other, we’ll see some of them in this article, so you can pick the best for your needs depending on the situation. String commands in Linux using semi colon This is the simplest way, for...

Introduction I’ve seen this very few times in Linux, but yes sometimes it happens, an application or process stop responding and gives you no other option than to terminate it. In Windows, you press ALT-CTRL-DEL then look for the not responding application and close it, if you are lucky enough and Windows is still responding. To do something like that in Linux, we will use the console, it is the best way, because if you are on your really bad day, you may have even X not responding, so you will have to another terminal. Pressing ALT-CTRL-F2 will do the...

Introduction If you have a music video on your computer, and you want to extract the audio to put it on your cellphone, your mp3 player, your car stereo or any other place you want to hear the music in that video, you can use ffmpeg to extract the audio. Please be sure to respect all copy rights before using this command. How to extract audio mp3 from a video file Maybe the most useful application for this tip, is to extract audio from youtube videos, first you will need to download the youtube video to your computer, there are...

Featured post By: Jenny Fellner Asterisk based calling systems offer the most reliable way of communication for business as well residential use. Ordinary PBX system is a quite costly solution. Asterisk helps reduce that cost and provides you the cheapest calling solution. Previously, it was impossible for a small business to invest in a call center program. Asterisk has made it possible as its low cost suits all sizes of business. Basically, Asterisk was made to work with Linux operating system but with the passage of time, it has undergone huge developments. Now most of the people are using it...

Introduction If you start a process on a terminal, being it local or a remote (ssh) terminal, you normally loose the control of the terminal while the process is running, then if you want to recover that control, you have some options. Cancel the process By pressing CTRL+C you can stop a running process, and recover the control of your terminal, this will tell to the running application to stop anything it is doing at that moment and shut down. Suspend a process Another way, is to suspend the process for a moment, you will use CTRL+Z for this, then...

Introduction The Linux Kernel will take care of the time each process, will have to use the processor, but you can change that, by changing the priority. When is this needed?, well usually never, but if you have a not to fast PC, and you are compiling something, and at the same time having a video conferencing, you may want to increase the priority of your video conference applications, while reducing the priority of the program compiling your software. How to increase or decrease priority We will use nice in order to change the priority of a given process, first...

Introduction Cache in Linux memory is where the Kernel stores the information it may need later, as memory is incredible faster than disk, it is great that the Linux Kernel takes care about that. Anyway you can also manipulate how the cache behaves, there usually no need to do that, as Linux Operating system is very efficient in managing your computer memory, and will automatically free the RAM and drop the cache if some application needs memory. Let’s see how to force Linux to drop the cache from memory. drop_caches Since Kernel 2.6.16, you can control how cache behaves, there...

Happy new year to all of you! To start this new year I will share with you the 10 most visited pages at Go2Linux this past 2010. Absolute top 10 articles How to copy files over ssh The sudoers file explained Upgrade from Debian Lenny to Debian Squeeze How to access ext3 file systems from Windows Recover Fedora and Centos root password How to use nmap from console and its GUI Comparing Debian, Ubuntu, Centos and Fedora How to set date and time in Linux useradd vs adduser The spartan and lightweight Debian Desktop Top 10 articles created on 2010...

[Update]I've decided to update this old post, as a warming post before the imminent release of Debian 6.0 Squeeze As I have mentioned in previous posts, I use to work on Desktops PCs, one in my office and one in my Home, I use my Laptop (an old IBM T30) only when I travel, and as I like to travel light, this also goes for my Laptop, so here I will show how do I configured my Laptop with Debian Lenny, and just the necessary software for my job while abroad. [Update]Well I now have an old T60, but still...

If you follow this blog, you know that I’ve been using Slackware for more or less three months now, Slackware as you may already know is the oldest surviving Linux distribution. How I started with Slackware?, Well I’m using Arch Linux for about two years now. In the Arch Linux Wiki, there is a comparison of Arch Linux with other distributions, one of them is Slackware. According to that page: Slackware and Arch are quite similar in that both are simple distributions focused on elegance and minimalism. Slackware is famous for its lack of branding and completely vanilla packages, from...

Introduction Domain Name System (a.k.a. DNS) is maybe one of the least known services in the Internet, by the common user, but also one, of the most used by everybody. From Wikipedia: The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system built on a distributed database for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these...

This comes from http://xkcd.com We all know that romance requires dating, and other stuff, so that demand time, time the Debian developers may not have, so they are going to take the time they use for the project and use it in dating. That is wrong for Debian, so here is how to deal with those issues. But think about that in the long term if there is no romance for Debian developers, we may loose the next generation of Debian developers. So, a good solution in the short term, but a wrong one in the long term.

Introduction Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions, it was created by Ian Murdoc in 1993. From Wikipedia: Debian (pronounced /ˈdɛbiən/) is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software especially under the GNU General Public License and other free software licenses. The primary form, Debian GNU/Linux, which uses the Linux kernel and GNU OS tools, is a popular and influential GNU/Linux distribution. It is distributed with access to repositories containing thousands of software packages ready for installation and use. Debian is known for relatively strict adherence to the Unix and free...

Introduction cd may be one of the most used Linux commands. From Wikipedia: cd, sometimes also available as chdir (change directory), is a command line command to change the current working directory in operating systems such as Unix, DOS, OS/2, AmigaOS (where if a bare path is given, cd is implied), Windows, and Linux. It is also available for use in shell scripts and batch files. There are some few tips that can help you save some time, while navigating between your folders in Linux. This article will touch a few of them, if you know more, please share in...

Introduction You may know how to change file permissions using chmod but, if you already have a file with the permissions you want to assign to some other files, you can use --reference option in chmod How to copy or replicate file permissions, using another file as reference If you want to use a file as reference to copy its permissions to other files you can do that using this command chmod --reference <reference-file> <target-file> As an example, if you have this: -rwxrwxrwx 1 ggarron ggarron 0 Dec 20 15:35 1.txt -rwx------ 1 ggarron ggarron 0 Dec 20 15:35 2.txt...

Introduction How to know how many processes each user is running?, there are lots of ways to do this, I've found this some time ago in the ubuntu forums I think. I can not find right now a real scenario when you may need this, but it is a good example about how to use pipes to get a different output, with a whole different purpose. Have fun: How to count how many processes each user is running in Linux ps hax -o user | sort | uniq -c ps will list the processes, h will remove the header, -o...

Introduction There are times when you need to compile software from sources, maybe because you need to compile the package with some specific option that is not enabled in the default package. Do that in Debian is really easy. Compile software from sources in Debian Fetch the dependencies The first thing you need, is to be sure that your Linux has all dependencies installed, so run: apt-get update Then, apt-get build-dep htop I’m using htop as the example in this article. Now we have all dependencies solved. Get the sources of the package Continuing with our example, run: cd /tmp...

Introduction Debugging is an important part of programming in any language, and so it is the same for Bash, one of the most easy way to debug is to run the program line by line. This way you can check what is happening with each line, and you can then find where is the error. Debugging shell scripts If you are using bash, you can debug using this command bash -x <program.sh> This way bash will print each line and then execute it, this will help you to find any possible error. Example: Given this shell script #!/bin/sh echo 'This...

Introduction We all sometimes needs to encrypt files, but if you are just encrypting text files, there are easier options. One of them is vi or vim. I’m a fan of vim and it is my favorite text editor, it can encrypt files, check spelling, etc. We’ll now learn how to encrypt files using vim or vi. How to encrypt text files with vim/vi Encrypt a file using Linux vi / vim, is easy just use the -x option when you create the file. vim -x some-text-file.txt Now vim will ask you for a password to able to decrypt the...

Introduction Linux’s runlevels are: From Wikipedia: The term runlevel refers to a mode of operation in one of the computer operating systems that implement Unix System V-style initialization. Conventionally, seven runlevels exist, numbered from zero to six; though up to ten, from zero to nine, may be used. Depending on your distribution runlevels may differ Whick runlevel am I in? So, to find out which runlevel are you In just run: who -r You will get something like this: run-level 3 2010-12-11 21:09 last=S

Introduction Ping is really useful, when you want to diagnose a network, to be sure you are able to reach a given computer, the good thing about ping is that it lets you know that both ways uplink and downlink are working. Ping works by sending a package from the originating computer to the receiving one, once it reach the receiving computer, that “computer” (better call it device), respond with a similar message. That way you are sure the path is working and that there is an IP enabled device on the other side. But, that is also a security...

Introduction If you need to run any program or command, and then leave the shell session or ssh session, but be sure to leave the command running behind you, then you can use setsid. I know you are going to mention screen and nohup, and yes they are maybe better options, but setsid is another option. setsid creates a new session id for the command you run using it, so it does not deppend on your shell session, therefore if that shell session is closed the other command will stay running. setsid - Running a command in a new session...

Introduction I like all about automation, and who no?. How about automatically run commands when you logout from a shell session in Linux. You can use this to erase temp files you may have use during your session, or anything you may want to execute each time you logout from your Linux Operating system. The .logout file If you are using tcsh you can use the .logout file, where you can write all the commands you want to be executed at logout time. This is a simple example, to erase your personal temporal files. I usually have a folder /tmp/...

Introduction Opensshd has a nice feature, that lets you present a welcome message to users who are login in to the Linux server. This feature is useful if you need to present a warning or any other message to users before they log into the system. A good example could be something like this message: “Please be responsible while you are logged into this server, any bad action will be recorded, and legal actions will taken” How to enable sshd banner First you need to create the Banner that will be displayed by ssh server. So create a file that...

Introduction I have installed VirtualBox on Debian Squeeze and, once installed, when I tried to run it, I got this error: VirtualBox: supR3HardenedMainGetTrustedMain: dlopen(“/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox.so”,) failed: /usr/lib/libGL.so.1: undefined symbol: _nv000135gl How to solve it What I’ve done, was first reinstall Virtualbox apt-get install virtualbox-3.2 --reinstall But that does not solve the problem, next, I thought I could reinstall libGL.so.1 That package is provided by: fglrx-glx libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-swx11 nvidia-glx nvidia-glx-legacy-96xx I’ve choosen to reinstall nvidia-glx as I know I have it installed on my system. So: apt-get install nvidia-glx --reinstall Problem solved

Introduction From: Wikipedia Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. The name cron comes from the word “chronos”, Greek for “time”.[1] Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration, though its general-purpose nature means that it can be used for other purposes, such as connecting to the Internet and downloading email Cron is driven by a crontab (cron table) file, a configuration file that specifies shell commands to run periodically on a given schedule. The crontab...

Introduction Since a long time not using it I tried to use VMware again today with my Debian Squeeze, and as the kernel have been upgraded, I had to reconfigure it by running /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl But it could not run, because of I had no kernel headers, it complained, saying this: What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running kernel? [/usr/src/Linux/include] So I had to install them. Here is how. Install C header Linux Kernel on Debian or Ubuntu It is really easy, just run this command, while running the kernel you want to...

Introduction sudoers file, is one of the most visited articles at Go2Linux.org, so I’m going to expand a little bit that article, by adding this small tips about sudoers file and sudo command. Grant root powers To a single user Add to the sudoers file [user] ALL=(ALL) ALL Example: john ALL=(ALL) ALL To a group of users The users need to belong to the given group, you can add the user to a group. Then add this to the sudoers file [group] ALL=(ALL) ALL Example: %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL Avoid writing sudo every time If you need to run a lot...

Introduction Sharing files and printers with Windows machines is something that sooner or later you will have to do. If you are using Linux as you only operating system, you really a great chance to have to share something with the windows universe, unfortunately they are more than us. But do not worry Samba is here to save you. We will see here a simple yet effective samba configuration file, that will give you a good idea about how it works, and how you can share files and printers between Linux and Windows. Install Samba Well, use you package manager...

Introduction If you are running out of RAM on your Linux system, you will want to find the culprit in order to solve the problem, either by reconfiguring the RAM-hungry application or by stopping it. We’ll use ps, awk, head and sort with a pipe, to find out which application is consuming our RAM List running processes ordered by RAM usage ps aux | awk '{print $2, $4, $11}' | sort -k2rn | head -n 20 You will get something like this: PID %MEM COMMAND 3349 9.3 /usr/bin/X 3815 6.0 /usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin 3750 1.0 gnome-panel 3753 0.9 nautilus 2751 0.8 /usr/sbin/mysqld...

Introduction I'm working with Nginx since more than a year ago, it is an extremely fast web server, specially to work in front of Apache serving static content. Well, if you need to customize your 404 (file not found) error page in Nginx, you are in the right place. First what is a 404 error, from Wikipedia: The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. 404 errors should not be confused with "server not found"...

Introduction If you need to block a user and do not allow him / her to log into your Linux system, maybe because she is a user who stopped working at your organization, or because she was moved to other department, or any other reason. I’m going to show how to do it temporarily as to do it permanent you just need to erase the user account. Temporarily lock a user out of a Linux machine We’ll use passwd command, and the syntax is: passwd -l [user] So let’s imagine the user’s username is “Jennifer”. The first step is to...

Interview with Raphaël Hertzog Today I’m presenting you my first interview, today is the turn of Raphaël, a Debian Contributor. I’ve meet Raphaël on his blog. He is interviewing other Debian contributors, and I’m interviewing him, continue reading and know him better. Who are you Hi. I’m 31 years old, I live in France near Saint-Étienne. I’m married and have a one year old son. I joined Debian in 1998 while I started my studies at the engineering school (INSA Lyon). I graduated in 2002 and started working for a Swiss company where I created a custom embedded Linux distribution...

Introduction There are situations when you want to find a web server, or the CUPS server, or any other server in a local network, but you do not know the IP of that computer. You can go to computer itself and check its IP, or you can check the DHCP logs, or you can ask the Network Admin, but you can also use nmap Using nmap to find open ports First, be sure to use nmap only in your own network, do not try to use it to scan ports of a computer that does not belongs to you, to...

For those of you who have not seen The Matrix, here is something from Wikipedia: The Matrix is a 1999 American/Australian science fiction-action film written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving. It was first released in North America on March 31, 1999, and is the first installment in the Matrix series of films, comic books, video games, and animation. Well, and for those of you fans of The Matrix, I want to show you now cmatrix which is a ncurses softare that makes your Linux Terminal looks...

Introduction We all use usb thumb memories, or memory cards like SD or microSD for our cellphones, cameras, or just to exchange data between computers. But when you share yours with a colleague or friend, you would want to erase that important project you are working on, or those pictures of your kids, before lend it to him. If you are working with Linux Operating System, and I’m sure you are as you’re reading this, you have a very strong tool available for this job. Warning: If you use this how-to and you’ve made no backup, or you use it...

Introduction When you are running out of disk space, you need to concentrate on the biggest files and folders on your disk, so you can get space quickly. The best way, is to list the first 10 folders, then go inside some of them, and find files you may or can delete, and get new free space. Commands needed There is not a single command in Linux to help us with this task, but we will use du, sort and head. du Summarize disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories. sort Write sorted concatenation of all FILE(s) to standard...

Our Tuesday MySQL tip, how to create Tables in a MySQL Database. Tables are somehow like spreadsheets, and one database may have lots of tables into it. So, once you have created your Database you may create the tables inside the Database. We’ll do it, working on the command line: First connect to the MySQL mysql -u [user] -p This will ask the password for the user [user], it should be the user you have given (grant) permissions to work on that database, when you created the MySQL database. The syntax is: CREATE TABLE [table_name] ([field_name1] [field_type1], [field_name2] [field_name2]); You...

Suspend to RAM is useful with Laptops and Netbooks, these days batteries last a lot, but anyway not enough if you leave your computer running on batteries while you are not working on it. Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Peppermint, Mint, Fedora and other alike may have automatic support for this by just closing the lid of the Laptop, Netbook. But if you use Arch Linux or Slackware Linux like me, you may have to do something like this: For Slackware users As root: echo -n mem > /sys/power/state For Arch Linux users echo -n standby > /sys/power/state This from the...

Well, now this is really a very small tip, but if you trying to send a man page my email, or any other similar thing a very useful one. So let’s see how to create a TXT file out of a man mam page. I will ls as the command for the example. man ls | col -b > /tmp/ls-man-page.txt That is, now you send the file /tmp/ls-man-page.txt as an email attachment, or any other thing.

SKILL(1) Linux User's Manual SKILL(1) NAME skill, snice - send a signal or report process status SYNOPSIS skill [signal to send] [options] process selection criteria snice [new priority] [options] process selection criteria DESCRIPTION These tools are probably obsolete and unportable. The command syntax is poorly defined. Consider using the killall, pkill, and pgrep commands instead. The default signal for skill is TERM. Use -l or -L to list available signals. Particularly useful signals include HUP, INT, KILL, STOP, CONT, and 0. Alternate signals may be specified in three ways: -9 -SIGKILL -KILL. The default priority for snice is +4. (snice...

How to logout or kill other user session? Well, let’s start saying that you need to be root to do that, and that it is not polite or a good idea to do that, unless that user is not logged with permission. It is always better to politely ask her to logout by herself, using the wall, command. But, let’s suppose you really want to logout that user. Use the command skill skill -KILL -u [user] Replace [user] with the username of the user you want to kill, if you only want to stop for a while his / her...

First of all, I want to warn you that any command that may delete files should be used with care, you may break or badly damage your Linux and get no warning about what is going to happen. You will only notice when it is too late. That said, I will show you how to delete files recursively, this is really powerful, and useful. There are times when you really need to find files under some criteria, and erase them, we will use find and rm to achieve this. find . -type f -name "criteria-to-find" -exec rm -f {} \;...

Introduction Recently Shuttleworth said: Today we have a six-month release cycle, in an internet-oriented world, we need to be able to release something every day. That’s an area we will put a lot of work into in the next five years. The small steps we are putting in to the Software Center today, they will go further and faster than people might have envisioned in the past. It seems to mean that Ubuntu may become a rolling release, instead of its actual six month cycle. This as I said in my Arch Linux review, has good and bad points. Rolling...

NAME badblocks - search a device for bad blocks SYNOPSIS badblocks [ -svwnf ] [ -b block-size ] [ -c blocks_at_once ] [ -i input_file ] [ -o output_file ] [ -p num_passes ] device [ last-block ] [ start-block ] DESCRIPTION badblocks is used to search for bad blocks on a device (usually a disk partition). device is the special file corresponding to the device (e.g /dev/hdc1). last-block is the last block to be checked; if it is not specified, the last block on the device is used as a default. start-block is an optional parameter specifying the starting...

Now a days, disks are very secure, and it is not easy to find bad blocks on them, anyway, if the information you are going to save in a given disk, it might be a good idea to check the disk for bad blocks first. Linux has a good tool for this: badblocks It is really easy to use, first, be sure the disk you are trying to check for bad blocks with badblocks command is not mounted, then run badblocks -n -s /dev/sdX or badblocks -n -s /dev/hdX Where the X is the partition of the disk you want...

Continuing with some basic MySQL tips, we will now see how to list / Show databases. We will use the command line to do this. First you need to connect the server son at the Linux command line prompt enter: mysql -u root -p I’m using root in this example, but you can use any user you have access to. Next the server is going to ask for your password, and once you enter it you will the mysql prompt. mysql> At the prompt enter: show databases; All databases your use has access to, will then be listed, something like...

Check out the episode 2 of my Podcast. "Arch Linux review"

Introduction PDF is great, and is a great way to share documents, I usually convert my OpenOffice documents to PDF before sharing them, and almost everybody has a PDF reader, now a days even the smart phones support PDF files. But, what If you want to ebbed the file in an email, or you want your document to appear in a web page?. Well in that case, maybe an image file is a better solution. So, we’ll now learn about converting a PDF file to an image file, like an .png or .jpg file. Convert PDF to JPG We’ll use...

Introduction There will situations, where you will want to convert MP3 files to OGG Vorbis files, some of these situations are when you are making a podcast show, you may record your podcasts as MP3 files, and then you will need to convert it to OGG Vorbis files, for your Linux listeners. That is my case, as I am starting with a Podcast show. The command you need to perform this task, is mpg321 and oggenc, and the packages you need to install are vorbis-tools and mpg321 How to convert MP3 to OGG Vorbis file To convert MP3 to OGG...

There are cases in which you may want to break the execution of a bash for loop, like if something happens that will prevent further execution, or of the goal of the task has been reached. You use break to do stop the execution of the for loop. Using break in a bash for loop Here is how it works break for i in [series] do command 1 command 2 command 3 if (condition) # Condition to break the loop then command 4 # Command if the loop needs to be broken break fi command 5 # Command to run...

HPLIP: Installing HP Printer plugin If you are installing a HP Printer on Arch Linux, and it is one that needs proprietary plugin, you may have problems while building that plugin. This is because Arch Linux upgraded python from 2 to 3, so while you are running hp-setup or hp-plugin, if you see this error: Verifying archive integrity... All good. Uncompressing HPLIP 3.10.9 Plugin Self Extracting Archive... File "./plugin_install.py", line 78 except ImportError, e: ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax error: Python gobject/dbus may be not installed You need to use python 2 to run the script instead of python 3, one...

Introduction Yesterday I’ve written a post about how to redirect traffic from www.domain.com to domain.com using Nginx. It is using an if statement inside the server section in the nginx.conf file, there is another way to do it. It is to create two server section, and redirect the traffic from one of them to the other: Strip www from url with nginx redirect server { server_name www.domain.com; rewrite ^(.*) http://domain.com$1 permanent; } server { server_name domain.com; #The rest of your configuration goes here# } What you need to do, it use the same IP in your DNS server for both...

These are great news, and are spreading all over the Linux world. Developer Mike Galbraith, made a patch for the Linux Kernel and adding only 224 lines to the kernel it really improves the speed of the Linux Desktop. I am in no ways a developer or programmer, but according to Phoronix The patch being talked about is designed to automatically create task groups per TTY in an effort to improve the desktop interactivity under system strain. To know a little more about TTY you may want to read The TTY demystified. This patch can be expected with Kernel release...

Update: This may be a better solution: Nginx redirect www Introduction It is not a good idea from the SEO point of view, to have duplicated content. If your content can be accessed from both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com you will have duplicated content. This is true at least for Google and other search engines. So, to avoid that, you need to forward all your www.yourdomain.com/something to yourdomain.com/something, of course you can do it the other way too. Today we will see how to remove the www part on your URI, on Nginx, I like Nginx as it is really fast...

I have been working with MySQL databases a little bit these days. I will write and share some small tips for the beginners the following weeks. Today, we’ll see how to create a Database. Get MySQL prompt mysql -u root -p You will be asked the root password, and then you will get access to the MySQL prompt. At the prompt run: create database myfirstdatabase; Now root, needs to grant permissions to other user, so the database can be manages by another user that is not root. GRANT ALL ON myfirstdatabase.* TO user1@localhost IDENTIFIED BY "some_pass" Thanks to Darren FLUSH...

This is my first podcast, and it is more an experiment than a real podcast with new content. I am thinking about making some podcasts, let's say one per month, but I would like to hear "read" your feedback, so this is somehow a test drive. You can download this very first try of making a podcast from: Switching from CentOS to Slackware Hope you enjoy it, and please let me know what you think.

Google’s Chrome OS Definition from Wikipedia Google Chrome OS is a forthcoming Linux-based, open source operating system designed by Google to work exclusively with web applications. First announced on July 7, 2009, Chrome OS will be publicly available as a stable release by the northern hemisphere “late fall” of 2010 according to Google I was reading an article on Ostatic You can find it at: http://ostatic.com/blog/googles-extreme-focus-on-the-cloud-could-be-chrome-os-achilles-heel Some part of it are: When Google announced Chrome OS last year, it got an overwhelming level of hype, especially because the open source operating system is a follow-up to Google’s ultra-successful Android mobile...

Lubuntu 10.10 released Lubuntu is not an official member of the Ubuntu family like Kubuntu or Xubuntu, but it is fully based on Ubuntu. Featuring LXDE instead of Gnome, it is oriented for Netbooks, and old hardware PCs. From: Linux Journal: Like its big brother Ubuntu, part of the appeal of a distribution like Lubuntu comes from its ease of installation. To this end, Lubuntu installs a complete set of tools and applications with only an essential set of install time configuration options. Basically, if you’ve installed any other *buntu, you have a good idea of what to expect: the...

This is a small old tip, but I want to share it here, in case it may be useful for someone. Also as a note to myself, as I usually forget how to do it. I usually like to print from the command line, when I am editing latex documents, programming, or creating markdown. I usually use vim to edit this kind of files. So, if you need to print from the command line, and assuming you already have the printer installed and working. lpr file This will print the file on the default printer lpr -P printername file This...

GNU screen attach The scenario where I use screen the most, is when I need to run a long process in a remote server, like compiling something on Gentoo, downloading a lot of files, rsyncing, etc. I can open a ssh session and run the command, but in that case I need to leave my local computer on, and there is the risk that for some reason the session could terminate and in that case the running application will also be terminated. So, what I do in those scenarios is, to open a screen session, and run the application in...

Create a pseudo TTY with ssh -t The -t option in the ssh -t command force pseudo-tty allocation. This is very handy when you need to run remote screen based applications on the remote server, establishing something like a “temporary” ssh connection, that will be established while the command is running, and it is closed as soon as the command is finished. Let’s suppose you want to edit a file in the remote server. ssh -t [user]@[remote-server] vim [file] Once you close the remote file, the ssh session will be terminated. Another good use, is to run htop on a...

Introduction This howto will show you how to upgrade from ext3 file system to ext4 file sytem Please be aware that following this instructions may destroy all your data, so you are really encouraged to back up all your data before continuing. Also, before doing any conversion, be sure you are really going to notice some noticeable improvements. ext4 according to wikipedia is: The ext4 or fourth extended filesystem is a journaling file system for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3. And is was created… …as a series of backward compatible extensions to ext3 meant to extend storage limits...

PSTREE(1) User Commands PSTREE(1) NAME pstree - display a tree of processes SYNOPSIS pstree [-a|--arguments] [-c|--compact] [-h|--highlight-all|-Hpid|--highlight-pid pid] [-l|--long] [-n|--numeric-sort] [-p|--show-pids] [-u|--uid-changes] [-Z|--security-context] [-A|--ascii|-G|--vt100|-U|--unicode] [pid|user] pstree -V|--version DESCRIPTION pstree shows running processes as a tree. The tree is rooted at either pid or init if pid is omitted. If a user name is specified, all process trees rooted at processes owned by that user are shown. pstree visually merges identical branches by putting them in square brackets and prefixing them with the repe‐ tition count, e.g. init-+-getty |-getty |-getty `-getty becomes init---4*[getty] Child threads of a process are found under...

Introduction Almost everybody should have hear about ps if you want to know more about it, you can read running processes on Linux But today I will write about pstree, it is very similar to ps but instead of listing the processes it shows them in a tree, which is more intuitive and useful for some cases. Another good feature of pstree is that it is easy to know which process is the parent and which ones are children, so this way you can terminate ‘kill’ the parent will all its children, instead of being killing process by process. Syntax...

There are some times when you need to turn automatically your PC off, there can be a lot of examples when this is necessary. I usually do this when I left some torrent downloading, let’s say some Linux isos to test a new Linux distribution, so I leave my PC downloading the ISO at office over the weekend, and program my PC to turn of, some two or three hours after the estimated time when the download is suppose do finish. I do not have too much bandwidth so a whole DVD can take some 26 hours downloading. Specially because...

Openmelody the fork of Movable Type has announced some days ago the release of its Beta version. http://openmelody.org/blog/2010/11/melody-10-beta-1-is-here Actually it may not be considered a real Beta as the Alfa was based on Movable Type 4.32, so it has a lot of background and stability. The Opinions sub-blog of this site is hosted by Openmelody. So I am already planning the upgrade. Check the Openmelod blog for more info.

Slackware Linux Review — Current version 13.1 Introduction From Wikipedia: Slackware is a free and open source operating system. It was one of the earliest operating systems to be built on top of the Linux kernel and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993. The current stable version is 13.1, released on May 24, 2010. Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity, and to be the most “Unix-like” Linux distribution, using plain text files for configuration and making as few modifications to software packages as possible from upstream. Slackware...

I am swtiching from feedburner newsletter delivery system to aweber.com. That is a paid service, but I think will give you a better experience. This might be the last email update you get from go2linux.org unless you have had reconfirmed your subscription. Two days ago, you should have received an email asking for a re-confirmation of your subscription, if you did not get it please go to: http://www.go2linux.org and in the right column, at the top, fill your details and be sure to click on the link on the re confirmation email you should get some minutes later. If you...

These days I have been working with csv files (Comma, separated files). Usually you deal with csv files using Open Office or Microsoft Excel, but if all you want to do is to extract some data from the csv (I mean columns) you can easily use cut. Let’s see a csv file example. United States,Washington,North America Japan,Tokyo,Asia Israel,Tel Aviv,Asia Bolivia,Sucre,South America Brasil,Brasilia,South America Let’s say we only want the country and continent cut -d',' -f1,3 file.csv The output will be: United States,North America Japan,Asia Israel,Asia Bolivia,South America Brasil,South America The options used are: -d, —delimiter use DELIM instead of TAB...

CUT(1) User Commands CUT(1) NAME cut - remove sections from each line of files SYNOPSIS cut OPTION... [FILE]... DESCRIPTION Print selected parts of lines from each FILE to standard output. Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. -b, --bytes=LIST select only these bytes -c, --characters=LIST select only these characters -d, --delimiter=DELIM use DELIM instead of TAB for field delimiter -f, --fields=LIST select only these fields; also print any line that contains no delimiter character, unless the -s option is specified -n (ignored) --complement complement the set of selected bytes, characters or fields -s, --only-delimited do not...

Too many Linux Distributions From time to time, I can read an article stating that there are too many Linux Distributions, and that this situation is counter productive for Linux. Usually those blog posts get a bunch of comments saying the opposite, and stating that precisely this is the grace of Linux, the freedom of choice it offers. The problems Let’s see the points typically scored as negative. Duplicated effort End users confused by so much choice Duplicated effort There might be some duplicated effort, but actually not that much, at the end of the day what is a Linux...

Ecryptfs Introduction Encrypt files, has always been needed in computer world, it could be something as simple as your diary, or as important as your private source code, for that important project. Linux offers some different approaches to provide file encryption, the most of them are focused on volume encryption, and require that you set apart some space of your disk, and dedicate it to the storage of the files encrypted. The problem with this, is that if you do not need all the space set, you will waste disk space, on the other hand if you need more room...

DNS Cache with dnsmasq Improve the browsing speed is something I’m always looking for. Some time ago I’ve written about DNS cache, with pdnsd this time I will write about dnsmasq, another DNS cache, that also works as DHCP server. How it works? A DNS cache works by saving locally all queries to DNS servers, and then any future request for the same query is served immediately, as there is no network delay, the idea is install dnsmasq in your own PC, or in a PC in your local network. Depending on how far or near you are from the...

Introduction From Wikipedia: SlackBuilds.org is a community-supported project for acquiring SlackBuild script of extra software not included within Slackware. A SlackBuild build script contains the build instructions and a source download link for building a particular package for your system. This is identical to the way Slackware’s official packages are built and is meant to address possible incompatibilities with community created binary packages while sacrificing the portability of typical binary distribution. Slackbuilds is the best option to install software in Slackware, software that is not in the official slackware repository. How to use Slackbuilds.org I will use htop to show...

mkfs.vfat is used to format a file system using the FAT32 file system. Usually needed to format thumb usb disks. In Arch Linux you need to install: dosfstools sudo pacman -S dosfstools This will get you mkfs.vfat and mkfs.msdos If you need to format using ntfs install sudo pacman -S ntfsprogs

Slackware is the oldest Linux still being maintained, it is light, simple, and stable. It is not too easy to maintain, specially because most Linux users now a day (me included) are accustomed to package manager tools that take care of dependency resolution. In Slackware the user is the one who should resolve this, and install any package or library needed. From Wikipedia: Slackware is a free and open source operating system. It was one of the earliest operating systems to be built on top of the Linux kernel and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by...

Spell checkers are really a good thing, and something almost all modern word processors have. But, when you work on a text editor, like emacs, gedit or vim, what can you do? Today I will cover how to install spell checker functionality to vim, which is the text editor I use the most, actually almost exclusively. First thing you need is to install the dictionary, I will install the English one for vim. sudo pacman -S vim-spell-en You can do it the same for your distribution using your package manager, the above command is to install it on Arch Linux....

Introduction Ningx is a great web server, working with static content, it is a great option to serve .css .js and .html files. If you need to run scripts, like php or perl, you can always send those requirements to Apache, and make Nginx work as a reverse proxy server. Why Slackware Linux?. Because it is small, stable and fast, I like to have Nginx running on a small VPS alone, and sending script requirement to an Apache server behind, running in another VPS. If you do not like Slackware, you may also use this guide, but install nginx using...

I have started testing Slackware Linux, and as I needed to compile some software on it, I also needed the necessary tools for it. I was looking at forums and blog, and could not find that, and only after two hours, I manage to find how to install all needed compile and development tools to work with Slackware. Installing development tools in Slackware Linux First go to: Get Slack, locate a mirror near you, then go to this folder: slackware-[version]/slackware/d/ Download all packages there, and install them with sudo installpkg [file].txz And you are done. I have installed the following...

Introduction If you plan to use your computer to develop software, or simply install software from sources, you will need some basic tools like: gcc c++ make others These tools are installed in different ways, depending your Linux distribution, here I will cover Fedora, Debian / Ubuntu / Mint and Arch Linux. Fedora sudo yum update sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Legacy Software Development" Debian / Ubuntu / Debian derivatives sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install build-essential Arch Linux sudo pacman -Sy base-devel Now you are ready to create / compile any software in your Linux computer, welcome developer! If...

Introduction These days, RAM is not as expensive as it use to be, therefore almost anyone can afford to have a lot more memory that he / she really needs. If you have more memory that your system usually needs you can give it a really good use. As everybody knows, RAM is faster, way faster than hard disks, then, why not use RAM to perform actions that require a lot of disk I/O tasks. Let see some examples: The /cache file, where Drupal boost or Super Cache from WordPress are storing its files. .css .js .ico and other files...

Arch Linux review Introduction Arch Linux is yet another Linux distribution. By the time of this writing Arch Linux is in the top ten list of Distro Watch. Computers are mostly used to perform certain task, and to do that task well, the user should not have to spend much time configuring the computer, or tweaking it to make it work, Arch Linux aims to keep computer working as simple as possible. In fact its philosophy is summarized in the acronym KISS Keep It Simply Stupid. But do not think that because it is simple it is not powerful, Arch...

From Darin Firewall Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML Incredible I have just discovered it, thanks to Movable Type, that comes with it as one of its html parser. What I have discovered about it, is that there is also a python-based program I can install on my Arch Linux. Why do it?, well because sometimes I want to write a draft, or even a final copy of a post for the blog. With Markdown is really easy...

If you are like me, you really like the command line. And sending email while working on the command line, is good, I use it to send me notes to myself, and sometimes to send configuration files as attachments. Is also good to have an option configured to send emails from the command line, as a way to send messages from scripts. I will show you now how to use mutt and gmail to enable a Linux computer to send email. Install mutt Arch Linux sudo pacman -S mutt Ubuntu sudo aptitude install mutt Configure mutt To configure it, we...

Gwibber social network client for Linux Gwibber is a client for Linux that support various social Networks, we will focus this time only in Twitter. Twitter is a social network, that let's you share your thoughts with your 'followers' using only 140 characters, for those who do not know about it. Twitter. One great plus for Gwibber is that it also support identi.ca, which is an open source micro blogging platform, similar to Twitter very common in the open source community. One great feature about Twitter is the support for Oauth authentication, that Gwibber has. So, you need to authorize...

Today is somehow a special day, today is 10.10.10, and no matter which date format you use, it means the same. Today also is the release day of the Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat, Ubuntu 10.10. As you may already know, the web, or at least the Linux related, blogs, forums, twitter accounts and facebook fan pages, they are all full of Ubuntu reviews, Ubuntu comments, Ubuntu new features, and a very big etc. Therefore I am not going to write yet another review, or post screenshots of videos about Ubuntu 10.10. I think enough have been already said about it, but...

Open SSH private/public authentication OpenSSH key public key authentication, let users log into server without the need to use their user's passwords. It is possible to disable any other form of login into server, and let available only authentication based on ssh public key. What is achieved, using this method is to avoid password break by brute force attacks. For this method to work, three steps should be taken. Create a pair public / private key ssh Disable root login in the server Disable password login for any other user in the server Create a pair of public / private...

I am sure you know Tuxmachines.org, and you may also know that the owner is Susan Linton. She does a great job with Tuxmachines, where you find articles from all over the web about Linux, sometimes I wonder how she read all that information, and collect it to create the Reader's Digest of Linux users. But, what I want to recommend you is to read the original articles of Susan, she periodically writes for Linux Journal magazine, but you can follow her articles in this page: Tuxmachines Original content. I would love to have an rss feed for that page,...

There are rumors about the possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft, both company's CEOs have been talking about an alliance to face Apple.It is well know that Apple does not allow Adobe in Apple's iOS, and they have their reasons. Steve Jobs months ago, has written this post explaining those reasons. It was also famous the thought about Apple from an Adobe employee, and his even more famous "Go screw yourself Apple". Finally yesterday the NY Times said. ...The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion...

By Kevin Elwood Introduction to the project: This is a free website for learning how to build a headless server managed over the network or secure internet connection. Donations are encouraged but never required. Motivation of creating it: Easy to manage disk space for internal network users as well as external internet users. Creating your own router from an older PC, so you can use your current wireless router as an access point instead, and move it to a better location in your home \ business. History: Up to revision 3.84, 2 years in the making. Step by step print-screen...

Some days ago I have written a post about How speed up Firefox by storing its cache files in RAM instead of in the disk. However, there is always a downside and in this case it is that once you shut your computer off, you loose all your day cache. This means, that the next time you turn your computer on, you will have to download again all icons, .js, .css files that maybe have not expired yet. The solution for this I have started to use, is to copy all the cache folder to the disk when turning off...

By the time of this writing, a lot has been said about this topic, and you should have read a lot about it.I have been reading posts on others blogs, and also the comments in those posts, and realized that not everybody agree with the fork.Some have some good points, not to agree with the fork.There are two that called my attention.Spreading the efforts is never beneficialWhile this is no doubt true, it is also true that being under Oracle's directions would slow the project, as far as could be seen from the reactions, and how patches to the next...

When you may need to convert a complete web page in html to a pdf file, Linux can help you. We will need two tools: wget - To download the complete page, including css, and others wkhtmltopdf - To make the real conversion from html to pdf You should be able to install both of them using your package manager. To be able to convert the html to pdf, we will follow a two stage process. First step, download the web page in html To do that enter this command: wget -p [url to download] Example: I will first create...

A friend of the page was having some troubles at installing gedit plugings. I will now show with an example how to do it. First thing, of course you need gedit installed on your system. Then download the plugin, in this case I will use for this example the smart highlight plugin. It can be downloaded from: Google code Once downloaded unpack it and then create this directory if it does not exists yet. ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/ you can do it with: mkdir -p ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/ Then copy the [something].gedit-plugin in that directory, in this case, it is the file. smart_highlight.gedit-plugin and finally...

Today I have read a post from Raphael Hertzog, taking about the possibility of a new Debian branch to be created.Debian already has three branches for those not familiar with it, O.K. maybe four branches.Old-StableStableTestingUnstableFrom Wikipedia we have: stable, currently aliased lenny, is the current release that has stable and well tested software. Stable is made by freezing testing for a few months where bugs are fixed to make the distribution as stable as possible; then the resulting system is released as stable. It is updated only if major security or usability fixes are incorporated. After Debian 6.0, new releases will be made every two years. Stable's CDs...

By default sudo "remembers" your password, when you enter it. This is very handy, when you are using a lot of commands with sudo. There is a way to stop this behaviour if you are concerned about security. make sudo not to remember your password But this way, you will have to enter it each time you invoke sudo again. There is another security measure you can take. Once you have finished using sudo, tell it to forget your password. sudo -K

Some days ago I have started testing Linux Mint Debian Edition and Archbang.They have some things in common but a lot more different, why did I pick those to test?, because Arch and Debian are my favorites Linux flavors.ArchBang is an Arch Linux based distribution, I think it is inspired in CrunchBang which until now is based on Ubuntu, and switching to Debian.ArchBang features OpenBox on its newly released 2010.09 "Apeiro" release. With the change from LXDE to OpenBox it looks a lot more like Cruchbang Linux.As the Office suite it offers Gnumeric and Abiword, and Firefox 3 for web...

As I have posted some days ago, I am trying Movable Type as an alternative to Drupal, since yesterday I am also trying Open Melody. Open Melody is a fork of Movable Type 4. Let's start saying that comparing these two, is a little weird, to say the least, it is not even like comparing oranges with apples, to me is like comparing beef with apples. To make this clear I will start with some facts about Drupal. It is a CMS written in PHP, that storages the data in a MySQL database (Can work with others). Drupal is a...

You have a lot of options if what you want is to take screencast (videos of your Desktop) in Linux. But for me the simplier the better, and that is why I normally use ffmpeg Just a simple command line, and you are taking your video. Here is the line. ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1280x1024 -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/screencast.mpg You can change the resolution, to whatever fits your needs. These are the options used here: -r: Sets the frame rate, means, the number of pictures per second. -s: Size, in this case 1280x1024 as that is the resolution...

Today I came across a post titled seven months with windows 7. I do not agree 100% with it. Let me tell you why. Before you continue reading, please take a moment to read the original post, as it is needed to understand my response. "So, what is it about Windows that makes it as good as, or better than Desktop Linux?" "It does not crash" .- Windows 7 has improved a lot specially compared to Vista, but it is also true that Windows XP does not crash either. If properly used. Here is the catch: If you plan to...

Better late than never, so I am entering into this fever called Twitter. And as a Linux Guru wannabe I like to use the command line for a lot of task, including tweeting. I have in past shared with you this post about: Twitter from command line, now I will show you a real Twitter application that runs in the Linux console. The application called TTYtter, is the one I am talking about, you can download it from TTYtter homepage. It is actually just a perl program, but really powerfull. Below some screenshots taken while I was installing it: The...

I have been blogging for some time, I have started in 2007. Even tough I have started with Joomla I have almost immediately switched to Drupal. Some days ago I have installed Movable Type (MT) 5 Open Source, While I am still exploring it, I think is time to share some thoughts about it. For those new to MT, it is a perl powered CMS platform, and that is some of its big differences from the rest. While Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and others are written in PHP, MT developers have chosen Perl. Another big difference is: MT makes static published...

I was trying to figure out a topic to write about. I usually focus on Tutorials and tips, as not being a native English speaker, my grammar is not good enough to write opinion posts. This time I decided to write about the future of Linux, and I was focusing of topics like: Need of marketingTeaching children how to use computers with Linux instead of others.Focus on new devices, like smart phones, tablets, etc. In the meantime, and while trying to clarify my mind, I stepped on this post written by Susan Linton owner of the well know Tuxmachines site....

There are a lot of ways to optimize Firefox, but one of the best way to improve Firefox speed, is by making Firefox to use RAM to save cache files. This way the speed of already downloaded pages is going to be increased. Of course like in almost anything you do there is always a downside, and in this case that is true too. All the cache files are saved in RAM, so when you turn the computer off, all those files are erased. Then, each time you turn it on, you need to populate it from the biggining. There...

Edit: 11/19/2010 I've decided to leave Open Melody or Movable Type, and stick to Drupal. Do not take me wrong MT or OM are great but I will not have the time to mantain two platforms. I am always trying to learn something new. Today it is MovableType, I really liked the idea of static publishing. Together with Nginx, the server should now be ready support digg, reddit, or slashdot. Of course if I am that lucky that some of those places publish any of my content. I am not moving the whole site from Drupal to Movable Type as...

Yesterday night, while installing Movable Type on a test server, I made a mistake in the httpd / Apache configuration and got this error. client denied by server configuration It was an error in the configuration. I just did not apply the proper permissions to the Once I make it look like this: <VirtualHost 11.22.33.44:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/srv/http/www.garron.me/public_html" ServerName garron.me ServerAlias www.garron.me ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/www.garron.me-error_log" CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/www.garron.me-access_log" common </VirtualHost> <Directory "/srv/http/www.garron.me/public_html"> Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> All was solved. So, be sure to use Order allow, deny Allow from all

Some time ago, I have written about taking screenshots with Linux. But at that time I did not know about scrot, so I am now going to write about scrot. Scrot stands for screen shot You will have to install it, as it usually is not installed on most Linux distributions, so using your package manager install it. How to use it To get an instant screenshot scrot file.png To have scrot wait until you orginize your screen. scrot -d 10 file.jpg That will enter a delay of 10 seconds before taking the screenshot. If you want scrot to display...

This collection of commands are some of the commands I have learned in these years. Of course I am not the author of them, as no one is the author of any command in Linux. I have found some of them in differente pages, and modify some of them, others I have "created" by myself. Reading books, or man pages. Disclaimer: Try any of these commands, in non-production servers, some of them may break something Add yours in the comments. Purge configuration files of Debian's removed packages There are different ways to do this, these are some options. sudo aptitude...

I have just installed Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) which is a rolling distribution based on Debian Testing. Here are the screenshots of the installation process. The installation procedure is really easy, it comes with full support for Office production, with Open Office installed. Rhythmbox, mplayer, vlc, brasero, and others in the sound and video category. F-Spot, Gimp, and Simple Scan in the Graphics category. The default /etc/apt/sources.list is as follows: deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing main non-free I really like it, I have...

If you want to share a file from your Linux with other users, the easiest way to do that is: Using Python and this command. cd /your/shared/directory python -m SimpleHTTPServer You need to have python installed of course. Thanks to my friend Rich Scadding who wrote that in the comments of Share a file with woof

This happens a lot to me, I usually forget to start a command with sudo, and therefore I had to run it again. If you run into this problem run: sudo !! And the last command run, will be run again but this time with the command sudo in front of it. i.e. [user@myhost ~]$ /etc/rc.d/sshd restart :: Stopping Secure Shell Daemon [FAIL] :: Starting Secure Shell Daemon [FAIL] [user@myhost ~]$ sudo !! sudo /etc/rc.d/sshd restart Password: :: Stopping Secure Shell Daemon [DONE] :: Starting Secure Shell Daemon [DONE] In the example above, I entered the command without sudo command...

If you want to dump all links in a page to a text file, including hidden ones, you can use lynx. This may be useful for debugging, or to bookmark all links in a webpage of your interest. Also if you want to download all specific files in a webpage, lets say all mp3 or jpg files in a index page. Well, lets see it in action. lynx --dump http://www.go2linux.org | grep http The output is: 1. http://www.go2linux.org/rss.xml 2. http://www.go2linux.org/ 3. http://www.go2linux.org/ 4. http://www.go2linux.org/all-linux-posts 5. http://www.go2linux.org/voip-posts 6. http://www.go2linux.org/web-design-posts 7. http://www.go2linux.org/all-gadgets-posts 8. http://www.go2linux.org/all-my-personal-posts 9. http://www.go2linux.org/archive 10. http://www.go2linux.org/rss.xml 11. http://www.go2linux.org/debian-ubuntu-1 12. http://www.go2linux.org/all-about-security-1...

Clone a Hard disk before making changes to it is a great way to be sure you can go back to the previous state. I usually do that before a major Linux upgrade on my servers, if something brokes during the update I can easily go back. And the command is as easy as: dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb Where if is the input media and of is the output media, be sure to avoid mistakes, as you can ruin your hard disk. Backup to an image If you prefer you can also save to an image, instead of using a whole...

To change the time zone in Linux, using the command line just enter this commands, do not worry they are few and easy. cd /usr/share/zoneinfo Look for your city, in my case it is: America/La_Paz Now create a link to the file /etc/localtime by doing this: sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/La_Paz /etc/localtime And you are done.

From the man page: fsck is used to check and optionally repair one or more Linux file systems. filesys can be a device name (e.g. /dev/hdc1, /dev/sdb2), a mount point (e.g. /, /usr, /home), or an ext2 label or UUID specifier (e.g. UUID=8868abf6-88c5-4a83-98b8-bfc24057f7bd or LABEL=root). Normally, the fsck program will try to handle filesystems on different physical disk drives in parallel to reduce the total amount of time needed to check all of the filesystems. So, if you want to force a file system check on the next boot of your Linux Operating System operated PC or Server. Issue this...

If you ever need to create directory trees like this You can do this: cd /tmp mkdir 1 cd 1 mkdir 2 cd 2 mkdir C or, you can just do this: mkdir -p /tmp/1/2/3 From the man page of mkdir -p, --parents no error if existing, make parent directories as needed You can also use this option to create more complicated trees. Like this one. Do that with this: mkdir -p /tmp/A/{1,2,B/{1,2}}

According to Wikipedia: "In computing, tar (derived from tape archive and commonly referred to as "tarball") is both a file format (in the form of a type of archive bitstream) and the name of a program used to handle such files. The format was created in the early days of Unix and standardized by POSIX.1-1988 and later POSIX.1-2001. Initially developed to be written directly to sequential I/O devices for tape backup purposes, it is now commonly used to collect many files into one larger file for distribution or archiving, while preserving file system information such as user and group permissions,...

When you logging into a Linux box using ssh, the Linux where you are logging from will ask you to validate the authenticity of the key presented by that host. Once you answer yes, that key will be stored. Future logging attempts to that same server will check they key against what is stored in the file: ~/.ssh/known_hosts If they do not match, may mean that someone is in the middle trying to capture your password, so be careful when you see some alert like this: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT...

With preload, you can speed up your Computer, but, only if it is running Linux Operating System. According to Wikipedia: "preload is a Free Linux program written by Behdad Esfahbod which runs as a daemon and records statistics about usage of programs using Markov chains; files of more frequently-used programs are, during a computer's spare time, loaded into memory. This results in faster application startup times as less data needs to be fetched from disk. preload is often paired with prelink." It is really easy to install, as it is included in all major package manager includes it. I installed...

UUID stands for Universally Unique IDentifier and it is used in Linux to identify disk in the /etc/fstab file. This way, the order of the disk in the motherboard can be changed, not affecting the mount point they will have. As can be seen, it is a good idea to have fstab using UUID instead of the /dev/xdx way to identify the disks. Let's learn how to add disks, to your fstab file using UUID. List the UUIDs There are two ways of doing this: ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ Being the output lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 2 10:54 11b7eb1f-79d5-4bfe-8aa5-9235e6cccbfe...

Today in my busiest hour, after a fool action I lost grub. And as smart as I am, I rebooted the PC, so I got locked out of it. Well, time to boot with a live CD and reinstall Grub. This is what I've done. sudo mount /dev/hdb3 /mnt That will mount my root partition in the mnt directory of the Live CD session. sudo mount /dev/hdb4 /mnt/boot As I have a different partition for boot, I need to mount it too, inside the /root partition, if you do not have this scenario, you do not need that line. grub-install...

I have been in the situation of having to share a file with someone in the same room with me, and I had to send it by email. Just because you do not have configured both devices (PCs, Laptops, Smart Phones, etc) to share files in a network, does not mean you can not share files. All you need is to have the file or files you want to share on your PC or Laptop, powered by any Linux Operating System flavor, and that the other device had a web browser and is able to establish a connection with your...

CHM files are a html help files used by microsoft, and others to provide help files From Wikipedia: "Microsoft Compiled HTML Help is a proprietary format for online help files, developed by Microsoft and first released in 1997 as a successor to the Microsoft WinHelp format. It was first introduced with the release of Windows 98, and is still supported and distributed through Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 platforms" But, how to read them in Linux? There are some options, the one I like the most is. Converting it to PDF. What you will need is: chm2pdf, that you...

The new Ubuntu 10.10 Meverick Meerkat is around the corner. And 17 new wallpapers are here to give it a fresh look. From Softpedia: Canonical uploaded today the new wallpapers and default theme for the up-coming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system. Seventeen new beautiful wallpapers and a lightweight and eye-candy theme will please every existing and future Ubuntu 10.10 user! Have a look at some of them: And if you like them you can download from here

Do you like to listen to the radio while working? I do like to listen to music while working, and sometimes my big collection of music is just not enough, so I like to listen to radio. Well if you are working on your Linux Desktop, and connected to the Internet then, you may find useful streamtuner2. This is an Internet Radio Browser with hundreds of music stations to choose. You can install it from the page. As I am running Arch Linux I used yaourt to do it. Once installed, the first time you run it, you will have...

As an initiative of Benjamin Humphrey, in 2009 The Ubuntu Manual sees the first light. Now after a year of hard work, they release their second edition of a great manual of 168 pages. Covering from Ubuntu installation to security and troubleshooting, going through hardware and other topics. This is a great guide and a must have for anyone (Individual or company) trying to start with Ubuntu. If you think you can collaborate with them, see here how to get involved with this project. It does not matter if you are a beginner or an advanced user, download Ubuntu Manual...

Yes, it seems it is now possible to do that, but hey why?, it seems that for now just for fun :) The project is called iX The project points high and these are some of its goals. Add a mobile optimised window manager such as Matchbox used on Maemo and OpenMoko. Add cellular capabilities, data would be my priority but phone functionality such as calls and sms would be ideal. Strip the OS down and optimise for the hardware restrictions such as the lack of ram and cpu speed, this could be as simple as removing unneeded applications or...

How to play poker on your Linux box If you ever wanted to play online poker on your Linux box then we've found a really good guide to check out. You can find the full story here, guide to playing poker on Linux thanks to PokerListings. There's also the complete guide, including work-arounds provided by Linuxconfig.org, and thanks to the ubuntu forum. Just like I always said, the more applications we may have for Linux the more users we have, and the more users, the more support for new apps and hardware. So this is another app that is tested...

/etc/shadow file Description This files stores passwords in an encrypted mode, in modern Unix-like systems, (later than 1990). Before this date the passwords were stored in the /etc/passwd file. In the passwd file the passwords were also shadowed, but because any user has access to it, (read permission, only root can write), the access to the shadowed file, make it easy to appy brute force break passwords attempts. How to avoid such brute force attacks? According to Wikipedia. Systems administrators can reduce the likelihood of such brute force attacks by making the list of hashed passwords unreadable by unprivileged users....

/etc/passwd The /etc/passwd file is a text file that contains important information about each user in Linux Operating Systems. Some of this info, is username, UID, GID, shell, home directory, and some other. From Wikipedia: The file is named as originally it also contained the data used to verify passwords. However, on modern Unix systems the security-sensitive password information is instead often stored in a different file using shadow passwords. . Every user can read it, but only root can write it, unless using sudo permissions. Format proftpd:x:106:65534:user's info:/var/run/proftpd:/bin/false The fields are separated by ":" semi colons. And a description...

You will find here how to discover which directory or file is using your disk space, and therefore where makes more sence to start erasing files. This is assuming you have all partitions in one disk, if not, do not run this command at the root level, but at each mount point of every disk you have. I will apply this on my own hard disk, I have in my Desktop PC all directories on the same disk. cd / sudo du -s * | sort -n Here is my result. 0 proc 0 sys 4 libsmbios_c 12 mnt 16...

Introduction wget and curl, are great Linux operating system commands to download files. But you may face problems when all you have is a dynamic url. Static url and Dynamic url From: http://www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-article-3.php We have: There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated...

PHP arithmetic operators Today we will lear about aritmetic operators for PHP. These are the arithmetic operators, below also a simple example, using the sum operator, to perform a simple sum of three numbers. Operation Example Result Sum $a + $b The sum of a and b Substraction $a - $b Difference of a and b Multiplication $a * $b Product of a and b Division $a / $b Quotient of a and b Modulus $a % $b Remainder Examples of Arithmetic operators Let's see a little example of some PHP coding to use some of these operators. <html> <head>...

Uniq is a Linux Operating System command, that removes successive repeated lines in its output. So if the input is a file that has repetitive lines, all of them will be removed but one, only if they are successive. To assure that all repetitive lines are removed, the file needs to be sorted first. The format of the file is: uniq [options] [input-file] [output-file] If no imput-file is specified, the input is taken from the standard input, also, if no outpu-file is specified the output is send to the standard output. Its Options are: -c, --count prefix lines by the...

Note: This is a cross-post from http://g.garron.me/the-myth-of-duplicate-content I think some webmasters who follow this blog might be interested in reading it here. After reading this post http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html I finally understand better what duplicate content means and how it can really affect your ranking in search engines. Maybe as many webmasters out there, I was thinking that if I receive for instance a guest post that the original author have also sent to other three sites, I would be penalized. But that is not the case, and that actually is only one article in a site, so even syndicated content like,...

It's been a long time since my last PHP post, so today we will start with some basic example of a PHP program What is PHP?, well from Wikipedia we have: PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired...

I have been working with my apache configuration, in one server where I only have one site. That is the main site, and today I have tried to add a second site, a virtual one. Of course I have created two virtual sites, one for the main site (otherwise it just dissapears), and the other for the real virtual site. After I have created it, I have kept getting 403 forbidden errors. When I checked in the error_log file I found this error. client denied by server configuration Well after googling a little, I found the solution, and it was...

I run into this error today, after the energy has gone while I was working on my computer. ssh: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory I needed to install openssl again, that solved the problem.

I run into this problem because I upgraded openssl After looking at the forums I found the solution. So I will learn from now on, that it is not a good idea to upgrade only some package in Linux. Arch pacman should take better care about things like this, as they can break the system. So let's see how to fix it. sudo pacman -Sy openssl Alone, so to have pacman working again, run: cd /usr/lib And then, make symbolic links sudo ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.0.9.8 And another one. sudo ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.0.9.8 Now install the previous version of...

Having a FTP server usually means some risks, in this how-to I will try to show you how to avoid some of them. First, if you can avoid installing an FTP server, do it, usually it is not needed at all, you may think you need it, if you have a web server, and you need to upload files to it, but no, you do not need it. You can use scp, (sftp) to upload your files. When the FTP server is really needed is when you need to put some files that non-techie users needs to download, and you...

I have read many articles dealing with that Linux is better or worse off than Windows. After researching the topic a bit, I think I have something to say in the matter. In my humble opinion these are the main points that an operating system must meet: (function() { var s = document.createElement('SCRIPT'), s1 = document.getElementsByTagName('SCRIPT')[0]; s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.src = 'http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js'; s1.parentNode.insertBefore(s, s1); })(); User friendly An operating system must be easy to use. Should be a tool that saves time. The user should not devote more time to learn how to perform a task than, to perform the...

From the Drupal Home Page (From April 27th) Our third Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the fourth alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love! This release includes many critical bug fixes and...

I have face this lots of times, I am connected to my server using ssh, then I start a download, a log processing or a bittorrent download. I realize that task is going to take a lot of time. What to do?, well usually one have leave the ssh session open, and the home computer on. What if the ssh session just drops? all work is done, and there is the need to start all over again. I have used nohup command to execute commands after exit from the shell prompt. But there are other options, one of them is...

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it may account for as much as 43 % of all Internet traffic (depending on geographical location) as of February 2009. BitTorrent protocol allows users to distribute large amounts of data without the heavy demands on their computers that would be needed for standard Internet hosting. A standard host's servers can easily be brought to a halt if high levels of simultaneous data flow are reached. The protocol...

I have got this by email, wanna to share with you, have fun.

With this email Hello Phil, my name is Daniela, the girlfriend from Jan and have to inform you that Jan died this morning sleeping at home. Yesterday he was still fine and there were no signs for that. Also the police will check whats happen to him. If there should be an interest I'll inform you all from Chakra about the inhumation in his home town Luedenscheid middle/end next week. Regards, Daniela Amnon82 has received this bad news. Jan Mette (funkyou) passed away of as-yet unknown causes. Jan was a major contributor to the Arch Linux community, the creator of...

Introduction to Firewall Builder 4.0 By Vadim Kurland {vadim at fwbuilder DOT org}, the main author of Firewall Builder. Vadim Kurland - vadim (at) fwbuilder {dot} org Systems administrators have a choice of modern Open Source and commercial firewall platforms at their disposal. They could use netfilter/iptables on Linux, PF, ipfilter, ipfw on OpenBSD and FreeBSD, Cisco ASA (PIX) and other commercial solutions. All these are powerful implementations with rich feature set and good performance. Unfortunately, managing security policy manually with all of these remains non-trivial task for several reasons. Even though the configuration language can be complex and overwhelming...

Updated: 18.00 GMT: Ubuntu is now officially released, download it from here http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download Well Actually not yet, but in a few more hours a new release of an LTS Ubuntu version will be released. According to Wikipedia this release ...includes the Linux kernel 2.6.32 and improved support for Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers, while switching to the open source Nvidia graphics driver, nouveau, by default. The new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of "Light". We're drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that "light" is a good value in software....

After a big break. I will post one more review of a great Linux site. Today the turn is for NixCraft. What is NixCraft? From its old page, we have this: The nixCraft Linux sys admin Blog / Site offers frequent updates and insights about Linux sys admin work, tips, hacks and news. This is a site about Linux and Open source software. Whether you are a developer or UNIX/Linux administrator, you will find lots of good information. The site has post as old as 5 years!, it may be running since 2005, the domain is registered since 2002, and...

For the workaholic, or the social media or Internet addicted via: http://www.todochistoso.com/

First let's define with the help of Wikipedia what a dictionary attack is: In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by searching likely possibilities. A dictionary attack uses a brute-force technique of successively trying all the words in an exhaustive list called a dictionary (from a pre-arranged list of values). In contrast with a normal brute force attack, where a large proportion key space is searched systematically, a dictionary attack tries only those possibilities which are most likely to succeed,...

TuneUp is a software that helps you clean your iTunes music. It adds the correct tags (ID3), correct your song names from song0001.mp3 to the real name, also finds the album art cover. Unfortunately it is not free as we Linux users are used to, but it is a real good piece of software, and they have now an offer of 20% off the regular price, I've just got an email. I wanted to share with you this info. Enter this code PUNKROCK2010 when buying TuneUP Gold or Annual edition. This code is good through May 4, 2010. If you...

When I create a new Virtual Machine in Virtual Box, I always choose "Dynamically expanding storage". And when I first install the gest OS (usually Windows to run iTunes) it starts very small, just Windows 7 and iTunes on it. (My iTunes library is usually on another disk). But I start to install and uninstall different kind of software, freewares, etc., and the image start to grow, and grow. When it comes to a point that the real space Windows is using is two thirds of the dvi image itself, it is time to optimize the Virtual Box disk image....

To disable the system bell or beep on Linux, at least the tab completion, and the back space bell. Edit the file /etc/inputrc (as root) and add this line. set bell-style none Do that if you want to be a system wide setup. If you want it only for some user session or for your own session. Edit the file ~/.inputrc and there add the line. set bell-style none

I really felt in love with Nginx I am using it and experimenting with it. As I already said in a previouse post about Compiling Nginx with gzip_static, one of the features I like the most is the gzip_static. Nginx can serve gzipped content in two ways. Compressing it on the fly Serving previously compressed files I like the latter a lot, but unfortunately I do not know about a Linux Distribution thats comes with that feature enabled. Even the source you download from Nginx page have this feature disabled by default. Therefore, we need to compile it by ourselves....

With increasingly faster internet access, these days everyone is waiting for pages to load faster and faster. So if your page does not load fast enough, you can lose too many visitors. According to studies, people wait up to 5 seconds for a page to load, if it does'nt they leave the site. Another reason to lose visitors, is when one of your pages becomes popular on sites like digg, reddit, slashdot or stumble upon, and your server does not support the load. This post will guide you step by step in the process of installing a robust server, capable...

While upgrading Arch Linux sudo pacman -Syu I run into this problem error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) cups: /etc/cups/classes.conf exists in filesystem cups: /etc/cups/printers.conf exists in filesystem cups: /etc/cups/subscriptions.conf exists in filesystem Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded. To solve it, just backup all files that are causing the problem. cp /etc/cups/classes.conf /etc/cups/classes.conf.original cp /etc/cups/printers.conf /etc/cups/printers.conf.original cp /etc/cups/subscriptions.conf /etc/cups/subscriptions.conf.original Then upgrade cups with force switch sudo pacman -Sf cups The output could be: resolving dependencies... looking for inter-conflicts... Targets (2): libcups-1.4.3-2 cups-1.4.3-2 Total Download Size: 0.00 MB Total Installed Size: 14.54 MB Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y checking...

When you type long commands like this one to display only certain fields of the squid log file. tail -f /var/log/squid/access.log | awk '{print $3,$4,$5,$7,$9}' You do not want to type it again, every time you need it, so, you use history, you can find it by using. history | grep tail You will see an output like this 967 tail -f /var/log/squid/access.log | awk '{print $3,$4,$5,$7,$9}' And then run it with: !967 or you can run !tail And history will search for the command starting with tail, and will execute it.

Security is important, we all know, and to protect files in Linux Operating System machines is really easy. The files can be password protected, so you can carry them in a flash memory, and if you loose the flash, you do not have to worry about your info, as it will not be readable. To encrypt a file in Linux we will use, gpg which is parte of the GnuPG. Syntax of gpg gpg -c filename.ext Let's imagine we have a file called my-personal-info.txt I want to encrypt with a password to protect the file, run this command. gpg -c...

If you need to debug, or for any other reason to log all queries your DNS server gets, you can turn log on. We will use rndc to achieve this goal. First we need to configure both rndc and bind. Fortunately rndc comes with a handy tool, that teach us how to configure both rndc and bind easily. Run: rndc-confgen The output should looks like this: # Start of rndc.conf key "rndckey" { algorithm hmac-md5; secret "t1cM8rHmLecMSu2SxbzI5w=="; }; options { default-key "rndckey"; default-server 127.0.0.1; default-port 953; }; # End of rndc.conf # Use with the following in named.conf, adjusting the...

Few tips to use with bash command history. Erase duplicates in your history file If you repeat some times the same command, like I usually do when checking memory with free -m You will end up with a lot of those command repeated through your command history, and if you type history You may see an output like this: ls -l ls -h free -m free -m free -m free -m free -m If you want to get rid of the reapeated commands, set the variable HISTCONTROL to erasedups. export HISTCONTROL=erasedups And the output of the command history will be:...

The jobs command will list the running, stopped, foreground and background jobs or task running in the current session. Syntax jobs [options] The options are: -l Report the process group ID and working directory of the jobs. -n Display only jobs that have stopped or exited since last notified. -p Displays only the process IDs for the process group leaders of the selected jobs. run some jobs to see it in action: xterm & xterm & Now run jobs This could be the output. [1]- Running xterm & [2]+ Running xterm &

Parallelize downloads across hostnames, this is usually one of the suggestions that Google's Page speed performance analysis tool in firebug gives you, and is sometimes a very easy task to perform, no matter if you are running Apache or Linghthttpd or Nginx. Usually are pictures, so let's say you have your pictures (Or actually any kind of files) in: /var/www/your-site/images/ Now let's create another directory structure like this. sudo mkdir /var/www/cdn0.your-site -p sudo mkdir /var/www/cdn1.your-site -p sudo mkdir /var/www/cdn2.your-site -p sudo mkdir /var/www/cdn3.your-site -p Once this is done, create four new virtual servers, that is not going to be covered...

When your run a webserver, which could be Apache, Nginx or Lighttpd, you may want to know how it is performing. Actually usually any web server can handle a normal day of work, but what happens when the server under your administration gets, stumbled, or appears in Slashdot, or digg front pages, now a days even twitter may drive a lot of traffic to a webpage. If that event occurs your server will be under real stress, and it is in that day when you want it to perform well, and survive the "attack". It is usually not possible to...

Backups are one of the most important tasks a Linux System Administrator has to perform. From Wikipedia: In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. These additional copies are typically called "backups." The verb is back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup (often used like an adjective in compound nouns). Backups are useful primarily for two purposes. The first is to restore a state following a disaster (called disaster recovery). The...

Continuing with Add second IP Ubuntu" Now let's see how to do it on Arch Linux. First edit the file rc.conf (I like the way Arch Linux is so simple). You have these options: Two Statics IPs eth0="eth0 10.1.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 1.1.1.255" eth0_0="eth0:0 10.1.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.1.1.255" INTERFACES=(lo eth0 eth0_0) In the routes section include something like this gateway="default gw 10.1.1.1" ROUTES=(gateway) One static and dynamic IP I have made this, I do not know if it correct, but works for me, I need one IP from the DHCP, and one static IP eth0="dhcp" eth0_0="eth0:0 200.87.61.XX netmask 255.255.255.240...

You can perform simple aritmetic operations on the Linux shell command line, without using any external program. use the command expr These are the aritmetic operations. Add expr 1 + 2 Substract expr 2 - 1 Multiply expr 2 \* 1 Divide expr 2 / 1 Reminder of a divition expr 20 % 3 Note that for multiplication we escape the * character, with the back slash, and that the % operand gives as the reminder of a divition, also the divition is only giving as the Integer

Log files are important when debugging or just to check how a system is performing, we usually use cat to list the log on the screen, but if we want to see a live view of the log file, the command is: tail -f /var/log/logfile.log It will display the last lines of the log file actually the tail of it, you can see more about tail command. The -f option makes it wait for more lines, which will be displayed on the screen as soon as they are written to the file, so you can in real time the log...

I like to work a lot on the command line of my Linux Boxes, and I am using Twitter a little bit these days, so I want to post from the command line. I have checked the twitter page and have found that they already have the solution, with the files of their API http://twitter.pbworks.com/API-Docs So lets use curl to update the status of any account in Twitter, the single command is: curl --basic --user "ggarron:*********" --data-ascii "status=Arriving the office" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json" And easily this can be inserted into a bash script like this #!/bin/bash curl --basic --user "ggarron:*****" --data-ascii "status=$@"...

My favorite editor is vim, but some others prefer nano, or emacs, nano reminds me WordStar, anyway. Cron job default editor which is invoqued by the command crontab -e is vi, while I prefer vim, and you may prefer nano, you can use this command. env EDITOR=nano crontab -e or as I usually do: env EDITOR=vim crontab -e You can create an alias

Perhaps is not one of the more important debates, as if it is an Operating system or not, or if you should name it Linux, or GNU/Linux, is the important thing and maybe the important thing is how it works, and how good you know to use all the programs that are part of the GNU/Linux, discussions are always entertaining, so here I leave you a good point of view about if Linux is or is not an Operating System per se. If you are at all familiar with my brain sneezes (I could use another word here but this...

I lost the forums In this site, while upgrading my server, but since this post is really visited, I am going to recreate it here: Here is the draft version, later I will make a better one. Installing KDE 4 on Centos This is an unfinished work, as until now I could have not been able to install (compile) KDE 4 on Centos 5, I will post here the steps I already did, and the error I have found, If someone can continue with the job please post below on this thread, I will also still continue trying. I will...

There are situations when you want or need a second IP on your box, for example when you are installing a firewall (In this case is always better to have two NICs but you can do it with only one) We will assume you already have a system running and already has one IP, if not you wanna read Define a static IP in Linux. Now we will add the second IP use the same command specifying a virtual NIC sudo ifconfig eth0:0 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up That's all, but to make changes permanent, edit the file /etc/network/interfaces There you...

Dictionary attacks as described in Wikipedia are: In cryptanalysis and computer security, a dictionary attack is a technique for defeating a cipher or authentication mechanism by trying to determine its decryption key or passphrase by searching likely possibilities. A dictionary attack uses a brute-force technique of successively trying all the words in an exhaustive list called a dictionary (from a pre-arranged list of values). In contrast with a normal brute force attack, where a large proportion key space is searched systematically, a dictionary attack tries only those possibilities which are most likely to succeed, typically derived from a list of...

I do not know since when, but today while browsing the Ovi Store from my Nokia E71 I have discovered that Skype is available, I downloaded of course. No more need of Fring or Nimbuzz, since today I will use native skype. The quality over Tigo 3G network is great! Actually Tigo is the only operator to offer 3G in Bolivia.

To send messages to user that log on a Linux System, you can use the "message of the day" function. Just edit the file /etc/motd and add there the message you want the users to see each time the log into the system. sudo vim /etc/motd Add there something like this: Be sure to change your password at least once a month. Just enter the command passwd at the prompt, and enter twice the new password The sysadmin Now when someone, logs into the console, or ssh the system will see that message.

This is a small tip, but a useful one also, to list only the directories in Linux use this command. ls -d ./*/ That will have an output like this ./ConsoleKit/ ./bash_completion.d/ ./cron.daily/ ./default/ ./gnome-vfs-2.0/ ./iptables/ ./logrotate.d/ ./nginx/ ./php/ ./profile.d/ ./skel/ ./vbox/ ./ODBCDataSources/ ./bluetooth/ ./cron.hourly/ ./fail2ban/ There are other ways, if you want it in a single column, use this ones: ls -l | awk ' /^d/ {print $9}' You will get something like this: ConsoleKit ODBCDataSources PolicyKit X11 alsa avahi bash_completion.d bluetooth bonobo-activation ca-certificates conf.d cron.d cron.daily cron.hourly cron.monthly cron.weekly cups dbus-1 default fail2ban To list only files use...

From the man page of figlet we have: FIGlet prints its input using large characters (called ``FIGcharacters'')made up of ordinary screen characters (called ``sub-characters''). FIGlet output is generally reminiscent of the sort of ``signatures'' many people like to put at the end of e-mail and UseNet messages. It is also reminiscent of the output of some banner programs, although it is oriented normally, not sideways. FIGlet can print in a variety of fonts, both left-to-right and right-to-left, with adjacent FIGcharacters kerned and ``smushed'' together in various ways. FIGlet fonts are stored in separate files, which can be identified by the...

To play flash videos like the ones downloaded from youtube, you can use VLC. You can also use to play other formats like. .mpg, .vob, .avi, .mp3, *.ogg Here are some uses examples. Install it on Arch Linux using sudo pacman -Sy vlc Then to view a video on your disk just enter: vlc /path/to/file/file.flv or vlc /path/to/file/file.mp4 Do not forget to see the man page for more options. also you can use cvlc to avoid the control window, and just view de video in a single window, with no controls.

If you get an error like this ==> Starting build()... ==> Connecting to GIT server.... /var/abs/local/yaourtbuild/get-flash-videos-git/./PKGBUILD: line 28: git: command not found While installing get-flash-videos from yaourt on Arch Linux, run this command, to install git sudo pacman -S git Then try to install get-flash-videos again.

get-flash-videos is a command line utility that let's you download videos from flash based sites. To install it on Arch Linux you can use yaourt First install a dependency. sudo pacman -Sy git Then run yaourt get-flash-videos Once installed, you may download some videos to test, as an example download this from my youtube page. get_flash_videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1wWkNdbqPw To watch your video you can use vlc vlc kde-4_Cube.mp4 To install it on Ubuntu or Debian run: sudo apt-get install libwww-mechanize-perl libxml-simple-perl wget http://get-flash-videos.googlecode.com/files/get-flash-videos_1.21-1_all.deb Or the latest version, see the webpage for the latest version http://get-flash-videos.googlecode.com Then, install it: sudo dpkg -i...

This is something every sysadmin knows, or shoul know, but maybe Desktop Linux users does not know. Yes it is not too useful for Desktop users anyway but, in case you do not know and might need to enable or disable the loggin ability of some users here is how to. First let's see why we would like to do such a thing (blocking a user from loggin). If you have a Linux System that works as email server, you do not need to give loggin permissions to all the users of the box, specially if you allow them to...

Apple is great at Marketing, they are doing a lot of noise around the iPad, and yes it is a wonderful product. I have myself an iPod Shuffle which I love for running, and I also have an iPod Touch, which I love to read emails, surf the web, while in my bed (avoiding the commercials on Tv). But the iPad, with no multitasking, with no flash support, and with almost the size of a Laptop, mmh, I may better prefer the HP slate. Which one would get "iPad vs Slate" Or even this tablet with all the power of...

From Gnome page, we have BOSTON, Mass — March 31, 2010 — The GNOME Project is proud to announce GNOME 2.30, the latest stable release of the popular Free Software desktop environment and applications suite. GNOME 2.30 builds on previous GNOME releases and brings hundreds of improvements for users and developers, including enhancements for user management, Web browsing, support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features. GNOME contributors have added improvements across the board for GNOME 2.30 in accessibility, productivity applications, Web browsing, instant messaging, and games. This release includes hundreds of new features, enhancements, and improvements over the GNOME...

This is a message for all Go2Linux readers, now Go2Linux will be on twitter, so if you like our posts, and use twitter, you can follow us there. Just go to http://www.twitter.com/go2linux and start following us

One command I use a lot is ls -l -l use a long listing format Here is an example of its output: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 9 11:49 modprobe.d -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jan 11 2009 motd drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 23 17:17 mplayer -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 311 Mar 31 10:01 mtab -rw------- 1 root ggarron 0 Feb 24 18:07 mtab.fuselock -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2614 Jul 13 2009 mtools.conf drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 9 11:48 mysql -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8728 Feb 13 14:30 nanorc -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 767 Jan...

A For loop is, as its name says a loop that executes certain code or commands for a given number of datum. From Wikipedia: for loop is a programming language statement which allows code to be repeatedly executed. A for loop is classified as an iteration statement. For Loop Syntax If you plan to use it in the command line, the best syntax to apply is: for: for NAME [in WORDS ... ] ; do COMMANDS; done Example: This for loop example will print all files in a given directory, in fact it will act almost the same as the...

Security is always a concern in today world, your house, your car, and your server, I do not know about your house or car, but I can give some advice to implement a real good security system using three doors the intruder will have to pass in order to gain access to your system. In the first place we will use a script I got on the Internet a long time ago, which implements a real good firewall using IPtables, then, we will have knockd to open the firewall when we want to enter and finally we will have fail2ban,...

Nginx is a web server / proxy server, according to Wikipedia, this is the description: nginx (pronounced as "engine X") is a lightweight, high performance web server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy, licensed under a BSD-like license. It runs on UNIX, GNU/Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows[2]. According to Netcraft, 7% of all domains on the internet use nginx. It is really fast serving static content, so a lot of sites are using it as a front end to Apache, where Nginx is only serving the static content and proxying the dynamic content to be processed...

In order to increase the performance of MySQL server, query_cache may be turned on. What this is going to do is make that the queries that are repeated will be cached and not actually executed each time they are requested by the code, this aproach is really good specially for php / MySQL based web pages, if a site grows and get lots of visits a day, tunning it is a must to better use the hardware resources, and not limit the webserver because of MySQL problems. Let's see how to enable query_cache. Edit the file my.cnf and add at...

I have just upgraded and optimize my web server, and I would like to know if it can get a lot more traffic than before, in case I can get digged in the future (I was three times in front page, and the server went down) So please use twitter, stumbleUpon and any other social network to bring traffic to this page, I will monitor the server in the meanwhile. I will give you this two funny pictures in reward, they have been taken from http://www.carandautoinsurancequote.com/ under creative commons licence, if you are the author of this pics and you...

Nowadays we have a lot of bandwidth available right?, well maybe not, yes it is true that in some countries, it is easy to have a 10 Mbps connection to the Internet, but that is only the connection speed of your house/office to the HQ of your Internet service provider, and not to the Internet itself, it is good to have that kind of connection if you are getting Video on demand, Voice over ip (VoIP) from your service provider, but if you are planning to get services from beyond that point you will need good connection with the server...

Until now I have been always using Debian in my servers while Arch Linux as my Desktop and Laptop's operating systems. A week ago I decided to run Arch Linux in one of my servers, and yes, there are some differences, for instance Apache, where even the name of the daemon is different (Apache2 in Debian and httpd in Arch Linux). But the one that really made me investigate a little more was cron daemon, they not only have differences they are different programs in each distribution, of course you can install either on Debian or Arch the version the...

With today's big disks and extremely powerful CPUs out there, memory is probably the more expensive resource. When it comes to Virtual Hosts, also CPU power could be a problem, I have been running this site at Linode for a year now with no big problems, the only ones were because of some lack of memory, which caused the CPU usage to scale up, until I needed to restart the server. Because of that experience I was investigating about vmstat. you can read vmstat man page at any time. First let's check how memory works in Linux, memory is made...

XCLIP(1) XCLIP(1) NAME xclip - command line interface to X selections (clipboard) SYNOPSIS xclip [OPTION] [FILE]... DESCRIPTION Reads from standard in, or from one or more files, and makes the data available as an X selection for pasting into X applications. Prints cur‐ rent X selection to standard out. -i, -in read text into X selection from standard input or files (default) -o, -out prints the selection to standard out (generally for piping to a file or program) -f, -filter when xclip is invoked in the in mode with output level set to silent (the defaults), the filter option will...

I have recently moved my site to a new web hosting company, I am running Drupal 6, the last version by the time of writing. I am getting this warnings when, updating / creating nodes, or when running the cron manually. Warning: strtotime(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. Please use the date.timezone setting, the TZ environment variable or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Chicago' for 'CDT/-5.0/DST' ..... The solution was pretty simple,...

VMSTAT(8) Linux Administrator's Manual VMSTAT(8) NAME vmstat - Report virtual memory statistics SYNOPSIS vmstat [-a] [-n] [delay [ count]] vmstat [-f] [-s] [-m] vmstat [-S unit] vmstat [-d] vmstat [-p disk partition] vmstat [-V] DESCRIPTION vmstat reports information about processes, memory, paging, block IO, traps, and cpu activity. The first report produced gives averages since the last reboot. Additional reports give information on a sampling period of length delay. The process and memory reports are instantaneous in either case. Options The -a switch displays active/inactive memory, given a 2.5.41 kernel or better. The -f switch displays the number of forks...

Linux never stops surprising me, I discover a new application, or a new tip every day, I have been with no time this last months so I could not write here as much as I would like. Anyway, let me share this tip with you. Today tool is xclip first of all install it Debian/Ubuntu sudo aptitude install xclip Fedora sudo yum instal xclip And for my favorite distro sudo pacman -S xclip This great tool sends the output of shell commands to clipboard, which is very useful, if for example you want to create a document containing man pages,...

I have been buying some music on itunes, it comes in AAC (.m4a) format, which is great to use in itunes (I have it on a Windows 7 running over VirtualBox), or to use it in my iPod Touch or iPod shuffle, but if I want to use it in my cell phone (an old one which does not support AAC format) I have to convert it to mp3, I have to also convert it if I plan to use mpg123 which I use a lot. Well lets go to learn how to convert from AAC to MP3 I will...

While Trying to install VirtualBox from AUR, and when installing the dependencies, I got this error. ==> Starting build()... /tmp/yaourt-tmp-keripix/aur-libpng12/libpng12/./PKGBUILD: line 26: patch: command not found ==> ERROR: Build Failed. Aborting... Error: Makepkg was unable to build libpng12 package. It was solved by install base-devel package sudo pacman -Sy base-devel So, as a note to me, keep in mind that to install "build" packages from AUR, base-devel package is needed.

It may happen that you have send a real big job to the printer, and then you realize that, you forgot to change the paper size from A4 to letter, or any other scenario where you may need to change something in a document already sent to the printer queue, so now you need to cancel it. So first lets see the spooler (Printer queue) lpq This will list all your jobs sent to the printer. BJC-250 is ready Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size 1st ggarron 248 (stdin) 0 bytes 2nd ggarron 249 (stdin) 0 bytes Now if you...

Iptables, is a great tool to create firewall in Linux, actually it is not only for that, but useful to pre-process or post-process any package of data that arrives to our Linux Operating System machine. The other day I was needing to block the access to my network using the mac address of a machine, and Iptables come to save my day. This is my scenario, I have an open Access Point (Do not never do that, always keep your access points closed, using WEP or better WPA, or mac address filtering). Well, I had it open, and had some...

I have just wrote a post about how to install nslookup, but what is nslooup? well, according to wikipedia it is "nslookup is a computer program used in Windows and Unix to query Domain Name System (DNS) servers to find DNS details, including IP addresses of a particular computer, MX records for a domain and the NS servers of a domain. The name nslookup means "name server lookup". The most common version of the program is included as part of the BIND package. More modern alternatives to nslookup are the "host" and "dig" programs which also ship with BIND. Both...

If you work with Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora, as soon as you have your default installation, you will probable have nslookup utility installed, but, if you are like me, working on Arch Linux, you will have to install it. Just enter this. sudo pacman -S dnsutils And you will nslookup and other dns utilities ready to run.

Everytime I upgrade my kernel on Arch Linux, VirtualBox stops working, and everytime, I can't remember the command to rebuild it. So I am copying here how to do it, so I can come and read it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT NOTES: - Run "vbox_build_module" as root every time your kernel is upgraded, to compile the module for the new kernel version. - Add your user to the vboxusers group: gpasswd -a USERNAME vboxusers - Add "vboxdrv" to the MODULES array in your "/etc/rc.conf" - Add "vboxnetflt" to MODULES if you want Host Interface networking. - Add "vboxnetadp" to MODULES if you...

The guys from Dataviz has just launched the V5 of its RoadSync Software for Symbian. This new version, has some new features, being the most important one, the ability to sync with GoogleSync. Until version 4.0 the "push" feature was not working as it should, while it was working with MFE (Mail for Exchange), it was not always working with RoadSync, I have just upgraded to version 5.0 today, and it is working like a charm with my Google Apps premier account, and my Nokia E71 phone.

If you have installed Picard in Arch Linux, and you try to explore the CD "CD Lookup", you may get an error like this: Error While reading CD Error opening library: libdiscid.so.0 cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory That is because, you may have not installed libdiscid.so.O, so go ahead and install it from yaour. yaourt libdisc You will get something like this: 1 aur/libdiscid 0.2.2-2 (47) A Library for creating MusicBrainz DiscIDs ==> Enter n° (separated by blanks, or a range) of packages to be installed ==> ---------------------------------------------- ==> Select the package, and yaourt will...

I do not have a very big mp3 music files collection, just 2 to 3 gigs of them, but I have made it over the years, and some of the original CDs are missed, so I can not import them again. I am using an iPod Touch and iTunes to hear my collection, and all the music I have bought from itunes is nicely classified, and I have the Album picture also available, but with my old imported music I do not have it, because the tags are not properly set. I have stumbled into this great application, which is...

If you are usually on the move, and you need quick access to your Linux server, you may buy a Nokia Symbian phone, E-series, N-series, and others like 6120 classic are useful, and you can then install Putty for Symbian on it and from there access to your Linux box. Here are some screenshots of Putty for Symbian in action. You can create different profiles, in order to save time accesing the same servers, some other features, are: You can change fonts, You can use full screen, You can create a log file, for more info about features, download putty...

Email has become such an important tool, that everyday more and more people wants to have it 24/7 available. Some years ago RIM started the blackberry service, and for years it was the only option available in the market, but that has changed, and now we have other options. Thanks to Google and its Google Apps product, we now have at affordable prices push email, as Google Apps is working with Active Sync and that way the Iphones, Windows Mobile and Nokia Symbian S60 devices with a Exchange client can have push email, calendar and contacts synced. Google has this...

As Arch Linux is a rolling release distro, there are updates available almost all days, and maybe is not a good idea or not practical to upgrade your system all days, maybe not even all weeks. I usually do it twice a month, or even once a month, but when I finally want to do it, there are a lot of packages to download, so I create a script that will keep my system ready for the upgrade, this script will run every time I turn my system on. So create a script file, lets say, upgrade-arch.sh, and put this...

Today, after a long time not updating my Linux Operating system (Arch distro), I decided to start a sudo pacman -Syu I got this error after downloading all the packages error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) vi: /usr/bin/view exists in filesystem Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded. Hopefully, the support for Arch Linux, is one of the bests out there, The solution is very simple, enter the next command. sudo rm /usr/bin/{view,rview} And then run again: sudo pacman -Syu for more info go to: http://www.archlinux.org/news/445/

Almost all major GNU Linux (operating system) distributions comes with inetutils installed by default, but that is not the case with Arch Linux, and maybe Gentoo as well. If you are running one of these distributions, you may miss the command line ftp or telnet, which are usually needed, if you are new to these distros, you may not know how to install them, well they all come in a bundle with other tools, all you need to install is the package inetutils with your package manager. i.e. In Arch Linux run: sudo pacman -S inetutils And you will have:...

These days 3G connections are becoming more and more popular, and one of the most popular modems, at least in Latin America is the Huawei 156, which is a USB HSDPA modem, it works automatically on Windows, also with Ubuntu (at least with the last version) but with Arch or Debian no, that is mainly because you do not install all the packages needed by default on these distros. Well the only needed package is wvdial, so install it using your package manager tool (pacman, aptitude, apt-get, etc). Once installed, edit the file /etc/wvdial.conf/ and make it look like this...

This is really easy on Linux, maybe even more that in Windows, you can use CRL+C and CTRL+V as in Windows, but the easy way is. Select the text you want to copy, then go to the application where to want to paste it, and using the middle button of your mouse (the wheel in some models) you paste it. Remember that to change from one app, to another you should use CRL+TAB, as if you use the mouse, you may loose your selection.

Since Go2linux was born some years ago, has been hosted in four or five different places, it started in my office in a VMWare virtual machine with Debian Edge, then I moved it to shared web servers, but more or less six months ago, I have moved it to Linode.com, and what is Linode? well it stand from Linux node. At Linode, you have VPS (Virtual private server), running Linux, that way you can be in total control of your server, you can install any software you may want, lets say, nginx+fastcgi instead of apache+mod_php, or anything you want. You...

Almost everybody have heard about Google Chrome, for those who not, it is the Google browser, it is a real good, fast Internet web browser, as almost everything from google. The drawback of it is, that it is only available for Windows, so what about us, Linux Operating System users?, well there is an option and that is to install chromium, which according to Wikipedia is "Chromium is an open source web browser which Google Chrome is based on.[1] The project's aims are to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web"....

If you want to play protected CDs or DVDs on Arch Linux or any other distro, you may need to install libdvdcss, in order to avoid the message "Media stream scrambled/encrypted". In Arch just enter this at the prompt. sudo pacman -S libdvdcss You may also need to install libdvdread libdvdnav, so enter at the shell prompt sudo pacman -S libdvdread libdvdnav Now you should be able to play those protected CDs, be sure to have legal copy of any copyrighted material.

There are a lot of pages explaining different ways to achieve this over the Internet, I have read a lot of them, and this is my summary of the steps I needed to follow to finally have a working Internet connection through my nokia E71 phone integrated modem. Yes, it is better to have an ADSL, Cable o any other connection over a 3G connection, but sometimes your cellular is your only way to access the Internet, for me that is specially true when traveling, sometimes the Hotel Internet fails and I need a backup connection to read my email,...

You may know that if you have a directory called My-Documents and you want to change to it, you have to do something like this cd My-[TAB] And you will end with the full command like this. cd My-Documents But, if you do this cd my-[TAB] You will probable hear the system's beep and nothing else, because Linux is case sensitive, if you want to be able to use TAB with capital letter or without it, add this line to /etc/inputrc, or to $HOME/.inputrc set completion-ignore-case on Now it will work with the capital My-Doc... or without it as in...

Well, actually it was more than a month not writting in my blog, and do not think this will be a permanent situation, but I am with too much work these days, but I have given some time to start reading Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo and Debian mailing list, and also to answer some of the emails. I am also starting to explore new topics to write about on this Linux blog, if you want to suggest any topic please use the comments, I had to enable comments moderation as there is too much spam these days, and nobody wants to...

There are times when you might need to filter the traffic on your firewall using MAC addresses instead of IP addresses, iptables has the option to do it. From the man page of iptables: Note that this only makes sense for packets coming from an Ethernet device and entering the PREROUTING, FORWARD or INPUT chains. You may want to insert this line in you firewall script. iptables -A INPUT -m mac --mac-source 00:11:2f:8f:f8:f8 -j DROP This way the packets comming from the network element with the MAC address 00:11:2f:8f:f8:f8 will be denied. That is if you want to block the...

If you have implemented Music on Hold on your asterisk box, you may want to listen to it, to know if it is working as you want, of course you can call to your IVR number and wait for the music on hold, but it is better if you create an extension specially designed to hear to music on hold. This is how to do it, in the extensions.conf file add these lines in the context your extension is. exten => 1000,1,Answer exten => 1000,2,MusicOnHold() Now each time you dial 1000, you will be redirected to music on hold, and...

I have been trying to write something on the blog for a long time, it was a very busy month, and the next one will not be any different, but I can not live without my hobby, and yesterday I run into a weird problem, my two computers showed the time four hours ahead!, I looked for an easy way to sync them and stumbled upon this way. Openntpd, and from its webpage: OpenNTPD is a FREE, easy to use implementation of the Network Time Protocol. It provides the ability to sync the local clock to remote NTP servers and...

The most common way to use an asterisk VoIP PBX is with an internal FXO card like Digium or Sangoma, but there are other ways, like using an external gateway like Quintum or Audiocodes to name just two of the options. I am not an Asterisk expert, but I prefer the second aproach, as it may save CPU power on the Asterisk server, as the Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog conversion is now done in the external gateway instead of the Asterisk server. Having said that, I will show you how to route calls to that external gateway,...

I have been working these last days on an Asterisk over Debian, and I will be posting some tips I am learning about it, today I will post about how to record a voice message that can be used with the IVR menu. The IVR (Interactive voice responce) is one of the most used PBX applications, and the best VoIP PBX (Asterisk) have a real good support of this feature. Create a extension for this in the sip.conf file. [205] type=friend username=205 host=dynamic allow=all secret=1234 context=default qualify=no After that, insert these lines in your extensions.conf file Exten => 205,1,Wait(2) Exten...

There are some situations when you need to start a second X session on your computer. If you are running KDE the solution is quite simple, just go to K->Leave->Switch User and if you are not using KDE, the solution is still easy :), Hit ALT+CTRL+F2 and log in the new terminal window, now run inside it. xinit -- :1 A new X session will start, now you can switch between them using ALT+CTRL+F7, F8 You can also start a third one, using the third terminal, and so on. Another way is to run startx -- :1 Instead of xinit,...

Note: Use this only as your last resort, and only if you also have a firewall protecting your server, this is dangerous to apply, and if you do, try to go back to the previous (default) configuration as soon as possible. When trying to connect via ssh to a server, I got this answer from the server. ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host If this happens to you too, first start looking if you are using this format to log in the server ssh -l [existing-server-user ] [ip-of-the-server] or ssh [existing-server-user]@[ip-of-the-server] Then, and here it was my problem, be sure...

According to Wikipedia: An ISO image is an archive file (also known as a disk image) of an optical disc in a format defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This format is supported by many software vendors. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .ISO but Mac OS X ISO images often have the extension .CDR. The name ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system used with CD-ROM media, but an ISO image can also contain UDF file system because UDF is backward-compatible with ISO 9660. And if you have one of those images,...

Today I have upgraded my Arch Linux, everything was good, and the system was upgraded, but then suddenly pacman refuses to update databases. This is the error: When entering this command: sudo pacman -Sy The output was: :: Synchronizing package databases... error: failed to update core (unexpected error) error: failed to update extra (unexpected error) error: failed to update community (unexpected error) error: failed to synchronize any databases After looking for the solution I realized that all the mirrors in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist were commented, so there were not mirrors available to update from. The simple solution was to uncomment some of...

Conky is broken after Arch Linux update/upgrade. Today I have run sudo pacman -Syu And conky was updated to the latest version, after that it stop working, and when I run it from the console, the output was like this: Conky: unknown variable ibm_temps Conky: unknown variable ibm_fan I found in the forums that the problem could be solved by recompiling conky with --enable-ibm flag set. So I did it, first I had to install abs or read my short version of that howto how to install abs on arch Linux Once installed abs and ready to run, compile and...

I am new to Arch Linux, but each day I love it more and more. Today I had to compile conky, because I was needing a special option that was not set by default, in any other distribution, I would have to download the .tar.gz (tarbal) file and go through the normal process of ./configure make make install And I am not saying that is not possible, or too difficult, but if you do that on Debian, Ubuntu or any other distro (not on Gentoo, or maybe slackware) the package manager will then loose control over the installed package, to...

If you need to install or update an Arch Linux package and you are behing a proxy, there is a way to quickly configure it to use that proxy. This will not be permanent, so it is great to use with Laptops, to set a momentary proxy server. To set the http proxy enter in the console su - To switch to root, as root is the user that is able to run pacman export http_proxy='http://127.0.0.1:8123' To set the ftp proxy enter in the same console window export ftp_proxy='http://127.0.0.1:8123' be sure to use the appropriate IP and port according to...

Time and date are important parameters in computer's world, if they are not accurately set, you will have problems. Some of problems are not too much importnnt, like the time on your emails, but others.... If time and date are not properly set in Linux, can lead you to a mess, like: Your cron jobs, will not run when they are suppose to run You may loose your appointments if you are using your computer calendar We need to accurately set time and date in our Linux, here is how to do it, from the command line. date +%Y%m%d -s...

How Customize Ubuntu with Backgrounds and Emblems   This guest post was written by Gilberto J. Perera. Gilberto writes for LaptopLogic.com where you can find the latest gaming laptop reviews and have a look at the best laptop accessories! As a new Linux user one of the first things I set out to do was customize my Ubuntu installation. I started to explore the main desktop and window options and I discovered that window backgrounds can be modified to use whichever picture a user designates. The user can also add Emblems to their files and folders to help identify contents...

For Desktop computers, this is usually needless, as you may be the only user logged in at an any given time, but if you are a server admin, you know that there may be a lot of users connected to the Server at a given time. It is useful to know who they are, and maybe also, what are they doing, this for security reasons, but also if you are planning any server maintenance or reboot, you will have to know who are logged, and what are they doing to know if you can reboot the server in that moment,...

I finally manage to have my KDE power control, screen brightness, working, as well as, I am now able to suspend to RAM or Hibernate to disk also working from KDE. First I must say that I had all of that working from the command line, I also have installed and working cpufreq So, the only needed step to have this working was to configure, /etc/Policykit/Policykit.conf Edit it with your favorite text editor as root It should look like this: < !DOCTYPE pkconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD PolicyKit Configuration 1.0//EN" "http://hal.freedesktop.org/releases/PolicyKit/1.0/config.dtd"> That text is modified so you can see it on this...

There are a lot of wireless manager software available for Linux, some of the most common ones are: NetworkManager, which is the default for Ubuntu KwifiManager, which is the KDE's default one I used to use wifi-radar, but now I am using wicd. Installation Use your package manager to install it on your Linux distribution. Debian / Ubuntu sudo aptitude install wicd Arch Linux sudo pacman -S wicd Gentoo Linux sudo emerge wicd Read How to install wicd for more installation methods. Configuration Once installed, you need to make the daemon to start at each boot of your Linux, this...

last is another command for the system admin tool box, it displays the login history of all or any specific user. Yo do not need to be root to use it: last ggarron pts/1 200.87.61.2 Sat Apr 25 11:02 still logged in ggarron pts/0 200.87.61.2 Sat Apr 25 10:41 still logged in publico pts/0 10.1.1.86 Fri Apr 24 16:25 - 16:47 (00:22) ggarron pts/0 200.87.61.2 Sat Apr 18 19:34 - 19:54 (00:20) ggarron pts/0 10.1.1.43 Wed Apr 15 15:27 - 10:30 (19:03) root pts/0 200.87.61.2 Mon Apr 13 22:41 - 01:11 (02:29) ggarron pts/0 200.87.61.2 Sat Apr 11 15:25 -...

The guys of MiniVDS ordered a review of their service, first lets explain a little what a VDS/VPS is, It is a Server with some virtualization software installed, like VMWare, XEN, or any other, where there are installed some virtual servers, and you may rent one of them. So it is like having your own private server, but given the fact that you are sharing the resources of a server with others, it is affordable. Now lets go to MiniVDS review. Introduction MiniVDS offers small Virtual Servers, at a really affordable prices, starting at 5.95 $us per month. And what...

Yes, maybe I am writing to fast, but only a few hours left, and Ubuntu 9.04 will be realeased, there are already a lot of posts about it in the blogosphere. I will try to give you a list of some of the best reviews about it and also some good sites with screenshots. Hope you enjoy the list. Reviews and Screenshots First Look at Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" Beta Jackalope gets jaunty with Ubuntu nip and tuck Ubuntu boss talks Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope - Review Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 1 Screenshot Tour Ubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty Jackalope' release...

I have installed KDE 4 on Arch Linux, it is the version 4.2, and I have installed it from the official repositories. It is as simple as: sudo pacman -S kde And here is the result.

Linux is a very versatile Operating System, one of its applications I like the most, is that it may run from a USB key, first there were only a few distros able to do that, Puppy Linux or DSL were some of them, now a days, a lot can, Mandriva, Ubuntu, and more, and more each day. You can find how to do install and run Linux from a USB key at PendriveLinux, but if you really want to let your friends amazed, get one of this amazing usb keys from La Cie. I really like how this usb keys...

VoIP has improved a lot since its first days, today a lot of multinational business are using it as a reliable way to keep stay in touch. With more and more telecommuters, and business man working, and with cell phone roaming costs still high, VoIP is a real option for both big and small corporations. And when you talk to a CFO about investing to save costs, you usually will see the checkered flag for your project. Most of these projects will involve IP phones or ATAs, but you may use softphones too, which are very convenient for the traveler...

That title, makes all of you fellow Linux users want to know why would someone may want to go back to Windows, right? It is because we (Linux users) have discovered freedom, and not only freedom to change it, or freedom to use it, but also the "living free of system halting", the "living free of viruses", the "living free of having to format the hard drive and reinstall from time to time", so, it is hard for us to believe that someone may want to forget about this, and go back to Windows. But face it, there are people...

Introduction History is one of the Linux commands I use the most, maybe I am too lazy to write a command again, so I keep looking in the history log for commands even as short as: sleep 5 && s2disk Which hibernate my Laptop after five seconds, so, continuing with my series of posts about History, I will write this time about histcontrol variable. This environment variable, will control how history stores the commands you enter in the shell. Options There are four options at which this variable could be set, and also the unset position, the four possible set...

I can't remember how, but I stumble upon this nice site, it seems to be new, as its oldest post is from April 9, 2009. I like that almost every post has a webcast in upper-right corner, it combines some good opinion posts, with how-tos, and also applications lists' posts. So if he keeps the pace, we have seen the birth of another great Linux blog, the user is now using Arch Linux and recently switched from Gnome to KDE. Check it out andsubscribe to its news You may say "hey is not there enough Linux blogs out there?", I...

Today, while updating my Debian Squeeze, after running sudo aptitude update I got this: E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.debian.org_debian_dists_squeeze _contrib_binary-i386_Packages E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.debian.org_debian_dists_squeeze _contrib_binary-i386_Packages E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. After googling a little, I found this solution. sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf This removed all the corrupted files, and the process could start again with no problems. After that all was working...

Few days ago, Blair Mathis has written a post about eight rocking Linux Distros, I think is a great post, and covers almost all categories (If we can use that word) of Linux Distros. The post has: Full Desktops, like: Ubuntu, based on Debian Sabayon, based on Gentoo PCLinuxOS, based on Mandriva lightweight, like: Crunchbang, based on Ubuntu Puppy Linux, based on SlackWare, or at least with compatibility with it Damn Small Linux, based on Debian Live distros, like: Knoppix, based on Debian It even talk about Linux XP Desktop 2008 which may fall into full desktop category, and now...

Today I was upgrading my Arch Linux box, (110 package to upgrade!!), suddenly when all the packages were downloaded, i got a message, that according to what I could read in the forums, it seems to be a common error when upgrading Arch Linux, but easy to solve anyway. Here is the message I got: :: Starting full system upgrade... resolving dependencies... looking for inter-conflicts... Targets (112): acl-2.2.47-2 libcap-2.16-3 avahi-0.6.24-3 xproto-7.0.15-1 fixesproto-4.0-3 compositeproto-0.4-2 coreutils-7.2-1 damageproto-1.1.0-2 dash-0.5.5.1-2 dmxproto-2.2.2-2 gconf-2.26.0-3 hal-info-0.20090330-1 pm-utils-1.2.5-1 udev-141-1 hal-0.5.12git20090406.46dc48-1 gnome-keyring-2.26.1-1 libglade-2.6.4-1 libgcrypt-1.4.4-1 libtasn1-2.0-1 gnutls-2.6.5-1 tdb-3.3.3-1 smbclient-3.3.3-1 gnome-vfs-2.24.1-2 libgnome-2.26.0-2 sqlite3-3.6.12-1 libproxy-0.2.3-1 libsoup-2.26.0-1 libgweather-2.26.0-1 libical-0.43-1 evolution-data-server-2.26.0-1 libavc1394-0.5.3-2 libv4l-0.5.9-1 ptlib-2.6.1-1...

When they say Arch Linux is at the bleeding edge, they really mean it, the latest stable kernel by the time of this writing is: 2.6.29.1 and it was released on April the second, 2009, and when I started the upgrade my Arch copy yesterday It was already available for this distro. I do not know about others, and I will try tonight to upgrade my Gentoo copy, to see if it also has this version available, but I really like how updated are Arch Linux packages, I have been using it for some weeks, not exclusively, but enough to...

Sometimes you may need to add a directory to the Linux PATH, and the reason to do this, could be to have some scripts you may have written included in the execution PATH. This is done easily by with a single command line, but that is going to last only until you reboot the machine or, if logout and loggin again, so If you want to make it permanent, you may need to edit some config files, there is one global, and there are also specific ones for each user, you may choose which according to your needs. Add a...

Once you have asterisk installed and running you need to configure it, to be able to use it as PBX. Asterisk has a lot of features, and we will start to explore some of them here step by step, in this first post about configuring Asterisk, I will only show you how to configure a single two internals and make them be able to call each other, you may add more than one, as you will see later, and all of them will be able to call each others. So lets start: Asterisk has two main configuration files, and those...

Continuing with the Asterisk setup, today we will see how to configure Ekiga to work with it, to install Ekiga, launch your package manager and use it to install Ekiga. This time I will use a screencast to show you this how-to, this is my first try, so please be gentle if you see that is in poor quality, or if it could have been better edited, I am sure the next ones will start to improve, hope you may find this how-to useful. Please be sure to read: simple Asterisk configuration to understand the parameters used in this video....

Some of the most popular posts here in Go2Linux are: How to transfer files with ssh and 10 useful examples of the Linux find command So, I have decided to merge them in a good tip to look for files in a remote server and then copy them to your local machine, I haven't already needed something like this, but it may be useful for someone (I hope). I will write a bash script, that will do the work for you, if you want to run this as a script it will be handy not to need to enter the...

I have found this video while stumble upon, It has a beautiful acquarium as "wall paper", and the Compiz cube turned on. Credits go to: http://www.youtube.com/user/sausagenmuff And here is a small description of him about how to do this. 1. install linux 2. install compiz 3. enable 3d cube, wobbly windows..ect 4. set cube opacity slider BOTH to 25. 5. use a skydome and check off "animate" (panorama's from google images work well) 6. Install atlantis "fish" plugin you can get it here: http://gitweb.compiz-fusion.org/?p=fu... (extract to your home dir, go into that directory inside a terminal, type "make" then "sudo...

Some time ago, I have written this post about human spam, since then I have moved Go2linux to Drupal 6, and have installed mollom on the site. Mollom is really taking care of the spam, specially spam bots, I have also installed another module, which do not permit to post links in the comments, this two tools, have stopped the spam in Go2Linux. If you still want to put a link in the comment, put it as simple text, people interested in reading your link will copy and paste it, but bots like google bot, will not follow them, and...

Arch Linux have some kind of community driven repository, AUR (Arch User Repository). There are a lot of packages there, you may want to install, the easiest way to do it, is using YAOURT (Yet AnOther User Repository Tool), this tool, will let you install packages from the AUR repository, as well as, the official Arch Linux repositories. Now that you know that this great tool exists, you will have to install it: We will get it from the AUR repository :) Go to your builds directory, create it if it does not exists cd $HOME/builds Get the Tarbal file...

In the past I have shown you, how to install Asterisk on Debian and CentOS, Now I will show you how to do it on Arch Linux According to wikipedia: Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) originally created in 1999 by Mark Spencer of Digium. Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Its name comes from the asterisk symbol, "*". Asterisk also supports a wide range of...

Sometimes you may need to erase some given type of files or with a given extension from a directory and its child directories. This can also work in some other ways, that I will also show you in this posts. To achieve this try this command. find /directory/where/to/delete -name '*.ext' -exec rm '{}' + You may also use it to delete files with a given filename. find /path/to/working/directory -name 'Aerosmith*' -exec rm '{}' + The above example would delete all files starting with Aerosmith, this may be used to erase all mp3 files that start with Aerosmith, but do you...

If for any reason you need to find where in the disk a command, you may use which this command will search on the PATH and display the directory where the command is located. You may also look for a list of commands instead of a simple command, lets see some examples: which ls The output is: /bin/ls Now if you run: which opera This is the output in my PC, where I have opera installed. /usr/bin/opera But, you can also run which to look for a list of commands as I said before. which ls opera This might be...

Every day I love small window managers more and more, actually I starting to think that there is no need for Gnome or KDE, I am using latelly OpenBox and was using fluxbox before. One of the differences between these light weight Linux window managers and the Desktops like Gnome or KDE is that when you add or install a new program it is not automatically inserted in the menus, so you need to add it manually or may have a program doing it for you. If you are using OpenBox you need menumaker First install it. Arch Linux sudo...

If you have a text file that contains a lot a lot of blank lines, you may want to avoid them printing in the screen when you try to read that file, there is a simple way to do that using either less or cat I have create a file to show you how this works. cat -n text-file.txt This is the output with all the blank lines 1 Hello 2 3 This is a text file 4 with 5 6 a lot 7 8 9 10 11 of blank lines 12 13 14 that I will use to 15...

I am starting to think that no matter the utility you may think about, It may already exists in Linux. Today I was happily surprised with the existence of units Units, is a tool that converts quantities from one scale to another directly from the command line, i.e. from meters to feet, or from liters to pint Interactive mode When working in interactive mode, you will enter the quantity and the origin scale, and then the scale you want it converted and you will get the answer, and the system is ready for the next conversion, useful when you want...

It is been a long time since my last Linux Site review, today I have stumbled upon Royal Linuxing and really liked what I have seen. Let's start with the site look, it is fresh, modern, and clean, I like clean sites a lot, they invite you to read. I have to copy here its "about" paragraph, I really like it. Royal Linuxing is a world where free software is valued, nay sought for!! While proprietary software is banished, degraded and ridiculed till the end of times. The author has written a lot of nice how-tos about day by day...

This post has nothing to do with Linux or technology, but being a Football fan, and as I am from Bolivia, I feel I should write about this historic victory of Bolivia against one of the best teams in the world, nothing more, nothing less than Diego Armando Maradona's Argentina. Today in La Paz, Bolivia Argentina was defeated by Bolivia 6 to 1, here in Santa Cruz, even the traffic in the city in the mid-afternoon appears to be calm, as most of the people were in the cafes, or going to house, and to any place with a TV,...

Continuing with my review of performance tools, I will now introduce you with iotop which is a top-like python application that will let you know in real time the data written and read from the disk, as well as, the average speed of these input and output actions. If you administer sites, you need to know which applications are reading and writing to the disk, so you can improve the performance of the server. Installing it Before installing it be sure to have: Python ≥ 2.5 and a Linux kernel ≥ 2.6.20, to know the versions you have do this:...

I am paranoid about security, I am always looking for new ways to secure my server or even my Desktop PC, which sometimes I left up and running. One of the beauties about Linux is that it is really easy to administer it remotely, but that is also one of the major concerns about Linux security, if you have weak passwords, you are exposed to attacks, there are lots of ways to protect yourself, one of the easiest is to close the firewall, and only permit access to port 22 from some specific IPs, but this is not an option...

I have found some Ubuntu Google Search Engines, which are Customized Google search to look only in sites that are related to Ubuntu, well I think that for the Arch Linux Community it could be good to also have a tool like that, because of that, this is my first try to do this for Arch Linux. The sites where this tool will search are this ones: http://www.go2linux.org http://www.archux.com/ http://aur.archlinux.org/ http://bugs.archlinux.org/ http://bbs.archlinux.org/ http://www.archlinux.org If you know of some other Arch Linux site or blog that should be included please let me know. To insert links in the comments, use this...

Today one of our blog readers asked me how to get hardware info of the memory, I want to share the answer with all of you, actually I have never needed this, but could be very useful in some situations. lshw is the command that will do the magic for us. Installing it sudo aptitude install lshw Yes, that easy if you are using Debian, for Arch you need to use AUR lshw AUR Once installed, run it as root sudo lshw The output will appear directly on the screen, so you can pipe it to less to be able...

This week I had to move a big .tar.gz file from an ftp server to another one, and I had to bring it first to my PC before sending it to the other server, and when I uploaded there it has errors, the same error it has in my Desktop, so I could have avoided the waste of time of sending it to the second server if I could have checked its integrity when it has arrived to my Desktop. Well the second time I did that and this time was all OK, here is how to check the integrity...

Today I've got an email from Ronald W. Hovsepian (President and Chief Executive Officer of Novel) announcing the release of Suse Linux Enterprise 11, back in 2006, Novel and Microsoft signed an agreement, Now Suse Linux Enterprise is the most compatible Linux with Microsoft, actually the email says that they are the only ones that offers full interoperability with Microsoft Windows Desktops and Servers. They have 3.000+ applications from different providers and partners and also the recomendation of Microsoft and SAP, this version is prepared to be installed on a x86, mainframe, Laptop or Desktop equipment. Th e mail continues...

A forum partner at Crunchbang Linux forums Mr. RigoSanta3 has created this two videos about how to start with crunchbang Linux, Check both of them, and help spreading the word about using Crunchbang Linux Here is the second video, this one is kind of funny :) And do not forget to help spreading the word.

If you have a pretty busy CPU and need to run a command that is not that important, you may schedule that command to run when the load of the CPU drops below 1.5 (Check this value with top or htop) by default or you can define a new value for this, this way you do not have to monitor the CPU load yourself, and can let Linux take care of it, and the program will run when the CPU can. The program you need for this is batch From the man page we have: executes commands when system load...

This seems to be a common problem when installing Arch Linux, so I recommend you to read this thread if you are going to install Arch and then OpenOffice, be sure to install also the right fonts. This command may be useful pacman -S artwiz-fonts ttf-ms-fonts openoffice text is nothing but rectangles - Forum: Workstation User Author: russianwizard Posted: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:32:26 -0400 Last post: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:32:26 -0400 [ArchLinux Forums] Also read the Arch Linux wiki fonts

If you have an apache server, you should be familiar with google analytics, awstats or other good ways to see statics about the use of your site, some of this services are free some others not, and they present you with a lot of good info, but the most of them are not in real time, you may want to see some statics in realtime about your site. A real good tool for this is apachetop, which will run on your server and present you with a some real time information about your site load, and the pages being seen...

You may want to read this updated version Introduction Arch Linux is a bleeding edge Linux Distribution, that is mainly focused on simplicity, according to them "...without unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications..", read its philosophy. It has a powerful and efficient package manager Pacman I will in this Arch Linux review, to be fair and not biased. Release cycle Arch Linux is a rolling release distribution, meaning there is no specific dates for new releases, it is continuously developing, it is almost always at the bleeding edge, with the most updated versions of packages. This means you only have to...

I recently needed to change the name of my Linux Operating System server, it is a Debian Lenny 5.0 Stable, what I did to make the change permanently is to run this line. sudo vim /etc/hostname And add something like this in there: www.go2linux.org Then I run the /etc/init.d/hostname.sh script, and that is, to test it run: uname -n or hostname -a

First a small introduction about wicd for those who are not familiar with it, it is a deamon/client application that manage your networks connections, more or less like Networkmanager which is the default in Ubuntu, I was using wifi-radar untill I discovered wicd reading the ArchLinux wiki, well now lets go to the problem I got while running it on Debian and how I solve it. I have installed wicd to manage my network connections on my Debian Squeeze, the daemon started OK, but when I was trying to start the client I got this error. Loading... Attempting to connect...

If you have a Core 2 Duo 2.8 Ghz, or better or any AMD equivalent you will be able to compile Gentoo software and continue to work with your PC almost normally, but if you are working on a Celeron, or any other old PC, you will find your computer really slow, while installing new software on Gentoo. You can use nice to reduce the priority of emerge/portage and let some available CPU cycles for your normal work while compiling. To do this, we will edit the /etc/make.conf file with your favorite text editor mine is vim sudo vim /etc/make.conf...

This tip is in the ArchLinux Beginners Guide, but I have thought it was a good idea to repost it here, as it is a very useful tip, when you are using ArchLinux. When you first install ArchLinux you will have a file /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist where are listed a lot of mirror servers for all the world's regions, and it will try to use the very first one, and then if it fails the second, and so on, so maybe the first one, or the next are not the fastest mirrors for you, in order to have listed the fastest in...

I was making a backup today and this message appeared, after .tar.gz the directory File shrank by 2014298112 bytes; padding with zeros After googling a little, I found that the problem is not actually a problem it is just a file that has more space that it is really using, so it is reserving space for future use, and this makes sense because I was backing up a VMware virtual machine, and the file that gave me this error, was the virtual disk of that VM.

I want to thank, all the go2Linux community, and want to share with all of you, that we are now 2000+ people, we are continously growing, and hope you all may find interesting posts and content at this blog. Keep reading and commenting. cheers to all of you.

If you need to tar a directory and compress it with gzip to backup or just to translate the files you can do it in one single command. Enter this: tar czf /path/to/tar.gz_file /path/to/directory/to/be/tar.gz In the next example I will add the files in /home/me/docs to a tar file named mydocs.tar.gz tar czf /tmp/mydocs.tar.gz /home/me/docs/

You may have noticed that Go2Linux have changed its appearance, I have also upgraded to drupal 6, I have used this method of migrating the drupal databases instead of upgrading the site. Well I hope you like the new view of Go2Linux, I am thinking about not putting adsense in the site and no other advertising form, but as I still need the income, you may consider donating to the site. Another approach is to add a subscription mode, where for 2 dollars a month, you may register and turn off the advertising, and let the advertising for the non...

I am using ArchLinux for some weeks now, I have installed it on my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60, and I must say I really like it, I will post here some few tips about it if you want to give it a try. We need to know that ArchLinux (Like Gentoo) is a rolling release, that means that there are no releases like in Debian or Ubuntu, where from time to time you get a new fresh release, and you have to upgrade it, in ArchLinux the packages are constantly being updated, so to have the last version or Arch once...

Bootchart is a tool that collects data from the PC at boot time, basically it shows a graph where you can see what was happening with CPU and Disk during the boot process of the PC. It is more a tool to find where to optimize the GNU / Linux operating system boot process, as it shows when the disk or the CPU is idle, and thus wasting time, that can be gained in order to have a faster boot. It also shows the process that run in that time and the resources them use. From its homepage, we get...

I have a us keyboard on my Laptop IBM/Lenovo T30, and usually I need to write in spanish, so I miss the "ñ", on this situation I use this command to change the layout of my keyboard from us to es, and then take it back to us when I need any special key that is hard to find. It is really easy to change the keyboard map or layout of your GNU/Linux operating system on the fly, with no need to configure nothing or change any configuration file. But be aware that once you reboot your computer it will...

I am thinking about buying this kind of phones for the office, I have implemented a VoIP PBX, based on Asterisk working on a Debian server. We use mainly Skype for our International calls, and Asterisk for the in-office calls, I know there are Skype Wifi phones also in the market, but I am faithful to my Linux PBX :), so I am thinking about trying the integration between Asterisk and Skype. Linux is always there to help you keep your office costs low, it acts as a PC with no need to pay for licenses, also as server, and...

If you use dhcp to get the IP on your Arch Linux, you will use the Network DNS server, and that is good, if that DNS server works well, but I have seen in some networks they resolv some addresses to 1.0.0.0, do not know why but to fix this you may do this, if working on Arch. On /etc/rc.conf file you will have some line like this eth0="dhcp" INTERFACES=(eth0) and now you must create (if it does not exists) a file named /etc/resolv.conf.head and add there your stuff, something like this nameserver 200.87.10.100 nameserver 4.2.2.2 This way these nameserver...

I work a lot at the console of my Linux systems, I do not have gdm or something like that to start my graphics mode, and usually use startx command to enter in graphics mode. But I do not want to work at the default resolution of the screen as it is not scrollable and it has too few lines, so I usually change it. Here is how you can also do that if you also like to work in text mode. Your first need to edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file with your favorite text editor, I like vim sudo vim...

bc(1) bc(1) NAME bc - An arbitrary precision calculator language SYNTAX bc [ -hlwsqv ] [long-options] [ file ... ] VERSION This man page documents GNU bc version 1.06. DESCRIPTION bc is a language that supports arbitrary precision numbers with inter? active execution of statements. There are some similarities in the syntax to the C programming language. A standard math library is available by command line option. If requested, the math library is defined before processing any files. bc starts by processing code from all the files listed on the command line in the order listed. After all files have...

One thing I really like about GNU/Linux operating system, is that it has a lot of utilities which are easily to install, free, and secure, something other operating systems does not have. One of those utilities is bc a handy calculator, with it you can perform easy calculations, or perform complicated calculus, you can even define your own functions, this utility is really useful. You may say that it is equivalent to the HP you had when you were at University, well I had a Casio :). There are two ways to use it, from the command line and using...

As in GNU/Linux Operating System, the most if not all configuration files are text based, and you usually do changes to them, now if you are wise you should keep a backup of your configuration file before change it. Well, I am talking about this, because this is the most frequent scenario where I use diff command, you may have some others. Well let's now see how it works I have these files. numbers1.txt 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 numbers2.txt 0 2 3 4 5 7 6 8 9 1 Let's start with diff diff...

From different GNU Linux Operating System sites I have been directed to Steve Lawson's Blog The Red Devil, which name is maybe related to the BSD mascot. Well talking about the blog itself, as you may see if you check the archive, you will find that this is not a daily updated blog, but hey! if you are looking for quality instead of quantity this is the side you should subscribe to, Steve is a journalist, so he knows how to write a post, it is nice to read its articles. The site is mainly dedicated to Linux but not...

I have found a good picture that ilustrate the main components of the Linux Operating System. (GNU Linux) The source of the image is here And it is licenced under Creative Commons

Here is the second problem I run into, once solved Proble updating Gentoo Trying again with this command. sudo emerge --update --deep -p world I got this !!! Multiple package instances within a single package slot have been pulled !!! into the dependency graph, resulting in a slot conflict: www-client/mozilla-firefox:0 ('ebuild', '/', 'www-client/mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.19', 'merge') pulled in by =www-client/mozilla-firefox-2* required by ('installed', '/', 'gnome-extra/yelp-2.22.1-r2', 'nomerge') (and 1 more) ('ebuild', '/', 'www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.0.6', 'merge') pulled in by www-client/mozilla-firefox required by world It may be possible to solve this problem by using package.mask to prevent one of those packages from being selected. However, it...

I would like to apologize to my readers, my real readers and commenters, but due to the huge amount of spam, human spam actually, which are people who read the post and then comment on them, but only to get the link back to its site. I think that to keep this site serious, I have to get rid of that, because of that nobody will be able to insert a link to his homepage in their name, when commenting. If you are a real reader of this site, and have a blog about Linux, you can write me, for...

When you work at routing, you will find yourself converting decimal to binary and the opposite, specially for the masks of the IP address, here I will show you how to do it easily using your command line terminal. Decimal to Hexadecimal echo 'obase=16;10'| bc A Or wcalc -h 10 Decimal to Octal echo 'obase=8;10' | bc 12 Or wcalc -o 10 Decimal to Binary echo 'obase=2;10' | bc 1010 Or wcalc -b 10 From Hexadecimal to decimal echo 'ibase=16;A' | bc 10 From Octal to Decimal echo 'ibase=8;12 | bc 10 From Binary to Decimal echo 'ibase=2;1010 | bc...

In one of my Gentoo installations I run into this problem when trying to update it, I run these commands sudo emerge --sync and then sudo emerge --update --deep --pretend world And I got this message Calculating world dependencies / !!! All ebuilds that could satisfy ">=sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41" have been masked. !!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request: - sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.3-r1 (masked by: required EAPI 2, supported EAPI 1) - sys-libs/e2fsprogs-libs-1.41.4 (masked by: required EAPI 2, supported EAPI 1) To solve that problem just run this: sudo emerge portage and try again, it should work this...

I ran into this problem. I upgraded my Gentoo kernel and suddenly my Eth stop working it was continously saying that there was no driver for the NIC, actually it said, there is no NIC at all. That was a driver problem, the way the gentoo community helped me on the mailing list to solve this problem is applicable to any other similar situacion, and not only on gentoo but on any other distro you are tying to configure and compile your own kernel. First to know which drivers you need, start with a Live CD, like Ubuntu, Knoppix or...

Hi, I have just upgraded from Debian Lenny to Debian Squeeze, and so far so good, everything is working great as I am used to since I start using Debian, when Etch was in testing. Since then I have never reinstalled my Debian machine, I have installed Etch Testing that day, and then upgraded to Lenny and now to Squeeze, I have even change the machine and only disconnect the disk from the old one and connect it to the new one, and everything continue to work the same, let me tell you that is not a server and it...

We finally have Lenny as Stable that happened yesterday and now the gave the news in the official site of this great Linux distribution. Lenny official release news Also Check out this notes Where you can see that the new testing Debian is now code named "squeeze", you can start upgrading your Etch versions to Lenny Upgrade Debian (Old stable) Etch to Lenny (Stable) If you have stable in your sources.list you will be getting the upgrade directly, just enter the upgrade commands, listed in the above post about upgrading. You can also see in the official release note that...

The guys at SpiderOak asked me for a review of their product. It is a backup tool, that lets you backup your data in specialized servers and that are accessible from anywhere, and from any computer either PC, Mac or Linux, provided that they have the software installed. Lets first talk about how to install it in Linux, they have .deb files for Ubuntu and Debian, and you can also go for the APT source, they have support for Hardy Heron, Gutsy Gibbon and Debian Etch, but off course you can install them on intrepid and it will work, I...

This small how-to is to show you how to add users to existing groups, either new or existing users may be added to one or more groups at once. In all examples I will use: user: go2linux groups: admin,printers There are two possible scenarios 1. The user is new In this scenario we have to use useradd, and also have two different scenarios. 1.1 Adding user to supplementary group useradd -G admin go2linux To add the user to more than one group useradd -G admin,printers go2linux 1.2 Adding user to primary group useradd -g admin go2linux 2. The user already...

You may know that if you type sudo [command] Your password will be asked, but if you type it again in a few seconds, it will not be asked, because Linux "remember" your password for some time, well if you are really concerned about this, you may force Linux to "forget" your password inmediately. How to do it? sudo visudo And add this line: Defaults timestamp_timeout = 0 You may change 0 to any number representing the minutes you may want your password to be "remembered", or let in 0 so you will need to type your password each time...

Nitrogen is a: "X11 background previewer and setter" You may use nitrogen to preview and set a wallpaper in Gnome, KDE, fluxbox or openbox, with KDE or Gnome is really simple to use it, just open it in the appropriate directory, the one which contains your pictures, then choose one and make it your wallpaper. nitrogen /directory/with/pics/ But to use it with Fluxbox, you can start the same as with Gnome or KDE, but each time you restart Fluxbox it will not appear as your Wallpaper. So, to make fluxbox reload the wallpaper each time you restart it, edit your...

When trying to run skype on my Gentoo Linux I got this error: floating point exception Nothing else, just that. Need to say that in order to see why skype was not starting, I had to start it from the console, so I could see the output messages. After googling a little, I found this solution, that I do not fully understand, 'cause I am just starting with Gentoo, but it worked just great! As root run this: echo net-im/skype qt-static >> /etc/portage/package.use And then reinstall skype sudo emerge skype This will make skype work the next time, If some...

I have a spanish keyboard, and my gentoo was using the default US keymap, so a lot of keys was difficult for me to find, to change this behaviour I did this. I edited the /etc/conf.d/keymap and made sure this line was in there: KEYMAP="es" I added keymap to the starting scripts sudo rc-update add keymaps boot I made sure these lines were in my X config file /etc/X11/xorg.conf in the "InputDevice" section Option "XkbRules" "xorg" Option "XkbLayout" "es" You can also change it from the command line with: setxkbmap es

I do use Linux Operating System in all my computers, my two Desktops and my Laptop, but some of my colleagues do still use Windows (poor them) so to send them zip files, I can not use the tar.gz files, so I usually put the files I need to send them in a /tmp/something directory and the use zip. First install it. sudo aptitude install zip That works for both Debian and Ubuntu Then use it. zip -r zipped_file.zip /tmp/something/ And it is done, as easy as that, and now all my colleagues will be able to read the zip...

And another year come and go, and what a year, on march my son came to this world, so for some months I could not sleep very well, and then I could not dedicate too much time to this blog, sorry for all that silent time. Anyway the Go2Linux community continue to grow, and now we have 1800 readers via RSS, 1200 more than a year ago, we are now receiving more than 3500 visits a day, mostly from google. The number of posts this year are a lot less than the year before, 167 vs 400, but I will...

After trying to mount an nfs file system on my Crunchbang I got this error: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on 10.1.1.1:/home/nfs, missing codepage or helper program, or other error (for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might need a /sbin/mount. helper program) In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so All of this was because crunchbang does not come with nfs-common installed, so if run into this problem, run: sudo aptitude install nfs-common If you are working with Arch Linux, type this: sudo pacman -S nfs-utils And the...

I have been thinking about trying Crunchbang Linux Operating System since a long time ago, but for some reason I just never had the time to download and install it. I wanted to test it specially because two years ago I have a common project with Philip, finally that project never go to anywhere, but it was great to meet some good people, I will take the time to let you know the blogs of those good people I met among Philip. Polish Linux Borys Musielak UnbuntuHQ Bert De Brabandere Linux Screw Artem Nosulchik Crunchbang Philip Newborough Well I think...

Today I needed to list some files in a .tar.gz files, and after checking the man page of the tar command, I decided to write this post for any one who may be asking. How to read the contents of a tar file? Here is how. tar -tf file.tar This will list on the screen all files on the archive file.tar, you may want to use less, to page the output. tar -tf file.tar | less To list the files if the .tar file is gzipped. tar -ztf file.tar.gz or tar -ztf file.tar.gz | less To list the files if...

As you know I am new to Gentoo, and I am experimenting some problems which I may call "Newbie problems" one of them was this. When I tried to update my Gentoo Operating System, and I run. sudo emerge --sync And then, sudo emerge --update --newuse --deep world I got this problem: Failed to emerge media-sound/alsa-driver-1.0.18a, Log file: >>> '/var/tmp/portage/media-sound/alsa-driver-1.0.18a/temp/build.log' * Messages for package media-sound/alsa-driver-1.0.18a: * * ERROR: media-sound/alsa-driver-1.0.18a failed. * Call stack: * ebuild.sh, line 49: Called src_compile * environment, line 3951: Called die * The specific snippet of code: * emake LDFLAGS="$(raw-ldflags)" HOSTCC="$(tc-getBUILD_CC)" CC="$(tc-getCC)" || die "Make Failed";...

Hi, I have had some problems installing my printer in Cruchbang Linux which is a Ubuntu modified based distribution which comes with OpenBox (Will write about it later). This was the problem, when I tried to install a new printer Read the update at the end of this post, for a better solution System->Printer Settings, I was unable, cause the New option was gray, and I was not able to connect to the cups local server. Then I realized it was off, so I tried to start it: sudo /etc/init.d/cups start And I got this: * Restarting Common Unix Printing...

First of all, if you forget your admin Ubuntu password, you will need physical access to the PC in order to recover your password. Usually Ubuntu install in the grub menu this option: title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic (recovery mode) uuid 393ac665-f5c2-488d-b601-b59ba1d5675b kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=393ac665-f5c2-488d-b601-b59ba1d5675b ro single initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic That text is part of my /boot/grub/menu.lst of my Ubuntu Linux, so first go to the easiest way to recover the password in Ubuntu. Reboot your system When it is starting, press ESC to get the grub menu Select the option that says (recovery mode) In the next dialog select the...

As some of you may know I usually run a Dual boot system, but hey! forget about Windows, I run a Dual boot system with two Linux Distributions, Debian is the sticky one, and for now the other one is Gentoo, before it was Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu and Sabayon. I have to say, that my favorite Distros are Debian and Gentoo, I am just starting with Gentoo, but it is just great!, well enough of blah, blah, I will later write a post about my experiences with Linux Distributions, now I want to let you know how to share the...

If you are running polipo and run out of disk space you have two options, one is to reduce the space polipo is using in /var/cache/polipo/ thus, fine tunning cache server or to change the cache directory to its own partition. Here we will see this second option First you need to partition the disk, then format the linux partition. Once those steps are finished, we can start the process of moving the polipo cache directory, which is by default located at: /var/cache/polipo. Assumptions The polipo cache directory is: /var/cache/polipo/ The new formated partition is: /dev/sdb1/ The file system of...

If you got a new disk and want to use it in Linux, you will first need to partition it and then to format it, this how to will show you how to partition it, the next one will show you how to format the Linux disk First you should know if you are using an (P)ATA or SATA disk or maybe even SCSI or USB, well the first one is identified by hdX where X is letter that will differentiate one drive from other. SATA, SCSI or USB are identified as sdX, we will use fdisk to create the...

To format a disk in Linux, first it should be partitioned, this how-to assumes you have already partitioned the hard drive, if you need to to partition your disk, read the how to partition a Linux disk Linux can format in various file systems, here we will use only ext2, ext3 or swap, which are some of the most used file systems in Linux. Lets suppose the drive you need to format is: /dev/hda1 To format it using the filesystem ext2, enter sudo mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda1 If it is ext3 what you want enter: sudo mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda1...

You may have been using useradd or adduser to add new users or create new accounts in your Linux powered PC. And sometimes you may have wonder about the difference between the two of them, well, the difference is also different depending on what version you are using. Debian / Ubuntu On Debian or Ubuntu systems, useradd is a command itself, and you can create users and define options to them using this command, and adduser is a perl script, that uses useradd to create the account, asking you the password, Full-name, phone and others like this: ggarron@debian:~/tmp$ sudo adduser...

It is been a long time since I have not write about a good Linux site, recently I have found this one. I like it, because it is dedicated to bash scripts, and shell commands more than to Desktop applications, because there are less sites devoted to shell than to Desktop. Even more, this site has a lot of useful scripts, easy to copy and to use, so you may want to get some of them and give them a try. There are also some perl, and awk applications, so if you are into shell commands, or just want to...

type, will help you know if a command, is an alias, a built-in command or an independed command installed in your PC. With no options, describe a command, for each name, indicate how it would be interpreted if used as a command name. SYNTAX type [-atp] [name ...] OPTIONS If the -t option is used, type prints a string which is one of alias, keyword, function, builtin, or file if name is an alias, shell reserved word, function, builtin, or disk file, respectively. `alias' (shell alias) `function' (shell function) `builtin' (shell builtin) `file' (disk file) `keyword' (shell reserved word) If...

When you use rmdir without the -r option, and the directory is not empty, you will get this message rmdir: failed to remove `tmp': Directory not emptyill get a So if you want to delete a directory with all its contents, you may use two different commands. rmdir -r directory or rm -rf directory Use this with care, as its results can not be undone, and better if you never use it as root.

Shell's built-in command usually do not have man pages, and you can try something like this: man cd And you will get something like this: No manual entry for cd But what if you still need help for a command like cd, you can use help help cd Change the current directory to DIR. The variable $HOME is the default DIR. The variable CDPATH defines the search path for the directory containing DIR. Alternative directory names in CDPATH are separated by a colon (:). A null directory name is the same as the current directory, i.e. `.'. If DIR begins...

usermod - modify a user account Once a user is already created, you can still modify its options and data, to do that use usermod Syntax -d home directory -s starting program (shell) -p password -g (primary group assigned to the users) -G (Other groups the user belongs to) Example If you want to change the default login shell of a user user usermod -s /bin/tsh user Read the man page of usermod for more information Related pages useradd userdel

To erase an existing user account, or login from a Linux machine, you can use userdel, be sure to use this with care, as its actions can not be undone. Syntax userdel [options] LOGIN Some of its options are: -r remove user account -f force user removal, even if the user is still logged, and removes its home and mail spool even if they are used by another user Example userdel -r user Be sure to read the man page of userdel Related pages useradd usermod

This is a command all Linux administrators should know, because they are the people in charge of creating users accounts, this will be one of three different posts about managing users. useradd, creates a new user or update default new user information. Syntax: useradd [options] LOGIN Some of its options are: -d home directory -s starting program (shell) -p password -g (primary group assigned to the users) -G (Other groups the user belongs to) -m (Create the user's home directory Example useradd -g primary_grp -G admin -s /bin/shell -p xxxx -d /home/user -m user Do not forget to read the...

history is a very useful command in Linux, because it helps you remember the commands you have used in the past. Well, the way most of people use it, is by typing history In the shell, and then copying the command to use it again, but there are some other ways, CTRL+R is another one, but there is also another one, and is to navigate in the list of history commands, using the index it has. Here is how to do it. <dl> ! Start a history substitution, except when followed by a space, tab, the end of the line,...

Normally you know which version of a given distro you are running if you are on your machine, but what if you are on a rented server, or a friend's machine. If you want to know which version of Debian or Ubuntu you are running, you can always check the /etc/apt/sources.list there you will see the version you are running but a better way is to run this on a terminal: lsb_release -a The output in my Debian Box is: Distributor ID: Debian Description: Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny) Release: 5.0 Codename: lenny You can also run this in a Debian...

There is a simple command that will make your Linux system to reboot, and inmediately after check the disks, useful trick. Here is the command: shutdown -Fr now And if you on the other hand want to skip the fsck to work after reboot, you know that after some number of mounts the fsck is activated and a check disk is forced, and you may need to be sure this is not going to happen because you need your system to reboot fast, enter this command shutdown -fr now

Check out this funny video, of a Linux commercial.

Debian and Ubuntu uses for visudo, crontab and other similar applications the default text editor, you want to change it use the update-alternatives command. It is as easy as, run this on a terminal window. sudo update-alternatives --config editor The options in my Debian system are: There are 6 alternatives which provide `editor'. Selection Alternative ----------------------------------------------- 1 /bin/ed 2 /bin/nano 3 /usr/bin/vim.tiny *+ 4 /usr/bin/vim.gnome 5 /usr/bin/mcedit-debian 6 /usr/bin/emacs21 Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: The + sign denotes the default option, and the * sign denotes the actual selection, to change from vim to nano,...

So, do you ever needed to change the behavior of a shell's built in command? O.K. the command builtin comes to save the day. First thing is to know which are built in commands, to do that, read the man of your shell echo $SHELL This will let you know your shell, and now read the man page of it. a good example, about changing the behavior of a build in command is, to make cd print your current directory each time it is used. Enter this in your shell window cd() { builtin cd "$@" && echo $PWD }...

When you are running out of disk space, you will want to know which are the biggest files in your home directory or in the disk itself. This way if you find some big useless file you may erase it and recover the disk space. This small command will do the job du /home/user/* -s| sort -nr | head Will show you the biggest directory and or file in your home directory. If you want to list more lines just add the number of lines you want to list, at the end of the command. du /home/user/* -s| sort -nr...

History is a Linux Operating System command, that lets you review the last commands used, so you can use it again. To learn a bit more about history read: History Linux command, once you have found the command you need, there is no need to re-write it or cut and paste it, just enter ! followed with the number of the command you want to reuse, with no spaces in the middle, and that is: Check this example: history 466 man nohup 467 sudo aptitude install coreutils 468 sudo vim /etc/apt/apt.conf 469 sudo aptitude install coreutils 470 man nice 471...

If you anytime need to execute a command once and again and again, you can use watch and tell it to execute the Linux command in a give interval. The syntax of the command is: watch [option(s)] command The default interval of execution of the given command is two (2) seconds, but you define a different interval using the option -n. Here are two useful uses of watch. watch -n 5 free -m Which will show you the use of memory each five seconds. watch -n 30 vnstat -h Which will show you the bandwidth used hourly, read more about...

If you ever need to know which application(s) are using (writing or reading) a given directory on your disk, lets say because it is a usb memory stick that you need to unmount and you cant because you do not know which application is still using it. And the Operating system says that the unit is busy This is what happens when I try to unmount it sudo umount /media/usb umount: /media/usb: device is busy Use this command. lsof +D /media/usb This is the output for me. COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME COMMAND PID USER FD...

There are some networks where DHCP is not yet implemented, and when you enter into those networks asking for connection, the Admin of the network will give you these data. IP, Netmask, Gateway and sometimes DNS, I see myself in this situations lots of times as I travel with my Laptop, and in the offices where I have to work I found this types of networks with no DHCP server installed. Well, what will you do with those info?, I like the command line, so I will show you how to assign this IP through the Linux command line console....

When you start a session on a Linux Server, and then you need to run a program or a process that is going to take a long time to finish, you will have to let your session open until that process finish. This is because Linux Operating System, by default will end the process if you exit your session. Now it is not secure to let your session open while you are not there, or maybe not possible to let it open if you are over a ssh connection, so you may want to use nohup command to let the...

nice is a command that allows you to change the scheduling priority of a command from -20 the most favorable to 19 the least favorable. Sintax nice -n NUMBER Where NUMBER is an integer number from -20 to 19, if you do not use the -n option, the niceness will be increased in 10 by default. Example: sudo nice -n 4 tail -f /var/log/messages Now if you start htop you may see that tail is running with a niceness of 4.

Hi, today starts a new year, and from Go2linux.org i want to wish you all a great 2009, full of happiness and health!. Be sure to dream, and to try to achieve your dreams. Happy new 2009 from Go2Linux!!, and thanks for being with me and supporting my work at go2linux this 2008, I really appreciate all your comments, and like to have such a great number of readers. Long life to Linux! :).

On December 26th, Thiemo Seufer an active Debian project member died in a car accident, he was involved with the Debian Kernel team, the Debian installer team, the port of Debian to MIPS architecture, and other smaller projects. Because of his dedication to Debian, and in a way to honour him the Debian project decided to dedicate the upcoming release of Debian to Thiemo Seufer may him rest in peace. Read the official Debian News at: http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20081229

ps, is a Linux command tool, that lets you view the current running processes, it is very useful when you are trying to kill a process or to view which applications other users are running (if you are the admin). You may use it to check your own applications, some other user's application or a full list of the applications running on the operating system, you may also combine it with grep. running it alone with no atributes ps Will give your actual running applications. 6999 pts/1 00:00:00 bash 7099 pts/1 00:00:00 ps notice, that those are the running applications...

Tilda is just another Linux terminal emulator, but it has some useful properties coming with it, like, no borders, transparency, but most important, it can appear on your window with the press of a key. Installing it As usually it is very easy, just ask your package manager to install if for you. sudo aptitude install tilda for Debian, sudo emerge tilda for Gentoo, I have it running on both, and with Gentoo using Fluxbox, but with +gtk flag in my make.conf maybe it is not necessary. Once installed the first time you run it, you will get the properties...

cpio is a tool to copy files from one place to another, and to create archives, (like tar), or extract files from an archive file. The good thing is that cpio takes its input from other commands like ls, or find So you can archive all .mp3 in your home directory by entering this command: ls *.mp3 | cpio -o --format=tar -F mymp3.tar Or if you want to include subfolders find $HOME -name "*.mp3" | cpio -o --format=tar -F mymp3.tar You can list the contents of a .tar file. cpio -it -F mymp3.tar And extract them: cpio -i -F mymp3.tar...

To check your memory information, just enter this command on the terminal cat /proc/meminfo And as its name says, it will display the memory information (mem info). This is the output of the command in my PC, you do not need to be root to run it. MemTotal: 2063748 kB MemFree: 1745124 kB Buffers: 19936 kB Cached: 169268 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 118432 kB Inactive: 155208 kB HighTotal: 1169640 kB HighFree: 905780 kB LowTotal: 894108 kB LowFree: 839344 kB SwapTotal: 2650684 kB SwapFree: 2650684 kB Dirty: 3064 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 84436 kB Mapped: 34700 kB Slab: 23900...

History is a great command to use, I use it daily, today I have found a real good application of it. It is the way to list the most used commands by you. Here is how, type this in the console: history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -r What this command does is to pass the output of history to awk, which prints only the second column of it, then it sorts it and count the occurrences of each command, finally it sorts the output in reverse order, so you have first your most used command and at...

Another good shortcut is [Ctrl+z], which stops a currently running job, which you can later terminate or resume it, either in foreground or background. The way to use this is to press [CTRL+z] while executing a job (task), this can be done with any application started from the console. i.e.: htop Then press [CTRL+z], and htop will be stopped, you can now check the running jobs. jobs You will see something like this: ggarron@gentoo ~ $ jobs [1]+ Stopped htop Use fg, to restart the stopped program, and put it to foreground, or bg, to translate it to background. Take...

This is a Linux shortcut, it is very usable, and with it you will be able to search in your history of commands, by just starting to write the command, it is something like Firefox works, when you start typing an address, and it try to guess where you are trying to go. Here is how it works. At the command line press [CRTL+R], you will get something like this: (reverse-i-search)`': There you can start typing your command, and the shell will try guess your command based on your history of them. something like this: (reverse-i-search)`histor': history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN...

It is true that when you start using Gentoo, you learn a lot about Linux, because it appears some problems that you have to solve, and you need to understand something before you can fix it. That was the case when I installed Gentoo Linux at my office, I do already have Ubuntu Linux installed there, so I followed the alternate method of installation which is really easy cause you have a running system with browser and Internet while installing so, you can be reading the instructions, and also googling if you find problems. But, following that method made me...

If you like me use Fluxbox may be aware that when you install a new program it is not automatically added to the menu, yes you can always edit it manually and add the new program to fluxbox menu. But you can also run: fluxbox-generate_menu Then from the old menu choose restart, and voila, you will have almost all your installed applications in the menu.

Well, finally I have all my hardware working with Gentoo, I have an Intel Core 2 Duo, with GeForce 7300 from Nvidia and an Intel ICH8 audio card, which is integrated in my mother board. You may see the output of the hwinfo command in my PC here And the output of lspci below 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82P965/G965 Memory Controller Hub (rev 02) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82P965/G965 PCI Express Root Port (rev 02) 00:03.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 82P965/G965 HECI Controller (rev 02) 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82566DC Gigabit Network Connection (rev 02) 00:1a.0 USB...

The other day a friend of mine was asking me how to stop all users' processes and then logout him. Well maybe the first thing you need is to send a message to the user, so he can actually save his work. to do that you may use the command wall to let your users know you are about to log them out. Now at the given time end all of your users' applications, using pkill sudo pkill -u username replace username with every username you have in your system, you can also use. who | awk '{ printf ("%s",$1...

Sometimes as the administrator of a Linux Operating System Server, y may need to send a message to all users in a multi-user system. There are some different ways to do this, but we will now see just one of them. We will use wall As the main input of wall is a file, we will first create our message file. Let's say you want to tell users that in two more ours the main SQL database is going to be unavailable because of maintenance. So type: echo 'Please note that in two more hours, and for one hour, you...

There is plenty of information about Gentoo (Thanks God!), I am going to write here a very little how-to install Gentoo, then X, the Nvidia drivers, and Fluxbox, I will not go into details about Gentoo installation as there is enough in the official page. Once you have your Gentoo Linux running, you can go to install nvidia-drivers, but first lets install sudo -Optional- (I like that sice I have used Ubuntu) emerge sudo Now edit the sudoers file using the command: visudo And enter this line at the end of the file. your_user ALL=(ALL) ALL Now continue with the...

I am starting with Gentoo again, this time installing using the alternative method more specific the Knoppix method, but I did from my running Debian Lenny using the chroot method, well I now have my operating system working, but when I tried to install Gnome emerge gnome I got an error Error circular dependencies After googling, and reading my configuration files I found that the problem was in my /etc/make.conf file where my USE variable were like this: USE="-qt3 -qt4 -arts -kde dbus hal avahi gnome gtk" So I took out the gtk and gnome, and installed the gtk package....

If you want to play a youtube video on your cellular you may need to convert it to the format you cell phone can actually play, I have tested this process with a Sony Ericsson K550i and it worked great, I suppose it should work on almost all modern cellphones. First thing you need is to download the video from youtube, there are a lot of ways to do that, more than a year ago, I have written this Howto download a Youtube video with wget, but you can now also use some other online tools like, Savevid, check this...

Today is Blog Action Day, and at Go2Linux we are supporting it by spreading the word, I think that Linux is a good way to fight against poverty, think about all the money that goes to software companies. Lots of people in poor countries can not afford to pay for Microsoft of Mac software, but Linux is free, and work almost the same (do not want to start a debate about which is better), the most of time it is suitable for everybody's needs. Also if you have the money to buy a expensive Operating System, but Linux can do...

Hi, I have found this good comic, hope you enjoy it. Credits to: xkcd

The users of a Linux Operating system computer, should always take care about security and if you are the admin of a Linux box with lots of users, you are responsible for the security of it, and maybe you should "force" the other users to change their passwords from time to time, to make this use the command chage Apply this to a user, lets say guillermo sudo chage --list guillermo something like this may appear. $sudo chage --list guillermo Last password change : May 10, 2008 Password expires : never Password inactive : never Account expires : never Minimum...

If you like the bokeh effect in some pictures you can create it with GIMP, it may not be the same as created at the time of taking the picture (With lenses). Check out this bokeh pictures Well now lets see how to create kind of bokeh effect using GIMP This is the original image: What we first need to do, is to use the GIMP free select tool. Then select the contour of the image you want to be highlighted, in this case the flower. Now with the selection done, press "Ctrl+c" and then "Ctrl+v", and go to layers...

If you need to start a program from the command line, and want to recover the command prompt, just add the & symbol to the command. Example. firefox This command will start firefox, but the command prompt will not be available for you to continue working. firefox & With this other you will get the prompt back to you, and you can continue using the console for other tasks, It also returns you a number that number is the PID of the application just started.

On my PC I have installed, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Sabayon and Debian (my main Linux operating system), but when I turn it on, usually I did not get the grub menu, and I am forwarded directly to Debian, sometimes I have to restart the system to start another Linux flavor. So, the solution was to put the timeout of grub menu to 15 seconds, so I have enough time to react even when I am not paying attention to the PC startup. The timeout parameter is stored in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst So, to change it edit that file with your...

Alias is a command that lets you create command aliases, it is very useful when you usually use commands with options. As an example in my case I use a lot these commands du -h and df -h In both cases the "-h" option makes the output be in Kbytes or Mbytes instead of bytes, so it is more human redeable. To create aliases for this commands just need to enter. alias du='du -h' and alias df='df -h' Now both du and df will be executed with its -h option. If you need to de-alias the command just enter: unalias...

whowatch is a console application that lets you monitor what different users are doing on the Linux operating system in a given moment, it works in real time. First install it sudo aptitude install whowatch Now to run it just enter whowath in the command line, some screen like this will appear. If you press ENTER while on a given username you will see the info about the programs that user is running. Like this: As you can see below you may see some command that lets you get more info about the user, and the programs being run by...

I run a sudo aptitude full-upgrade On my Debian Lenny, but once all the packages were downloaded and started to be installed, suddenly the process stopped, then when I run sudo aptitude reinstall I got this: sudo aptitude reinstall Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Writing extended state information... Done Reading task descriptions... Done The following partially installed packages will be configured: cups-driver-gutenprint cupsys-driver-gutenprint debian-faq gxine libregexp-java menu 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 170 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives....

Some days ago I have updated my Lenny and VMware stop working, this time it was not a problem of a new kernel usually solved reconfiguring vmware, this time the problem was the new version of libx11-6 does not work with vmware, so the solution is to downgrade it to the Etch version. First create a file called /etc/apt/preferences put this content inside: Package: libx11-6 Pin: release a=stable Pin-Priority: 1001 Package: * Pin: release a=testing Pin-Priority: 500 Then modify your /etc/apt/sources.list and add the stable (or Etch) lines, mine looks like this: deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main non-free contrib #deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/...

One of the most uses I give to this command is to turn the PC off after some time, sure there are other ways. I like the way you may execute batch jobs at a given time, all you need is: Write your shell script Which actually is a list of commands in a text file Execute the at command at now + 5 minutes You can use times like "now", "noon", "midnight", or a date in the format of DD.MM.YY check man at in order to have more details

Hi, I have found this video on Youtube, take a look at it.

Debian uses .deb binary packages and you manually install and uninstall them using dpkg tool. dpkg has lots of options but maybe the most important or used ones are: -i Installs and configures a package -r Removes the package but keeps the configuration files on your systems, thus you may reinstall it later and does not need to configure it again -p Purges a package, meaning it will remove the package and also all configuration files How to use it To install a .deb package sudo dpkg -i package.deb To uninstall a .deb package sudo dpkg -r package To purge...

If you someday have a window out of your screen or at least the title bar out of your screen as I had today, I was surfing the web using Opera and when I pressed CTRL+F to look for a text in the page the little window appeared too high in the screen that I could not click on the title bar and move it a little down. Well the solution for this is to press the and hold the ALT key, and click any place on the window to move it. Tip: If you use the righ button of...

This is a very useful command you may use to find which file or directory is filling you disk. So if you need to check the file and directory size in your home directory you can enter cd to switch to your home directory du -S * | sort -n This is going to list all files, directiries and sub-directories in size order, and will not include sub-directories' size in directories' size, if you want to have a total size of a directory including its sub-directories, you will have to remove the -S du * | sort -n If you...

I have this new video camera Sony that records on mini DVDs, and I got a video from my daughter dancing for the mother's day, I copied it as an image to the hard disk of my Linux Operating System machine cat /dev/dvd/ > $HOME/video.iso But now how to play that iso image from my disk with out using my DVD player? These are the simple commands needed. sudo mkdir /media/iso To create a mount point sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop /home/ggarron/dvd_video.iso /media/iso To mount the iso as a DVD sudo aptitude install gxine To install the player gxine...

Today I sent an email to a person with an attachment that was not supposed to be sent, so I had to log into my postfix server and delete it from the queue before it leaves the server. Fortunately, I realized before it leaves, and thanks God the email was big enough for me to have time to log in, find the message and delete it. If you ever need to delete an email from Postfix queue, you have to follow this steps. Once logged in your server find the message you are looking for. sudo postqueue -p This is...

I want to write a little about this good Firefox extension, maybe lots of you already know it, but for those who does not, here it goes. As its name says, this extension lets Firefox access your Gmail account, install it from: Gmail Manager Firefox extension once installed you will have it located at the bottom of your screen, you can manage lots of accounts, which is great, you can see how many emails you have unread, which labels they have, all of that at a glance. It is also good that you can add sound when there is incoming...

I wrote a little runlevel explanation, now I will show you how to know in which runlevel your Linux Operating System is actually running. Which runlevel are you in? Enter the following command: sudo runlevel My output is: N 2 Switch to other runlevel To do that enter: telinit [number of runlevel] This will change your runlevel to whatever number you enter there, be careful with this command as you can loose data, some programs may not close in an appropriate way. telinit is actually the same as init, or better said: telinit = tell init to do change runlevel...

Continuing reviewing some of my old posts, I found this one Examples of find command, now I want to show you a faster and easier way to find files. We are going to use the commands updatedb and locate updatedb This command will update the database of the files in a given file system, with no arguments, it will read from / to all file system structure looking for files and archiving the data in the database, located in Debian (/var/cache/locate/locatedb). There is an option for those using NFS (like me) that you can use to include your NFS file...

Hi, this post is to thank you all for reading this blog, I want to celebrate with you "my readers" because today we surpassed the line of 1000 readers, we are now 1001 readers of this blog. These are the statics from feedburner. Thanks again to all of you, and hope you continue reading the posts, and more important that what I write could be useful for your

Sometimes you really need to see the number of the line where you are while editing a text file, if you like vi / vim, this will help you how to turn on and off the numbering of lines. Turn on the number display on vim While editing the file enter: :set nu or :set number Turn off the number display on vim While editing the file enter: :set nonu or :set nonumber Printing the numbers Sometimes you want to print those numbers, specially if you are debugging software, so enter: :set printoptions=number:y Note: Remember that you can always put...

I think this should work for any Linux operating system using Gnome, I have tested on Debian and Ubuntu. Well, automatic login will let you avoid to enter your login and password each time you turn on your PC, this could be insecure, but if your computer is physically secured it is Ok to enable this, that could make your booting more smooth. How to do it? On Gnome go to: Systems->Administration->Login Window, you will be prompted for the administrator password, enter it and then select Security tab, once in there select Enable automatic login and select the user you...

It is really important to know which ports are open in your PC, this is not only useful for Linux, but also for other operating systems, Linux has a lot of tools to check which ports are open, the most common is nmap which is a command line tool, but also exist a Graphical frontEnd for it if you prefer that way. So to scan you own PC and find open ports you can enter: sudo nmap -T Aggressive -A -v 127.0.0.1 -p 1-65000 That will scan all ports and you will an output like this: Starting Nmap 4.53 (...

I just stumbled on this site, it is a promotional site devoted to Ubuntu, you might be thinking, "well yet another Ubuntu site" but I think this one deserves a visit, it does not have how-tos, or such kind of info, it is mainly promotional, it has some information about Ubuntu's, Flexibility, Speed, Simplicity, Appearance, Stability, Freedom, Security and Community, which are the columns where Ubuntu rests. You can also share your story (your Ubuntu's Story) with others, and you can read other's story, there are some good ones, you find how Ubuntu helps people in all areas, from students,...

As a matter of fact, I made myself that question more than a few times, but never took the time to try to find an answer, because Ubuntu is a relatively new Distro, it comes from Debian when Mark Shuttleworth, who was part of the Debian project decided that Debian was not focused on the final user as it should, and made its own distribution. Well, I have found an article which touches some facts about why is Ubuntu so popular today, and we have to say that, in less time than RedHat, Suse, or Debian. Of course as almost...

If you have some Debian machines already installed, and you plan to install some others, you maybe are going to use the net-install CD, which is the most common way to install Debian. That may take a long time, to install all the Desktop Gnome or KDE, all the applications or servers, etc, and if you have just installed your apt-cacher server as me, you will not be able to use it this first time .... unless you populate it. Usually at nights you are not working and your bandwidth is wasted, so at night you can enter this command...

wget is a command line tool used to download files, or complete webpages, it is a great utility with lots of options, as you can see if you read the wget man page Some months ago, I have written about how to download files with wget, now I want to add some other tips to those already explained that day. Resume a download If you need to stop a current download, and pretend to resume it later, you should use the -c option i.e.: wget http://some.server.com/file -c Traffic shaping, or limiting the speed of the download I really use this...

Yesterday, I wrote about apt-cacher, and when you first install it, its database is empty, and of course the server where it is installed could have a lot of .deb files, in the /var/log/apt/archives/, so it would be great to use those packages in our new ATP proxy. To do that we need one of the perl scripts that come with apt-cacher, and that are stored in: /usr/share/apt-cacher The right script for this task is: apt-cacher-import.pl , so run: sudo /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-import.pl /var/cache/apt/archives That is all, now you have all those packages available in your new Proxy server, to save disk...

There is some behavior of your Linux Operating System which is easy to change, but not too common to know how. The things you can change are: Frequency to erase /tmp/ directory Use UTC or local time How Verbose are the boot messages of your Linux If a disk error should be always repaired while booting automatically There are more than those, but I will touch only those, for the rest, you can enter: man /etc/default/rcS Well, this is what we can do: Change the frequency of cleaning /tmp/ directory The variable that controls that is TMPTIME, its default value...

If you have more than one PC using Debian or Ubuntu, you know that upgrading them makes most of the time download the same files more than once, and that is not good for your bandwidth. I usually forward my requests to my Squid (in my office) and to my Personal proxy Polipo at home, it works, but apt-cacher may be a better approach as the way it decides if a file stays or is erased from the cache is more appropriate for .deb package than in Squid or Polipo, as they are optimized for web surfing. Well, after that...

If you want to use the fastest mirror to download the .deb files you may need to upgrade or update your Debian machines, you have to remember that not always your nearest server is the fastest one, and that could be because not only the distance the server is from you but also the network congestion is a factor when talking about network speed. For instance, your ISP may have a direct satellite connection to another country, and thus your nearest server should be in that country, to avoid you the hassle to get that info, Debian give you some...

It is always useful to know how much bandwidth you are using, also to check if your provider is honoring the contract you signed with them. At my office I have installed Cacti and as I have a layer 3 SNMP capable switch, I can graph the bandwidth that all my office's PCs uses, and also the main pipe to the Internet (My ADSL connection), but at home, I do not have such an expensive switch (and I do not need it), and my ADSL modem is not SNMP capable, so Cacti is not a solution, but with Linux Operating...

I like to play with simulators, and I have found a good car race simulator, that works great under my Debian, the game come in autopackage binary format, or at least that is the one I have downloaded. Download your package from VDrift page, I got the full version for Linux, once you have the .package file make it executable and run it as root, If you have installed an autopackage software before you can run: package install VDrift-2007-03-23-full-2.package Replace the name of the package with the one you have downloaded If you haven't installed a .package file before, be...

Some months ago I have posted an article showing how to use audacity to edit mp3 files with Linux, this time it is almost the same but we will use our Linux Operating system command line to do that. We are going to see two different options: 1. mpgtx To install this program under Debian sudo aptitude install mpgtx Now if you want to trim a mp3 file into 10 pieces just enter this command mpgtx -10 input.mp3 -o output You will get output01.mp3, output02.mp3 .... output10.mp3 files, and now you can easily transport them, use them as ringtones, or...

I own a Motorola L6 phone, I have been trying to connect it to my Linux (Debian Lenny) to upload some .mp3 files to be used as ringtones. I have found in my search Moto4Lin which is a software written using QT, and it works great!, well lets see how to install and use this program. As I am running Debian it is really easy to install sudo aptitude install moto4lin The same should work for Ubuntu. For CentOS or Fedora, or any other distribution (including Debian) you can download the latest version from here and then uncompress it, once...

The Debian menu systems really saves you a lot of time, when you are trying to find a new installed software. Yes you can run the applications from the command line, as I was doing these days on my Laptop with Fluxbox, but if you are using Debian or Ubuntu you can automatically create the menus using the Debian Menu System. To install it (if you are using Debian might be installed) sudo aptitude install menu then run sudo update-menus and you will have your menus recreated, (or created) with all the available programs in it, this will work for...

Xen Virtualization Is a real good book for beginners to intermediate users looking for Xen documentation, it is written in an easy language, with examples which are easy to follow, and from which you can learn how Xen works, and also how to use it, but lets now go to the review. Chapter 1: Introduction On this chapter the author start explaining what virtual machines are, and how we can get advantage from them, also he explain the different ways to virtualize a machine, once he has our attention, goes to define Xen and how it works as well as...

I have received an email from Ulteo yesterday, and they are good news, now using your Ulteo account, you can sync your documents between your office, your home, and any other PC (even a work with them at a public PC). Yes I know you can also do this with Google, or other tools, but if you prefer Ulteo, which is a whole Linux desktop online, instead of only some applications, this is for you. Because the use of Java, Ulteo Desktop is slower than other applications but still a good option. Here is the email I got, check it...

Today, I was "playing" with the Linux configuration (as usually) and using tasksel on my Debian I remove the Desktop section, and installed it again, when I tried to use startx I just could not, there was no startx command. After reading a while I found that I needed to install xinit package to have startx in my machine. so: sudo aptitude install xinit once it is installed you have to create or edit your $HOME/.xinitrc file, and write in there something like this: #!/bin/sh exec startfluxbox #exec gnome-session #exec startkde be sure to have only one Desktop uncommented.

The replacement for Dapper Drake 6.06, is going to be released today, Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions, I has grown real fast ported from the also very popular Debian, is one of the most important candidates to be a replacement for Microsoft products, specially in the Desktop arena. Ubuntu is every time more and more user-friendly, it installs automatically the codecs needed to watch movies, or listen to music, detect automatically printers and cameras attached to it, and I am not saying some others also did this, but Ubuntu also did this, and has some other...

As some of you may know tomorrow April 22nd is the earth day, and if you are thinking in a way to contribute, you can do by splitting your PC into two, using Linux. This way your children or spouse will not need an extra PC to work while you are using your PC. I think that Linux philosophy has a lot to do with earth conservation, and ecology, as we think that software and knowledge should be free, also the nature should be free, free for anyone to enjoy it, but preserving it for future generations, and only for...

There are six different runlevels in Linux, there could be more than six, but for compatibility reasons six are the default. I have used RedHat and Debian based Linux, more specifically Fedora and Ubuntu and Debian itself, I have noticed that there is a difference in the runlevels on this different Linux distributions. Well but first let's define the runlevels: Runlevels in Linux are seven and they are: 0 = halt 1 = single user 2 = CLI, multi-user, no net 3 = CLI, multi-user, networked 4 = open 5 = GUI, multi-user, networked 6 = reboot You can define...

cpufreqd is a Linux daemon, that lets you control the speed of your CPU(s), depending on some variables, or also be set manually, you can set it to act dynamically or manually, you can define a lot of profiles and rules, which will control your CPU speed, the variables could be the temperature of your CPU, the amount of charge in your battery if AC is connected or not. First thing you need to do is to install the daemon, in Debian / Ubuntu sudo aptitude install cpufreqd Then you need to check if the desirable modules are loaded, so...

I am using OpenOffice 2.3 with Debian Lenny, and using a drive over NFS and OpenOffice seems to fail locking the file, so it "hangs" for a while and suddenly comes to life again but the file opened is only in read mode. First I went to check my /etc/exports file and then to check if everything in the /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow files and all was correct, so after googling a while I found the solution. You need to change the file: /usr/bin/soffice and make these lines look this way: STAR_PROFILE_LOCKING_DISABLED=1 export STAR_PROFILE_LOCKING_DISABLED #SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1 #export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING unset SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING use your...

I was looking for a good and light calculator for Linux, and found some command line ones, I liked this one wcalc it is really light, and accept almost all mathematical expressions, and I say "almost" because I do not want to say that are all and make a mistake. The use of it is really simple, just enter wcalc followed with the math expression in the command line, press ENTER and you will the result. To install it on Debian run: sudo aptitude install wcalc and to calculate some simple operations: wcalc '(200+200)/8*25/35.3553^2' the result will be one, note...

Linux Desktops, at least Gnome and KDE has a trash can, where your deleted files go, (only when deleted from a Desktop utility). Now if you want to manage it from the console, you can, first we need to know that the trash can is only another folder in the File system structure and it is located at: $HOME/.Trash so you can send files to Trash just moving them to there, as an example, lets suppose you have a file in your home called balance.ods and want to move it to the trash can. mv $HOME/balance.ods $HOME/.Trash/ Whenever you may...

I have started testing PCLinux, I am still trying it using the Live CD, I am going to install it later. I have seen that it has discover my hardware very well, and seems to be really fast even using the live CD. I will post more later, but in meanwhile I have discovered that there is a PCLinux Magazine and the april 2008 version has been released. I contains good stuff, and you can download it in PDF or read it in HTML. I have to say that I like the minime version idea, where you can customize your...

Ubuntu by default has no root password, and you can also configure Debian in that way if you choose the advanced installation option, and decide not to use the root password. But what to do if later you need the root user? well you just need to assign a password to the root user and then you will be able to switch to root user. sudo passwd Type a good strong password twice, and you are done. su - Type the root password and voila! you are logged as root, you know you have to be carefull on what you...

I really like to work with the console, and to connect to my servers using ssh, to administrate them, so sometimes I found myself with lots of terminal windows open, I have explored some solutions in the past, that you can see on this post about Terminal emulators, now I have found a new one which I really like, it is called terminator. For Debian users it is available only on Sid, and as I use Lenny I had to install it from the sources. If you are using Ubuntu it is available for Gutsy and Hardy here Well lets...

As some of you may have noticed, Go2Linux is powered by Drupal, and Drupal has released its 6 version some time ago, we are still using 5.x cause I am waiting all the modules to be ready and tested with 6.x before switching, I do not want to break Go2Linux :). Anyhow I am reading some articles about installing and upgrading Drupal, and i have found this two good articles about that topic. If any of you are interested in Drupal, you may like to read these: Drupal 6.0 Installation and basic usage Drupal 6 keeps getting better Drupal is...

NFS or Network File System is a great way to share documents, or expand your disk space, using the disk on another server, I am using it to share documents between my office and home, I have my office disk mounted in my home's PC using NFS. Well the PC at my office has CentOS, so the first thing I need is to install the necessary software. yum install nfs-utils portmap If you are using Debian write: sudo aptitude install nfs-user-server portmap Ok, now we need to configure it, there are basically two configuration files one in the server side,...

My friend from UbuntuHQ, had a great idea, he installed a Wiki on his site, and now you can add links to Ubuntu How-Tos, the page already has lots of How-To links. It seems Ubuntu users really like the idea, just need to check how it preformed on StumbleUpon or digg Of course you can use a lot of those links on other distribution, as Linux is Linux no matter the flavor, just a little tweak to the commands or configuration files, and they will work for your distro also. please visit the page, and add your own how-to links...

I did not know this, but if you need to show a compressed text file on the screen, you do not actually need to uncompress it. You can use zcat to send the file to the standard output, uncompressed, but the original file remains untouched. The syntax of the command is: zcat file.gz or you can also use, gunzip -c file.gz what is going to happen is that the file will be uncompressed on the fly, sent to the standard output (usually screen). If the .gz file contains more than one file they will be shown in sequence, you can...

Until some weeks ago I used to use only apt-get, and then I realized that aptitude is better in taking care of orphan packages. I am no expert here, but this is the way I think they both work, at least on Debian Etch, I have heard that in Lenny both works more or less the same, I use Lenny, and yes they can do the same thing but in different ways. Well when you install a package with apt-get, and that packages needs other packages due to dependencies, it will install all of them for you, which is great,...

If you are like me, and administer your own email in a Linux box, and do not have set CPanel or any other similar tool, you can still forward your email to another account or, just send a cc to another account. Let's say you are: [email protected] And the email for john.com is managed by a Linux server with sendmail, or Postfix, and you may want all your incoming email to [email protected] to be copied to [email protected] just have to edit or create the .forward file in your home directory vim $HOME/.forward and add these lines inside. \john [email protected] note...

I will try to update the blog this weekend, but if I cant please forgive me, on March the 7th my second child was born, he is a boy! I already have a girl who is six years old. My boy came to the world with 3.350 Kgs and 49 cms, he is healthy, and by the time I am writing this (using the hospital's WiFi) he is with his mother, feeding him :). I wanted to share my happiness with you! thanks for your support, and also for reading this blog.

After one year of the release of Debian Etch the Security support for Sarge is going to be terminated as previously announced, as informed three days ago in the Debian page. Here is part of the announcement. One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' and nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 alias 'sarge' the security support for the old distribution (3.1 alias 'sarge') is coming to an end next month. The Debian project is proud to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and even for one...

Two days ago in a Release Update Marc Brockschmidt announced that Debian Lenny will be released under the number of 5.0, he also announced that it could be shipped with KDE 4, as he says There may be a possibility to include KDE4 in lenny. The efforts on KDE4.1 have been quite promising and seem to be leading to a desktop environment which can fully replace KDE3. If you want to check the release schedule of Debian Lenny read here

Mplayer is one of most known movie players in Linux, and also in Mac OS, and Windows. To install it in Debian / Ubuntu run: sudo aptitude install mplayer Mplayer has lots of options, and we will explore some of them here, the files format it can play according to its official site are: MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies.. Playing your music/video files If you want to...

Because of a comment here in Go2Linux I discovered Lindesk, which is a great Linux blog, I really enjoyed the articles posted there. The blog is mainly focused on Fedora, and have lots of Desktop applications' reviews since some time ago, the author has focused on multimedia applications, and has reviewed, MP3 players, showing the features, the pros and cons of every software reviewed, there are also lots of KDE tips, like how to start with "numlock" enabled. The Fedora section comes with some good tips to tweak your Fedora and make it faster, and more usable. The articles are...

One real important part of programming is to control the flow of the program, you need to be able to repeat some part of the code, jump to another part, etc, depending on the estate of some variables, there are a lot of commands to achieve that, and one of them is for It can be used directly at the command line like this example using basename for i in *.jpg; do echo $i $(basename $i .jpg); done This command will print all the filenames which ends with .jpg with and without the .jpg suffix. This line has three parts,...

Just like The light weight Debian we can do the same with Fedora, I will use Fedora 8 and Fluxbox to install a light Desktop Linux. First start the installation CD, I have chosen the text environment as, this is supposed to be a light installation, I am doing this on VMware with 128 Kbytes of memory assigned. Once you get to the package selection screen be sure to have something like this: So you can select later which software to install, then on the next window, when you are selecting individual packages select these: Administration tools Development tools Editors...

If you need to remove the directory or any suffix from a file name you may use basename, this is really useful when you are creating shell scripts. In the man page, there are this examples basename /usr/bin/sort Output "sort". basename include/stdio.h .h Output "stdio". you can enter info basename to get this output: File: *manpages*, Node: basename, Up: (dir) BASENAME(1) User Commands BASENAME(1) NAME basename - strip directory and suffix from filenames SYNOPSIS basename NAME [SUFFIX] basename OPTION DESCRIPTION Print NAME with any leading directory components removed. If speci- fied, also remove a trailing SUFFIX. --help display this help...

Google earth according to wikipedia is: "... virtual globe program that was originally called Earth Viewer and was created by Keyhole, Inc. It maps the earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS 3D globe. It is available under three different licenses: Google Earth, a free version with limited functionality; Google Earth Plus ($20 per year), which includes additional features; and Google Earth Pro ($400 per year), which is intended for commercial use" So, how could we install it on our Debian or Ubuntu system?, it is really easy now. First we need to...

According to Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie, because of the mopolistic practices of Microsoft, giving Windows and IE as a bundle, there is no real browser market, and Microsoft does not hear its users, as in any monopoly there is no need to hear the users. Here is a portion of the article in arstechnica With recent news about Internet Explorer 8's imminent beta, Microsoft's long and checkered history with web standards compliance has been hurled back into the harsh, unflattering spotlight. Even though IE8 will have a new "standards compliant" mode, it won't be perfect, stirring up a new...

I think Friendly Interactive Shell (a.k.a. fish) is a real good tool for newbies on the console at Linux, it has a lot of features, which you can by typing help. Well first lets see how to install the application. Fedora / Centos sudo yum install fish Debian / Ubuntu sudo aptitude install fish Once installed just enter fish at any console and you will have the prompt again, but this time a more friendly prompt :). As you can see in this screenshots: here you can see that after entered ls a and by pressing TAB you get as...

Maybe a lot of you already know about this, but for those who do not know, Drupal has released almost a week ago the stable version of Drupal 6.0, they have worked on this for almost a year, and now it is focused on PHP5. If you use Drupal on your site, check that all your modules have been ported before you do the upgrade, otherwise, you will have to disable that module not ported from 5 to 6. It is also a good idea, if you use an alternate site, to make the test, like http://www.yoursite.com/drupal6/ and check how...

Maybe most of the readers of this blog do already know about shell scripts, and maybe they know even more than me (which is not difficult), but for those who does not know about it, I will write a little about shell scripts. A shell script is a sequence of commands -For those coming from DOS is like a .bat file- this command will execute in the sequence they are entered, unless loops, if, do, for, or any other commands like those are used. Writing the script Lets go with the classic example, of "Hello World" First just use your...

Continuing with my Lightweight Debian configuration, today I wanted to add sound and music to it, I have 4 Gigs of MP3, and I needed to hear them. Maybe the best option is mpg123 which is command line mp3 player, but today I wanted to try audacious, which looks a lot like XMMS although it is not a fork of it, you can see some good screenshots of it. To install the sound in my Debian first I needed to install alsa-utils sudo aptitude install alsa-utils And then install audacious sudo aptitude install audacious after that everything was running perfect...

This week I have installed Gentoo, I made it using the Live CD once there I have used the text interface to install it, with the expert option, and using Networkless, so it is more or less like installing the Debian base system. Once that installed (the instructions were easy to follow), I installed xorg emerge xorg-x11 Follow this: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml and fluxbox emerge fluxbox Follow this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Fluxbox After that I wanted to install firefox, so I had some problems, I had to resync my portage packages using: emerge --sync Then follow this to install firefox Install Firefox on Gentoo As...

Two of our collaborators has entered new How-tos to that section in the Forums. Please check: Installing and using Compiz in ubuntu and How to install KDE 4 on Centos If you want to post a how-to just let me know, and I will enable your account, so you can create How-Tos.

To start Fluxbox with a wallpaper, you will have to edit some configuration files, and have a image viewer installed on you machine, not all of them works, so consider using one of these two. Esetroot or feh. To install Esetroot run: sudo aptitude install eterm Now run: fbsetbg -i You should see something like this: feh is a nice wallpapersetter. You won't have any problems. Now lets edit your ./fluxbox/init file with your favorite text editor (mine is vim with colors), and add this line if it is not present. session.styleOverlay: ~/.fluxbox/overlay Now create a file ~/.fluxbox/overlay and inside...

If we are using Fluxbox because we need it to be lightweight it does not mean we can not have some eye candy on our Desktops. So if you want a cool terminal, a transparent one starting with your log on, it is real possible, we will need aterm Install it using your Distro package manager, I am using Debian so: sudo aptitude install aterm Aterm is real lightweight also, and looks great! after installing it, we will need to go and edit the $HOME/.fluxbox/startup, and add just this line on it: aterm -name aterm -sl 3000 -tr +sb -si...

If you want to change your screen resolution, while still running Linux but you are not using Gnome or KDE, which gives good options to change screen resolution, you will have to use the xrandr command If you enter it alone: xrandr You will see something like this: Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 1280 x 1024 default connected 1280x1024+0+0 0mm x 0mm 1280x1024 60.0* 47.0 43.0 1024x768 85.0 75.0 72.0 70.0 60.0 800x600 85.0 75.0 72.0 70.0 60.0 56.0 100.0 90.0 640x480 85.0 75.0 72.0 60.0 120.0 100.0 90.0 1152x864 75.0 70.0 60.0 47.0...

I always prefer to use the package manager instead of compiling from sources, mmh maybe compiling is more creates more efficient programs, than using binaries, but in that case, we better use Gentoo or Sabayon, but if we are using Debian/Ubuntu, or Centos/Fedora, I still think is better to use binaries. Well this said, I have to add that sometimes there is no binary available for our favorite distro, in that case we are forced to compile from sources, but wait, we can still use a binary, we can make our own .deb or .rpm package and install it using...

If you want to keep always the latest available copy of Skype on your computer, not having to check the skype home page every time, you may want to use the skype repository for Debian, which also works for Ubuntu, Check this How to First add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free which can be done with this command: sudo echo "deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list once that is done, install the software with: sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install skype You will have to accept untrusted packages, as I could not find the key for...

Let's continue with the light weight applications, this time I will show you a great image viewer, that does not need too much disk space nor hardware requirements. The application is feh, to install it run: sudo aptitude install feh then to use it, you will have to be used to command line, but that is one of the great things about Linux isn't it? If you want to open a single picture run: feh /path/to/the/picture/picture.png If you need to open a whole directory with pictures run: feh /directory/ This will open the first picture on that directory, and you...

Today my friends at bluefur.com made an upgrade in their server, and suddenly go2linux.org went off-line :( The problem reported was: "Client does not support authentication protocol", so after working with Tina from the technical support at ,Bluefur the problem was solved by re-adding the MySQL user. You may find more info about this with this link: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/old-client.html Sorry for the inconvenience to those who have found the site down.

If you are using FluxBox and want to start programs when you log into FluxBox, you will need to edit the file $home/.fluxbox/startup. As you can see each user will have its own startup script, so each one of them can have their own programs starting at login time. The startup script may look like this: # fluxbox startup-script: # # Lines starting with a '#' are ignored. # You can set your favourite wallpaper here if you don't want # to do it from your style. # # fbsetbg -f /home/ggarron/pictures/wallpaper.png # # This sets a black background /usr/bin/fbsetroot...

As you may have noticed I am switching to Fluxbox and I am trying not to use Gnome programs to keep my configuration light, one problem I have faced is how to read PDF files without using evince, or adobe application, which are big, a good replacement I have found is xpdf To install it on Debian or Ubuntu just run: sudo aptitude install xpdf it does not render as the complex and big PDF files as good as the Adobe application but it works for the most of work you may need.

Sometimes you may want to store a web page as text to read it later, here is a small tip to achieve that, we are going to use Lynx for that. If you do not have it installed you can use your package manager to install it, taking Debian as example: sudo aptitude install lynx then run: lynx -dump http://www.go2linux.org > $HOME/go2linux.txt You will have the home page of Go2linux stored in your Home as go2linux.txt, and you can read it later as your convenience.

MPSTAT(1) Linux User’s Manual MPSTAT(1) NAME mpstat - Report processors related statistics. SYNOPSIS mpstat [ -P { cpu | ALL } ] [ -V ] [ interval [ count ] ] DESCRIPTION The mpstat command writes to standard output activities for each avail? able processor, processor 0 being the first one. Global average activ? ities among all processors are also reported. The mpstat command can be used both on SMP and UP machines, but in the latter, only global average activities will be printed. The interval parameter specifies the amount of time in seconds between each report. A value of...

I have started using FluxBox, which is an alternative to KDE or Gnome or XFCE, FluxBox is smaller than all the other three mentioned by me, and it is also faster, FluxBox is the Default windows manager for DSL (Damn small Linux). Well after this really small introduction, let's go to the point. To access the menu just right-click on the Desktop and you will see the menu of FluxBox, but if you want to add another application, like VMware you will have to edit the file $HOME/.fluxbox/menu with your favorite text editor, by default it should look like this:...

After a long time not posting, our friend Mary Riley the author of the The Daily Ubuntu is back and posting again. She promises us to keep posting at least one Ubuntu application per day, so you are hardly encouraged to subscribe to her RSS, and keep in touch with her blog. Check out the site, and suggest her new applications to post about.

As some of you may know Linux does not use the extension (suffix) of the file to determine the type of it, what it does is to look at the file content. So you can name your files as you want and Linux will still be able to recognize it. If you ever need to know the type of a given file, with no suffix, or with the incorrect suffix, use the Linux command file You should have this command already installed on your Linux, but if not, installing it is really simple. Debian / Ubuntu sudo aptitude install file...

January 29th of 2007 Go2Linux went online, and started with our first post, today one year later I would like to celebrate with all of the readers. First I would like to thank all of you the 600+ regular readers of this blog to whom this blog belongs, and it is because of them that some time late at night I am writing here :), also I want to thank some good friends I have made through this year, thanks to this blog. Borys Musielak from PolishLinux.org Bert De Brabandere from UbuntuHQ.com Artiomix from LinuxScrew.com The Master Chief who has...

I have been traveling the last two weeks, and I have found how useful is wifi-radar on my Linux powered laptop. I have an IBM Thinkpad T30 with an Aironet Wifi internal card (for the records) As you may see on the wifi-radar home page, there are packages for Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu and Suse, I have seen that the Gentoo link is broken, but it is also easy to install on it. Installing wifi-radar Gentoo emerge wifi-radar Debian / Ubuntu sudo aptitude install wifi-radar Fedora sudo yum install wifi-radar The first time you run wifi-radar, it will detect the available...

Hi, I finally finish installing KDE 4 on a Fedora, I used F7 for this, I am still trying to install it on CentOS, but in F7 it is installed. check the threads on the forum, I am using the forum, to make it easier for you, to post your problems and interact if you are having problems installing or compiling KDE 4 on CentOS, Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu, I will later post the same how-to install KDE 4 on Debian and Ubuntu. How to install KDE4 on Fedora How to install KDE4 on CentOS

Introduction iftop is a real good utility both for your own PC/Laptop and for your server and specially good for the latter and even better if this server is acting as the main router in your premises. Well lets explain what iftop does, it is more or less like top, or htop but it does not measure the processes in the processor, but it measure the "processes" in the ethernet interface, giving you information about the IPs that have a connection with the PC where iftop is running, also giving information about the traffic, if it is incoming or outcoming,...

I started to study CSS by my own, and will be posting here, some things I start learning , maybe you will not see too much CSS and web design stuff here, as I will need a lot of time to learn enough to start posting some original stuff, but in the meanwhile I want to post a great list I have found surfing the web, actually I made the list by myself, this list contains great pages with CSS templates, CSS menus, CSS tutorials and CSS tools hope you may find it useful. CSS templates 100% cross browsers with...

Yesterday at the KDE developer conferences, Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord announced that the QT cross-platform developer toolkit is going to be released under GPL 3, this are really good news for KDE developers, and also for any developer who uses QT toolkit. So maybe we will soon will be able to see the "buy" button for QT disappear, and it will be easier for developers to release its job. I am not a lawyer but as far as I understand, this also means that nobody will be able to use QT to sell "closed code" applications, and all applications developed...

sysstat is a package of monitoring tools, these are the tools included in the package. iostat Reports CPU statistics and input/output statistics for devices, partitions and network filesystems. mpstat Reports individual or combined processor related statistics. pidstat Reports statistics for Linux tasks (processes) : I/O, CPU, memory, etc. sar Collects, reports and saves system activity information (CPU, memory, disks, interrupts, network interfaces, TTY, kernel tables,etc.) sadc Is the system activity data collector, used as a backend for sar. sa1 Collects and stores binary data in the system activity daily data file. It is a front end to sadc designed to...

Hi, This post is to look for volunteers to help me compile and install KDE4 on Centos 5, I worked on this by this time for three days (and one night :) ).. If there is any volunteer I can post in the forums the steps I take so far, and the error I got, so we can continue working together. Thanks and let me know if you are interested in the comments. Update: here are my notes about what I am doing, hope this may help anybody, read How to compile KDE4 on Centos

One important thing to check on your Linux box, is the CPU utilization, specially if usually compile software, or if you have server applications running on your PC. One good tool to check this is: htop, which will show you a lot of useful information, the important data is the load average, that will show you if you are having processes waiting for the CPU or not. the three numbers shows your the load average in the last 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes, so you will also see the trend of the CPU usage, and now how much...

OK friends, KDE 4.0 is ready, as you can read here, and it can be downloaded from KDE FTP mirrors, but some distributions have already include it in their testing or something branches, or as Live CDs, if you want to see if yours is included check the bottom of this page If some of our readers compiles it, or install it and want to share its experiences, please use the Forums to post them, and share with the rest.

When someone like me comes to Debian from the RedHat world, one of the first things you start to miss is ntsysv, which is a command to control which daemons are going to start with the computer and which will remain off. But there are also options for Debian / Ubuntu, but these are not installed by default, so you may need to install. There are two options, sysv-rc-conf To install it run: sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf And it looks like this: sysvconfig To install it run: sudo apt-get install sysvconfig This is the first screen: Select the first option...

gnome-volume-manager is the Gnome daemon in charge of controlling how removable media is going to be treated in Linux (When using Gnome) And to control how this daemon is going to act, can be used gnome-volume-properties this command can be invoked from the command line: gnome-volume-properties or from the menu System->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media If it is not in the menu and not installed in the PC, I guess that to install it this command should be issued: aptitude install gnome-volume-manager This is how it will look like. Select how to act when removable storage and blank CDs are inserted...

In two more days we will finally have KDE 4 stable with us, this has really create a lot of buzz, I am a Gnome user, I will install it as KDE was my first Desktop manager. I am not going to write a review because a lot of reviews have been written so far about KDE, here are some good ones. KDE Beta 3 ScreenShot tour KDE4 Devel Live-CD Review: Work in Progress Great KDE screenshots Great review of KDE components The plasma icons One of the latest reviews of RC2 before it is launched How to install KDE...

Gnome System Tools, is a packages of front end tools to manage your system using GUI tools. The tools this package includes are: Users and groups Date and time Network configuration Runlevels Shared Folders through Samba or NFS You can access these tools, from the system main menu in you Gnome, for example: System->Administration->Users and Groups System->Administration->Time and Date System->Administration->Network System->Administration->Services System->Administration->Shared Folders These tools are usually installed by default, in case you do not have it and want to install them. run: apt-get install gnome-system-tools

Qemu-Puppy, is a real great tool, you can install it on a USB-key and even boot a PC with it, or use it over any other operating system, so you can take your Linux Operating System with you, together with all your applications and your work, and just borrow a PC upload your applications and you environment, do your tasks, and then return the PC as if nothing has happened. As you may see, it is a must have tool for those who travel, and like to travel light. You have a word processor, and spread sheet, Internet browser, calculator,...

Well once again reviewing some good Linux blog, today is the turn of LinuxLove, I wanted to make this review some weeks ago, but sadly the site went down for some days, happily it is up and running again. In its short life, it was born in May 2007, it came extremely popular, it hit I think twice Digg frontpage, has a lot of articles in StumbleUpon, there should be a reason! So if you want to know the reason for its popularity, take a look at its posts and will know. Has lots of small simple tutorials, with screenshots,...

NMAP(1) Nmap Reference Guide NMAP(1) NAME nmap - Network exploration tool and security / port scanner SYNOPSIS nmap [Scan Type...] [Options] {target specification} DESCRIPTION Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is an open source tool for network exploration and security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of...

nmap is a wonderful tool specially for debugging, there are lots of times when you need to know if a port is open in a server, or maybe blocked by a firewall, or just to test your iptables rules. Here we will learn how to use it at the command line, and using its GUI front end, nmapFE and Knmap. Introduction Well, so what does nmap does? From the man page: Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is an open source tool for network exploration and security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts....

Gentoo a Light file manager for low resourses PCs here you have a screenshot. Update: 01/02/08 This post was originally posted on 02/07/2007, but I wanted to complete its information and repost it. Gentoo is a light File manager, you can use over a SSh connection, with it you can copy files, create directories, change permissions, etc. You can install it on Fedora yum install gentoo and on Ubuntu sudo apt-get install gentoo hope you like it, you will have access to lots of tools as you can see on this screenshot As you can see, you can even tar,...

I have found a great compilation of 25 sites given free icon sets, which are very useful for web designers, I think this is going to be of interest of Linux users, as most of them are web designers. The list includes, icons for web 2.0, gray scale icons, asp.net, face icons, files, databases, website icons, and lots more! take a look at this page. Check the full list here

There are some applications we always start as soon as we log into our Linux, as Firefox or our news reader. If you want you can ask Linux to start these programs for you as soon as you log in, to do this just go to: System->Preferences->Sessions in you Gnome menu. Now click on Add, and fill in the fields the appropriate info, so you can start you new application. Put in name the name of the application, in command the command you need to start that applications (better if you use the complete path) you can use the command...

We the Linux users, are always interacting with Windows users, and one of the most difficult part of that interaction is the exchange of documents, that they create and edit mostly with Microsoft Office, and we use Open Office, and I think that even if they use OpenOffice, they will have access to the system's fonts, so, we need MS fonts installed in our Linux Operating System, in order to look at the documents in the same way they are looking at it. Let's go first with Debian / Ubuntu It is really easy, just enter at the console, the...

Well, this time is the turn of Tuxmachines, I am almost sure the most of you know about this site, it is really popular, it was one of the first sites I met about Linux, when I came to Linux Operating System world again, some two years ago. For those who hasn't heard about this great site, I will explain a little how it works. It is powered by drupal just like this site, it offers its visitors, the opportunity to register into the site, and thus gain your own blog at: tuxmachines blogs, so you can add your own...

Different ways to rename bulk files in Linux, using mv and rename We are going to explore different ways to change names of multiple files using command line of Linux Operating System. We are going to use rename which is a perl script, and also the know mv, together with for, in "one-line" shell script rename Syntax rename [ -v ] [ -n ] [ -f ] perlexpr [ files ] -v Verbose: print names of files successfully renamed. -n No Action: show what files would have been renamed. -f Force: overwrite existing files. perlexpr Perl Expression Regular Expressions ^...

I really want to go into Gentoo, I think I will learn a lot using and learning it. As a first step I looked for some useful sites for Gentoo's beginners and I want to share them, here they are: Good Explanation about Flags on Gentoo Detailed instructions to install Gentoo Gentoo's site FAQ Convert RedHat 9.0 to Gentoo over ssh The Gentoo Howto Great and complete guide to install Gentoo Flags Descriptions Another good how to for Gentoo Desktop Linux Install Gentoo on a USB memory Stick The Gentoo Wiki page Sabayon the most famous Gentoo based Linux Using...

Linux console brings acpi to us to check the status our Laptop battery, right from the command line. [Edit sept-7-2010] Thanks to my Friend Jake: You need to install the package acpi, with your package manager, before using it. To check the state of the charge of battery acpi The output could be something like this. Battery 1: discharging, 44%, 00:18:48 remaining yes I know I need a new battery :). To check the battery temperature acpi -t And the output could be Battery 1: discharging, 37%, 00:15:59 remaining Thermal 1: ok, 49.0 degrees C if you need it in...

Today I have found a site, that focus on showing people why they should give Linux a try. Some of the arguments are: No virus Stable system Money Freedom There are lots more, in the page, this page is also written in various languages, 23 in total by the time I am writing this. Is an interesting page to visit, give it a try. English Version Spanish Version Polish Version to check it in other languages, click on the flags at the top of the main page.

Lots of times you need to determine your public IP address, if you are using Linux operating system to power your PC, you may use some good console commands to guess your public IP address. Using wget wget -q -O - checkip.dyndns.org|sed -e 's/.*Current IP Address: //' -e 's/ Using curl curl -s checkip.dyndns.org|sed -e 's/.*Current IP Address: //' -e 's/ curl -s http://whatismyip.org/ Using Lynx lynx -dump checkip.dyndns.org lynx -dump www.whatismyip.com | grep 'Your IP' As you can see, there are a lot of ways to check your Public IP address using console commands in Linux. Of course you...

Hi, please read this comment I personally find it really interesting, and have try to solve it, here is my post about the solution: aptoncd, to clone a system, as you can see the solution is not yet finished, as I am not really good at shell scripts, does anyone please help me finish this?.

This is really good about Debian, its 3.1 version (old Stable) is still getting updates, and maintained, which are great news for all those servers which are still using the old Sarge. You can get the new updated CDs from here Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update. So if you usually run apt-get upgrade you should not worry about anything. Read the announcement here

Hi, I want to inform you that I have changed the platform of Go2Linux forums from SMF to myBB, as passwords can not be converted, please create again accounts, I have read this platform is better. I have copied the last thread and the one with more action these days, please continue to post your favorite Linux sites and blogs. Check it here: http://www.go2linux.org/forums/list-of-best-linux-blogs-t-1.html

Debian has released another security upgrade to the Etch which is now release 2 so Debian Etch is now Debian 4.0r2 These updates are basically security updates, and does not constitute another Debian version, all you need to do is: apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade and you will be running all security patches, but if you install Debian constantly it is better if you download your Installation CDs again, to avoid big time upgrading over the Internet. The main security updates are: Advisory ID Package(s) Correction(s) DSA-1288 pptpdDenial of service DSA-1317 tinymuxBuffer overflow DSA-1319 maradnsDenial of service DSA-1320 clamavSeveral vulnerabilities DSA-1321...

With AptOnCd you can backup and restore your .deb packages and store them in a CD or DVD or just in an ISO image in your USB Drive. aptoncd, will help you still be able to use apt, aptitude or synaptic even, with no, or poor Internet conection. All you need is to install one system with all the desired software, using apt-get to install all the software, once installed all the .deb files will be on your /var/cache/apt/archives/ directory, so you can backup all them up, in a CD or DVD and take it with you for your next...

Today I have found a site which started on December 9th, yes it is really new, the author is just switching to Linux as a Desktop OS, he used Linux for servers for some time now. He started this blog, to post how he makes things work, the problems he faces, and how he solves them, so it could be a great blog for those beginning with Linux as him. He is focusing on Ubuntu (as most people) and I also hope to see some CentOS server posts here. :). have a look at it. Adventures in Switching to Linux...

I have posted a new thread in the Forum. Please help me to create a great Linux blog's list, my goal is to have at least 100, but the more the better, please post your own blogs or any other blog you may know, you can post more than one, pleas provide a Link to it, if it is frequently updated or if it is not being updated any more, and a small description of the blog. Really please go the thread and post your blog's links and description, and I will make a list with all your posts, which...

Hi, I would like to wish a Merry Christmas to all readers of Go2Linux.org, may the good Jesus bless you today as He is always does, and all single days of the year. To the readers who are not Christians, also go my best wishes and also may God bless you, as almost all people in the world have an idea of GOD, may He be with us, and help us find the peace and help us be better humans each day. God bless your families! Sincerely, Guillermo Garron PS. Use comment to post your wishes to other readers. Credits...

Four days ago, Drupal has released the RC1 for its 6.0 version, we are really near to start using this new version. I like that the block_cache is now part of the core, it is really useful, if you want to pass a web 2.0 effect, or at least have a chance to do it. Before upgrading, check that all the modules you are using are available or ported to 6.0 version, you can do that, by going to modules page and select 6.0. Check the post at Drupal site here

I have written some LaTeX documents, LaTeX is great to help you give format to documents, as for your CV or Resume, it is a real good idea to use LaTeX instead of Word layouts, as the most of people use them, so if you want to have a resume different to the rest, use a different editor, give it a different format, make it look more "professional" so you can have better opportunities that the people reviewing the CVs take yours just giving a glance to the CVs. Here is my collection of documents of LaTeX. Today I have...

Ubuntu as a Debian derivative has in Tasksel a great tool, from where you can easily install some applications Tasksel, is a tool that comes from Debian, and it was not first included in Ubuntu by default, but since Feisty I think it is included by default, if it is not installed in your Ubuntu version you can install it running: sudo apt-get install tasksel It looks different in Dapper than in Feisty or Gutsy, here is how it looks like in Dapper Drake. For the Debian users this is familiar, as you will see this same image when you...

The Cisco Catalyst Express 500 software does not support Linux Yesterday I had to configure my Cisco Catalyst Express 500, of course I do not have any copy of Windows on my PC, so I started reading the instructions. Getting Started guide for the Catalyst 500 where it clearly says. Equipment that you supply to set up the switch: 1. A PC with Windows 2000 or XP installed. 2. A web browser (Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0, Netscape 7.1 or later) with JavaScript enabled. 3. A straight-through or crossover Category 5 Ethernet cable to connect your PC to the switch. But...

Two days ago, Firefox 3 beta 2 has been released, it includes fixes to 900 bugs found on Beta 1, great job, 900 bugs fixed in one month, I think it is great! You can download Firefox Beta and start working with it in 25 languages. Also if you are interested you can read the release notes of this new Beta. enjoy it.

If you need to work hours with your laptop where there is no place to plug it, for example at the airport while waiting for the endless time between one fly and the other. :( .. You may be needing something like this, the good thing about this external battery is that it is universal, the bad thing is that is another package to worry about, and to carry also, but almost everybody is carrying two Laptops batteries. Its specifications are: weight = 0.75 kg dimensions = 298 x 216 x 15 mm power = 70 VA/hour And it is...

I want to show you some great Firefox Addons, at least they are great for me :). Mouse Gestures Introduction This add-on enables the mose to work on different tasks, instead of using the keyboard, or instead of clicking some buttons, with only movements of the mouse some actions are performed. Just as an example, to reload a page, you just need to right-click and move the mouse up and down. Where to get it download Screen shot Bookmark sync Introduction If you have more than one computer and you need to keep your bookmarks synchronized, you are like me,...

I had an idea today, as the 2007 is ending I wanted to review the Digg Linux/Unix most popular on this year page and look for some stories that were not news, and were not pictures, but instead are useful Linux guides that will be useful also next year, don't get me wrong I am not saying the other stories are not useful, anyway they got digg's front for some reason. While looking for these stories, which were suppose to be only 5 I have found some real good ones so now they are more than five, actually they are...

SHA1SUM(1) User Commands NAME sha1sum - compute and check SHA1 message digest SYNOPSIS sha1sum [OPTION] [FILE]... DESCRIPTION Print or check SHA1 (160-bit) checksums. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input. -b, --binary read in binary mode -c, --check read SHA1 sums from the FILEs and check them -t, --text read in text mode (default) The following two options are useful only when verifying checksums: --status don’t output anything, status code shows success -w, --warn warn about improperly formatted checksum lines --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit The sums are computed...

RENICE(1) BSD General Commands Manual NAME renice - alter priority of running processes SYNOPSIS renice priority [[-p] pid ...] [[-g] pgrp ...] [[-u] user ...] DESCRIPTION Renice alters the scheduling priority of one or more running processes. The following who parameters are interpreted as process ID’s, process group ID’s, or user names. Renice’ing a process group causes all processes in the process group to have their scheduling priority altered. Renice’ing a user causes all processes owned by the user to have their scheduling priority altered. By default, the processes to be affected are specified by their process ID’s. Options supported...

NICE(1) User Commands NICE(1) NAME nice - run a program with modified scheduling priority SYNOPSIS nice [OPTION] [COMMAND [ARG]...] DESCRIPTION Run COMMAND with an adjusted niceness, which affects process scheduling. With no COMMAND, print the current niceness. Nicenesses range from -20 (most favorable scheduling) to 19 (least favorable). -n, --adjustment=N add integer N to the niceness (default 10) --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit NOTE: your shell may have its own version of nice, which usually supersedes the version described here. Please refer to your shell’s documenta? tion for details about the options it...

One of the biggest uses of sha1sum is to verify integrity of files, that are going to be sent by any electric medium, here you will how to use it Do you need to send an attachment by email, or upload/download a file by ftp, or exchange a file with any other way, and need to be sure that file arrives its destination with no corruptions? Well you may need to use sha1sum, which is a Linux console command that will check and print the sha1 hash Summarizing, it will scan the file and print a string, which is unique...

How to assign and reassign priority to Linux commands or processes, to optimize your CPU ussage You may have seen this problem with your Linux sometimes, you are working with your normal applications, like browsing the web, using Open Office or any other thing, and then Linux start a cron process or you start a make command, and all the other applications slow down. Well you can solve that by entering different priorities to different applications, this is done with the nice and renice commands. Lets say you need to compile a program, and do not want it to eat...

Import photos into Linux is really an easy task, just need to install gthumb and you are ready gthumb is a Linux tool or better said a Gnome tool, to view images, but one of its better uses is to import photos directly from the camera. Install gthumb For Debian or Ubuntu sudo apt-get install gthumb For Fedora or Centos sudo yum install gthumb Once installed, open it from: Applications->graphics->gthumb image viewer You will get something like this: then go to: file->import photos and you will get this box. then just select the pictures to import, if you want them...

Today I ran into a problem with my blog, for some reason after a two hours server failure (sorry for that) one of my database's table appeared corrupted. It was the sessions table and therefore I was no able to login to my drupal again, that was really bad, after one hour of being nervous, I started to figure out what was wrong. Once I realized that table was corrupted I went to PHPmyadmin and selected my MySQL database. and then checked the corrupted table, and select from the menu to repair it, after that all was solved. Here are...

Today I learned a funny use of the well know Debian Linux command: apt-get I am a regular visitor of John Cow.com, and as soon as I say this command I immediately think about him. Hey John if you are using Debian or Ubuntu in your server, go to the console and enter: sudo apt-get moo If you do not have a Linux console with you, I will give you the result also. Here it is: (__) (oo) /------\/ / | || * /\---/\ ~~ ~~ ...."Have you mooed today?"... Hope you like this post, and switch to Linux :)....

Introduction to sed, "stream editor", here you will see how to change words in text documents, using a console command line in Linux Sed is a great tool to do a lot of things, the most known use of sed is to change words or strings in text documents, which is we are going to show here. Changing only the first occurrence in a sentence In a given text document we are going to change only the first occurrence of the a given word in each sentence of the text, check this give text. Hi, This is a text document...

When you use man pages, you will notice some numbers at the beginning and at the end of the man page like this: man ls LS(1) User Commands LS(1) NAME ls - list directory contents SYNOPSIS ls [OPTION]... [FILE]... =========================//============================= SEE ALSO The full documentation for ls is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and ls programs are properly installed at your site, the com? mand info ls should give you access to the complete manual. ls 5.97 January 2007 LS(1) that number LS(1) indicates the section where man page of LS belongs. the most common sections and...

If you as the most of Linux users, are coming from Windows, you maybe are missing the clipboard manager that lets you copy and paste and also have a history of the copied objects so you can choose which one of them to paste, well if you are now using Gnome you also have that feature, just need to install it. Debian / Ubuntu sudo apt-get install glipper Fedora / Centos sudo yum install glipper once installed, you only need to launch it from the menu: Applications->Accessories->Glipper It will appear on the right upper corner of your screen, and now...

If you have read my post about Installing personal web server and you have installed it, you may be now enjoying its benefits but now it is maybe time to tweak it a little, specially the way it purges files and maintain the cache size in the disk. Polipo never erase a file from the cache, so there is a script that installs automatically on your Linux box when you install Polipo that takes care of this, that script is run daily with cron, and it is located at: /etc/cron.daily/polipo its content is: #!/bin/sh set -e FORBIDDEN_FILE=/etc/polipo/forbidden CONFIG_FILE=/etc/polipo/config if [...

By default Firefox scales images that are bigger than your screen or in fact bigger than the size of Firefox window at the time it is showing the image. If you want to change this default behavior do it this way. In the address bar enter this: about:config Then browse below until you see: browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing double click on it to change the boolean value from true to false, and you are done!.

Sometimes when a machine is booting up with Linux Operating System, some errors appears on the console while booting up, but they just pass too fast for one to read them. Therefore you need look at those messages somewhere else. If you are using Debian, you can enable boot logging so all the messages send to console while booting will also be sent to a file that you can later examine. Note for Ubuntu: Since Feisty, it seems that do not include bootlogd anymore, and the boot messages are now copied to: //var/log/dmesg from kernel's ring buffer, the script that...

A regular visitor of this blog, my friend from Spain Averia started her blog almost three years ago, in that time she was starting with Linux, by now you can find at her blog hundreds of good Linux tips, news, also humor posts, she writes in Spanish, so this is a great site to visit for the Spanish speakers of this blog. Its minimalistic Red and white design looks great! at least for me, so If you speak "Castellano / Español" and like to visit a good Girl's Linux Site go, check. La otra bola de Cristal and enjoy your...

If you have ever found yourself in the situation of needing to perform an action in Linux, but you are not sure which console command you may need there is a way you can find that command. apropos or man -k are the command that will come to rescue you. The way you can use the is. apropos copy Where copy is the action you want to perform, the output will be something like this. cp (1) - copy files and directories cpgr (8) - copy with locking the given file to the password or group file cpio (1) -...

There are two stories about the use of memory by KDE4 vs the use of memory of KDE3, they have somehow different information, actually opposite. The two "studies" comes from the same author on its first test, he used KSysguard applications to measure the amount of memory used by both versions of KDE and the results showed that KDE 4 uses 40% less memory than KDE 3, this story is now on Digg and Slashdot. digg Slashdot It is even on reddit, pointing to the slashdot article, well this making everybody think that KDE 4 with composite on uses less...

The Debian project founded on 1993 by Ian Murdock was named that way because of the three first letters of his wife's name Deborah and his own name Ian Debian. Later on 1996 Bruce Perens took the command of the project, it appears that he worked at that time in Pixar and since that year all the next Debian releases came with a code name of one character of Toy Story sid (The kid who destroys toys) buzz (Buzz Lightyear) Debian 1.1 rex (The T-Rex) Debian 1.2 bo (Bo Peep) Debian 1.3 Hamm Debian 2.0 slink (Slinky the dog) Debian...

ulteo who claim to be the the easiest Linux in the world is now offering for beta tester users, the possibility to run Ulteo online on your web-browser, and also use Open Office online, with collaboration tools, so you can send invitations via email to people to collaborate with you while working on a document, Like Google Docs but with the well know Open Office. As well as offering instant 'no-install' access, Ulteo's service also provides OpenOffice.org users with instant collaboration capabilities. A user working with OpenOffice.org on the Ulteo server can invite other people to work with him or...

Yesterday after an upgrade of my Debian system the resolution of my screen switched to 800x600, I checked my xorg.conf configuration and everything was OK, but fortunately in Linux everything has an easy solution, what I needed to do was: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and Debian took care of the configurations, after that the option 1024x768 appeared again in my Gnome options.

If you ever installed Debian you should know this screen. This appears when you install your Debian Linux operating system from the NetInstall CD, sometimes you may want to select nothing there, and just install the minimum installation. Once your installation is finished, and you want to install some task, like Desktop Environment just call the application again as root: tasksel thats all you need, now select the task you need to install and voila! This is useful in some of the following scenarios. Your CPE modem assigns an IP with DHCP but the DNS it assigns (itself) does not...

It is normal the need to add tables into documents, If you are using LaTeX to write your documents this goal can also be achieved in a very simple way. We will have to use the tabular environment. the format for this is: \begin{tabular}[pos]{table spec} Where: pos Can be eiter: b = bottom c = center t = top table spec Can either: l = left-justified column c = centered column r = right-justified column p{width} = paragraph column with text vertically aligned at the top m{width} = paragraph column with text vertically aligned in the middle (requires array package)...

Update: Sorry, the video is no longer available at youtube due to a copyright claim by a third party This video appeared in some days ago, it is actually fun, do you think it could be true that we are facing the Bubble 2.0 :) It is not related to Linux in anyway, but I think is o.k. to have some fun and not just work :). Please post your comments. via calabozodelandroide

I use this tool a lot as I have lots of ISOs in my Hard Disk, you maybe know it, but for those you don't here it is: Create the directory where your ISO is going to be mounted mkdir /media/ISO Mount your ISO file mount -t iso9660 -o loop image.iso /media/ISO Remember that it is just like a CDROM, so it is a read-only file system, but that is what you need really?

digg_url = 'http://www.go2linux.org/vista-and-ubuntu-battle'; About a week ago, my good friend of PolishLinux posted a thread (Yes it is now a thread, like in a forum) about Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon) and Vista (Business Edition), in the battlefield of Desktop Oriented Operating systems. He stated that: It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years And then he made a side by side comparison of some aspects he thinks are...

Find here how to take Screen Shots with Linux, could help you specially if you like to write Linux tutorials If you like to write tutorial, or need a screen shot for any homework or job, the Linux Operating System gives you some very good resources to have this task done. The Gimp With Gimp you have to go to: File->Acquire->Screeshot and you will get a dialog box like this As you see you have three options: Take Screenshot of a singe window: This will make your cursor be a thick cross, and you can select the window to take...

Yesterday I got an email from Greg Laden inviting me to read on of his posts on Scienceblogs.com As I am not a programmer, (I am an Electronics Engineer) I do not fully understand how Linux Kernel is made, but reading this gave me an idea about how drivers could be inserted in our Linux, instead of given my point of view about something I do not fully understand, I prefer you to read the article by yourself and post your opinions here if you want to. The two articles (which are related) you may want to read are: Why...

I am not a KDE user, but used to be, and after seeing so much about KDE4 I am really thinking about start using it again. But the question Beineri ask is. Which Distro will be first to ship KDE4? According to him as soon as it is released lots of distributions will start to offer it, well maybe that will not occur with my favorite Linux Distro (Debian) even though I am using Lenny in my Laptop. Maybe Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Sabayon and others like those will offer KDE4 as soon as it is available, also CentOS is another...

Yesterday and after some months of beta testing the Sourceforge.net marketplace has been officially opened. But, what is that?, well is a place where both people selling support for specific Open Source projects can meet the people demanding for those services. Each expert is free to open an account, set the prices for his services, and the way he collects the money which may include Paypal, credit, card, check or others. Sourceforget.net is also offering a rating method where both the buyer and the seller can rate the transaction, so when you are going to buy a service you can...

Some days later of the Beta 3 release the Beta 4 of Drupal 6.0 has been released, they hope to release the first Release Candidate if no more critical bugs are found on this beta, so, Drupal users please start testing it and reporting bugs. According to Drupal these are the changes and fixes in this new release Changes made since the release of Drupal 6.0 beta 3 include several multilingual support fixes, caching improvements, more clear help texts, drag and drop support for book outlines, user profile administration, taxonomy pages and file uploads, and fixes to node teaser generation....

This how-to shows you an easy way to backup and then restore your thunderbird data including your emails It is a good idea to backup from time to time your data, and maybe some of our most valuable data now a days are our emails, and email addresses. And yes there are a lot of on-line applications that may take care about that, like plaxo or gmail I prefer to have all that in my PC with my favorite email client which is Thunderbird Today I will show you which steps you need to backup and then restore to the...

If you want to check if all the packages you have installed on your Linux (Debian based) are free software you can use the vrms software to check it. vrms is according to its site: The vrms program will analyze the set of currently-installed packages on a Debian-based system, and report all of the packages from the non-free tree which are currently installed. Installing and using it sudo apt-get install vrms vrms The output on my PC was: fglrx-control Control panel for the ATI graphics accelerators fglrx-driver Video driver for the ATI graphics accelerators fglrx-driver-dev Video driver for the ATI...

Update: 2010-04-06, you may also want to read get_flash_videos Here there is an easy way to download Youtube videos using wget. First thing we need is the video ID which we are going to get using also wget together with grep. First locate the page of the video you want to download, I will use for this example one showing compizfusion in action. wget -O /tmp/page.tmp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHvAXLBMWGI Then using cat and grep we will get the video ID cat /tmp/page.tmp | grep video_id= This will be the output var fullscreenUrl = '/watch_fullscreen?video_id=UHvAXLBMWGI&l;=51&t;=OEgsToPDskKBFLkte03dOnia39Rzd63j&sk;=7Ayx8rGROMLJrkh6LkXj7AC&fs;=1&title;=CompizFusion'; var relatedVideoGridUrl = '/related_ajax?video_id=UHvAXLBMWGI&view;_type=G&watch3;=1&search;=compiz%20linux%20ubuntu'; var relatedVideoListUrl = '/related_ajax?video_id=UHvAXLBMWGI&view;_type=L&watch3;=1&search;=compiz%20linux%20ubuntu';...

Today I upgraded my Linux from Etch to Lenny, and one of the first things that stop working was vmware-server, actually I did not expect it to work at all. Well to fix that I run ./vmware-config.pl as root This is the error I got: Your kernel was built with "gcc" version "4.1.3", while you are trying to use "/usr/bin/gcc" version "4.2.3". This configuration is not recommended and VMware Server may crash if you'll continue. Please try to use exactly same compiler as one used for building your kernel. Do you want to go with compiler "/usr/bin/gcc" version "4.2.3" anyway?...

Maybe a lot of people already know this, but I will write it down here, in case anyone forget it, or of somebody does not know already. To upgrade the Linux Debian Stable Etch to testing Lenny, just need to follow these two steps. 1. Edit sources.list sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list and change all words etch to lenny, or stable to testing 2. Update and upgrade sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude sudo aptitude full-upgrade that is all, this also work if you want to go from lenny to sid, just change your sources.list accordingly. It is also...

This December 3rd Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS has been released in its Alpha 1 version. This is only intended for testing purposes, and to help the developers find bugs, is not intended for production machines, so do not download to install it as you main system, and back-up your data before installing it. These are the highlights about this version. Xorg 7.3 The latest Xorg is available in alpha1, Xorg 7.3, with an emphasis on better autoconfiguration without config files. Massive merge from Debian As with the beginning of any development cycle, the Hardy one has seen the merge...

digg_url = 'http://www.go2linux.org/latex-simple-tutorial'; Today I would like to introduce you to the world of TeX, specifically LaTeX. As LaTeX is complex, I have divided this document into these parts Introduction to LaTeX My first LaTeX document Setting LaTeX paper Size and margins Inserting Figures on LaTex Texmaker a cross platform LaTeX front end Create Tables with Latex I will later add more LaTeX tips.

When we are writing documents, no matter if these are with MS Word, Open Office or Latex, sometimes we need to insert graphics on them. Well if you are using Latex, there is a solution, and a good and easy one to insert graphics on the document. The first thing you need to do is to add this line below the documentclass control sequence. \usepackage{graphicx} and then wherever you want to add the image use this code. \begin{figure} \includegraphics[scale=0.20]{ptop.eps} \end{figure} where ptop.eps, is the encapsulated post script graphic you may want to add to the file and the scale option...

We are going to cover now the front end for LaTeX in Linux, well one of them as there are more than one. Texmaker Texmaker is according to its site: Texmaker is a free LaTeX editor, that integrates many tools needed to develop documents with LaTeX, in just one application And according to Wikipedia its features are: a unicode editor to write LaTeX source files (syntax highlighting, undo-redo, search-replace, spell checker...) the principal LaTex tags can be inserted directly with the "LaTeX" and "Math" menus 370 mathematical symbols can be inserted in just one click wizards to generate code ('Quick...

Page Margins and page size are really important parameters if you want to have a neat and nice print of you work. First lets see how to declare the paper size, that is declared with \documentclass control sequence. \documentclass[10pt,letterpaper,titlepage]{article} Now, this picture is going to help us know what variables to use to set the margins. As you can see you need to declare the topmargin, and to declare the bottom margin, you will have to add topmargin + textheight +footheight, and subtract that from the paper size, that is going to be your bottom margin. It is the same...

PWD(1) User Commands PWD(1) NAME pwd - print name of current/working directory SYNOPSIS pwd [OPTION] DESCRIPTION Print the full filename of the current working directory. --help display this help and exit --version output version information and exit NOTE: your shell may have its own version of pwd, which usually super? sedes the version described here. Please refer to your shell’s docu? mentation for details about the options it supports. AUTHOR Written by Jim Meyering. REPORTING BUGS Report bugs to <[email protected]>. COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the...

Beside the captain in a ship, the next most important guy is the navigator, because is always important to know where you are in the sea, also in your Linux File System you need to know where you are and how to get where you want to: This is done with some few commands, where some of the most used are ls, pwd, cd Knowing where you are pwd shows you where you are in the directory structure, just type: pwd And you will have an output like this. /home/ggarron/Desktop/borrar/go2linux/1024 Which means you are in the subdirectory 1024, which is...

LS(1) User Commands LS(1) NAME ls - list directory contents SYNOPSIS ls [OPTION]... [FILE]... DESCRIPTION List information about the FILEs (the current directory by default). Sort entries alphabetically if none of -cftuvSUX nor --sort. Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. -a, --all do not ignore entries starting with . -A, --almost-all do not list implied . and .. --author with -l, print the author of each file -b, --escape print octal escapes for nongraphic characters --block-size=SIZE use SIZE-byte blocks -B, --ignore-backups do not list implied entries ending with ~ -c with -lt: sort by, and...

On this second part of the document we will start to see the structure of a LaTeX document. As our first step we will install the necessary software apt-get install texlive-latex-base Then to create the document we first declare the document type and the letter type (at least) \documentclass[10pt]{article} The document will 10pt letter, and will be an article, you can also define the size of paper here: \documentclass[10pt,letterpaper,titlepage]{article} Or make it two column (like books) \documentclass[10pt,letterpaper,twocolumn,titlepage]{article} After that we can go with the author title and date of the document. \author{Guillermo Garr\'{o}n} \title{Hello World} \date{November, 2007} From here with...

Now it is really easy to use any MP3 file as ringtone on almost all cell phones, you just need to transfer the song to the phone and make it your default ring tone. But there are two problems with this, at least for me. My phone does not have enough memory to have too much songs Almost all songs start with low volume, and when I finally hear it, the call was droped Well, to solve that, you need to edit the mp3 file and transfer to the phone only the part you want to use as ringtone, and...

PhoroLinux is a new site, it started on September this year, and because of its great articles it is growing up in number of readers real fast!. Most of its articles are focused on Ubuntu and on Desktop application, for both KDE and Gnome. Its red on white theme is really nice to eyes. It has lots of screenshots it even has a Screenshots category. We do not know too much about its author as its about page does not say too much, but I think I can not comply about that, my blog does not even has an about...

Definition Latex is like a derivation of TeX which was created by D.E. Knuth and LaTeX by L.B. Lamport and is better for long articles than TeX. From Wikipedia LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system. Introduction A LaTeX document is a plain text document which contains tags like an HTML document which gives the document its format. This tags should be defined in another file called class. Class are files where the control sequences are defined. Control Sequences Control sequences are the commands in LaTeX language, they...

The post I am going to partially translate here was originally written by an 11 years old girl from Gijon Spain. The equipments installed this year in my classroom let us surf the web, and they are also useful to take notes. They do not have Windows but Xubuntu which is a similar operating system. The word "Xubuntu" comes from Africa. There are also Mac, Mac is usually used on design and press companies. To use the PC you need to enter "Evaristo" as user and password. After hitting ENTER lots of options in English and some in Spanish appear....

IBM's offices suite a.k.a. Lotus Symphony has released its Beta 2, Symphony gives the user three major applications. Word Processor Spread Sheet Presentations You need to download the .binfile which has 200 Mbytes size, and you need 562 MBytes of free space to install it. It supports Suse and RedHat, according to IBM's site, I have installed on Centos 5, and works great. According to its site these are the requirements are: At least 750MB of free disk space on Linux and at least 540MB of free disk space on Windows At least 512MB RAM memory Windows installer does not...

Once again reviewing good Linux sites, this time is the turn for BashCuresCancer, as its name suggests the site is devoted to command line uses. I think it is a great site, and highly recommend you to subscribe to its RSS. I can see the author likes CentOS a lot (like me), and lots of its tutorials are based on CentOS, but the command line is basically the same for every Linux Distribution, so it does not matter which Distro you are using, you will learn a lot reading BashCuresCancer. The clear colors also make it easy to read, I...

Would you like this view to your Ubuntu Linux? If your answer is yes, the solution is quite simple. just enter this command. sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-look You will also have the sounds of Ubuntu studio, (the default Ubuntu sounds will be removed)

In few more days we will have Ubuntu Hardy Heron Alpha 1 released, this is the LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu (One of the major Linux distros) since 6.06 Dapper Drake. Long Term Support releases are intended to be stable releases, for those who need a really stable OS either because they do not like to be experimenting or just because they need the OS for server applications. So on November 29th we will have Alpha 1 ready and on April 24th 2008 the final release is scheduled. Check the schedule

digg_url = 'http://www.go2linux.org/firefox-3-vs-firefox-2'; Firefox Beta 3 has been released some days ago, I have installed it and made a little comparison with Firefox 2.0 to see some of the changes. Here I am comparing them with screen shots, side by side when that is possible, because there are some features in 3 that are not present in 2. Zooming When you zoom with firefox 2 you can only zoom the text and not the images, but now with Firefox 3 the images are also zoomed, so you can zoom a page with text and images, or only images pages. Firefox...

This Laptop is a powerful and good in-expensive option for some people looking something between a smartphone, handheld and Laptop. Well it is actually a Laptop with no disk but with a 4 Gbytes flash memory (disk), and USB 2.0 lets you attach any other USB memory or an external disk to it. It comes with Linux pre-loaded, with OpenOffice, of course it has WiFi so you can stay connected with your email, your blog, or anything you want (or need) to do before arriving your home or work. It has half of the size of the average Laptop and...

There are some people whose hands sweat too much when in contact with things, they will be more than happy with this new mouse. It has a fan inside that keeps your hands cool and dry while you are using it. Optical sensor: 800dpi Built in cooling fan Cooling fan switchable Ergonomic Design USB interface Support Windows 98/ME/2000/XP Cable Length: 1.2m Dimension: 12 x 66 x 40 mm Net Weight: 109g via: http://www.gadgettastic.com

SUDOERS(5) MAINTENANCE COMMANDS SUDOERS(5) NAME sudoers - list of which users may execute what DESCRIPTION The sudoers file is composed of two types of entries: aliases (basi? cally variables) and user specifications (which specify who may run what). When multiple entries match for a user, they are applied in order. Where there are conflicting values, the last match is used (which is not necessarily the most specific match). The sudoers grammar will be described below in Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF). Don’t despair if you don’t know what EBNF is; it is fairly simple, and the definitions below are annotated. Quick...

The file /etc/sudoers, has the rules that users have to follow when using sudo command. If you are (or was) running Ubuntu, you may know that by default the root account is not usable in Ubuntu, because it has no password, you may assign one and use it as in every other Linux, but that is another story. On normal Ubuntu Linux machines you need to use sudo command to perform operations as root. I like that approach, and even though I am using Debian, I always give my account root rights, so I can run commands as root without...

For those who use Drupal as your CRM platforms you may be interested in knowing that the Beta 3 of its version 6.0 has been released yesterday. In more or less two more weeks we should be able to start testing the first Release Candidate. This release has fixed lots of the reported bugs, and it almost ready for production (do not use it in a live site yet!). Everyone is invited to test it, I will start doing that this weekend. As they say in their site the more people helping the faster we will have the final release...

Vim has great searching capabilities, and one of most interesting is incremental search. Using this once you enter in search mode you will see how the word matching the search criteria highlights, to enable this just enter this command while editing the document :set incsearch Another great search tip, is the smartcase function, which when combined with ignorecase make the searches match no matter the case, unless you put the first letter in upper case, this way you are telling vim that you want it to be case-sensitive. To enable this options you have to enter these commands. :set ignorecase...

At Mozilla's blog it is announced that Firefox 3 Beta 1 has been released for testing. But like they say, it is not recommended to install this in your working system, you can download and install in a testing PC, or Virtual Machine, because it may have a lot of bugs yet. These are some of its new features according to the same site. Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins. Improved ease of use through: better...

I think that there should be lots of people like me that even having Gnome Text Editor, or some KDE tool for the same goal, still uses vim as their primary text editor. I use vim since my first days with Linux on '97, I think on that time that was maybe the only or one of the few options, was not easy but being used to WordStar or WordPerfect, it did not look as intimidating as it may look to people now a days. vim is a very powerfull editor, and I want to put here just some commands...

I like this video a lot, it shows how you can made a TV stand out of the own TV package. You can first see a good picture at: tomballhatchet.com And here is the video: via: http://www.walyou.com/blog

These are 10 useful uses of the command find in Linux, they are not the most useful, just some useful for me, I will use $HOME as the path for every example but you may use any other. Find empty directories find $HOME -depth -type d -empty This will find empty directories in your home directory. Find empty files find $HOME -depth -type f -empty This will finde empty common files in your home directory. Find a file with a specific name find $HOME -name [name_of_file] This will find files with a given name in any child directory of your...

Iron key is a "Mission Impossible" like flash memory, it has AES encryption method that goes beyond military standards of security Among others these are some of its features. It comes with a hardware encryption method, where all your data is encrypted to be saved and decrypted to be showed to you, it is password protected, but if you (or anybody else) fails 10 times your passwords, this chip will self destroy making impossible to read your data Run applications directly from your flash key, so you do not left traces on the hosts machines you may use The Iron...

If you need more WiFi range this can help you, this router has a nearly a quarter mile of range (400 mts) and also has 4 100M Ethernet ports too. It also supports WPA-Enterprise, WPA2, or WEP for security, which is really important considering its great range, so your neighbors can not steal your bandwidth. These are some of its features: Five units in one: Access point, router, point-to-point bridge, point-to-multipoint bridge, and wireless repeater Nearly 30 dBm, the limit allowed by US FCC regulation Extreme receiving sensitivity of -96dBm, so even weak clients can be heard 4x the range...

This really surprised me, this pen is a cell phone, it is a concept but like some concept cars, this one may get to the market. As you can see it even has a micro-sd slot, the numbers are along the pen, and there is also a LCD display. Hope to have one in the future, I think it will use bluetooth earphone as I just can't imagine where the mic and speaker is. Via: http://www.gadgettastic.com

I have extracted this section of this Linus Torvalds interview. As you can see, from the creator of Linux point of view, there is no reason to start a battle (or sustain it) against Microsoft, we (Linux Community) Should focus on how to do the things, and to teach other users, how to use Linux better and maybe stop doing comparisons. (I also did them a lot). I am just thinking that maybe is better to focus in how good we are, and also on improving the things we are not too good yet. This way we will gain more...

digg_url = 'http://www.go2linux.org/linux-blog-day'; Hi readers, today I have been thinking the whole day, about A Merry Ubuntu Christmas and Blog Action day and I think that we can do something similar for Linux. Let's say we can choose a day, December the 6th for example (just an example), and on that day all the subscribed Linux blogs should post about a topic, the topic of this year could be to give a Linux CD as a gift (do not have to be only gift you gave :). ) to everyone you want to give a Christmas gift. So, if some...

Today I have tried to compile a software in a Debian Linux machine, when I run ./configure I got checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes checking for gawk... no checking for mawk... mawk checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes checking for multicast... checking for gcc... no checking for cc... no checking for cl.exe... no configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH See `config.log' for more details. Then I installed gcc with: apt-get install gcc and try again, this time I got: checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether...

Gnome is one of the most used windows manager for Linux, it is also highly configurable. You can customize it by changing themes, or on each theme changing the controls, windows borders or icons. First thing to do is to download some good themes. You can use Google or use one of these sites I have found. Gnome Themes, wallpapers, icons Eyecandy for your Gnome-Desktop Gnome Art Once you have downloaded the file, you need to go to menu: Desktop -> Preferences -> Theme for Debian, and I think Desktop -> Preferences -> Appearance for Distros with newer Gnome version,...

Hi, I have started a poll and a discussion today here about which Distro you prefer to use, and why, also which ones you have already tested. Tell us your experiences, using Linux. I will run the poll till the end of the month, please participate and post your opinion in the forum about your preferred Linux Distribution or maybe you have more than one. Hope to see your opinion.

I have found this post about giving an Ubuntu CD as Christmas gift, I think is a nice idea, (and free hehe). You just need to go to Ubuntu Shipit and order your gifts, or just download the image, and then burn the ISO. Also as grab the code and add it to your site, so you will be participating on this campaign about giving Freedom to others.

GAMMU(1) Gammu Documentation GAMMU(1) NAME Gammu - Does some neat things with your cellular phone or modem. SYNTAX Usage: gammu [confign] [nothing|text|textall|binary|errors] <command> [options] DESCRIPTION This program is a tool for mobile phones. Many vendors and phones are supported, for actual listing see <http://cihar.com/gammu/phonedb/>. OPTIONS First parameter optionally specifies which config section to use (all are probed by default). Second parameter optionally controls debug level, next one specifies actions. Commands can be specified with or without leading --. Debug levels Parameters, which allow to control debug level: nothing - no debug level text - transmission dump in text format textall...

Yesterday, The Fedora Project has released F8 (code name "Werewolf"). According to Fedora project leader Max Spevack, "Fedora 7 was so much about infrastructure and under-the-hood changes, and now Fedora 8 is showing that with our infrastructure in place, custom 'spins' have been thriving and there is a laundry list of new stuff, There is so much new stuff that it shows that Fedora is good at innovating and putting new technology into the Linux world and into the hands of users which is one of Fedora's core goals." Actually the Spins are some of the better new improvements in...

OBEXFTP(1) ObexFTP OBEXFTP(1) NAME obexftp - Mobile Equipment file transfer tool SYNOPSIS obexftp [OPTION] [COMMANDS] DESCRIPTION obexftp is used to access files on mobile equipment, i.e. cell phones. This tool lets you access the ObexFTP library by the means of a command line interface. You might consider using the other means available. E.g. GTK Client gObexFtp, Gnome-VFS-Module vfs-obexftp and some others. OPTIONS The ordering of options is important. Every command will use the most recent device set. Every file without command switch will apply to the command given most recent. See EXAMPLES -i, --irda Connect using the IrDA protocol. This...

Today I have bought a cheap Msi Star Key Bluetooth USB DongleUSB Bluetooth dongle, and start working to download my pictures from my cellular to my Linux PC. It is actually not difficult and here is how. Install the software apt-get install obexftp bluetooth Connect your cellular to your PC Connect the Dongle to your PC it should be recognized immediately, Now on your cellular scan for new devices, once you have found your PC try to connect to it, both your cellular and your PC will ask for a password, choose any (4 digits) but the same on both....

Today TalSiach visited my and thanks to that I have came to his blog And there what really caught my attention was this post about a usb collar for your Dog. This is great, as you can put all your info there, and if you dog get lost, anyone can just plug the USB into his computer, and get all the needed data to return your lovely Dog (or cat) to you and your family. You can get yours at Amazon. For your PetSafe - Small Dog Micro I.D.small dog For your PetSafe - Large Dog Micro I.D.Large Dog or,...

The Geek of Ubuntu is our friend author of UbuntuGeek, this site is dedicated to make the transition from Windows to Linux easier for those who decide to do the switch, as the author says. Ubuntu is in my humble opinion the easiest and best way to switch from Windows to a free and open-source operating system. In order to make your transition easier, and to help those that have started using ubuntu. I am started using ubuntu nearly 2 years and i want to share my experiences and some useful information to ubuntu lovers.This weblog contains Ubuntu Tips,Tricks,Howto’s and...

We all know that is not easy to write a message using the phone keyboard, and it would be great to have a "real" keyboard with it, but that will also take too much space, so here is the solution for that. As you can see, this will give you the possibility to use a qwerty keyboard. It works with laser and will that way "know" what key you have pressed. It is compatible with Acer N50, Asus MyPal A716, Audiovox xv6600 PPC6601 Harrier, Blackberry 7100 Series, Blackberry 7130e, Blackberry 7250, Blackberry 7290, Blackberry 7520, Blackberry 8700, Dell Axim 50/X50V,...

You probably already know about gOS, it is everywhere gOS (Green Operating System), comes with lots of web 2.0 applications, and Google applications like: Gmail Meebo Google News Google Calendar Google maps Google Docs Google Product Search Facebook Youtube Wikipedia Blogger Skype But even though it comes with lots of Google applications it has no relation with Google. According to this Interview that my friend from fscking got. The idea of starting this project comes to light because of: Well, I guess a couple things happened… I got interested in Google applications, especially docs and spreadsheets, presentations; and originally, I...

Today I want to write about some of the biggest wonders on the Linux world, this are my thoughts, and they may differ from yours, and they could even change in my mind after reading what you think the 7 Linux world Wonders should be, so please read this post, and the comment about it. The Linux kernel The Linux Kernel is Linux itself for lots of people, without it, Linux would have never exists, it is the core of the Linux Operating System, (GNU Linux). We have it thanks to Linus Torvalds who posted at comp.os.minix I’m doing a...

digg_url = 'http://www.go2linux.org/Looking-glass-on-debian-Etch'; I have wrote a long time ago about Looking Glass a Sun/Java 3D Desktop for Linux, yesterday I installed on my Debian Etch, using now my latest ATI drivers. Installing it on a Debian Linux box is really easy, lets see how to do it. Modifying the apt sources vim /etc/apt/sources.lst You may use your favorite text editor, mine is vim Then be sure to add this line. # Looking Glass Repository deb http://javadesktop.org/lg3d/debian stable contrib Getting the software sudo apt-get install lg3d-core It will download all the needed packages, grab a cup of tea, as it...

While browsing the web I have came to this site, Fsckin w/ Linux it has some good tips, and how tos. I like its Linux Nation section, where the Wayne Richardson the author of this site, comments about the biggest Linux/Unix news on Digg for that given week. The site has a good layout, easy to read, and nice colors also, its RSS are not in full mode, so you if you subscribe you will have to jump to the site for each post you are interested in. -- Wayne I really suggest you to change this to full mode,...

If you like Compiz Fusion, you will like this site, it is at least until now (It is really new) completely devoted to Compiz Fusion. Check out the screenshot, I like the colors of the blog, they are different to the common blogs out there. To be a new site, it is growing real fast, should be because of its great content, hope you enjoy your visit to Forlong's Blog

While for these days I have been busy at my job, I had not enough time to write on the site, but I have been reading some sites, one of those is ArsGeek I am not linking to its main page, but to its Linux section. You will find on this section good Linux stuff, specially for the Desktop users, I mean those who use Linux as a XP replacement, and not as much as a server. You will find how to rip CDs, play mp3, beautify your Desktop, the site also have an Ubuntu specific section, where you will...

Fedora is one of the most used Linux distribution and if you are interested in Fedora, or are a Fedora user, this site is for you. Fedora FAQ is a site, with the most needed advices and small how-tos for Fedora users, as it name says, it is the Frequently Asked Questions about Fedora list. I like a lot the the Using Fedora and installing Software section. Where can I get software for Fedora? How do I install software in Fedora? (How to use yum or an RPM) (Updated 2 Nov 2007) Is there a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for...

What is Elightenment? From Enlightnment Home page we can get the answer. Some people affectionately refer to Enlightenment as E because typing or saying the whole word is a bit of a mouthful. Early in its history, which began back in 1996, E was just a window manager for X11. Enlightment tries to bring you the latest graphics effect, while still being light and not an eating resources application. On its features you may see. Sound Effects for different windows action Mouse focus on windows Move between Desktops by moving your mouse to the end of the window Lots of...

Today I checked at my stats in Google Analytics, and also at Awstats. The results are different, while the trend may be the same, well look at the numbers. As you can see the number of visits to the site is 60,146, this is not unique visitors, these are total human visitors, (bots are supposed not counted), also there were 86,906 page views according to Google. Now lets see AwStats. Second column are the number of visits 82,472 and 155,478 page views (third column) according to AwStats. Google report a 27% less that AwStats in visits, and why? that was...

WGET(1) GNU Wget WGET(1) NAME Wget - The non-interactive network downloader. SYNOPSIS wget [option]... [URL]... DESCRIPTION GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies. Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting Wget finish the work. By con? trast, most of the Web browsers require constant user’s presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a...

When there is the need to download files like pictures, PDFs, or any other type of file, it can be done by right clicking on the link and choosing to save the given file, but that is tiring. A better approach is to use wget It is usually installed in all Linux distros, but if not we can install it. Debian / Ubuntu apt-get install wget Fedora / CentOS yum install wget Sabayon emerge wget Now lets explore some of its features. If there is the need to download a single page. wget http://www.site.com/file.pdf But if there is the need...

AMD has released the new 7.10 version of ATI drivers for Linux. It is good to know that AMD is taken seriously Linux users, this time Linux boxes will have support for AIXGL so, 3D acceleration will work now better and therefore Compiz and 3D games will have better performance on Linux. According to AMD the supported cards by this new version are: ATI Radeon X1000, X800, X700, X550/X300, 9800, 9700, 9600 y 9500 Series. I have installed it, on my Debian Etch with an ATI Radeon X300, and now I have Compiz working, but still have some problems. I...

Be sure to read Boost your internet speed part I I am writing this post because a reader of this site has suggested. Polipo is a Linux proxy, like squid but it is intended in a personal use, I used to use squid as my personal proxy but because I have a PIV HT processor and 1 Gig of RAM, in Laptop that approach was just to heavy for it. Now with Polipo things will change, well go to the installation. Installation apt-get install polipo There is almost no need to change the configuration file as with the defaults it...

Update Check the part II of these article, boost your internet connection II Some days ago while I was on a business trip, and trying to work in the Hotel, the second day the Internet connection was really slow, (maybe some other guest was downloading a lot of information), while trying to look for some information on the web, it took lots of seconds to even get the IP of the pages I was trying to visit. I decided that I needed a local DNS on my PC to improve at least a little my speed experience. Installing Bind apt-get...

dhclient.conf(5) NAME dhclient.conf - DHCP client configuration file DESCRIPTION The dhclient.conf file contains configuration information for dhclient, the Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client. The dhclient.conf file is a free-form ASCII text file. It is parsed by the recursive-descent parser built into dhclient. The file may contain extra tabs and newlines for formatting purposes. Keywords in the file are case-insensitive. Comments may be placed anywhere within the file (except within quotes). Comments begin with the # character and end at the end of the line. The dhclient.conf file can be used to configure the behaviour of the client in a wide...

The first time I run DSL about one year ago, I loved its system monitor, it took me sometime to discover the name of that incredible application. Conky is that great application, it is really useful for me, as I always want to be aware about which applications are running, how much memory they are using, how much micro-processor, etc. I use to use among others: htop which is kind of improved top when working in text mode, for my Desktop I have tried some but my favorite is Conky. Well lets see how to install it. Install Conky on...

When there is the need to check the space used or the space available on a Linux filesystem there are a lot of utilities like: df or du both of them for the command line, for the GUI we have baobab With Baobab you can check the space each directory or sub-directory is using on you file system, the information is presented in absolute values as well as percentages, you can go as deep as you need in your directory structure. There is also the possibility to scan a network disk, via Public FTP, FTP with Login, SSH, Windows Share,...

Ubuntu Ultimate is a modified version of Ubuntu, Gnarly Gnome is its latest version available and it is based on Feisty Fawn but with lots of applications pre-loaded. Extracted from its page this are some of its applications. Enviroments KDE Gnome XFCE WindowMaker Enlightenment Sawfish And what is maybe the best of all for some game adicts Ultimate Ubuntu (Gnarly Gnome) come with all these games. UFO_AL Astromenace Enemy_Territory Tremulous Americas_Armi See its Screenshots.

Finally, After days or better said months of waiting Gutsy Gibbon is released, by the moment I am upgrading my Gutsy Beta to the recently released stable version. Features Some of its better features: I like that on Firefox now is really easy to install applications, like Flash, Java, Video plugins check here Also its video and music support is improved, as we are asked for to install the right codec to play the file we are trying to open. (of course you say that Sabayon Linux comes with all of that installed by default but if you have a...

For all of you who are using Drupal as your CMS platform. Drupal has released yesterday its 5.3 and 4.7.8 versions with security patches, so you are encouraged to upgrade to it. Keep in mind that you should make a complete backup of your site before, because as any big upgrade you do it has its risks. Drupal is a great CMS platform where you can maintain lots of blogs, forums, and has lots of features, this site is powered by Drupal.

Now when you have an interesting video on your PC to show your family, you do not need to call them all to your PC monitor, you can watch the video on your TV set. The KiSS 1600 is a DVD player equipped with a WiFi connection that can stream the videos or music directly from any PC in the network and send it to the TV. Lots of formats are supported like: AVI MPEG DIVX JPEG MP3 WMA Of course it also plays common DVDs, and it can also access the internet to play online radios, online gaming etc),...

Some time ago as one of the add-ons of the new Opera came the speed-dial option. This add-on let the user predefine some pages (usually their favorites) as small thumbnails that will appear on a blank tab or a blank page and then with a click on it, the browser goes to that page. I find this feature of Opera very useful as I usually review the same pages, everyday, I think the most of the users usually do that also. Well now our FireFox also has this feature, as a plug-in that can be downloaded from Speed dial for...

Mororola had a huge success with Razr, and now they want to repeat this success, it can noticed because they have not even change the name of this new phone the launched to the market. Well this new phone is even thinner that its predecessor it has 45 Mbytes of memory which is upgradable to 2 GB, also support 3G/HSDPA, Bluetooth 2.0 and has a 3.6 megapixels camera with digital zoom. Maybe one of the best thing about it for a Linux lover like me is that its software JUIX which is a platform for mobile phones based on Linux...

You may have some or maybe a lot of LP disk somewhere in your house, I have some of Scorpions and Def Leppard among others, now there is a way to recover all those disks and with all the quality of Technica, they have this product called AT-LP2Da Some of its features. Built-in switchable phono preamp—no interface needed Fully automatic operation 2 speeds - 33-1/3 and 45 RPM Professional aluminum platter Balanced tone arm with soft damping control Easily accessible front controls It also comes with a software called Cakewalk PYRO which can: Create MP3, WAV, and WMA files…and much...

Never was as easy to have your family pictures at your desk as with eStarling products. This gadget equipped with WiFi can sync with your Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, AOL, Smugmug, iPhoto, etc. there is also the possibility to email pictures to it, or send messages via email or SMS from a cellular phone. So you can use it to leave messages to your family, once they arrive home. They have good prices, and it is what a Geek needs on his desk. Learn more about it at: eStarling

Every day are appearing more and more ways to convert people from Windows to Linux, if this should be our goal as Linux users or not, is another discussion, but on its way to make Linux more and more user Friendly for those Windows users it comes Vixta. Vixta is a project with this in mind. Absolutly free, in every sense Spread linux to the "masses". ABN - Absolutly No Config User-Frendly. Eye-catching. Familiar look and Feel Vixta is based on Fedora, so for sure it will have stability, hardware support and lots of applications. If you want to give...

If you can not live without watching your favorite Tv show or you can not miss a single chapter of your favorite soap opera, then Satgo from DirecTv is for you!. It includes the antenna, a LCD 17" screen, all of this in a practical suitcase, so you can take the Tv with you. Its weight is 7.7 Kilos (17 lbs), has two speakers for great sound, also has a cigarette adapter so you can power it in the car, AC and DC power supply option, and a battery for 1 hour of Tv show. This great gadget cost only...

Linux keep growing and growing, you see it not only on Hard Disk, but on USB keys, powering Smart Phones, handhelds, and lots of other devices. Asus launched to the market a motherboard with Linux embedded, also containing Firefox and Skype. So imagine you can launch your PC in seconds and be ready to surf the web and talk with your pals, no need to wait until an operating system launch on your PC. When this become available on laptops will be a great thing for people traveling on business trips, imagine opening your laptop at the airport connecting to...

In only six more days Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon will be officially launched in its stable version. It will be downloadable through different mirrors all around the world given its popularity, if you do not have enough bandwidth or if your Internet connection is not as stable, you can ask for the free CDs that Canonical support. And there is no need to wait until Gutsy Gibbon is released!, yes it can be pre-ordered. So ask for it at Shipit, and start enjoying this new version of Ubuntu.

RSS feeds is a way in which your readers, can be kept informed about the changes on your site, without having to come to your site in a daily basis, and they can have your posts in their favorite RSS readers, like Google, Yahoo, Firefox, Thunderbird, or any other they prefer to use. The number of readers your site have also shows how interesting it is to readers, if they subscribe to your feeds is because they like your content. There are some rules I think you need to follow to be successful in gaining RSS readers. Invite your visitors...

I really like the design of this phone from Motorola, its features does not include some important features at least for me, like: EDGE and WiFi, but anyway as all the Motorola phones it has 4 bands support which is real good for people who travel a lot. some of the most important features are: General Network GSM 850 / GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900 Announced 2005, December Status Available Size Dimensions 95.7 x 51.7 x 21.5 mm Weight 122 g Display Type TFT touchscreen, 256K colors Size 240 x 320 pixels, 36 x 48 mm  -...

I have found this new site while surfing the web, and I think it deserve a place in this section. It is new, it started on April this year, but it is growing really fast, due to its great posts about a lot of topics of Linux Their articles are nice and useful, easy to read an follow, it is also easy to navigate on their site map you will find there lots of articles distributed in interesting categories, like Debian, Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, FUN among others. At this site you will also find that the colors of its WordPress...

For Distros with lots of Kernel upgrades Like Ubuntu Gutsy now that it is still in Beta, it is annoying to start every day your PC and see that your grub list keep growing and growing. Clean this unused kernel images is not only good for haven a cleaner grub menu, but also to gain disk space, as all those kernel images uses a lot of space in your disk. I will show you this under Ubuntu, but should work for other distros just taking care of the names of their kernel images, and also its package managers. If you...

SmoothWall 3.0 Express (Code name: Polar) is now released, and ready to be downloaded. You can expect to find an easier to install and configure SmoothWall according to its announcement. It now has an improved VPN support, comes with Clamav to protect your Microsoft machines, also has the ability to monitor and record instant messages that passes trough it, and also to block some words the admin would find not appropriate. (This includes MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL) It has improved graphics to let you see who is using more bandwidth, and will not only see, you will be able...

As previously announced on the Linux community and also on this blog Lenovo is offering Suse on their laptops. As you can see on this page (Written in spanish) the great T60 is one of the models offered with Suse loaded. The good news is that if your favorite Distro is not Suse, as Lenovo now support Linux will not be difficult to install your favorite Linux distribution on it. It was first Dell with Ubuntu, now with Lenovo and Suse we can expect some other major vendors also start offering Linux on their Laptops. Laptops was always a difficult...

Imagine you can get out of your wallet all the plastic cards you have there, including credit card, debit cards, loyalty cards, etc. And replace all of them with an only one "intelligent card", that is what icache offers to us. This is a device with biometrical security, so only with your finger-print the data is accessed. This device will store all the information of your magnetic cards and put that in an unique "card" so you can go lighter. I will be available on the second quarter of 2008 and there is no price yet, it will be first...

Starting this year I posted about DenyHosts, which is a must have tool to avoid dictionary attacks to port 22 (ssh). This kind of tools are really needed by sysadmins because the normal user refuse to make strong password, If the admin gives them a strong password, they will write it down, and then it stops being "strong", If the admin tells the normal users, they need to remember their passwords and not to write them down, they will come with weak passwords like their son's name, looking for new ways to secure the servers against dictionary attacks or brute...

chgrp is a utility that changes the group associated with a file. A file belongs to a user and to a group where one or more users could be associated. It is similar to chown but chgrp only changes the group and not the owner of the file, while chown can change both of them. Usage chgrp [options] group file-list or chgrp [options] --reference=rfile file-list group: Is the name or numeric group ID of the new group to assigned to file-list file-list Is a list of the pathnames of the files whose group association is going to be changed. rfile...

Mandriva 2008 is out and ready to be used, this is an incredible and easy to use as Desktop Distribution. It has support out of the box for ATI video cards, and therefore it is really easy to have compiz, metise, or other running in your PC. Its package manager tool also performs well, you only need to run rpmi [application] in order to have it installed on your PC. This is what Mandriva Blog is saying We’re proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site, and on the network of public...

For those lovers of a light Desktop, those lovers of Fluxbox, there are good news, it is finally released its 1.x stable version. Here is what its webpage is saying about this "A new stable release! Finally after almost four and a half years with 0.9.x release we got to 1.0.0! This release includes a lot of bugfixes, new styles, updated language support, better shaped corners nd much more. Grab it here! More info about the release here. We will soon update the entire webpage, so stay tuned!" Fluxbox is a complete Desktop for Linux, it has all features, but...

The other day I met Gentoo, I tried to install it, and finally did it after four tries, and the one using the minimal installation did not work. I finally manage to install using the Live CD but only using the Networkless option one on VMWare and one in another partition of my disk. Well this introduction about Gentoo is to talk about Sabayon I decided to try it as I have read it is like Gentoo but easier to install, I also wanted to try its OOTB (Out of the box functionality). Sabayon is an Italian Linux that is...

Today I discovered a new and great tool it is called xnest, well and what this tool lets you do? I am going to show you a screenshot so you can see by yourself. xnest in action Well and how to do it? Install xnest apt-get install xnest and then run this command gdmflexiserver --xnest you can then login with a different user and have one session nested into the original one.

Today I have installed Gentoo in my PC, I have started reading also about it. It seems to be real good distribution, I will also start testing Sabayon as it seems to be kind of "easier" Gentoo, it has its differences and similarities, maybe like Debian and Ubuntu or Ubuntu and Mint. I have used Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva frequently, and OpenSuse just for some days, I like the ones that is frequently use, all of them they all have its cons and pros. I will test now Gentoo and Sabayon, I think I will like them also, and...

APT-CACHE(8) APT-CACHE(8) NAME apt-cache - APT package handling utility -- cache manipulator SYNOPSIS apt-cache [-hvsn] [-o=config string] [-c=file] {[add file...] | [gencaches] | [showpkg pkg...] | [showsrc pkg...] | [stats] | [dump] | [dumpavail] | [unmet] | [search regex] | [show pkg...] | [depends pkg...] | [rdepends pkg...] | [pkgnames prefix] | [dotty pkg...] | [policy pkgs...] | [madison pkgs...]} DESCRIPTION apt-cache performs a variety of operations on APT’s package cache. apt-cache does not manipulate the state of the system but does provide operations to search and generate interesting output from the package metadata. Unless the -h, or --help option...

When you need to compile software on Linux you should take care of the dependencies, if they are not satisfied you will not be able to compile and use the software. If you are doing this on Debian or Ubuntu, you may have apt-cache to help you. Here is how you have to use it. When you get your tarbal file and uncompress it, to compile you first usually run ./configure This will start to check for lots of things, and dependencies, you may have an output like this. checking for Qt... configure: error: Qt (>= Qt 3.2) (headers and...

Hi, I think we are now mid community here at Go2Linux, and as I have started to see some questions posted on the comments, I though it would be better to have forum for the questions, and also for any Linux topic you would like to talk about. We could start maybe registering and introducing ourselves, I know there are some regular visitors, and I would like to have some help posting answers at the forum, so any help is welcome. If you have any suggestions, pleas use the general board to post your suggestions, or the comments at this...

Introduction A friend of mine from StumbeUpon, to be precise The Master Chief (Visit his SU blog) asked me after reading Dual boot with two Linux sharing home asked me if I have ever hear about doing the same thing under VMware, well the answer was not, but I decided to try it and here it is what I did, hope this was what to need MasterChief. Creating the two Virtual Machines First we need to create two virtual machines each one with two hard disks, and one of it will be the same for both Virtual Machines (The one...

Wizpy is the name of an incredible product from TurboLinux. It is a: Mp3 Player Mp4 Player ebook reader Live Linux drive It screen displays 256000 colors for a great video and picture viewing It will support these formats MP3, MP4, Ogg, AAC, DivX and JPEG. Its operating system is TurboLinux, so you can just plug it into any PC, restart the PC and boot from the USB and you will have a complete Linux with OpenOffice, your email your browsing history, and all your data inside with its 4 Gigs storage space. Unfortunately it seems it will only be...

One of the goals of writing a blog is to have it read by others, It does not matter if you are thinking in making money from your blog, or just writing for fun, I am sure that almost all of use want that our blogs get traffic, establish a community of readers, etc. Well, so to get traffic to your blog one of the better resources you may count on, is search engines, so you need to rank high on them and Title tags " " are a good way to get high page rank, and be listed in...

Hi, I am going to post here some personal entries, not specifically about Linux, that could be of interest of some of you, I am also thinking about adding a forum to the site, the people of this small and great community could discuss about the posts, the how-tos and why not about other topics may interest to us. would like to know what do you think about the forum idea.

Maybe this is not the category for this review as this site is not only dedicated to Linux, but it has lots of great how-to about Linux and also for Microsoft and Mac. It is a great site as all of us who works in the computer world need advices about Linux, Microsoft, and other PC how-tos. You are invited to its news. The site has a year and its having a huge number of visits, that is an indicator of the good content it has. If you may answer why this site exist? here could be the answer as...

To change the default browser, email reader or terminal your system uses, and if you are using Gnome the way to do that is to change the preferred applications. This was particularly helpful for me when I use Ubuntu as I prefer Thunderbird as my default email reader and not Evolution which is the default in Ubuntu. well to change this defaults just go to On Debian: Desktop -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications On Ubuntu: System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications Then you will see a dialog box like this, where you will be able to change you preferred applications....

When trying to use my VMware server to run an asterisk on it, I had the problem that as soon as I click on the browse button the VMware just hang on. I got also this error on the terminal, (vmware:5077): libgnomevfs-WARNING **: Cannot load module /usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/libfile.so' (/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1: versionGCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6)) What I found in a forum here is that you can run vmware using this command. VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 vmware Hope this may help somebody, it worked for me.

For today September 27th was announced the Beta Release of Gutsy Gibbon, as you can see on the Schedule. AbiWord The spread sheet ------> Gnumeric You can install this software from the repositories of your distribution. Fedora: yum install abiword gnumeric Ubuntu: apt-get install abiword gnumeric Debian: apt-get install abiword gnumeric CentOS: yum install...

This post is my way to communicate to my readers, as some of you may have seen there are more 100 readers, we are having an average of 2000 unique visitors per day, and 200 of those are returning visitors, so I would like to know what do you think about this site. Do you think we need a forum? maybe a good idea could be to put a poll to know how many of you think a forum could be a good idea. What is good and what is bad according to you? This blog is 4 months old,...

I am going to start this new section of the blog, with UbuntuHQ, inside this section I will write about other Linux Sites, that may interest you, and will describe them a little bit, so you can have an idea about what you are going to find there. Well let's go into UbuntuHQ UbuntuHQ is a site mostly dedicated to Ubuntu, it updates every day, in fact it updates 6 to 10 times a day!, most of its post are summaries of other blogs. So you have a summary of the other's blog post, and then the link to the...

This is my first time with Mandriva, I got the Mandriva DVD and bought a new Hard Disk to test it, I installed it on a PC with this characteristics. Microprocessor Intel Pentium 4, 3 GHz, 1 MB Cache RAM 1024 MBytes Video Card ATI Radeon X300 128 Mbytes RAM Sound Intel AC97 embedded on the Mother Board I made a fresh install with the DVD selecting GNOME instead of the default KDE, and configured it as a Dektop PC, not a server. I have to say that I am really impressed with the easy installation, only a few clicks...

To display the type of a file, and the info about the type you can use the command line file, this command shows you the type of file no matter the extension it may have. So it is really useful to know the type of file, and to know which tool you need to work with that file. Usage file [option] file-list Option -f file When specified, the file command takes the list of file from the file specified after the -f parameter, you need to enter one name per line in that text file -i Displays MIME file information,...

This is a command related to my previous post about head - Linux command line but this one opposite to head displays the tail of the file instead of the head. It also has a great feature, if you use it with the -f option you will have a never end file that will continue showing in the screen the new lines that got appended to the file, this is extremely useful when you are debugging, and using file like those in /var/log directory. See how it works Usage tail [options] [file-list] Options -c=[+]n[u] Tail counts bytes instead of lines...

One question I always made to myself, but to be honest never really investigate, is: Why we never need to de-fragment Linux disks?. Ok, today using the stumble upon I have found the answer to my old question. I have never thought it could so easy, but actually it is, here you will find the answer in case you don't have it yet. Why doesn't Linux need defragmenting?

Each day 3D effects on Linux become more and more popular, Compiz came first, later Beryl, now we have compiz and beryl together but we also a new player here, it comes from SUN and its name is Looking Glass, it has really great effects, its creator is: Hideya Kawahara. Update: How to install Looking glass on Debian Etch The system requirements to run this on your PC are: Micro Processor: 1.4 GHz or bigger Graphics card: 3D accelerated with at least 128 Mbytes RAM, better an ATI or NVIDIA with 256 MB Memory: At least 512 MB Linux: Enabled...

Sometimes you may want to take a look at a file, only to the first lines of it, this is specially useful when you are watching at CSV files that you may be using to work with MySQL or PosgreSQL databases, in this cases what we need is to look at the head of the file to see its structure, but not all the file. To do this we use the head command. Description Displays the beginning of a file (as many lines as you want). usage head [options] [file] Options -c, --bytes=[-]N print the first N bytes of each...

If you need to find files in your disk, you have two command lines options (at least I know two) Find Locate We now will look at Find Description Files files based on a search criteria. usage find [directory-list] [expression] Directory List specifies find which directories to look for files you can specify more than one direcotory i.e.: find /home/jhon /etc -name file.txt This way it will look at /home/jhon/ and also at /etc/ and all its subdirectories, find always look at the subdirectories, if you do not specify any directory list it will look in the working directory Expression...

When we have a problem about Linux we usually go to google, someones go to http://www.google/linux, nice site. Some also goes to Digg to look for info, it is a great place but I think it could be better, maybe Mr. Kevin Rose could split Unix/Linux categories into two different ones. Could be Unix/Linux News Could be Unix/Linux Howto/Tutorials/Tips That way some of use looking for good info that other cyberguys sent to digg (usually good ones) we could focus on the specific side of our search. Usually we look, more for HowTos than for news, as good news are...

Reading the Blogsphere I have found this really interesting post about how good for Linux itself is the agreement between Dell and Canonical. The author puts on the table some interesting things to think about, like hardware support, binary drivers, Dell's support for Linux, etc. According to him, this could have been manage better, I think off course it could, but finally Dell and Canonical are there to make money, and we can not wait any action from them without thinking how beneficial that action is going to the companies. Actually they have the obligation with the company and not...

Sponsored post This is the first review me we accepted at Linux operating System with Go2Linux This is really an interesting site for lots of the readers of this blog, as most of you have blogs, you may want to increase your SEO and your Page Rank, this site will really help you doing that, well start with the review. Has lot's of tools for improving your SEO at seo tools this are some of them. Create content This utility helps you create content, in fact you right your content off course, as you usually does, but instead of writing...

Now it is official, Dell will be available with Ubuntu, this is what Ubuntu's site says about. "Dell To Offer Ubuntu LONDON, 1st May 2007 - Canonical and Dell are pleased to announce a partnership to offer Ubuntu 7.04 on select desktop and notebook products. This is a tremendous step forward for Ubuntu, our users and customers. More about the announcement is available on the Dell website, including a video interview with Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth. We believe that Dell’s decision is a strong endorsement of Ubuntu and to the work of many in coding, translating and promoting open source...

When you ever need to know how much space a file or directory is using on your disk, you should use du, this command line command, is great for the job Usage du [options] [file or dir] If you use it with no arguments you will the usage of all files and directories (recursively) of the working directory. Options -a write counts for all files, not just directories -B zs Use size-byte blocks, so it means you will have the size in the number of block at the size you specified on the sz, example: -B M (will get the...

If Dell finally decides to offer Ubuntu as their Linux Distribution, what seems to be actually happening, read here. Updated: Now it is official Dell and canonical signed deal What will be the impact of such decision on Ubuntu's position in the Linux Market? also what impact will that have in Linux's position in the operating system's market? We have first to analyze the position of Dell in the Laptops and PCs market. Well according to its web page Dell is Number 1 in US Number 3 in Japan (Asia Pacific) Number 3 in Europe. From: Dell that said, we...

This is not an official announcement from Dell, but Desktop Linux said that they have information from inside Dell that shows we will have by may Dell Desktops and Dell Laptops with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). The models that will maybe be offered with Linux are: According to our sources, Ubuntu will be released on a Dell e-series "Essential" Dimension desktop, an XPS desktop, and an e-series Inspiron laptop. read the complete note at Linux Destop Maybe we should not be a surprise, as all the Blogsphere some days ago were full of announcements that Michael Dell uses Ubuntu on...

This post from apcmag.com, points out some things they do not like about Feisty, as it is always good to hear the good and the bad things that people have to say about a topic we are interesting it, this time (Ubuntu Feisty), it is good to take a look at this article, if you agree or disagree with the author posts your opinions here so this Linux operating system's blog community can know what you think.

Introduction fsck (File System Check) is a frontend utility that checks your file systems and if it founds some problem ask you about an action to take. Sintax fsck [options] [filesystem-list] Some Options Global Options -A (all) means that it is going to process all the file systems listed in /etc/fstab file in parallel if this is possible, you should not use the filesystem-list when using this option, See the -s option for serial file system check, you can also use -t option to specify a specific file system type. -R (root-skip) This option force fsck to skip root filesystem,...

After a some time quite it appears a comment at Ulteo's news site, they explain they are working hard to prepare the Beta Release which is not ready yet, ulteo promises to be a really easy Linux distribution and also to be a good option for Linux and Windows users. It is based on KUbuntu, and it is a creation of Gael Duval, among others off course. You can read Linux magazine article in PDF at Linux Magazine. You can also see some Ulteo's screenshots We will keep you posted about this new Distro as more news come from them....

I have installed beryl in my Feisty and also in my Fedora 6 following the same steps followed to have it installed on Feisty. Looking at it work we all could see it is really nice, and if we have a regular video card, not a minimal negative effect is seen in overall performance. But I started to think what is the real impact of this project in Linux, beside being nice it gives no other functionality, but wait, then I realized I was wrong the composite projects like Compiz and Beryl now together are really important for Linux. Where?...

Debian has been accepted by Google to participate in Debian Summer Code, some of their members will be in charge of nine projects during it's summer vacations, all of them sponsored by Google. These people from Debian will work on these projects: Jeroen van Wolffelaar will implement Mole, an infrastructure for managing information. This will help make Debian's vast supply of data easier accessible to developers and users. Included are package history and release statistics. Ian Haken will write tools to use QEMU, a virtual machine emulator, to test upgrades from one Debian release to the next without having to...

I found how easy is to install Beryl and emerald on Feisty, I have this Feisty Fawn which started as Dapper, then upgraded to Edgy and now Upgraded to Feisty Fawn, I have never installed Beryl nor Compiz on this PC, an Intel Celeron with Intel Video Card embedded on the mother board. Ok, to install Beryl on Feisty all you have to do is: Go to System -> Preferences -> Desktop Effects, and enable the Desktop Effects and the Desktops on a cube. Later open a console, and type this: sudo apt-get install beryl beryl-manager emerald-themes After that run...

It is good to have virtualization tools like vmware and VirtualBox to test new Linux distributions, but if you are lazy and do not want to install your own machine, or if you are using vmwareplayer and not server or workstation, you can download the images directly. At Linux tracker you can find the Ubuntu image for VMWare. If you need to install vmware on Feisty Fawn follow this link

Just on schedule, FC7 Test 4 have been released today, this is the last test and now we will start waiting for the final release. If you are planning to download this Beta, remember to use is just as a Beta, upgrading from Beta to final is not always a good idea, on RedHat based Distros like Fedora and Centos. Here is the announcement: As seen at: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2007-April/msg00006.html ==================================================== The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of the fourth and final test release of Fedora 7! Test 4 is for beta users. This is the time when we...

All of us when we are starting using Linux, mmmh ok maybe not all of us, some of you maybe started just like me, at my job I had to work with RedHat in early '97, but going into the topic again, some of the people who are giving the big step of changing from Microsoft Windows to Linux has the same problem. Is Linux good for me? Where do I start? which distro should I use? and things like that. There is a lot of articles out there about Debian vs. Fedora, Suse vs Ubuntu, Knoppix vs Centos, etc....

Yesterday a friend of me asked me if he can switch to Linux, as the new Vista needs a lot of resources. Well until yesterday I could have thought that everybody could use Linux, but with his question my friend put me to think. So I would like to put some functions for what Linux is suitable and some that Linux is not good at. (at least from my point of view). Traditionally and may until 4 years ago, Linux lovers where computer engineers, as the main function of Linux PCs were to be servers. The ones of us which...

This guide to install samba server on Ubuntu, will help you share files from your Ubuntu Feisty with the windows machines on your network. This way maybe you will be able to use Ubuntu at your office, hope you can. [Update: 12/13/2010. You may want to check Share files and printers with Samba First install samba sudo apt-get install samba With this you will have samba installed on your system, now you need to edit the configuration file which is located at: /etc/samba/smb.conf Here I will put a simple minimal configuration to allow share files from your Linux server. [global]...

Yesterday, Google announced that they were going to release it's own changes to MySQL, which the change to fit their needs, this is good as the developers could get some of this changes to include on the official release, or the general public can use some of these changes for their own purposes. Here is the complete note, that comes from: Tech News Blog Google long has been known to be a user of the open-source MySQL database software, but the search powerhouse this week published its own changes to the project. "We think MySQL is a fantastic data storage...

If you ever need to restart your X session (your work will be lost if not previously saved. Press this keys alt+ctrl+back_space

VMWare has just released its beta version of VMMark, which is a Benchmarking tool that can be used to measure the performance of your virtualization platform. But before you start downloading it keep in mind that you will need 5 GByte of memory to run it. Read here the most relevant parts of the original document. "I am pleased to announce that the public beta release of VMmark is now available. It can be found at http://www.vmware.com/beta/vmmark/. "....."VMmark has undergone some key changes from that original specification in order to simplify benchmark setup and execution. The most important changes are:...

OSWeekly wrote a nice article about Beryl, lots of the things they say about it are true, Beryl is beta, and if you a have a machine you really need to work, maybe it is not a good idea to install Beryl on it, also Beryl needs more hardware resource and can make your PC runs slower, I have a Petium Celeron with an INTEL integraded on the mother board video card, and this system runs both Fedora Core 6 (FC6) and Ubuntu Feisty, on both of them in installed beryl (as easy as yum install beryl-gnome or apt-get install...

Fedora Core 7 (FC7) Test 4 is going to be release this April 26th, this is going to be the last Test before we have the final release of Fedora Core 7, which according to its schedule will be this may 24th Some of the news on this release Fedora Core 7 (FC7) is the merge of Core and Extras repos, and the ability to build custome Live CDs based on Fedora, it is supposed that any user will be able to do it really easy.

I needed a command line BitTorrent client for my Fedora Core 6, and started to look for some options, I found ctorrent, which I could see has the options I may need, and as it is written in C should be fast, I know there is another one written in python also. Let's see how to install and use this one. (ctorrent) First we need to install it. yum install ctorrent (you will need extras repository for this) If you run ctorrent with no arguments this is what you get. CTorrent dnh2 Original code Copyright: YuHong(992126018601033) WARNING: THERE IS NO...

Somebody "almost" succeed to create a virus for iPod and I say "almost" because it is really difficult to make it run, (even if you want to infect your iPod). The virus name is Oslo They call it a proof of concept, so this virus have been developed just to show that an iPod running Linux can be infected with a virus. Anyway there is almost nothing to worry about, according with: http://www.viruslist.com/weblog (April 5th post) there is nothing to worry about, read what they say. "Overall, I don't think iViruses will cause serious problems in the future. The iPod...

This is not intended to make publicity to this company, but I really like it when I saw, any way I may think its price could be a little bit cheaper, as 280 Euros I think could be a little bit expensive, considering this PC has no disk, no monitor, no keyboard, etc. Any way I think it is a good option for internet cafes, or schools maybe. As it has four usb ports, you can use external disk for saving your documents. It comes with xubuntu, in a 1 GByte usb key Nice :) Check it's site: http://www.linutop.com

As I was trying to find an easy way to backup a MySQL database with no ssh access to the server, there should be better ways, but i found this easy one. You will need a Shell script, a .php script. Ok, lets make this work First create a shell script with this line mysqldump --opt -u [user_name] -p [database_name] | gzip > [backup_file].dump.gz and name it, lets say: the_backup_script.sh Now create the .php script that will call the shell script. It will contain this: and name it, for instance the_backup_php_script.php Until this point this should...

Ok, I have not tested this yet, as soon as I did I will update this posts, so please if you try it and have good results (or bad) post it on comments. First get the ATI drivers from its page, here: http://ati.amd.com/support/driver-sp.html follow the instructions given there for CentOS Then you will need the Fedora Extras repository enabled in your yum configuration. So create this file: /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo with this content. [extras] name=Fedora Core 6 Extras mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=extras-6&arch=$basearch enabled=1 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras gpgcheck=1 Remember to turn this repo off once Beryl is installed, I think is better that way, so you do not...

MySQL is one of the most used Databases in Linux, (if not the most). It is a great Database engine, but anyway it could have problems, or your server, if it goes out of power for instance, you could loose a lot of data, so backing up is always a good idea. A good command for doing this is mysqldump, this is a Linux shell mysql command, so you may need ssh access to the server to run it. (Later I will publish a php version of this) What mysqldump really does is to create a script with the structure...

Finally!, The Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has been officially released, as announced today 04/19/07. The Ubuntu Mirrors are: Bittorrents: Feisty Fawn Desktop i386 torrent Feisty Fawn Server i386 torrent Full world wide list of mirrors: Africa Namibia Ftp.polytechnic.edu.na (Africa) Namibia Polytechnic of Namibia (Africa) South Africa Internet Solutions (Africa) Asia China rootguide.org (Asia) China Mirror.lupaworld.com (Asia) Indonesia IndikaNet (Asia) Israel INTERHOST (Asia) Japan Yamagata Univeristy (Asia) Japan Ftp.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp (Asia) Korea, Republic of Ftp.kaist.ac.kr (Asia) Korea, Republic of Mirror.letsopen.com (Asia) Mongolia Mongolian Open Source Initiative NGO (Asia) Russian Federation Ftp.chg.ru (Asia) Singapore Ftp.science.nus.edu.sg (Asia) Taiwan HCC Net Center (Asia) Taiwan TaiChung...

Mozilla's Thunderbird 2.0 has been released! this new version includes a lot of new feautures. Specially focusing on security, and email organizing. You can download it from the mozilla site. Here are some of its new features Advanced Folder Views Thunderbird 2 offers a variety of ways for you to organize and display your folders, whether by favorites, recently viewed or folders containing unread messages. As always, you can also set up RSS and newsgroup folders to stay on top of news and your interests. Thunderbird 2 also allows you to maximize your message view pane by opting for a...

It seems, that we can start downloading the great new Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. If you check it's release site, you will see some of the date of the files is today! 04/19/2007. If you are going to start downloading go to torrents, please do not put to much load on the servers. Here is the link: http://releases.ubuntu.com/feisty/ Ubuntu Feisty Fwan Download Mirrors

There are a lot of articles out there talking about how user friendly Linux is, in fact it is, there you have automatix for Ubuntu, Xandros with it's out of the box good Desktop (XP look alike), Ulteo , and the list can grow and grow! But we should not only see Linux as a windows replacement, as it is more than that. This are some usefull tools Linux has (In some distros out of the box). Iptables With this "tool" you can configure really strong firewalls for increasing the PC security , if you found it difficult to configure...

This is a great tool, a powerfull Linux sniffer, that lets you even sniff layer two packets. Some moths ago as a part of my job I needed to help implementing VLANs in a Satellite Hub, for that job we needed to sniff in the network and find if the VLAN tags were attached to the Ethernet packages, we used two sniffers My Laptop IBM T30 with tcpdump A professional Fluke sniffer Of course the Fluke could find the packages tagged and the untagged ones, but also the Linux machine! which cost a fraction of the Fluke sniffer. All you...

My friend from http://polishlinux.org, send me this links, that are a good complement to my post of choosing the Linux distro. Read them at: Compare Distros Distro quiz

Hi, this is a personal post to my blog, I usually do not do this, actually this is the first one, but while surfing the web looking for SEO information, I found a great site with lots of info about improving the page rank of your site, this site talks about how to Make money on the Internet, and now is giving away a Microsoft Zune If you put a post in your blog talking about this, so I am doing now, and hope to be lucky and got that Zune.

This time I really have to apologies with all my readers, today at 6:00 (GMT-4) I experimented a big affluence of people to my site, (Happy me!!) the server where my site was hosted could not handle it, so the server crashed one and again, and again, it was really difficult to recover my database. At the first time I did not realize it was because of the visits, and thought it was a server problem, so I reinstalled everything, just to realize that it crashed again, So this time I moved everything to another hosting. Some of the screenshots...

[Update: 01/24/2011 - You may to also read a newer “kind of” Linux Distribution comparison Hello, I will try today to share my little experience on using Linux, the distribution if have tested are: Fedora CentOS Ubuntu Debian OK, first we will compare them with some facts, no personal opinions, later I will let you know my preferences. Number of packages available: Here could be some errors specially because of the lot of repositories each distribution may have, I will try to use only the most common ones. Fedora.- (Repositories enabled are: core, extras, updates, livna) The number of packages...

1. The problem You have limited bandwidth, which you need to share with some others or just between different services on you PC. So you need a tool that can shape, control and manage the bandwidth so everybody can make a responsible use of it. 2. The solution Here is where trickle comes to help us. trickle - a lightweight userspace bandwidth shaper, that will help use control the use of our bandwidth. Installing it. For Centos and Fedora yum install trickle For Debian and Ubuntu apt-get install trickle This will actually install two binaries: trickle which is the stand...

Today I needed to install the Livna reposotory, and it is really easy, but maybe somebody out there may need some help, so I will write the two steps needed to have it installed and running Installing the Livna repository for Fedora su -c "rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm" (This will download the rpm for you from the web and install it. Getting and installing the GPG key so the packages could be verified with its signature. rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY That is all, now you can start using the packages from the Livna repository with yum or yumex. Update: 3/10/2011, In case...

There are a lot of useful tools in Linux wc is one of them this tool let us know the number of: Lines words Characters that we could find in a text file, its use is very simple, so if you are asking How to count lines, how to count words or how to count characters, you can use this tool. Usage: wc [OPTION]... [FILE]... Where the options are -c, --bytes print the byte counts -m, --chars print the character counts -l, --lines print the newline counts -L, --max-line-length print the length of the longest line -w, --words print the...

Swap Memory is a space in the Hard Disk of your computer that Operating Systems (Linux in our case) will use to put the info that is actually on the RAM to free it for another application. This should be done when the system needs memory for a new process and there is none, so we can see that if our system has plenty of RAM it will maybe need no SWAP memory. How much Swap Memory do I need? As a rule of thumb if you have 512 MB RAM put 1 GByte Swap, but this stops being true...

When ever you may need to create Virtual Servers for Apache2, you can use this script. It will create the directory, the config file, and the symbolic link to the /etc/apache2/sites-available in the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled, so will do the job for you. The usage of the script is: ./virtual_site_creator [FQDN] FQDN = your fully qualified domain name for your virtual server. i.e. if your virtual server to be created is linux.go2linux.org the command should be ./virtual_server_creator linux.go2linux.org after executing it, you just need to go to: /var/www/linux.go2linux.org/ and create the index.html. Job Done! Download the shell script for automatic Virtual Server...

To install Apache2 on Debian Etch you only need to first install Debian Etch itself After that just run this command. apt-get install apache2 apache2-doc apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils libexpat1 ssl-cert And that is all, you have Apache2 up and running, but here comes the new thing, you can Install Automatically the Virtual Server as many as you like.

CentOS 5.0 the Linux distro based on RedHat has been released, few weeks later RedHat itself has been released. The news for this version of Centos are among others: Apache-2.2, kernel-2.6.18, Gnome-2.16, KDE-3.5, Compiz, AIGLX, MySQL-5.0, PostgreSQL-8.1, and much more It has support for i386 and x86_64 platforms, on its 6 and 7 CDs respectively, the software can be downloaded from i386 x86_64 Here is the complete release note taken from the CentOS site: "We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-5 for the i386 and x86_64 Architectures. CentOS-5 is based on the upstream release 5, and includes...

Updated on April 22: Read all related to Ubuntu Mark Shuttleworth, announced today that the code name for Ubuntu 7.10 is going to be Gutsy Gibbon, It will have full integration with composite, the Compiz/Beryl community is working hard, and also Ubuntu team, so this release will be by default Composite. Here is the complete note from the Ubuntu team (Mark Shuttleworth email) "Folks, allow me to introduce the Gutsy Gibbon, who will be succeeding the Feisty Fawn as the focus of our development love in a few short weeks, for release in October 2007. The Gibbon won the G-race...

Updated 04/19/07 Ready for download Feisty ready for download Ubuntu Feisty Fwan Download Mirrors The release Date for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has been delayed due to validation bugs, There is no ETA yet, but the Ubuntu team hopes the delay will be just a few days. Here the complete note: "The Ubuntu 7.04 release candidate (due today) has been delayed due to bugs discovered during validation testing, specifically problems with certain ATA chipsets and problems with the connection status displayed by the network-manager panel applet. There is no updated ETA yet, but the core development team is actively working on...

Making simple edits, such as replacing text, to multiple files is a common chore. Thankfully it is something that can easily be automated. There are several different approaches, depending upon the tools you prefer. Here we'll look at two. The way that I generally perform simple search and replace operations on multiple files is to use Perl, from the command line. The reason I do that is because the common way of using Perl to script replacements allows a simple backup to be made of the original file, so if I make a mistake I know I can revert it...

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn is finally available at Ubuntu Shipit, so you can ask for your Feisty Fawn Free CDs

Debian 4 (Etch) Installation screenshots This is the first part of the Debian Installation tutorial I am planning to write, in this part, is the installation itself based on screenshots, the next part will be the description about installing the servers, WEB, Email, MySQL, DNS... This installation was made from the net-install CD of the Debian Etch Step # 1 Download the CD image from here Step # 2 Burn the ISO into a CD Step # 3 Press ENTER Select the language for the Installation Choose your country Choose your keyboard layout Put the name you want your server...

With this shell script you can choose at your discretion to use ftp (ncftpput) or ssh (scp) to move your backup files to another server, you can get this script run on a cron job for automatic backup, it also uses tar command to compress your files, before copying them. To use it, just copy to your $HOME/bin directory, or where ever you would like to, make it executable chmod 700 backup_script.sh be sure to make it readable only by you, because it will contain password information, so use the above permissions. If you plan to use it with scp...

This is the scenario: you want to set a cron job and the script you want to use runs correctly when called from the command line, but when you run the same script with crontab, it does not work. More than likely, this problem is caused by the default shell environment variables setup by crontab. Cron supplies a default (bare) environment for every shell: HOME=user's-home-directory LOGNAME=user's-login-id PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:. SHELL=/usr/bin/sh Here are a few solutions: * Explicitly enter the needed environment variables. * Load your .profile in the crontab or in the script called by crontab. * Use the absolute path for...

Debian 4.0 has been released. It is recommended that you upgrade the system to latest version. Upgrading remote Debian server is a piece of cake :D Currently many of our boxes are powered by Debian 3.1 Sarga. For example typical web server may have following packages only: => Apache => PHP => Postfix and other mail server software => Iptables and backup scripts => MySQL 5.x etc Procedure Following are essential steps to upgrade your system: 1. Verify current system 2. Update package list 3. Update distribution 4. Update /etc/apt/sources.list file 5. Reboot system 6. Test everything is working Backup...

There is a new update for Debian/Sarge, this is security update only, the good new is that reading in lines, we can expect that the final release of Etch is really near, as the sarge is being moved to old stable. Please all of you who use sarge and are going to continue using it, change your /etc/apt/sources.lst, from stable to sarge, and then run: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade as root, here is the note extracted from the Debian Site The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (codename `sarge'). This update mainly adds security updates...

We finally have Etch released, some of its bugs are still open, but anyway it is finally relesed. Debian bugs This is extracted from the Debian Site, we finally have Etch Stable released!! The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB....

It seems like Feisty Fawn is going to available throw Shipit, at least when login into the Shipit Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn this is what the messages says "We'll be back in a few days, shipping Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) CDs." I think we can see this as we are going to be able to count with Feisty CDs. Great! --Update-- Feisty Fawn CDs for Free now available from shipit.

All started in 1997 when in my job, administering the servers at the biggest ISP in Bolivia, I started to work with Red Hat Linux where we have sendmail, tacacs, apache, bind, among others services, well since 1998 I could not work with Linux because I needed windows at my new job, but I could back to it in 2005, of course I went to the RedHat site and look for a new distro to download, i found FC4 which I started to use, as my Desktop PC and also as my server. For my server I followed The perfect...

This april 4th, LinuxMint another ubuntu based Distro has released its first KDE version, on march 29th its Gnome version have been released. I will be installing it and testing, in the next week, also will post here my experiences about that. This is what the site: DesktopLinux.com said about it. The Ireland-based Linux Mint team yesterday made available the first release candidate of its next version, Linux Mint 2.2 KDE Edition Beta 020. Code-named "Bianca," it uses the KDE 3.5.6 desktop for the first time, running on a 2.6.17-10 kernel, the team said. "As this is our first try...

The Puppy 2.15CE (Community Edition) is the result of collaboration of a team of Puppy enthusiasts. It is built upon version 2.14 but with many enhancements. In particular the guys have worked on an improved user-interface and nice out-of-the box first impression. They have also developed some "SFS" files that add OpenOffice, web and graphics applications -- SFS files are "combo packs" of applications that can be installed and uninstalled with a few clicks. The release announcement is on the Community News page: http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/LatestNews The file 'puppy-215CE-Final.iso' is 131MB and is available from our primary host ibiblio.org: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... uppylinux/...

Launchpad.net today started public beta testing of Launchpad 1.0, a web-based collaboration service that improves the flow of communication between different software projects. Collaboration is crucial to free software projects, but has traditionally been difficult across communities that use different tools which don’t easily exchange information. Launchpad’s new approach links data from a variety of project-specific sources in different communities and presents it in a unified interface, bringing those communities closer together to solve common problems such as bugs in shared code. This public beta includes a redesigned interface that allows projects to brand their presence in the system and...

According to the Compiz site the Merge of Compiz and Beryl is official, but nothing about this is said in the Beryl site. This is the complete note extracted from the Compiz site: "The Compiz and Beryl communities are pleased to announce that they will be reuniting, as part of the general Compiz Community to begin work on a combined project. This project, going by the temporary name of "Composite Community", will be based on the latest Compiz core and will provide the best plugins, decorators, settings tools, and related applications from each community. Working closely with upstream core, and...

Still not official, but it seems that Compiz and Beryl may merge, according to LinuxTechDaily. That could be really good news, as while they are separated they are wasting capacities, of each other groups, some could also say that it could be good to have options, like KDE and GNOME, it will depend on the point of view of each of us. Here is some part of the story: "It was a pleasant surprise to see talks of a merge start to show up on the mailing lists. This article by Kristian Hogsberg seemed to kick it off. The talks...

Preliminary This march 14th the verson 1.3.8 of VirtualBox was released VirtualBox is an opensource virtualization software, it has a nice graphical interface like VMWare, and which is a lack of QEMU, recently (march, 14th) it has released its version this is what their site says about VirtualBox. "InnoTek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU...

Taken from: http://www.debianadmin.com/securing-apache-web-server-from-information-leakage.html A lot of more interesting content, for Debian, visit: http://www.debianadmin.com/ By default, most pre-packaged apache installations come with full information leakage, so if you telnet to port 80 on your webserver you can check, just type in the GET / HTTP/1.1 line, then hit enter twice telnet localhost 80 Trying 127.0.0.1… Connected to localhost.localdomain. Escape character is ‘]’. GET / HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 09:59:37 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Debian GNU/Linux) PHP/4.3.10-18 Content-Length: 337 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Here we see the Apache version, the distro, and the php version. If...

After asking Dell with Linux pre-loaded being the first thing users ask in the IdeaStorm that Michael Dell started in February. Dell announced that their products are being tested to work with Suse Linux This is according to http://slashdot.org Dell said "[W]e are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. [On the question of which distro to choose:] "[T]here is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux... We want users to have the opportunity to help define the market for Linux on desktop and...

Taken from: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/14885 PCLinuxOS founder Texstar said in a private interview that they would using Ubuntu for the base of future versions of PCLinuxOS. Citing the old adage 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em,' Texstar states that PCLinuxOS 2007 will be delayed for another six months or so while the new change is implemented. When asked why they would make such a drastic change Texstar said, "If Ubuntu is going to take over the Linux world, then perhaps we should be on the winning team." Texstar also said that the upcoming default interface would indeed be gnome. He added,...

From: http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6172060.html?part=rss&subj=news Oracle on Wednesday trotted out a list of 26 customers who are paying the database and applications software company to support their Linux operating system as well. The effort, which arrives a few months after the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company started selling its own clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, presumably is aimed at convincing the world that it's OK to let Oracle handle the support. Indeed, in the lead-off endorsement, chief information officer of pancake vendor IHOP asserts, "Oracle provides the responsive support we need to deploy and maintain Linux-based solutions, and the switch from Red Hat...

The procedure Update: If you are looking for support of ext2 or ext3 on Vista read: Access your Linux partition from Vista, but if you are looking for ext2 or ext3 from XP, continue reading. The software we are going to use is Ext2IFS and can be downloaded from its home page Once downloaded install it on your Windows system on your dual boot PC. If your windows ask you to unblock the excecution of the program answer "Execute" Accept the licence Enable large file feature, and select a letter for your linux partition, you better leave untouched the swap,...

OpenOffice.org 2.2 is the project's first release in 2007, and reflects the community's commitment to offering enhancements and new features on a regular basis. OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users' PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals. In version 2.2, users will immediately notice the improvement in the quality of text display in all parts of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that the previously optional support for kerning, a technique to improve the appearance of text written in proportional fonts, has...

Here you can see the screenshots for Ulteo, the new kid on the block, and claims to be the world's easiest linux. The screenshots you will see are for, the installation step by step (only 6 steps!!) As I can confirm by myself installing it is really easy, I will install it later on my laptop to see how it performs with WiFi. Loading from the Live CD As you can see its booting image looks a lot like SUSE's but it is based on Kubuntu. Installing Ulteo in six steps Now the system start to install automatically Ulteo Installed...

Gael Duval, the creator of Mandrake (now Mandriva) and now fired from its own company, has recently released the Ulteo project. This new distro claims to be the easiest linux now a days, it is based on KUBUNTU, according to Duval, Ulteo is more than just user friendly, the Ulteo philosophy is to offer a system where the user won't need to spend too much time upgrading, fine tunning and managing the system. This is what their website says about Ulteo "After years of looking at Windows, Mac and Linux users with limited knowledge in computers, Ulteo was designed as...

Yesterday I updated my Ubuntu from Edgy to Feisty, just one day after doing it from Dapper Drake, and that because on Edgy my Intel Pro/Wireless stop working, but now with Feisty seems to be working again, anyway my VMware Server stop working and the vmware-config.pl did not success to compile the module for my Kernel 2.6.20-12-generic. so I applied the same steps I did for my Debian Etch configuration, and it worked, here is the how to. Installing VMware Server on Debian Etch

To upgrade your Ubuntu From Edgy to Feisty (still beta) release Feisty Fawn, you just need to run two commands. Do this at your own risk as for this moment, Feisty is still in beta release. sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude upgrade to update and upgrade to the latest Edgy packages. gksudo "update-manager -c -d" With the -c it looks for new versions, and the -d tells Ubuntu to look for pre-released versions. If you do not have graphics access to your machine, will have to use the second method. which is this: sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list and change all...

For security reasons it is not a good idea to permit ssh root direct login, it is better to login as another user, and then switch to root using the 'su -' comand, to do this, you need to disable root from login directly using ssh protocol, this will decrease the possibility of a hacker breaking your linux box, as now he will have to guess your user name and your password Ok, let's go and see to make this. Edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config (you can use your favorite text editor) I strongly recommend you to open two...

To be almost 100% that your data is secure, and I said almost because you are never 100% secure! Ok, Here we will see how to use together ssh (scp) and duplicity to encrypt your backed up data and to copy it to another server using an encrypted tunnel. Pre-requisites Your will need: gpg duplicity ssh keys on the backing server http://linux.go2linux.org/node/16 Installing the software This is tested on Debian and Ubuntu, but should be distro independent To install duplicity run: apt-get duplicity Generating the key To generate the key you will use for encrypt your backup run: gpg --gen-key...

Sometimes, it is really needed to run some windows software on your Linux machines, there are different ways to do this, one of them is using wine. We will see here to do it, running at the end of the example the famous putty.exe file We will see here how to do it for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora We first need to install the file. ** Note: If you have Debian or a Based on Debian Distro like Ubuntu or Knoppix you can install this repo to your apt sources.list file, this is only if do not want to use...

The use of the swap memory by default on Kernel 2.6.xx is set to 60% that means that the system will use intensively the swap memory, this is good if we have a small amount of memory and lot of load on our PC or server, but if we have plenty of RAM or we are using a Desktop machine, we maybe do not need this setting, let's see how to change it. This is valid for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and CentOS On a Terminal do this as root (use sudo if running Ubuntu) cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness You should see 60,...

This guide for installing ATI Radeon Video Card, should work for Ubuntu Dapper, Edgy and Feisty Fawn, and also work for Debian Etch (Tested) If you plan to install Beryl or Compiz, or just want to use Google Earth with your Debian or Ubuntu Linux you will need to use Hardware Graphics Accelerator. If you own an ATI graphics card, you better install the drivers for Linux from its site. Here is a small guide to do it. Getting the software You can download the software at ATI's site, here is the link http://ati.amd.com/support/driver-sp.html Download the .run file that correspond...

If you have two servers, could be a good idea to make cross backups of the important data, so if any of them fails you can always restore from the other. Here we will use rsync and ssh to make this possible, rsync is used to sync files between folders on the same machine or between machines, ssh will open an encrypted tunnel so the data could be secure on the transfer. We will have the option to make this automatic using a cron job Enable the ssh login with no password I have written how to do this in...

This will describe you how to set up a smarthost using either sendmail or exim, for the exim, i will only consider Debian. This is to send emails using your linux server as your smtp server, and it will use your ISP email server to send all your emails through it, to the final users. The sendmail configuration I have tested on CentOS, and Fedora, but should work on Debian and Ubuntu as well Sendmail You need sendmail 8.11 or a later one to do this. sendmail.mc Edit with your favorite text editor the file /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and add this line...

LVS or Linux Virtual Server is a great way to balance the load of your servers, and also could be a way to in someway secure them, but you are also given the hackers a way to attack you with DOS attacks. Get the code Debian / Ubuntu apt-get install ipvsadm RedHat based (Fedora, CentOS) yum install ipvsadm The scenario __________ |Internet| ---------- | | ________________ |166.114.152.10| | Director | |192.168.1.1 | ---------------- | | ----------------------- | | | | --------------- ---------------- |192.168.1.2 | |192.168.1.3 | |Real Server 1| |Real Server 2 | --------------- ---------------- Configure the director As we...

This Article is going to be rewritten soon, in the meanwhile please visit the The home page or this great site: Pendrivelinux.com The owner of the article on which this article was based, asked me politely to take it out from the site, so I will soon rewrite the procedure again and you will have it here once more. By the way he found this post following the referral on his site, as this post had the links to the articles on which it was based. Thank your for your comprehension. You can read the message asking to take this...

If you would like to add FeedFlare from www.feedburner.com to your block based on Drupal, you need to do this: First find your node.tpl.php To do that use this command find / -name node.tpl.php Add a line to this file vi /$yourpath/node.tpl.php $yourpath is anything you need to put here to edit the right file, depending on how many themes you have installed you will more or less node.tpl.php files, you will need to edit all so on any Themes you choose later you will have the same effect. This is the line to add. {script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/yoursite_at_feedburner?i=http://yoursite" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"}{/script} Be...

Every body recommends to back up your important files and systems, but almost nobody does it :), here are some good tools to back up your full or partial linux systems, it can also back up windows partitions, but that is not going to be touch in this article. The tools we are going to use here are mondo and mindi Install the software To install them in a Debian and Ubuntu (use universe repo) systems just run (as root) apt-get install mondo mindi For CentOS get the rpms from http://mondorescue.muskokamug.org/rhel/4/ For Fedora get the rpms from http://mondorescue.muskokamug.org/fedora/ Making a...

To install VMware server on Debian Etch (4.0) you first need to have Etch installed on you host PC, you can achieve this by using the netinst CD available at: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ Once you have it installed you can proceed with this How To install VMware server on Debian Etch 1.- First install some software needed (as root) apt-get install libx11-6 libx11-dev libxtst6 xinetd wget apt-get install linux-headers-uname -r build-essential apt-get install binutils-doc make manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gdb libc6-dev-amd64 lib64gcc1 gcc-2.95-doc apt-get install gcc 2.- Get the Software You can get the vmware server here: http://www.vmware.com/download/server/ and do...

Suppose you have a layer 2 switch with support for 802.1q, and want to route traffic from one VLAN to another VLAN you can use a linux box for that. VLAN is Virtual Lan and it is created with equipments such as switches that support the 802.1q protocol, which manage to insert a 'tag' in the ethernet frame, this tag identifies the VLAN to which a packet belongs. If you have two VLANs in a switch is like having physically two switches, as the packets from one does not pass to the other, if you need to pass traffic from...

How to make your $HOME directory only for your eyes. Make directories only viewable by you: find $HOME -type d -exec chmod 700 '{}' \; make regular files only viewable and editable by you: find $HOME -type f -exec chmod 600 '{}' \; Thanks to: Stephen R. Laniel Cell: +(617) 308-5571 http://laniels.org/ for this tip.

Making your system a triple boot box, this can help you achieve this. Triple boot XP and two linux (FC5 and Ubuntu 6.06 in my case) Hi,Now i want to share my experience of making my system a triple boot one.Ok what i have is a Desktop with a 120 Gigas SATA disk.As usually what you need to do is install XP first but be sure to let enough space for the linux OS.after you have finished, install some of the two linux, lets say Ubuntu, if you install from the live CD, be sure to manually edith the disk...

I have taken these screenshots of an instalation of smoothwall, hope it helps  This is the first screen you will se as soon as you reboot your PC with the smootwall Disk inside, don't forget that if you continue from here ALL YOUR DATA WILL BE LOST  Note that this software only work on IDE hard disk, i tried on a SATA disk and have no successYour green interface is the one that is internal, and will look to your own network If every thing went Ok you should be able to login withhttps://the.green.interface.ip:441/   ...

If you ever need to reinstall your Grub loader, here is how to. If for some reason you need to re install your boot loader GRUB try this. Boot with your First CD, or your live CD, depending on what you have Once you have the prompt go with this. grub root (hd0,0) setup (hd0) quit exit You need to chage hd0 and the hd0,0 for anything your system needs. hd0 is the first disk on the system hd0,0 means the first partition of the first disk.

When you have two ISPs you may want to make your linux machine balance the load of your internet access, you can use ip route The package needed for this is iproute, if you are using debian you can install it with apt-get install iproute or go to this page and download the source of iproute Let's use this Load Balance Script which work for Centos, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and should work for all distributions. -----------cut here-------------- !/bin/bash IPs of the def gateways IP1=192.168.1.1 IP2=192.168.2.1 REDLOCAL=10.1.1.0/24 IPLOCAL=10.1.1.1 NICs IF1=eth0 IF2=eth1 ip rule add from $IP1 lookup T1 ip route add...

This How-To has been taken from: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2780 And will show you how to make your motherboard Sensors, to be useful for you, using LINUX, you will be able to see temperature of your microprocesors, fan speed, hard disk drive temp. all of this on the panel. Howto Install and Configure lm-sensors Install lm-sensors using apt-get or the Synaptic GUI. sudo apt-get install lm-sensors Run the mkdev.sh script in the lm-sensors source. It is extacted below: a. Copy the script file below to a text editor and save it to a file named mkdev.sh. #!/bin/bash # Here you can set several...

If for some reason you need the physical info from the hard drive connected to your linux machine. hdparm -I /dev/hda[x] Here is the man page fro hdparm. HDPARM(8) HDPARM(8) NAME hdparm - get/set hard disk parameters SYNOPSIS hdparm [ flags ] [device] .. DESCRIPTION hdparm provides a command line interface to various hard disk ioctls supported by the stock Linux ATA/IDE device driver subsystem. Some options may work correctly only with the latest kernels. For best results, compile hdparm with the include files from the latest kernel source code. OPTIONS When no flags are given, -acdgkmnru is assumed. -a...

Once I have a problem with a CentOS server (Could be the same on RedHat based). The HOSTNAME given on the instalation was not the reverse lookup name. I solved with the help of the linux list, here is how. I edited the /etc/hosts [root@ns1 ~]# cat /etc/hosts Do not remove the following line, or various programs that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 ns1.somedomain.com ns1 localhost.localdomain localhost and also make sure that the info on /etc/sysconfig/network is the same. [root@ns1 ~]# cat /etc/sysconfig/network NETWORKING=yes HOSTNAME=ns1.somedomain.com and on the reverse lookup zone, you should have assigned ns1.somedomain.com to the IP...

This is useful to burn CDs using the command line How to burn ISO images on CDs First we need the ISO images, this can be done this way. cat /dev/scd0 > your_file.iso Off course you need here to instead of scd0 the right device where you have the info you want to put into an ISO file. The other way is: mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom then, get the ISO mkisofs -r -o your_file.iso /mnt/cdrom If your cdrom was already mounted, you will need first to umount it. umount /mnt/cdrom or umount /media/cdrom Now you need to...

If you would like to connect to your machine through ssh without being asked for a password you should do this. Create a public/private key pair ssh-keygen -t rsa Please Do not forget not to write any passphrase, just empty for no passphrase for this to work Copy te file id_rsa.pub to the $HOME/.ssh directory of the machine you wish to connect to, where $HOME is the directory of the user you would like to connect as. /root/.ssh in the case you would like to connect as root. Consider you would like to connect as the user user scp $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub...

Running a script to backup your VMWare machine. If you are running a server as a Virtual Machine and you are using VMWare to do this, you can have this VMware Virtual Machine completely backed up in a periodic basis, and here is how Assumptions You are going to make your backup in another PC not on the same the Virtual Machine is running. Tasks 1. Make possible to log into remote machines using no password 2. Create the script to rotate your backup files in the destination server 3. Create the cron file 1. Make possible to log into...

As VNC is not a secure way to connect to your linux server, you can run VNC over an SSH connection, here is how First install your vnc server - For Fedora and CentOS yum install vnc vnc-server For Debian and Ubuntu apt-get install vncserver Configure your VNC server Run this command, this will start your vncserver running in "possition" 20, with 8 bits of colour and a screen of 1024x768 vncserver :20 -depth 8 -geometry 1024x768 Stop the server use this other command vncserver -kill :20 Edit the applications file, to have your GNOME or KDE running when you...

Hi, I want to share this with all of you, today my server suddenly start showing this. Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect() What I had to do is First, apt-get install php4-mysql after that dpkg-reconfigure php4-mysql Edit: 12/15/2010 You may want to run instead of the above commands: apt-get install php5-mysql and dpkg-reconfigure php5-mysql If you want to use php5 instead of php4. -------------------------- Then you can continue ---------- and finaly. /etc/init.d/mysql restart and. /etc/init.d/apache2 restart I don't know why if it was working before, suddenly stop working, my PHP application (like this one) but it did.

Para poder instalar la nueva versión del Vtiger 5.x en Debian 3.1 (Sarge), se requiere de MySQL 5.x, veamos como se hace. Primero obtenemos el código, aquí Luego el manual de instalación del Vtiger Pueden luego seguir las imagenes de instalación de Debian, para el CD NetInstall que lo pueden bajar de aquí Tan pronto como termines de instalar tu servidor Instala el repositorio de Backports Esto es necesario, para poder instalar el MySQL 5.x, sigue las instrucciones aquí Una vez concluido, ejecuta este comando. apt-get -t sarge-backports install mysql-server mysql-client Instala PHP y Apache Para hacer esto ejecuta apt-get...

Hi, If you want to make your linux machine balance the load of your internet access, you can use ip route. Let's use this script -----------cut here-------------- !/bin/bash IPs of the def gateways IP1=192.168.1.1 IP2=192.168.2.1 REDLOCAL=10.1.1.0/24 IPLOCAL=10.1.1.1 NICs IF1=eth0 IF2=eth1 ip rule add from $IP1 lookup T1 ip route add $REDLOCAL via $IPLOCAL table T1 ip route add 0/0 via $IP1 table T1 ip route add from $IP2 lookup T2 ip route add $REDLOCAL via $IPLOCAL table T2 ip route add 0/0 via $IP1 table T1 ip route default equalize nexthop via $IP1 dev $IF1 nexthop via $IP2 dev $IF2...

I have got this info from a spanish site http://chgonzalez.blogspot.com/2006/11/instalar-vmware-server-en-fedora-core-6.html So the thanks to Christian González G. You need to be root at first. Then run this yum update Then yum install kernel-devel xinetd gcc now go to ntsysv and make sure that xinetd will start each time you start the server, and start it now. /etc/init.d/xinetd start Now get the VMware from here wget [url from the site] Register yourself and get the serial (It is free) tar xvfz VMware-server-*.tar.gz Now you need to do this. touch /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i686/include/linux/linux.h It could be needed also to perform this operation. cp /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2849.fc6-i686/include/config/i2o/config.h...

How to recover / change the root password on RedHat Linux based systems If you found this useful, please use the above buttons, and submit it to your social networks, StumbleUpon if you can, twitter of Facebook When you lost your root password in a RedHat Linux Based systems you should first have access to the console, (the machine itself). Power on, or reboot as needed. and as soon as you get this screen (or similar depending your system and configurations) Now you should press 'e' and you will get this screen. Select the image you would like to boot,...

QEMU, is a great alternative to VMWare or XEN, for installing let's say Windows on your Linux Machine First get the QEMU RPM or use YUM :) yum install qemu Now create the directory where you are going to install your VM cd $HOME mkdir XP cd XP After that create the file that will content your guest OS qemu-img create xp.img 8000M Here the 8000 Mbytes is what you will have available as disk space for XP, you can change this to fit your needs, (and your disk space) Now boot your new machine, I am using the winxp.iso...

This small guide will help you install Vtiger 5.x on a Debian Sarge 3.1 Linux Server. Getting ready. First get the source of vtiger and the manual of installation. Install your Debian. You can follow the screenshots provides here to install your Debian server from the net-install-cd   As soon as you finished installing your server. Install Backports respository This is needed because Vtiger 5.x needs the MySQL version 5.x and Debian Sarge comes by default with version 4.x so go on with the instructions provided here. once this is done run: apt-get -t sarge-backports install mysql-server mysql-client Install Apache...

This document, was taken from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/howto/other-formats/pdf/Chroot-BIND-HOWTO.pdf If you want the HTML version you can read it below.  Chroot−BIND HOWTO Chroot−BIND HOWTO Table of Contents Chroot−BIND HOWTO.....................................................................................................................................1 Scott Wunsch, scott at wunsch.org.........................................................................................1 1. Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 2. Preparing the Jail...................................................................................................................1 . 3. Compiling and Installing Your Shiny New BIND............................................................1 4. Installing Your Shiny New BIND.........................................................................................1 5. The End................................................................................................................................1 6. Appendix − Upgrading BIND Later...........................................................................................2 7. Appendix − Thanks...............................................................................................................2 8. Appendix − Document Distribution Policy.........................................................................2 1. Introduction.................................................................................................................................2 1.1 What?....................................................................................................................................2 1.2 Why?...................................................................................................................................2 1.3 Where?.................................................................................................................................3 1.4 How?.........................................................................................................................................3 1.5 Disclaimer............................................................................................................................3 2. Preparing the Jail.................................................................................................................3   2.1 Creating a User...................................................................................................................4 2.2 Directory Structure ............................................................................................................4 2.3 Placing the BIND...

For that old PC, which can not boot from CD, you can use this HOW TO   We all have old PCs and because they only boot from Diskettes or Hard Disk it is really dificult to install new sofware on them.   Here is how we can achieve that. 1. Get the SBM (Smart Boot Manager) wget http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/3.7/sbminst 2. put the execute permissions. chmod +x sbminst ./sbminst -d /dev/fd0 Now use that diskette to boot your old PC, with your Damn Small Linux Xubuntu Puppy Linux or your favorite "Lite" linux, and go on with the instalation. ...---...   ...

Security is always an Issue in all computer environment and Linux is not an exception, you can use this to protect either your home PC or your small office network This uses the script rc.firewall Follow the instructions below. * Getting the code The first thing you need is to get the code, you can download it from here and get the final version, or the final stable.  Next configure is to your needs  Here are some tips.Under Permit you write the network you want to allow access to your server/networkPermit "192.168.0.0/24 200.90.85.32/32 0.0.0.0:80/tcp 166.114.10.10/32:22/tcp"On the above example you could...

Whenever you need to left open the port 22 for ssh you machine from every where,but want to prevent Dictionary attacks, you can use DenyHosts to stay protected First thing you need as DenyHost runs as a python script, is to be sure you python installed. On Ubuntu or debian apt-get install python wget then get DenyHosts itself from its page. here, or if using Debian or Ubuntu you can just enter: apt-get install denyhosts and go directly to edit the configuration file, if you want to have it from the source, follow to the next step. tar xvzf DenyHosts-2.6.tar.gz...

If you want to have the latest software for Debian, but you only want to upgrade some specific software, and not all your debian just follow this instructions First, change to root $su - Then edit with your favorite text editor, (I use vi) #vi /etc/apt/get/sources.lst Mine looks this way, maybe yours look different. #deb file:///cdrom/ sarge main deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r3 _Sarge_ - Official i386 \ Binary-1 (20060904)]/ unstable contrib main deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ stable main deb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ stable main deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib # Backports deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ sarge-backports main That is all, but if you want to...

If you have a network of Linux Fedora, maybe you want to save bandwidth by creating your own repo on your local network. Here is how. Look for your favorite Fedora mirror, In this case i will use. http://mirror.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/ Now, you have chosen your favorite download site, go to your local server and create a directory where to store the .rpm Now use the rsync program rsync rsync://mirror.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/*.rpm /home/repo/rpms This may take a while, so grab your cup of coffe. You can now create your repo with this command createrepo /home/repo/rpms Your repo is created, you only need now to...

This How - To in its first version, has Apache2, Postfix, MySQL 5.x, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, proftp, and Bind (Chroot) all on a stable Debian server installed from a NetInstall CD, and with Backports enabled (Selective) Installing Debian Be sure to enter linux26 to install the 2.6 version of the Kernel.  Select the language you want to use.  Select your country. Select your Keyboard layout  choose the name you want for your server. Here you put your domain name. In my case is go2linx.org Select to manually set the partition.   Confirm that you are going to work on that Disk....