Fedora on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

Creating and using ackrc

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0530

ack is a fantastic replacement for grep and probably much more than grep. Here is what the dnf info has to say about ack

Name         : ack
Architecture : noarch
Summary      : Grep-like text finder
URL          : http://beyondgrep.com/
License      : Artistic 2.0
Description  : Ack is designed as a replacement for grep.

And their websites says -

Designed for programmers with large heterogeneous trees of source code, ack is written in portable Perl 5 and takes advantage of the power of Perl’s regular expressions.

mussh-run-commands-on-multiple-hosts

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0530

mussh allows you to run command/commands on multiple hosts at the same time. If you have farm of server setup with passwordless ssh or with same password (which is generally the case), then using mussh you can either check all the servers for some output or fix something or maybe update all the packages. How cool is that :)

Here is description of this package from dnf repo

Name         : mussh
Version      : 1.0
Release      : 18.fc35
Architecture : noarch
Size         : 20 k
Source       : mussh-1.0-18.fc35.src.rpm
Repository   : fedora
Summary      : Multihost SSH wrapper
URL          : http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/mussh
License      : GPL+
Description  : Mussh is a shell script that allows you to execute a command or
             : script over ssh on multiple hosts with one command. When possible
             : mussh will use ssh-agent and RSA/DSA keys to minimize the need to
             : enter your password more than once.

terminal.sexy – make your teminal sexy

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:55:11 +0000

terminal.sexy is a nice webpage that allows you to select the colors for your terminal and then you can export it in various formats.

Main site : http://terminal.sexy

and for the source code: Github URL

Check your session type – wayland or X11

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 00:51:43 +0000

With both wayland and X11 in mainstream, its pretty easy to forget if you are running in Wayland or in X11. To check this here are the commands:

loginctl list-sessions
# The above command will show you all the sessions. Note the session number for your session

loginctl show-session <session number> -p Type

Running dnsmasq with NetworkManager in Fedora

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 01:00:04 +0000

Here is a good link to do this:

https://fedoramagazine.org/using-the-networkmanagers-dnsmasq-plugin/

Fedora – dnsmasq with NetworkManager

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:59:03 +0000

I have been thinking of writing about this for long time but someone else did and it is nice write-up so here is the link – https://fedoramagazine.org/using-the-networkmanagers-dnsmasq-plugin/

Gnome with i3 on Fedora 29

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:56:15 +0000

I have been thinking of doing this for long time, finally I managed to get this working. Here is what you need to do to get i3 with all other gnome services running.

First we will create 2 files, this is actually all you need. In these ones, I copied the original gnome files and just change gnome-shell to i3 to replace my window manager.

11:15:43=>[]> cat /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/gnome-i3.session
[GNOME Session]
Name=GNOME + i3
# RequiredComponents=gnome-flashback-init;gnome-flashback;i3;gnome-settings-daemon;
RequiredComponents=i3;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.A11ySettings;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Clipboard;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Color;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Datetime;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Housekeeping;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Keyboard;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.MediaKeys;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Mouse;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.PrintNotifications;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Rfkill;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.ScreensaverProxy;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Sharing;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Smartcard;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Sound;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Wacom;org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.XSettings;
11:15:47=>[]> cat /usr/share/xsessions/gnome-i3.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=GNOME i3
Comment=This session logs you into GNOME + i3
Exec=env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=gnome-i3 gnome-session –session gnome-i3
TryExec=gnome-session
Type=Application
DesktopNames=GNOME-Classic;GNOME;

bash function for rpm whatprovides

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 01:00:38 +0000

Sometimes some simple one-liner function can save you a lot of time, like-

wps ()
{
    rpm -q --whatprovides $(which $1 )
}   # ----------  end of function wps  ----------

rats – source code analysis

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 01:00:57 +0000

I stublemed across this recently so thought of sharing this for you 🙂

sudo yum install rats

And some details about rats

RATS(Rough Auditing Tool for Security) scans through code, finding potentially

dangerous function calls. The goal of this tool is not to definitively find bugs (yet). The current goal is to provide a reasonable starting point for performing manual security audits. The initial vulnerability database is taken directly from things that could be easily found when starting with the forthcoming book, “Building Secure Software” by Viega and McGraw.

systemctl enable and start service

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 01:04:04 +0000

Most of the times when I want to enable the service, I find myself enabling it immediately or it is vice versa. So, the commands I used to use were:

systemctl enable sshd.service
systemctl start sshd.service

But recently I learned that I do not need the 2 commands and this can be done in single command like below

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systemctl enable --now sshd.service

recoll – Desktop search tool

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 00:59:33 +0000

Name         : recoll
Version      : 1.23.7
Release      : 2.fc28
Arch         : x86_64
Size         : 2.1 M
Source       : recoll-1.23.7-2.fc28.src.rpm
Repo         : fedora
Summary      : Desktop full text search tool with Qt GUI
URL          : http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/
License      : GPLv2+
Description  : Recoll is a personal full text search package for Linux, FreeBSD and
             : other Unix systems. It is based on a very strong back end (Xapian), for
             : which it provides an easy to use, feature-rich, easy administration
             : interface.

sigil – ebook editor

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:54:47 +0000

sigil is WYSIWYG ebook editor, here are more details.

Name         : sigil

Version : 0.9.9 Release : 2.fc28 Arch : x86_64 Size : 3.6 M Source : sigil-0.9.9-2.fc28.src.rpm Repo : fedora Summary : WYSIWYG ebook editor URL : https://sigil-ebook.com/ License : GPLv3+ Description : Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books : in ePub format. : : Now what does it have to offer… : : * Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16 : * Full EPUB spec support : * WYSIWYG editing : * Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View : * Metadata editor with full support for all possible metadata entries with : full descriptions for each : * Table Of Contents editor : * Multi-level TOC support : * Book View fully supports the display of any XHTML document possible under : the OPS spec : * SVG support : * Basic XPGT support : * Advanced automatic conversion of all imported documents to Unicode : * Currently imports TXT, HTML and EPUB files; more will be added with time : * Embedded HTML Tidy; all imported documents are thoroughly cleaned; : changing views cleans the document so no matter how much you screw up : your code, it will fix it (usually)

ranger – try terminal file manager

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 01:00:06 +0000

ranger is a terminal file manager, just install and run and have some fun.

Tip: You might want to try it on uxrvt terminal and in Photos folder once.

Name : ranger

Version : 1.7.2

Release : 8.fc28

Arch : noarch

Size : 1.2 M

Source : ranger-1.7.2-8.fc28.src.rpm

Repo : @System

From repo : fedora

Summary : A flexible console file manager

URL : http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/ranger/

License : GPLv3+

Description : Ranger is a free console file manager that gives you greater flexibility and a

good overview of your files without having to leave your *nix console. It

visualizes the directory tree in two dimensions: the directory hierarchy on

one, lists of files on the other, with a preview to the right so you know where

you’ll be going.

glances – new way to look at contention

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 01:00:39 +0000

glances is like top/htop but little different. It shows you sort based on contention (smartly and automatically) unless you change that and hence if you just want to check what is biggest bottleneck in system, then head over to glances quickly. Here is quick description from dnf info command

Name : glances

Version : 2.11.1

Release : 2.fc28

Arch : noarch

Size : 3.2 M

Source : glances-2.11.1-2.fc28.src.rpm

Repo : @System

From repo : fedora

Summary : CLI curses based monitoring tool

URL : https://github.com/nicolargo/glances

License : GPLv3

Description : Glances is a CLI curses based monitoring tool for both GNU/Linux and BSD.

Glances uses the PsUtil library to get information from your system.

It is developed in Python.

vagrant box to libvirtd (QEMU) VM

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 01:00:35 +0000

Like ova images, you can use box images as well with Qemu. After all, both have the disk images, so here is the script to do that. Just put the script somewhere in your path and run with ova or box image name :

#!/bin/bash - 
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE: ova2vm.sh
# 
#         USAGE: ./ova2vm.sh 
# 
#   DESCRIPTION: 
# 
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: ---
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka),
#  ORGANIZATION: Mobileum
#       CREATED: 12/28/2017 13:59
# Last modified: Sun Mar 11, 2018  12:01PM
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

set -o nounset                              # Treat unset variables as an error
dest='/mnt/Backup/VM'
ORIG=${PWD}

if [[ $# == 0 ]]
then
    echo "You need to provide ova/vmdk filename"
    exit
fi
if [[ $1 == *ova || $1 == *box ]]
then
    tmp=$(mktemp -d /tmp/amitXXXXXXX)
    cd  $tmp
    tar xvf $ORIG/$1
    file=$(echo $PWD/*vmdk)
else
    file=$1
    echo "Not a OVA file"
fi
dfile="$dest/$(basename $file)"

read -p "Enter the name for VM :: " vmname
qemu-img convert $file $dfile -p -c -O qcow2
virt-install --disk $dfile --ram 512 \
    --virt-type kvm --vcpus 1 --name "$vmname" --import

Send history of current host to some other host over ssh

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:44:11 +0000

Sometimes I want to save the history of current host on another host. This is to ensure that I can use copy/paste on other host to run the commands. To this, I found a simple solution –

history| ssh <user>@<host> 'cat - > /tmp/history'

And on the new host, you can find the history in file “/tmp/history”, cool :). Now I can quick edit this file to create this as shell script as well if required. How cool is that.

asciinema – video for your terminal session

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 01:04:39 +0000

Info about asciinema:

Name         : asciinema

Version      : 1.4.0

Release      : 1.fc26

Arch         : noarch

Size         : 144 k

Source       : asciinema-1.4.0-1.fc26.src.rpm

Repo         : @System

From repo    : fedora

Summary      : Command line client (terminal recorder) for asciinema.org service

URL          : http://asciinema.org

License      : GPLv3

Description : Asciinema is a free and open source solution for recording the terminal sessions

and sharing them on the web.

To install, you can do:

remind – set and manager reminders the easy way

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 01:10:28 +0000

remind – is a calendar and alarm program. Its simple to use from CLI. To install:

dnf install remind

and some details about it:

Name : remind

Version : 03.01.15

Release : 3.fc26

Arch : x86_64

Size : 440 k

Source : remind-03.01.15-3.fc26.src.rpm

Repo : @System

From repo : fedora

Summary : A sophisticated calendar and alarm program

URL : http://www.roaringpenguin.com/en/penguin/openSourceProducts/remind

License : GPLv2

Description : Remind is a sophisticated calendar and alarm program. It includes the following

features:

A sophisticated scripting language

Plain-text, PostScript and HTML output

Timed reminders and pop-up alarms

Fedora – change from one edition to some other

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 01:11:22 +0000

You will need to install convert-to-edition, description

Name        : convert-to-edition
Arch        : noarch
Epoch       : 0
Version     : 25
Release     : 1
Size        : 9.7 k
Repo        : fedora
Summary     : Script for converting between Fedora Editions
URL         : https://pagure.io/fedora-release
License     : MIT
Description : Provides a script to convert the running system between Fedora Editions

So, all you need to do to convert from one edition to another is :

convert-to-edition -e <edition>

flatpak – get latest libreoffice

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 01:03:17 +0000

flatpak is tool similar to 0install. You can find more details here.

# Get the gnome-sdk gpg keys
wget https://sdk.gnome.org/keys/gnome-sdk.gpg
# Add the keys to trusted keys
flatpak remote-add --user --gpg-import=gnome-sdk.gpg gnome https://sdk.gnome.org/repo/

# Install pre-requisite gnome
flatpak install --user gnome org.gnome.Platform 3.20

# Download the flatpak file and install it. Or you can follow the next step.
wget 'http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/flatpak/latest/LibreOffice.flatpak'
flatpak install --user --bundle LibreOffice.flatpak

# Install flatpak without downloading
flatpak install --user gnome org.gnome.Platform.Locale 3.20

# Run you brand new shiny latest libreoffice
flatpak run org.libreoffice.LibreOffice

# At a later date, when you want to update libreoffice.
flatpak update --user org.libreoffice.LibreOffice

systemd – start service when you enable it

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:57:24 +0000

More often than not for any service, I end up doing :

systemctl enable <service>
systemctl start <service>

But there is shorcut to this. In systemctl command when you enable the service, you can use “–now” to start the service as follows:

systemctl enable --now <service>

quite a timesaver 🙂

Kernel dropped packet analysis

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:30:26 +0000

Found a simple method to check for all the packets dropped by kernel.

First you need to install dropwatch with

dnf install dropwatch

and details of the package

Name        : dropwatch

Arch        : x86_64

Epoch       : 0

Version     : 1.4

Release     : 13.fc24

Size        : 27 k

Repo        : fedora

Summary     : Kernel dropped packet monitor

URL         : http://fedorahosted.org/dropwatch

License     : GPLv2+

Description : dropwatch is an utility to interface to the kernel to monitor for dropped

network packets.

journalctl command to see kernel messages

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 01:19:12 +0000

Sometimes, there are just too many messages in journalctl output and it becomes a mystery game to search for the messages you are looking for. But luckily you do not need to use grep to find the right message. Here is example of what I had to do when I was looking for kernel messages.

journalctl _TRANSPORT=kernel
# To see all the fields, you can use the verbose mode
journalctl _TRANSPORT=kernel -o verbose

# And the filter on priority if needed to get the messages you need
journalctl _TRANSPORT=kernel PRIORITY=4

# and follow
journalctl _TRANSPORT=kernel PRIORITY=4 -f -l

ansible with docker dynamic inventory

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:50:55 +0000

So, I have a few dockers. Every now and then I want to run some command on all of them. Doing ‘docker exec’ is tiresome. I found this neat solution with ansible that I thought I should share with you.

To get started, you need to have the “docker.py” script. This script will be used as python script inventory for ansible. So, use the following command and get the script:

power saving on laptop

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:54:15 +0000

One of the easiest way to make sure that you can have a decent battery life is

sudo yum install tlp smartmontools
sudo systemctl enable tlp
sudo systemctl start tlp

And after this you can check the status like this:

sudo tlp stat
— TLP 0.9 ——————————————–

+++ Configured Settings: /etc/default/tlp
TLP_ENABLE=1
TLP_DEFAULT_MODE=AC
DISK_IDLE_SECS_ON_AC=0
DISK_IDLE_SECS_ON_BAT=2
MAX_LOST_WORK_SECS_ON_AC=15
MAX_LOST_WORK_SECS_ON_BAT=60
SCHED_POWERSAVE_ON_AC=0
SCHED_POWERSAVE_ON_BAT=1
NMI_WATCHDOG=0
ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_AC=performance
ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=powersave
DISK_DEVICES=”sda sdb”
DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_AC=”254 254″
DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_BAT=”128 128″
SATA_LINKPWR_ON_AC=max_performance
SATA_LINKPWR_ON_BAT=min_power
AHCI_RUNTIME_PM_TIMEOUT=15
PCIE_ASPM_ON_AC=performance
PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersave
RADEON_POWER_PROFILE_ON_AC=high
RADEON_POWER_PROFILE_ON_BAT=low
RADEON_DPM_STATE_ON_AC=performance
RADEON_DPM_STATE_ON_BAT=battery
RADEON_DPM_PERF_LEVEL_ON_AC=auto
RADEON_DPM_PERF_LEVEL_ON_BAT=auto
WIFI_PWR_ON_AC=off
WIFI_PWR_ON_BAT=on
WOL_DISABLE=Y
SOUND_POWER_SAVE_ON_AC=0
SOUND_POWER_SAVE_ON_BAT=1
SOUND_POWER_SAVE_CONTROLLER=Y
BAY_POWEROFF_ON_BAT=0
BAY_DEVICE=”sr0″
RUNTIME_PM_ON_AC=on
RUNTIME_PM_ON_BAT=auto
RUNTIME_PM_ALL=1
RUNTIME_PM_DRIVER_BLACKLIST=”radeon nouveau”
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_BLACKLIST_WWAN=1
RESTORE_DEVICE_STATE_ON_STARTUP=0

enki editor – amazing for md and rst files

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 01:15:31 +0000

First, you need to install enki. YOu can do so with

sudo yum install enki

And then you can use the editor as usual. The first thing that you will notice is the navigator window. And here is screenshot for you.

Enki Editor main window

As you can see if you make a typo or mistake then you will immediately be warned with RED color.

xsos – a tool for sysadmins and support

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:31:24 +0000

Here is a very nice article that you may find useful

https://access.redhat.com/discussions/469323

sysreporter on Fedora – basic system report in email

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:41:17 +0000

From the packages github page:

{#user-content-sysreporter.anchor}SysReporter

SysReporter (System Reporter) is a bash script that runs and aggregates a set of reports about its host system. The report can then be emailed to the system administrator on a daily, hourly, minutely basis.

and from dnf info

Name        : sysreporter
Arch        : noarch
Epoch       : 0
Version     : 3.0.4
Release     : 1.fc24
Size        : 17 k
Repo        : @System
From repo   : updates
Summary     : Basic system reporter with emailing
URL         : https://github.com/onesimus-systems/sysreporter
License     : MIT
Description : Basic system reporter with emailing

firewalld – enable logging

Mon, 16 May 2016 01:06:06 +0000

firewalld by default does not allow packets that are dropped. In some cases, you need to find out if some packet is being dropped or not. For doing so you may want to enable logging of dropped packets with the following command:

sudo firewall-cmd  --set-log-denied=all

This will enable logging all the packets and help you figure out if firewalld is dropping the packet.

speed up journalctl

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:40:56 +0000

Sometime back I noticed that whenever I run my favourite command, viz.

journalctl -xn -f -l

it was taking more time than usual. So, I thought to dig more into it and finally found that the following command:

sudo journalctl --disk-usage

showed that journalctl was using some huge space in tune of about 4GB. So, the solution was simple, vaccum the journal entries and the command to do so is :

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size 90M

Checking journalctl size after that confirms the size is reduced and after that indeed the above journal command takes no time 🙂

Most simple and fast lightweight container with Fedora systemd

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 01:05:32 +0000

If you need to have a quick bash shell in sandbox with not network as well, then the most simple command I could find so far is:

sudo virt-sandbox -c lxc:/// /bin/bash

For this you will need to have libvirt-sandbox installed which you can do with the following command:

sudo yum install libvirt-sandbox

virsh – show ip address of all running VMs

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:52:31 +0000

If you are using the libvirt and associated tools, then you must be aware about virt-manager. However this being a GUI tools, it is not possible to always use this. “virsh” is a good option for this.

To start with, if you need to know all the VMs all the running VMs, then you can use (to only view the names):

virsh list --name

Extending this to make it more useful is the case if you need to know the IP address for the running VMs. Here is a simple code that you can put in alias or function that can be used to get the IP address of the running VM’s.

Disk usage by file type

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:51:20 +0000

Trying to find the total usage for each of the file types by extension, then here is a quick bash function for you :

disk_usage_type () 
{ 
    find . -name '*'$1 -ls | awk '
    BEGIN{
        a[0]="Bytes";
        a[1]="KB";
        a[2]="MB";
        a[3]="GB";
    }
    {sum+=$7; files++;}
    END{
    print "Total sum is ::\t" sum;
    print "Total files  ::\t" files;
        while (sum > 1024) {
            sum=sum/1024;
            count++;
            };
        print sum" "a[count];
    }'
}

Just define the function in one of your bash startup files. After that to use the function pass in the extension for which you would like to find the total size. Output should be something like below:

Text file based presentation tool – pinpoint

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:33:50 +0000

Pinpoint description:

Name        : pinpoint

Summary     : A tool for making hackers do excellent presentations

URL         : https://live.gnome.org/Pinpoint

License     : LGPLv2+

Description : Pinpoint a simple presentation tool that hopes to avoid audience death

by bullet point and instead encourage presentations containing

beautiful images and small amounts of concise text in slides.

Pinpoint is a presentation tool. The source file for the presentation is text file and thus very easy to manage. You can see an example with :

Executing commands on multiple hosts

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 00:33:38 +0000

If you have to execute the same command in multiple hosts, then you can use mussh:

Description : Mussh is a shell script that allows you to execute a command or script

over ssh on multiple hosts with one command. When possible mussh will use

ssh-agent and RSA/DSA keys to minimize the need to enter your password

more than once.

First install mussh with the following command

dnf install mussh

Now to run this for multiple hosts, you can run like this

Network Manager post-up script (dispatcher script)

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 01:30:48 +0000

Network manager is supposed to be much better than network, how so?

it supports dnsmasq for one…

Dnsmasq with netowrkmanager

Local name resolution

Also Network Manager supports dispatcher scripts. How can that help? For one, I used to send interface up emails. To do so, all I had to do was put the following script in “/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d”

#!/bin/sh

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
. ./network-functions

[ -f ../network ] && . ../network

# Notify programs that have requested notification
IF=$1
STATUS=$2

cat

dnsmasq local name resolution with NetworkManager

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 01:15:06 +0000

Network Manager suports starting dnsmasq which helps you have a local cache for DNS thus getting faster resolution for the DNS queries.

Dnsmasq with netowrkmanager

So, one thing that I have been thinking about is having a local name resolution for the VMs. So, I wanted something like this to work:

vm1 => 172.17.42,1

vm2 => 172.17.42,2

and so on …

To achieve this and reverse dns to work, we will add the entries in file “/etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/hostnames“. Just one more problem, adding so many entries manually? So, to help you with that, I created this small script:

ShellCheck – check basic POSIX shell script errors

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 01:15:16 +0000

Here is description of the tool:

Description : The goals of ShellCheck are:

To point out and clarify typical beginner’s syntax issues,
:   that causes a shell to give cryptic error messages.

To point out and clarify typical intermediate level semantic
:   problems, that causes a shell to behave strangely and
:   counter-intuitively.

To point out subtle caveats, corner cases and pitfalls, that may
:   cause an advanced user’s otherwise working script to fail under
:   future circumstances.

To install

evvsubst – substitute variables in text in shell

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 00:45:47 +0000

First you need to install gettext, which by the way might be already installed, however you can install with

dnf install gettext

Details of the package:

Name        : gettext

Arch        : x86_64

Epoch       : 0

Version     : 0.19.4

Release     : 4.fc22

Size        : 4.6 M

Repo        : @System

Summary     : GNU libraries and utilities for producing multi-lingual messages

URL         : http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/

License     : GPLv3+ and LGPLv2+

Description : The GNU gettext package provides a set of tools and documentation for

producing multi-lingual messages in programs. Tools include a set of

conventions about how programs should be written to support message

catalogs, a directory and file naming organization for the message

catalogs, a runtime library which supports the retrieval of translated

messages, and stand-alone programs for handling the translatable and

the already translated strings. Gettext provides an easy to use

library and tools for creating, using, and modifying natural language

catalogs and is a powerful and simple method for internationalizing

programs.

Usage examples:

Easily monitor and archive your system log reports.

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 01:15:56 +0000

If you want to monitor your server logs and also like them to be emailed then just Logwatch may not be sufficient. It sends you a mail but does not archive them, so head over to epylog

Name        : epylog

Arch        : noarch

Epoch       : 0

Version     : 1.0.7

Release     : 9.fc22

Size        : 151 k

Repo        : fedora

Summary     : New logs analyzer and parser

URL         : https://fedorahosted.org/epylog/

License     : GPLv2+

Description : Epylog is a new log notifier and parser which runs periodically out of

cron, looks at your logs, processes the entries in order to present

them in a more comprehensive format, and then provides you with the

output. It is written specifically with large network clusters in mind

where a lot of machines (around 50 and upwards) log to the same

loghost using syslog or syslog-ng.

To install :

tlp – optimize and maximize your battery power.

Mon, 22 Jun 2015 00:51:39 +0000

So, you are having issues with battery life on linux. Then head over to tlp project.

TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux
without the need to understand every technical detail. TLP comes
with a default configuration already optimized for battery life.
Also an optional install of the smartmontools package enables hard
disk SMART data in tlp-stat (smartctl).

Install with following command

dnf install tlp
#or
yum install tlp

retext – Editor for restructured text

Fri, 15 May 2015 01:04:50 +0000

restructured text is a simple text editor for markdown/restructured text which can show preview as well. So, here is some details on same :

Name        : retext
Arch        : noarch
Epoch       : 0
Version     : 5.0.1
Release     : 7.fc22
Size        : 412 k
Repo        : @System
Summary     : Text editor for Markdown and reStructuredText
URL         : http://sourceforge.net/p/retext/home/ReText
License     : GPLv3+
Description : ReText is a simple but powerful text editor for Markdown and reStructuredText.

tracer – trace outdated files on your system

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 14:17:43 +0000

Tracer finds outdated running applications in your system.

Home page : Tracer Home page.

To install :

sudo dnf install tracer

Once you have done that, after every dns update/upgrade you would see a list of process’s that need to be restarted. If you want to find manually, then just :

sudo tracer

PID File for squid in Fedora – 21 ( Fedora.next)

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 00:44:05 +0000

So, the other day, I wanted to have squid store its pid in the regular ‘var/run’ directory. Good simple enough – just add the following to “/etc/squid/squid.conf” :

pid_filename /var/run/squid/squid.pid

and create the /var/run/squid directory. Simple, hold on not so fast. Reboot and psssst.. ‘/var/run/squid’ is gone. Finally found that /var/run is handled by systemd-tmpfiles and thus you need to do this as well:

cat <>/lib/tmpfiles.d/squid.conf
d /run/squid 700 squid squid
EOF

So, basically you need to tell tmpfiles to create the squid directory as well.. How complicated things are becoming 🙂

Fedora/Ubuntu issue with assigned IP by dhcp server.

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 00:40:51 +0000

In the recent versions of Fedora/Ubuntu, I found that if the DHCP server assigns a reserved address, the address is not applied to the system. Finally I found that adding the below in /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf, would fix the issue.

send dh-client-identifier = hardware;

speedtest cli

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 01:01:47 +0000

To test your speed you can use speetest-cli. Here is the description:

Command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net

and to install and test:

sudo yum install speedtest-cli

#Run
speedtest-cli

The output is like below:

[][1]

speedtest-cli

shell script for some quick tests on Linux

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:43:31 +0000

Head over to the link and grab the script. Just run it and make yourself a little bit more safe 🙂

https://github.com/rebootuser/LinEnum

colorize your logs

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:36:32 +0000

CCZE is a robust and modular log colorizer with plugins for apm, exim, fetchmail, httpd, postfix, procmail, squid, syslog, ulogd, vsftpd, xferlog, and more.

For installation

sudo yum install ccze

and to use it:

tail -f -n 50 /var/log/firewalld | ccze
#or better yet
cat  /var/log/firewalld | ccze|more

apache in docker to serve local website

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 01:15:44 +0000

I have some backup’s of website on my laptop, which I occasionally want to view. Now, I could have setup apache to serve them directly with VirtualHost or alias but wanted a better solution. So, docker comes to rescue.

First, I installed fedora-dockerfiles and then made some modifications, here they are :

sudo yum install fedora-dockerfiles

After this is done, go to /usr/share/fedora-dockerfiles/apache and make some modification to Dockerfile. After the modifications, the file looks like this

repotrack and repoquery -commands to resolve dependencies.

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 01:06:28 +0000

To get all the depencies of a package, you can try:

repoquery -a --requires --resolve 

Example output:
glibc-0:2.20-5.fc21.i686
bash-0:4.3.30-2.fc21.x86_64
chkconfig-0:1.3.63-1.fc21.x86_64
glibc-0:2.20-5.fc21.x86_64
openssl-libs-1:1.0.1j-1.fc21.x86_64

and then to query in nice tree format, you can use :

repoquery -a --tree-requires PACKAGE_NAME

And finally use that with repotrack:

repotrack -a x86_64 -p . $(repoquery --qf=%{name} -g --list --grouppkgs=all 'Office Suite and Productivity' |tr '\n' ' '
)

Now for the fun part, why use all the above when you can simply use:

yumdownloader --resolve 

So, if you have reached this line then you don't need repotrack/repoquery, simply use yumdownloader :)

script to get hard disk health in fedora/ubuntu

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 12:12:08 +0000

First, put this in a script.

#!/bin/bash

#Change as appropriate
HDD=sda

export sub="SmartCtl data for HDD"
echo 'To: &lt;Your Email&gt;
Sub: [Cron] $sub
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Disposition: inline

&lt;html&gt;&lt;pre&gt;'


echo '&lt;style&gt;

hr {
    display: block;
    height: 1px;
    border: 0;
    border-top: 1px solid #ccc;
    margin: 1em 0;
    padding: 0;
}
&lt;/style&gt;
'

echo '&lt;h2&gt;Errors on HDD:&lt;/h2&gt;'
echo '&lt;hr&gt;'
sudo smartctl -l error  /dev/$HDD
echo '&lt;h2&gt;Health of HDD:&lt;/h2&gt;'
echo '&lt;hr&gt;'
sudo smartctl -H  /dev/$HDD

echo '&lt;h2&gt;Detailed info&lt;/h2&gt;'
echo '&lt;hr&gt;'
sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/$HDD

echo '&lt;h2&gt;Journalctl output for smartd&lt;/h2&gt;'
echo '&lt;hr&gt;'

if [[ -f /etc/fedora-release ]]
then
journalctl -x --show-cursor -u smartd --since=yesterday
else
#This is for Ubuntu.. still using dmesg

dmesg -T -l err,crit,alert,emerg

fi


echo '&lt;h2&gt;All Details&lt;/h2&gt;'
echo '&lt;hr&gt;'

sudo smartctl --xall /dev/$HDD


echo "Thanks for using Amit Agarwal's script"
echo '&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/html&gt;'

and then put this in cron:

Whaaw! light weight media player

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:47:17 +0000

Description : Whaaw! Media Player is a lightweight media player that supports fullscreen
            : mode, seeking, changing video colour settings and more. It will play any audio
            : or video files that GStreamer can play. It is intended to be a basic media
            : player without any GNOME dependencies.

So, this is light weight media player with not too many features but does good as a simple media player.

To install:

ncurses based eFTE editor – programmers lightweight editor

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 01:15:49 +0000

nefte is a lightweight programmers editor. Here is descriptioin:

Description : eFTE is an advanced programmers editor with goals of being lightweight, yet
            : totally configurable. Support for user defined programming languages, menu
            : systems and key bindings are provided with many common defaults already
            : defined. eFTE is still a new project, however, we extend from the FTE editor
            : which was first released in 1995, so eFTE is tried and true with many features
            : for the programmer/text editor.
            : 
            : This package contains nefte, the ncurses version of the editor.

And to install:

nomacs – light weight image viewer

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 01:10:04 +0000

To install:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      sudo yum install nomacs
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

nomacs is a very light weight viewer for images with some fetures that you find useful (rotate image,
crop and see in 1:1. Not too much features but definately very light weight and good for daily use.

Description : nomacs is image viewer based on Qt4 library.

nomacs is small, fast and able to handle the most common image formats.

Additionally it is possible to synchronize multiple viewers

running on the same computer or via LAN is possible.

It allows to compare images and spot the differences

e.g. schemes of architects to show the progress).

nall – schedule your tasks like a pro

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 00:42:02 +0000

nall is a utility to run your scripts ( for whatever ) every defined period. Here is description:

Description : Nall is a small gtk+ application that discretely fits into your freedesktop

system tray (such as trayer).

Its purpose is to spawn periodically every kind of script and display a

one-line output in the tooltip window. The main usage of nall is monitoring or

just notifying of almost everything (it just depends upon your imagination and

ability to script).

For installation :

Download Ticket Service – dl is now on fedora.

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 00:49:42 +0000

From : http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/dl/

“dl” is a file exchange service that allows you to upload any file to a web server and generate a unique ticket for others to download. The ticket is automatically expired according to the specified rules, so that you don’t need to keep track or cleanup afterward. “dl” also allows you to grant an anonymous, one-time upload for others to send you a file, without the requirement of account management.

tlp – optimize and maximize your battery power.

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:30:53 +0000

If you are concerned about the battery life on your Linux laptop, then you should consider using tlp. tlp customizes your Linux distribution for maximum battery life and thus helps improving battery longevity when on Linux.

TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux
without the need to understand every technical detail. TLP comes
with a default configuration already optimized for battery life.
Also an optional install of the smartmontools package enables hard
disk SMART data in tlp-stat (smartctl).

Backup – simple and intelligent

Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:35:42 +0000

However much you stress on the importance of backupm people will forget about keeping it. So, if you do need a completely automated and simple backup then consider using “Back In Time“.

Description:

BackInTime is a simple backup system for Linux inspired from
“flyback project” and “TimeVault”. The backup is done by taking
snapshots of a specified set of directories.
This package contains the GNOME frontend of BackInTime.

For installation:

x2go – possible replacement to VNC

Thu, 22 May 2014 00:31:47 +0000

If you are accessing you Linux machine from VNC then you can try x2go.

Pretty straight forward installation, with packages available for both Ubuntu and Fedora and most other common distros as well. Just install, change one line ( visit the link above) and you are done. Neat, I must say.

Do try it when you feel the need to do something new.

unrar or unar – go open source way

Thu, 15 May 2014 00:15:40 +0000

Recently there was a utility released called unar, a open source replacement for unar.

Description::

The command-line utilities lsar and unar are capable of listing and extracting
files respectively in several formats including RARv3. unar can serve as a free
and open source replacement of unrar.

To install on fedora:

yum install unar

The utility provides 2 commands called lsar and unar, which can be used to list and extract rar archives.

terminal in browser.

Fri, 09 May 2014 00:55:48 +0000

Quite a lot of time, we are spending most of the time on Browsers and during this time, leaving the browser just to do some ls or some command for quickly checking something does not look productive and here is where butterfly is useful.

Just install butterfly with:

pip install butterfly

and then head over to :

http://localhost:57575

and voila you have a terminal in your browser.

sunflower – file manager.

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 01:10:06 +0000

Sunflower file manager is a new file manager that has couple of interesting features, that I liked, not that I use graphical file managers much.

It has a in-built command line, terminal and other interesting features, so what are you waiting for just head over and download and install :

rpm -ivh http://sunflower-fm.org/pub/sunflower-0.1a.58-1.noarch.rpm

Or head over to their downloads page at :

http://sunflower-fm.org/pub/

There is still no home-page and might come soon.

Xephyr – Nested X Server

Thu, 24 Apr 2014 01:01:01 +0000

Nested X-Server is running a X server root window within your running X-windows session like Gnome or KDE. This could be useful if you want to keep all you ssh windows in one window or maybe run all you IRC, firefox, chat and others inside one window, or maybe run another window manager itself.

Lets first install ::

sudo yum install xorg-x11-server-Xephyr

Once done, you can define an alias to do the magic with your nested server. So, lets define an alias:

xca – Graphical X.509 certificate management tool

Mon, 14 Apr 2014 00:52:53 +0000

If you are looking for some tool to manage X.509 certificates then probably xca is your best guess. This is a graphical tool and you can open any file and view the keys in it.

So, first install it:

sudo yum install xca

And some information on xca::

Description : X Certificate and Key management is a graphic interface for managing

asymmetric keys like RSA or DSA, certificates and revocation lists. It is

intended as a small CA for creation and signing certificates. It uses the

OpenSSL library for the cryptographic operations.
: Certificate signing requests (PKCS#10), certificates (X509v3), the signing

of requests, the creation of self-signed certificates, certificate revocation

lists and SmartCards are supported. For an easy company-wide use, customizable

templates can be used for certificate and request generation. The PKI structures

can be imported and exported in several formats like PKCS#7, PKCS#12, PEM,

DER, PKCS#8. All cryptographic data are stored in a byte order agnostic file

format, portable across operating systems.

Fedora.next – what is it?

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:47:55 +0000

Fedora.next is being much talked about but what it really is. If you want some insight’s and understand what it is, head over to this presentation.

A nice presentation that explains the concept for Fedora.next.

Sandbox apache (httpd) for better security.

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:37:40 +0000

Apache/httpd is something which you would like to have contained. And now fedora provides a native way/mechanism to to so with virt-sandbox-service. With this, you can create a virtualized sanbox service and then connect/list/manage such with virsh.

We will be using LXC.

Basically its couple of commands and you have a contained service running.

# List all the containers
virsh -c lxc:/// list

# Create the sandbox, all default parameters. Will take dhcp address.
virt-sandbox-service create -C  --username amitag -u httpd.service httpd_conta

# Create the container with static IP.
virt-sandbox-service create -C  --username amitag -u httpd.service -N \
address=192.168.122.11/24%192.168.122.255  httpd_conta#Enable and start the service.
virt-sandbox-service start httpd_conta
virt-sandbox-service enable httpd_conta#Delete the container if not required any more.
virt-sandbox-service delete  httpd_conta

Sandbox Firefox – First step to security

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 01:21:04 +0000

First we will setup cgroup to limit cpu and memory usage, so here we go:

Add the configuration in /etc/cgconfig.conf

#------start cgconfig----------------
#new group
group firefox {
    perm {
        task {
#user your login id and group here, so that you can control this group
        uid = amitag;
        gid = amitag;
        }
        admin {
# same as above, set to your login id and group.
           uid = amitag;
           gid = amitag;
        }
    }
# set the limits for cpu.. by default there are 1024 shares of cpu with no other groups,
# so share of 102 would be around 10% .
    cpu{
        cpu.shares="102";
    }
# limit the cpus to be used to only 0-1
    cpuset{
        cpuset.cpus=0-1;
        cpuset.mems=0;
    }
# limit the maximum memory to 700Mb.
    memory {
        memory.limit_in_bytes="700M";
        memory.max_usage_in_bytes="0";
    }
}
#------end cgconfig----------------

get all the urls in html file (local or on server).

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 10:35:53 +0000

To use this, you will need the lynx tool, so install that first.

sudo yum install lynx

Now, to get list of all the URLs in local html file or some URL, just execute this:

lynx -dump -listonly

nautilis fork ( File manager ) with tree view in sidebar.

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 00:49:09 +0000

Was searching for this for sometime now, finally found it.

sudo yum install nemo
sudo yum list nemo*

First just install nemo. Configure nemo not to interfere with default desktop and also make it default handler. So, here are the settings that would do it.

gconftool-2 --set  /desktop/gnome/applications/component_viewer/exec --type 'string' 'nemo "%s"'
gconftool-2 --set  /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/trash/command --type 'string' 'nemo "%s"'
gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons false

Now, if you need more functionality in file manager then check the list of nemo packages from the output of second command of yum. It has plugins like file preview and so on. Install and enjoy.

mpd – change the music directory context for selinux.

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 01:15:37 +0000

For running mpd with different use, you may find necessary to change the SELinux context of your music directory. For this, you would need to run the below command:

chcon -R  -t mpd_user_data_t Music/

cgroups – use to control your cpu and memory

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:33:23 +0000

cgroups is a kernel feature and with userspace utilities, we can use the feature to control the cpu and memory for per process. So, lets first install the required tools.

sudo yum install libcgroup-tools

Now, we need to enable the service.

sudo systemctl enable cgconfig.service
sudo systemctl enable cgred.service

cgconfig.service is to enable configuration for cgroups and
cgred.service is to enable configuration for cgroups for processes depending on the name.

more clients for mpd.

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 01:01:41 +0000

Here are some more clients that you can use with mpd.

sudo yum install mpd mpc qmpdclient.x86_64 gmpc.x86_64 sonata.x86_64

mpd is ::

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a flexible, powerful, server-side application for
playing music. Through plugins and libraries it can play a variety of sound
files (e.g., OGG, MP3, FLAC, AAC, WAV) and can be controlled remotely via its
network protocol. It can be used as a desktop music player, but is also great
for streaming music to a stereo system over a local network. There are many
GUI and command-line applications to choose from that act as a front-end for
browsing and playing your MPD music collection.

get systemd journal entries on web interface.

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 01:19:50 +0000

Just in case you need it, you can get the journalctl entries from systemd in the web page.

First install :

yum install systemd-journal-gateway

Once you have done this you can get the journal entries with wget as well with

wget http://localhost:19531/entries

or if you prefer, you can browse with a browser at http://localhost:19531/. It has a nice little interface for browsing the entries, nothing too fancy but just sufficient.

sxiv – image viewer

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 01:13:06 +0000

sxiv is a nice alternative to feh. It is very light weight and quite useful. Here is the description:

Description :
sxiv is an alternative to feh and qiv. Its only dependency besides xlib
is imlib2. The primary goal for writing sxiv is to create an image viewer,
which only has the most basic features required for fast image viewing (the
ones I want). It works nicely with tiling window managers and its code base
should be kept small and clean to make it easy for you to dig into it and
customize it for your needs.

Monitor your system with sysusage.

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 01:02:31 +0000

First some information on sysusage:

Description :
SysUsage continuously monitor your systems informations and generate
periodical graph reports using rrdtool or javascript jqplot library.
All reports are shown throught a web interface.

SysUsage grabs all system activities using Sar and system commands allowing
you to keep tracks of your computer or server activity during his life.
It is a great help for performance analysis and resources management. The
threshold notification can alarm you when the system capabilities are
reached by sending SMTP messages or throught Nagios reports.

Change display manager on Fedora

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 13:29:27 +0000

Simple, just install and run the following

sudo yum install system-switch-displaymanager-gnome
system-switch-displaymanager-gnome

Beautiful set of icons.

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:35:24 +0000

Here is a link to a very beautiful set of icons for you gnome/kde desktop:

http://bokehlicia.deviantart.com/art/Pacifica-Icons-402508559

Find directory/file with inode number

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:57:57 +0000

Couple of days back, I was getting the following error:

Directory inode 2362521 has an unallocated block #245823. Allocate?

And this continued for hours together and I was in a hurry. Did not really care about the error and all I wanted was to get rid of the error but for that I needed to get to the file/directory with inode number mentioned in the error and finally “find” command came to rescue:

Set some disk params to be safe

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 01:20:52 +0000

It is always “Better safe than sorry” so, here are some things you
should do..

First check fstab, if you have partitions other than root then use UUID instead of device:

UUID=a8f13a0d-3f1f-42e4-b076-f44b4163306c /mnt/Backup     ext4 defaults,relatime 1 2

Then entries for all your mounts should be like above.
Points to note here :

Disk is mounted using the UUID and not with /dev/sdXX. This ensures
that even if your disk ids change, you will be able to mount them. To
get the partition UUID, you can execute :

pkgwat -search packages for Fedora.

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:52:44 +0000

pkgwat is a nice utility to search the fedora packages websearch.

Description : Pronounced "package WAT", pkgwat is a fast CLI tool for querying
: the fedora packages webapp.
: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/
:
: You can make its search even better by helping us tag packages.
: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/tagger

And to search for a package, you can use ::

pkgwat search 
pkgwat -h # get help on package.

power save mode for battery in Fedora 19.

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:41:21 +0000

I was getting really bad battery life on my Fedora 19 system, and did not find much on how to tune it. Finally I found something that just does not need much configuration but works pretty well. So, here is what you need to do:

sudo yum install tuned tuned-adm

The second package, tuned-adm installs additional themes for power saving. It is optional and not mandatory. Once you have installed these, you can do the following:

Delete all but some directories

Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:06:05 +0000

I think, like me, you would have faced a lot of situations, where you wanted to delete all the files or directories in a location, leaving only the required files/directories. So, I have a directory containing lots of files/directories and I want to delete most of them except some 5/10 of them, how to I do it.

I finally wrote a small script to do that. First save list of files that you do not want to delete in file called “listnames” and then execute the below script. This will give you the rm commands that you need to execute. If you want you can execute the rm command from the script, but to be able to review, I just have the commands echoed.

Photobooth party on Fedora

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 01:49:38 +0000

If you like the kind of effects in those photobooths then here is something that will get you some pretty good time.

http://fedoraproject.org/en/using/tutorials/cheese.html

conky transparent window on Fedora with Gnome.

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 01:43:45 +0000

On Fedora with Gnome-shell 3, its been long time that I was not able to get transparent window. So, finally I thought to spend some time to try to fix that. Finally got that fixed with all the configurations below in the conkyrc. Here the default color is set to LightSkyBlue but feel free to change that.

I hope this helps fedora community who is struggling to get transparent window. And here is the code :

create text tables from delimited files.

Fri, 12 Jul 2013 01:24:19 +0000

To create simple text tables to paste in emails or to use in any other document where you want to show a table, here is something that you can use. There is a perl module which provides “tablify“. And here is how to use it:

sudo yum install perl-Text-RecordParser

This will install a command “tablify” that you can use in number of ways. Here is a simple example to use it. You can read the man pages to see how you can use it.

convert tabs to spaces, the easy way

Mon, 08 Jul 2013 01:32:03 +0000

Lots of times you want to convert tabs to spaces and sometimes from a shell script, if that is the case, then simple solution is “tidy“. First you need to install tidy as follows:

sudo yum install tidy

and then you can use the command tab2space.

tab2spcae

This will print the output to STDOUT by default which you can redirect if you want.

Fedora – Ramdisk creation

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:40:07 +0000

In Fedora, ramdisks are not created by default as is the case with RHEL. So, if you need to get Ramdisks on Fedora, then you can do this:

sudo yum install MAKEDEV

This will create some default Ramdisk’s in the “/dev” directory. Now, if you need to change anything then feel free to go to “/etc/makedev.d” and feel free to change these files.

The Fedora Project logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

cksum – compare for multiple files.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:15:30 +0000

If you have to compare cksum for couple of files, the you know how cumbersome it is. So, I wrote a simple script, wherein you can create a file called cksums in the current directory and copy paste the result of “**cksums ***” into this file, and then run this script. Cool 🙂

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE: checkcksums.sh
#
#         USAGE: ./checkcksums.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION: Compare cksums of multiple files.
#
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: ---
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (),
#  ORGANIZATION:
#       CREATED: 02/22/2013 09:12:17 PM IST
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

file=cksums
while read line
do
    a=( $(echo $line) )
    if [[ -f ${a[2]} ]]
    then
        b=( $(cksum ${a[2]}) )
        if [[ $a == $b ]]
        then
            echo "Cksum for ${a[2]} = ${a[0]} matches"
        else
            echo "Failed ::Cksum for ${a[2]} = ${a[0]} matches"
        fi
    else
        echo "Failed :: file ${a[2]} does not exist"
    fi
done < $file

configure firewall – the easy way.

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:50:17 +0000

It is good practice to keep iptables/firewall enabled. But configuring it is difficult, do you agree. Not any more 🙂

Install firewall-config

sudo yum install firewall-config

This will install a GUI application, which you can run with “Firewall” application in the dash or with “firewall-config” in terminal. It is pretty straight forward to use this tool, even if you don’t have much knowledge on Firewall/iptables.

sendmail or sending mail

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 01:35:01 +0000

If you want to use sendmail so that you can send all your mails from the local system to your email address, then you have to use sendmail. Now, configuring sendmail has never been that easy and if you are working internally on your corporate network then for sending mails to the same domain, generally you don’t have to login. That being the case, you can use something simpler like “sstmp“. Install ssmtp with:

ss – anothre utility to investigate sockets.

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:42:04 +0000

ss is :

ss is used to dump socket statistics. It allows showing information similar to netstat. It can display more TCP and state informationsthan other tools.

This comes in iproute package in Fedora. So, to install this you would need to install “iproute” if not installed already.

sudo yum install iproute

Now, once you have done that you can look at the man page to check what all you can see with ss. but here are some examples:

dwb – keyboard driven browser

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 01:35:36 +0000

First off, install using the command

sudo yum install dwb

Now for the description:

dwb is small webkit-based web-browser in the spirit of tiling window managers,that aims to be mostly keyboard-driven.

I liked the fact that it does well what it tries to do and pretty good at being fast.

duff – find duplicate files.

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:44:38 +0000

duff – description:

Description : Duff is a command-line utility for quickly finding d

AURA Console (Photo credit: jameswatts.solfenix)

uplicates in a
given set of files

and now time to execute :

find . -type f -print0|duff -e0|xargs -0

This will print a list of duplicate files. If you directly want to delete them then you can use them in a rm command directly like ::

dnsmasq not starting from NetworkManager with SELinux enabled.

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 11:34:11 +0000

OpenWrt – Dnsmasq (Photo credit: magicfab)

Some time back I posted on dnsmasq starting from Network Manager and how to setup dnsmasq.

Now, couple of days back , I setup dnsmasq in NetworkManager but was astonished to see that there was no dnsmasq running. I checked with dig and saw that there was no response from localhost for dns queries. Checked “ps -eaf|grep dns” and found that there was no dnsmasq running. I knew that once you mention “dns=dnsmasq” in the NetworkManager then it should start up but that was not happening. And then I checked audit log, found that some permissions were denied by SELinux.

steam on Linux – for Fedora

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:35:25 +0000

The Fedora Project logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was trying to get steam on linux on my Fedora box. Headed over to steam website, but was astonished to find only Ubuntu client over there. A little googling presented me with the developer website blog of valvesoftware.com. So, here is the link for you, just in case you are searching for the same:

viewvc – serve current directory in web interface.

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:35:01 +0000

Here is the description of viewvc:

ViewVC is a browser interface for CVS and Subversion version control
repositories. It generates templatized HTML to present navigable directory,
revision, and change log listings. It can display specific versions of files
as well as diffs between those versions. Basically, ViewVC provides the bulk
of the report-like functionality you expect out of your version control tool,
but much more prettily than the average textual command-line program output.

ssh reverse tunning..

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:41:21 +0000

If you want to access some local resources like the release website from the remote server when you are connecting to the remoter server using ssh over VPN, then possibly reverse ssh tunnelling is the best option. So, basically when you are connecting to the remote server, you tell the server your intent to do so and which local resource you want to connect to and on which port.So, here I want to connnet to google.com and tunnel the data to 192.168.131.921:9090 tthough the tunnel, then the command to use will be ::

NIce backgrounds with Fedora with Yearly calnedar

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:27:37 +0000

Here is something that you can try

sudo yum install yearcalendar-backgrounds

This will install 3 wallpapers with yearly calendars. There is no interesting background in the calendar but then you get the clarity since there is no background. The calendars are quite nice by the way.

dnsmasq – use with Network Manager.

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:42:24 +0000

Niles Machine Company (Photo credits: roadtrafficsigns.com)

Well if you have not heard about dnsmasq:

Dnsmasq is lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server.
It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network.
It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global
DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines
with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured
either in each host or in a central configuration file. Dnsmasq supports
static and dynamic DHCP leases and BOOTP for network booting of diskless
machines.

lightweight pdf viewer – zathura.

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:11:32 +0000

Zathura is a lightweight viewer for pdf which works on plugins. Here is shor description :

Zathura is a highly configurable and functional PDF viewer based on the Poppler
rendering library and the GTK+ toolkit. The idea behind zathura is an
application that provides a minimalist and space saving interface as well as
an easy usage that mainly focuses on keyboard interaction.

But the viewer will not work unless you install the plugins to display the correct plugin. So, if you want to use it for any real purposes then you will have to install the appropriate plugin as well, so here is what you need to do:

dnstop – top like utility for Fedora and other *nix

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:15:44 +0000

For installation :

sudo yum install dnstop

And now some description:

dnstop is a libpcap application (ala tcpdump) that displays various
tables of DNS traffic on your network.

dnstop supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

To help find especially undesirable DNS queries, dnstop provides a
number of filters.

dnstop can either read packets from the live capture device, or from a
tcpdump savefile.

Couple of days back, I realized there was too much network activity on my
system, although I was not doing anything. Fired up wireshark and to my
astonishment, there was too much of DNS traffic on the network. But the
problem was analyzing the data in wireshark and this is where dnstop came
into light. It helped me narrow down the issue within minutes and problems
resolved.

Disable a few cores when you want to save power.

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 01:23:46 +0000

If you have a lot of CPU power and working on battery. If you do not need that much of power and would like to rather save some battery power by disabling some cpus then you can use the below script. This script disables cpus from 4 to 7. You can change the number in the for loop. You would need the sudo to be setup or remove sudo and run the script as root. The script will show you the currently active cpu’s before and after disabling the CPU’s.

Battery performance improvement with powertop and using xidel.

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 01:13:51 +0000

For those of you, who have not heard about powertop, it is a tool to monitor the power consumption on your system. It has a tab which shows the tuneable parameters. Doing the changes suggested in those would improve the life to quite an extent. Here is the description of powertop:

PowerTOP is a tool that finds the software component(s) that makeyour computer use more power than necessary while it is idle.

Allow incoming/outgoing ports on iptables

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:22:23 +0000

Schematic for the packet flow paths through Linux networking and Xtables (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last couple of years, I just used to disable iptables on my system, this time I decided not to disable it and keep it enabled.

So far so good, now comes the tricky part, I have http server enabled on my system and since this is on local network with already firewall and other security in place so I can allow all incoming to my system and similarly I need to enable XDMCP outgoing. So, I can add the rules like this :

Xnest – XDMCP protocol and virtual DM

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:50:21 +0000

An IceWM Xephyr session is running inside a Fluxbox Xephyr session, which is running inside another IceWM Xephyr session, which is running under Linux Mint 8. (Note that Fluxbox is also licensed under the MIT license by the Fluxbox developers, but IceWM is released under the GPL and LGPL by Marko Ma?ek.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

XDMCP is protocol that allows remote connections and provides you with a working Display Manager like KDE, GNome, et al. Its a remote connection protocol that is mostly enabled on Solaris and disabled on most Linux boxes. If you need to have a remote session where you need the X Display to open some GUI applications then you can have a connection with the remote server with XDMCP.

meld – cvs diff with ease

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 01:15:01 +0000

Visualization of the “history tree” of a revision controlled project, showing branching, merging, tagging, etc. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are couple of ways to make life easier with CVS diff. But here is one that is really good.
First if you haven’t, install meld:

sudo yum install meld

meld is basically a diff viewer and pretty good at it 😉

phpmyadmin access problem and change server from URL

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 01:33:55 +0000

I was having issues with one of the phpmyadmin setups. The first server defined in the config file was not accessible and the theme that I was using was not allowing me to change the server from the first page. This resulted in a state where I was not able to access phpmyadmin in any way. I could not connect to any of the servers. And thus had to hack my way in to phpmyadmin to find out how to connect to other servers from URL. And here is my finding:

Shortcut to run current command with sudo in bash

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 02:27:56 +0000

For me, I mostly forget to add “sudo” to the command until the time I am actually supposed to run it. Also sometimes, on some systems, bash completion does not work as expected with “sudo”. With these in mind, I wanted something such that when I have completed the command, I could insert sudo in the begining of the command without much ado. So, finally this is what I came up with in my “~/.inputrc” file. Note: If you don’t have this file, then simply create this file.

snmpd -verify if the mibs are loaded.

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:38:23 +0000

If you are setting up the snmpd server and have added your own mibs and do not really know if the mibs are loaded or not then simply go to the directory:

/var/lib/net-snmp/mib-indexes

This can save you a lot of time, if you are not getting results with snmpwalk. You can even use snmpwalk as :

snmpwalk -v  -c

Well, these little things can save you a lot of time 🙂

using iTerm color schmes with gnome-terminal.

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:40:02 +0000

the OS X Lion install key (Photo credit: blakespot)

Found this great page and thought of sharing this:

http://www.sharms.org/blog/2012/08/using-iterm-2-themes-with-gnome-terminal/

When using this, you will need to install :

https://github.com/caseyhoward/nokogiri-plist

and when you install this, you will find that the permissions for the files are not appropriately set, so go to your ruby gems directory or the installation directory for nokogiri-plist and change the permissions.

script for changing gnome-terminal color schemes.

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:31:51 +0000

This is the Gnome-Logo made with vectors. GNOME and the foot logo are trademarks of the GNOME Foundation. Español: Éste es el logo de Gnome hecho con vectores. GNOME y el logo del pie son marcas registradas de la Fundación GNOME (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Earlier I had posted this. So, if you want to try all of these schemes, then you need not have to copy paste the schemes from the web page, you can try the below script.

gnome-terminal color schemes.

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:23:17 +0000

Colours (Photo credit: CherrySoda!)

I was looking for a way to set the terminal colors for gnome. There is a GUI way to change the same by going to the Preferences->Colors. And then you can change the colors that you see in the color pallete in the bottom of the dialog box.

But I was looking at doing it faster and better, and finally I found this page.

Different bottom panel for gnome3.

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:56:03 +0000

If you miss the bottom panel on gnome3, the do give tint2 a try. Here is how this looks (by default).

tint2

procinfo and procinfo-ng : Get system information from /proc.

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:45:37 +0000

The Fedora Project logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Install procinfo or procinfo-ng. The procinfo contains three programs :

/usr/bin/lsdev
/usr/bin/procinfo
/usr/bin/socklist

and procinfo-ng contains ::

/usr/bin/procinfo-ng

The description for both of them is similar ::

Name        : procinfo-ng
Version     : 2.0.304
Release     : 5.fc17
Architecture: i686
Install Date: Tue 24 Jul 2012 05:45:10 PM IST
Group       : Applications/System
Size        : 140366
License     : GPLv2 and LGPLv2
Signature   : RSA/SHA256, Mon 12 Mar 2012 09:56:55 PM IST, Key ID 50e94c991aca3465
Source RPM : procinfo-ng-2.0.304-5.fc17.src.rpm
Build Date : Wed 29 Feb 2012 02:30:54 AM IST
Build Host : x86-06.phx2.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager    : Fedora Project
Vendor      : Fedora Project
URL         : http://sourceforge.net/projects/procinfo-ng/
Summary     : Console-based system monitoring utility
Description :
Procinfo-NG is a complete rewrite of the old system monitoring application
procinfo. The goal is to make more readable (and reusable) code and to
restore broken functionality.

Music players on Linux – the poor mans random song player.

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 06:06:43 +0000

If you have more applications running on your system then your system can handle them then you know what I mean when I say that the Music Players take a lot of CPU. Otherwise harmless, but when you are doing too many things, then lot of times you would feel that probably stopping the Music player might help. But then Linux is all about alternatives. So, there is a command line player called mpg123, which does not use so much CPU. But what about playlist 🙂

colorgcc – Color your compiler output on Fedora

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 05:51:39 +0000

Lets start with installing colorgcc :

sudo yum install colorgcc

Now once that is done, you will need to ensure that the call to g++, gcc and others that you want to use, you will need to create a link in the “~/bin” directory, like so:

for i in g++ gcc c++ cc 
do
    ln -s $(which colorgcc) ~/bin/$i
done

The one liner above will create the links for colorgcc as **** your favourite compiler in your homedir. Don’t forget to add the bin diretory to your PATH variable:

convert word document to html

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 01:45:05 +0000

First install the required package:

sudo yum install wv

Description:

Description : Wv is a program that understands the Microsoft Word 6/7/8/9

binary file format and is able to convert Word

documents into HTML, which can then be read with a browser.

And here is the list of the programs that this utility provides:

/usr/bin/wvAbw
/usr/bin/wvCleanLatex
/usr/bin/wvConvert
/usr/bin/wvDVI
/usr/bin/wvDocBook
/usr/bin/wvHtml
/usr/bin/wvLatex
/usr/bin/wvMime
/usr/bin/wvPDF
/usr/bin/wvPS
/usr/bin/wvRTF
/usr/bin/wvSummary
/usr/bin/wvText
/usr/bin/wvVersion
/usr/bin/wvWare
/usr/bin/wvWml

So, if you want to convert a doc file to html just do:

tora installation on Fedora 17.

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 01:35:21 +0000

Here are the previous links on Tora:

Tora on F16

Tora on Fedora

And if you are interested in installing from source then you can always use this link:
http://blog.amit-agarwal.com/2012/02/06/tora-fedora-16-mysql-oracle/

And if you are interested in just installing it then you can always do:

rpm -ivh "http://amit-agarwal.co.in/mystuff/tora-2.1.3-1.fc17.i686.rpm"

Upgrade to Fedora 17 from 16.(amit-agarwal.co.in)
Fedora 17 warning: kernel panic after upgrade (part 2)(kparal.wordpress.com)
Fix Fedora 17 Kernel Panic after Preupgrade(loviniltra.com)

rpmconf – Tool to handle rpmsave and rpmnew files

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 02:18:40 +0000

Install the utility:

sudo yum install rpmconf

Description:

Description : This tool search for .rpmnew, .rpmsave and .rpmorig files and ask you what to do

with them:

Keep current version, place back old version, watch the diff or merge.

And finally run the utility:

sudo rpmconf -a

and if there is a conflict or rpmsave or rpmnew file, then you will see something like this:

symlinks -delete all invalid soft links in Linux/Fedora

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 01:05:34 +0000

First of all, install symlinks if it is not installed :

sudo yum install symlinks

and here is the description:

Description : The symlinks utility performs maintenance on symbolic links.

Symlinks checks for symlink problems, including dangling symlinks

which point to nonexistent files. Symlinks can also automatically

convert absolute symlinks to relative symlinks.

Install the symlinks package if you need a program for maintaining

symlinks on your system.

and the help for the same:

unable to browse windows network with samba4

Sun, 27 May 2012 15:40:58 +0000

I use Fedora 17 on my work laptop and thus need to connect to windows share sometimes. After I upgraded to Fedora 17 some time, I was unable to browse the windows network. I would get all kind of errors and warnings and tried everything that I knew about Samba to fix the issue. Tried searching through all the forums to figure out what was wrong but nothing helped. And suddenly today I resolved it and guess how:

Upgrade to Fedora 17 from 16.

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:31:50 +0000

As usual time in couple of days to upgrade to Fedora 17. Release schedule is for 05/22 and so its just around the corner. So, if you are looking at upgrading using yum, then make sure that you visit this page.

There are some changes in latest version that will not allow you to upgrade without executing few commands manually and that page lists them. And if you are too brave and just want the steps and the command then here it is:

Display X applications from virtual terminals

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:05:37 +0000

GNOME Session plugin (Photo credit: David Siegel)

Here is a script that can help you set the proper envirionment to start a gnome-shell from one of the terminals.

#!/bin/bash - 
#===============================================================================
#
# FILE: xenv.sh
# 
# USAGE: ./xenv.sh 
# 
# DESCRIPTION: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Debugging
#
# 
# OPTIONS: ---
# REQUIREMENTS: ---
# BUGS: ---
# NOTES: ---
# AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), amit.agarwal@roamware.com
# CREATED: 09/14/2011 04:45:31 PM IST
# Last modified: Wed Sep 14, 2011 04:45PM
# REVISION: ---
#===============================================================================

gnome_session=$(pgrep -u $USER gnome-session)
eval export$(sed's/\o000/\n/g;' < /proc/$gnome_session/environ |grep DISPLAY)
eval export$(sed's/\o000/\n/g;' < /proc/$gnome_session/environ |grep XAUTHORITY)
eval export$(sed's/\o000/\n/g;' < /proc/$gnome_session/environ |grep DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS)

So, once you have done that you have the correct environment to use the X display and thus you can start the gnome-shell as well or do any other fancy thing that you want 🙂

colors in bash scripts

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:52:29 +0000

Colours (Photo credit: CherrySoda!)

I have been trying to understand the color codes for bash for a pretty long time, but somehow never got time to understand this clearly. So this time around when I was writing a script to analyze some logs. I thought I will give it a go and finally understood some part of this.

So, first we will start with this script. This is taken from here.

systemadm – simpler way to manage the service files for systemd

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:43:09 +0000

Once the systemd unit and service files have come into being, understanding of the system services have changed a little bit and it might require some time to understand the cli tools for managing these services and units. That being the case, systemadm comes to rescue. This is a simple tool which :

Graphical front-end for systemd.

For installation :

sudo yum install systemd-gtk

And here’s a screenshot::

Your own local search engine.

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:31:17 +0000

There are times when you would want to have a local search engine capable of indexing even pdf and doc files. So here is a solution.

You can use “Omega” and here are the instructions.

download omega from http:// xapian.org/download

yum install xapian libuuid-devel

And then make and install omega and for this you can follow the instructions.

Federated Search Engine Diagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Create index using command omindex
and then you can use quest or search.py to search or you can setup the cgi way so that you can use local browser to search.

uptimed – keep track of your system uptime.

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:34:34 +0000

Uptimed is an up time record daemon keeping track of the highest
up times the system ever had.

Uptimed has the ability to inform you of records and milestones
though syslog and e-mail, and comes with a console front end to
parse the records, which can also easily be used to show your
records on your Web page

Installation :

sudo yum install uptimed

Once installed, you will have to first create the boot id with this command:

pigz -parallel gzip

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:32:33 +0000

Here is a short description of pigz:

pigz, which stands for parallel implementation of gzip,
is a fully functional replacement for gzip that exploits
multiple processors and multiple cores to the hilt when compressing data.

And for the installation:

sudo yum install pigz

With pigz, if you don’t have many things running on your multi processor machine then you will see a significant improvement when you are gzipping the files.

cream bash ide – vim with bash support

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:16:48 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Here you can find the cream editor. This is basically vim editor with lots of customizations thus making it simpler for the users to use the editor directly.

This version already has the bash and perl support plugins and thus you can start using them as IDE without the need to add any plugins. It has a simple and advanced mode. In the simple mode you need not worry about all the modes of the vi/vim editor. How cool is that 🙂

Setup your own RFC Editor for Linux.

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 11:51:54 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Well, if you are a professional who has to keep referring to RFC, then you know how good it would be to have the RFC downloaded and kept in your computer. But then unless you can search it and use and editor with it, its of not much use. So, here is something that you can do :

Check out all the colors on you X window system.

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 05:12:52 +0000

If you ever wondered what combination of some colors would look like but did not really feel like setting them in your xterm just to check them out. Or if you wanted to know about all the colors on you X window system then you can install this utility called xcolorsel.

[][1]

xcolorsel

You will need to setup the rpm-shere repo for this.

glances – Get a glimpse of the whole system

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 04:42:41 +0000

You would have used top at some point of time. Did you not wish that instead of just the processes it list all the vital statistics of the system as a whole. How good it would be to see the Memory, Net, Processes and Disk usage on the same screen. Well then you should take a look at glances. Here is how it looks:

[][1]

glances

For using this tool, here is what you need to do :

Tora installation on Fedora 16 with rpm

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:47:04 +0000

[][1]

Image via Wikipedia

Last article I talked about tora installation from the sources, but if that is too much for you then you can use this one liner:

rpm -ivh "http://amit-agarwal.co.in/mystuff/tora-2.1.3-1.fc16.i686.rpm"

But if you like the hard way out, then you can always try this.

Unrar in Fedora… (gryphon143.wordpress.com)
Fedora Utils just got easier (funsurf.wordpress.com)
rpmorphan – deborphan for the rpm based distros. (amit-agarwal.co.in)

tora on Fedora 16 for mysql and Oracle.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:30:45 +0000

Sometime back I had posted a article on Tora on Fedora. But that was a while back and things have progressed and we already have Fedora 16 (aka Verne).

So, awhile back I installed Tora on my Fedora 16 and here are the steps to do so:

First get the Tora sources from sourceforge.net . Download the source tar file and extract the same.

Set gnome-shell to start in fallback mode without GUI.

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:05:25 +0000

If you run into issues with gnome-shell then gnome-shell should allow you to disable all the plugins and get the gnome-shell. But since gnome-shell is still evolving, you might run into issue where the shell does not come up. What to do in that case. You can set the shell to start in fallback mode, where there are more chances that it will come up.

Alas, but you don’t have a shell or desktop session to do that. Simple, start the gnome-shell and before it is killed, do this:

Color disk usage on Fedora

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:43:40 +0000

For this tip, you would need to setup the rpm-shere repository. You can get the information here. Once you have done that you need to install the cdu package with the following command:

sudo yum install cdu

And then you can use “cdu” to view the disk usage in all beautiful colors with the command:

cdu

and the output looks like this:

[][2]

cdu screenshot

Quickly install most of the things that you need on Fedora. (amit-agarwal.co.in)
Upgrading Fedora using yum – FedoraProject (fedoraproject.org)
Consistent ethernet device names in Verne (amit-agarwal.co.in)

Interesting repository for Fedora.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 08:11:19 +0000

Here is one repository that you can add to your Fedora to give it a few more hundred packages:

cat >/etc/yum.repos.d/rpm-sphere.repo <<EOF
[rpm-sphere]
name=RPM Sphere
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/zhonghuaren/Fedora_16/
gpgkey=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/zhonghuaren/Fedora_16/repodata/repomd.xml.key
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
EOF

Benchmarking the system/CPU performance

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 07:56:44 +0000

Have you ever wanted to have a quick check on your CPU performance. I know that lot of people will say that this is not the right way to do this, but here is something that you can use to check the CPU speed.

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE:  benchmark.sh
#
#         USAGE:  ./benchmark.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:  Benchmark the CPU
#
#       OPTIONS:  ---
#  REQUIREMENTS:  ---
#          BUGS:  ---
#         NOTES:  ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), amit.agarwal@roamware.com
#       COMPANY: Roamware India Pvt Ltd
#       CREATED: 09/21/2011 11:46:03 AM IST
# Last modified: Wed Sep 21, 2011  12:22PM
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

add ()
{
    COUNTER=0
    exec 2>&1
    time=$(exec 2>&1;(time while [[  $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]]; do ((COUNTER++)) \
        ; done))
    echo "Time for 100000 additions is "$time
}	# ----------  end of function add  ----------
mul ()
{
    COUNTER=0
    test=2
    exec 2>&1
    time=$(exec 2>&1;(time while [[  $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]]; do ((COUNTER++)) \
        ; ((test=test*2));done))
    echo "Time for 100000 mul is "$time
}	# ----------  end of function add  ----------
div ()
{
    COUNTER=0
    test=1000000000000
    exec 2>&1
    time=$(exec 2>&1;(time while [[  $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]]; do ((COUNTER++)) \
        ; (( test=test/2)); done)|tr -d '\n')
    echo "Time for 100000 divisions is "${time}
}	# ----------  end of function add  ----------

time add
time mul
time div

And here is the output :

conky script used to monitor server status remotely.

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:48:00 +0000

[][1]

Image via Wikipedia

I was looking for something to monitor few details on the server. I thought about quite a lot of applications, some open source and some scripts developed in house. But my requirements were quite petty and the scripts and applications were quite heavy. So, I thought why not conky :).

So, with some quick work on conky script, I was able to get what I wanted and here it is for all of you.

Consistent ethernet device names in Verne

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:50:54 +0000

[][1]

Image via Wikipedia

Fedora now supports consistent device names across the network with bios device names for the ethernet devices. If you upgraded your earlier version of Fedora then you may need to go to root access to get this working.

Here is what you need to do:

rpmorphan – deborphan for the rpm based distros.

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:02:15 +0000

Lets first install the rpmorphan package:

    <td>
      <div class="bash codecolorer">
        &nbsp;<span class="kw2">sudo</span> <span class="kw2">yum install</span> rpmorphan
      </div>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

and here is the description of the package:

rpmorphan finds "orphaned"[1] packages on your system. It determines
which packages have no other packages depending on their installation,
and shows you a list of these packages.  It intends to be clone of
deborphan Debian tools for rpm packages.
It will try to help you to remove unused packages, for example:


quadkonsole – multiple consoles to make your life easier
Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:46:58 +0000
First lets install quadkonsole:
yum install quadkonsole
Now, to launch the quadkonsole, just type quadkonsole in the run box (appears with Alt+F2).
You will by default see 4 console windows in single window but you can change that with command line options like so:
quadkonsole --rows 4 --columns 4
This will initiate windows with 16 consoles. How cool is that.

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    How Can I Make the Windows Command Prompt Better? [Ask Lifehacker] (lifehacker.com)
  
  
    Extend NuGet Command Line (devlicio.us)
  


  



mplayer – find all the installed codes for audio and video
Wed, 09 Nov 2011 07:45:34 +0000

  
    
Image via Wikipedia
  

Some time back, I was trying to find out all the codecs that are installed for my mplayer. These could be the ones that came with mplayer or the ones that I downloaded from the site and installed in the various directories.
I could not find a direct way to do this, until I found this:
mplayer -ac help -vc help
And here is the output of the command:


Quickly install most of the things that you need on Fedora.
Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:57:45 +0000
easyLife is a user friendly program that installs packages on Fedora as well as adjustments most users want. It makes new users’ experience easy and fun, providing the means to set the OS up quickly and painless.
 
 This app does not really require any more introduction. 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/easylife-linux/
[][1]Easy Linux for Fedora

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    Build EiskaltDC++ on Fedora 16 Lovelock 64-bit (k4rtik.wordpress.com)
  


  



gnome-tweak-tool gets a fantastic new Font Selector window
Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:47:11 +0000
Here is the quick look at how the Font Selector looks like now. And its not just for the gnome-tweak-tool, its for all the places for font selection. I really loved it. So intuitive to use and amazingly good to look. This is what a good design and thinking can do. Kudos to Gnome team for coming up with this.
[][1]Font Selector for Verne

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    How to Install Custom Gnome Shell Themes (maketecheasier.com)
  
  
    Stunning Google-Inspired GNOME Shell Theme (omgubuntu.co.uk)
  


  



Fedora 16 screenshot with conky and bmpaenl2
Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:34:30 +0000
For all those who used to keep complaining about the bottom panel of Gnome which used to show a list of windows, you can get it back with bmpanel2 (there are lot of other options too, but this one is light.). You can have themes for the panel also.
And the best part about using gnome-shell is that I always getting a feeling that I now have more space on the Desktop. And, thus conky looks good too on the Desktop. Here’s a screenshot.


Compare files excluding certain lines.
Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:12:15 +0000
Quick tip, you can use any expression for the sed commands in the (). With this trick you can redirect the stdout of 2 commands to the diff command. This might become very useful, if you want to compare 2 files, excluding the first  line.
diff <(sed '1d' file) <(sed '1d' file2)
More interesting example is where the string ABC is converted to abc before comparing in the second file with the following command:


Script to get yourself some conkyrc files
Sat, 08 Oct 2011 10:37:48 +0000
Continuing from where we left, here is a script that can do all this for you 🙂
curl http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=281865\&page=$i | sed -n '/\\/pr/ p'| sed '// d'| sed 's##\n-----------------------------------\n\n\n#' >conkyrc
	dos2unix conkyrc
	cp conkyrc .test
	while [ $(wc -l .test|sed 's/[^0-9]//g') != 0 ]
	do
		sed -n '1,/------------------------/ p' .test|sed '$d' >conkyrc.$count
		diff .test conkyrc.$count |sed 's/^<.//'|sed '1, /---------------------/ d;2d'>.test
		((count++))
	done
This will create couple of conkyrc.files in the current directory. Each of these is one from the web-page that I mentioned earlier. So, enjoy….


Get yourself some conkyrc files.
Wed, 05 Oct 2011 15:18:56 +0000
If you are looking for some nice conkyrc files, then you can head over to :
Ubuntu Forums
In this thread you can see some very nice conkyrc files with screenshots. You can browse through the thread and get the one that you like. But if you are like me and would like to download all of them to see the features and commands in each of them then you would need to copy each of these files and paste them separately. But if you have to do everything manually then there’s not much of being on Linux 🙂


Creating a chroot environment – the script.
Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:47:48 +0000
Here is the script, very simple and effective 🙂
#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE:  mkchroot.sh
#
#         USAGE:  ./mkchroot.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:  Make a  chroot environ and cd to it
#
#       OPTIONS:  ---
#  REQUIREMENTS:  ---
#          BUGS:  ---
#         NOTES:  ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), 
#       CREATED: 09/03/2011 02:53:37 PM IST
# Last modified: Sat Sep 03, 2011  03:11PM
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

 binaries=( bash2 ls cat vi vim sudo)
#===  FUNCTION  ================================================================
#          NAME:  copy_binary
#   DESCRIPTION:  copy binary to chroot
#    PARAMETERS:
#       RETURNS:
#===============================================================================

copy_binary ()
{
   cmd=`which $1`
   echo $cmd
   cp $cmd bin/
   ldd $cmd
   while read line
   do
      while read ld
      do
         if [[ -f $ld ]]
         then
            echo copy $ld
            cp $ld lib/
            if [[ -L $ld ]]
            then
               ld1=$( ls -l $ld |sed 's/.*> //')
               echo "  copy $ld1"
               cp  /lib/$ld1 lib/
            fi
         fi
      done < <(echo $line|sed 's/.*> //'|sed 's/ .*//')
   done < <(ldd $cmd)
}	# ----------  end of function copy_binary  ----------

#===  FUNCTION  ================================================================
#          NAME:  init
#   DESCRIPTION:  Do the required initialization
#    PARAMETERS:
#       RETURNS:
#===============================================================================
init()
{
   mkdir -p {root,home,dev,etc,lib,usr,bin}
   mkdir -p usr/bin
   mkdir -p libexec/openssh



   mknod -m 666 dev/null c 1 3

   cd etc
   cp /etc/ld.so.cache .
   cp -avr /etc/ld.so.cache.d/ .
   cp -avr /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ .
   cp /etc/ld.so.conf .
   cp /etc/nsswitch.conf .
   cp /etc/passwd .
   cp /etc/group .
   cp /etc/hosts .
   cp /etc/resolv.conf .
   cd -
}
cd $1
if [[ -f .status ]]
then
   cat .status
   echo "Not running now"
else
   init
   for i in ${binaries[*]}
   do
       copy_binary $i
       cp -avr /etc/${i}* etc/
   done
   ln bin/bash2 bin/bash
   echo "complete" > .status
fi
cp -avr ~/bin/automation root/automation
sudo chroot .


.


Creating a chroot environment in Fedora with bash and other utils.
Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:59:23 +0000
[ad#ad-2]
I am testing some of my scripts to work on a very old system and there the versions of the most popular applications are very old, real old :(. So, some of things that I am very used to since last couple of years, do not seem to work as expected and I need to keep verifying a lot of things on the server, very inconvinient to keep testing the script on the server (need to connect on VPN) just to test some very simple things.


ss – utility to investigate sockets.
Wed, 07 Sep 2011 06:27:46 +0000

Sometimes, you find some interesting application/command by accident, and that is just what happened a few days back. Well, I was doing a ssh and as usual made my share of mistake in typing and missed the “h” from the ssh command and saw a list of options instead of my prompt on remote server.
Now, that set me thinking and fond that its a very interesting command that comes with iproute on Fedoara, so if you want this command, then install iproute like this


[Solved] ssh works but scp does not
Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:48:04 +0000

  
    
Image via Wikipedia
  


For quite sometime now, I was having this issue, that for the home system, I was able to connect to is using ssh but it never worked. Fnally after quite some debugging finally I found that the issue was with thebashrc. So, everytime I had to do a scp I would have to move/rename bashrc and do the reverse action after the scp was done.


Screenshot of Gnome3 with awn
Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:47:40 +0000

Here is another screenshot of my laptop desktop with Gnome 3 and AWN (Avant window Navigator) running. Looks beautiful, isn’t it?

  
     
  
  
     
<p>
  By the way, with this setup I have the <a class="zem_slink" title="Old Style and New Style dates" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates" rel="wikipedia">old style</a> menu also just that instead of on the top it is on the bottom just like old RH9 🙂
</p>

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    <a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/08/17/1943218/Interview-With-GNOME-3-Designer-Jon-McCann">Interview With GNOME 3 Designer Jon McCann</a> (tech.slashdot.org)
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    <a href="http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/08/04/0115232/Linus-Torvalds-Ditches-GNOME-3-For-Xfce">Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce</a> (linux.slashdot.org)
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Gnome 3 screenshot with conky dock
Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:06:20 +0000

Just to give you a idea of how beautiful it looks, here’s a screenshot 🙂
[][1]gnome3-desktop

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    Gnome Sweet Gnome (casasugar.com)
  


  



Gnome 3 shell themes
Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:33:31 +0000

  
    
Image by grantc via Flickr
  


If you are using gnome-shell and are bored with the same default theme then read on…. 🙂
By default changing the default theme requires that you modify the files yourself or copy few files to the required directories. Well, if this is not in your scheme of things for changing the theme, a very simple task. Now, you can simply do this with gnome shell extensions.


bash completion
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 03:36:37 +0000

I was working on some functions in bash to make my life easier and realized that if I added custom completion to my functions, it will be really good. So I headed over to google and searched for what I wanted. I did get a lot of information on bash completion but not a single concrete example that could help me do what I wanted. So, with the help of man pages and some results from the Google pages, I was finally able to accomplish what I wanted. So here it is:


Total upload and download on any interface.
Sun, 05 Jun 2011 01:29:21 +0000

Something that I have been searching for a long time, finally some look inside the <a class=“zem_slink” title=“Procfs” rel=“wikipedia” href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procfs" _mce_href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procfs">/proc got me what I wanted. Hope this will save someone’s day. So far, the only option I could think of was to run conky which becomes a little heave on some of the very old laptops I have to use sometimes 🙁

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      &nbsp;cat /proc/net/dev|grep eth2|awk '{print $2/1024/1024"&nbsp; "$10/1024/1024}'
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

CPUSPEED Slowing you down? (jarneil.wordpress.com)
Interface Curmudgeons versus Gestures (lingpipe-blog.com)
Alias in .bashrc (michaeldaranto.wordpress.com)

Results of Fedora 16 Release Name Voting

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 02:17:48 +0000

Fedora 16 is codenamed Verne. Here are other details:

The voting has concluded for the Fedora 16 release name, and the
results are in! Thank you to the Fedora community members who made
name suggestions and participated in the voting.

The Fedora 16 release name is: Verne

Voting period: Tuesday 2011-04-05 00:00:00 to Monday 2011-04-11 23:59:59
Number of valid ballots cast: 421

Using the range voting method, each candidate could attain a maximum
of (421*9) = 3789 votes.

sakura – Reaaly good terminal with very few dependencies.

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:43:35 +0000

I was searching for something in the Fedora repos and found a really good terminal, sakura. Its very much like Gnome-terminal. I did not find much difference other than using less memory.

To install:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      sudo yum install sakura
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

and the details of the package:

Name        : sakura

Arch : i686

Version     : 2.3.8

Release     : 1.fc14

Size        : 137 k

Repo        : installed

From repo   : fedora

Summary     : Terminal emulator based on GTK and VTE

URL : http://pleyades.net/david/sakura.php

License     : GPLv2

Description : Sakura is a terminal emulator based on GTK and VTE. It’s a terminal emulator

with few dependencies, so you don’t need a full GNOME desktop installed to

have a decent terminal emulator.

Zephyr Announces Support for Internet Explorer 9 (prweb.com)
Vintage Terminal Emulator (adafruit.com)
GNOME Terminal tricks and tips (ghacks.net)

use finch, less memory and cpu usage, in replacement for pidgin.

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 06:50:14 +0000

Well, if you are on linux then you have options – is a known fact. But how those options help?

I was working on a machine which had very less RAM and was quite old system and it was running F14. Guess what would be the state of the system with pidgin, xmms, firefox, evolution and couple of terminals. Now, this is where if you could save a few cycles of CPU then you can actullay see the difference in sluggish GUI and and an okay sort of GUI. So, first off, kill pidgin and use finch.

Try all colors in xterm with script before setting the color

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 07:41:39 +0000

If you are looking for testing the colors on how they would look like in the xterm before you set the color then here is a small script for you.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      #!/bin/bash -<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> #<br /> #          FILE:  xterm_colors-test.sh<br /> #<br /> #         USAGE:  ./xterm_colors-test.sh<br /> #<br /> #   DESCRIPTION:  Test all the colors for xterm bg<br /> #<br /> #       OPTIONS:  ---<br /> #  REQUIREMENTS:  ---<br /> #          BUGS:  ---<br /> #         NOTES:  ---<br /> #        AUTHOR:   Amit Agarwal (amit.agarwal@amit-agarwal.co.in), aka<br /> #       COMPANY:  Individual<br /> #       VERSION:  1.0<br /> #       CREATED:  02/18/2011 01:02:51 PM IST<br /> #      REVISION:  1.0<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> <br /> cat /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt |sed 's/\([0-9]\{1,3\}[ \t]*\)\{3\}//'|sed 's/^ *//' >~/rgb.txt<br /> while read line<br /> do<br /> bg=$(echo $line)<br /> echo $line<br /> echo "Trying $bg color"<br /> xterm -bg "$bg"&<br /> sleep 5<br /> kill -9 $!<br /> done < ~/rgb.txt
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

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This can be used in various ways but I will leave the choice to you. One option that I should probably still tell is :

All in one solution for all the scripts of vim from vim.org

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 16:39:52 +0000

For quite sometime now, I was looking for some console based program which would help me get the scripts from vim.org. A simple solution would have been to do a wget for the scripts. But since there are so many scripts coming up daily and with a need to search based on script ID and name of the script, I thought better to write a script that can do all of those things. Now, what was required was that the script should be either able to download this or add to the GLVS script. Also note that, I had done something similar in the past here. There are some additions in the below script. You can download a copy of the script get_vim_scripts. Or you can copy the script from below:

configuration for afraid-dyndns on Fedora and other similar distro.

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:42:56 +0000

First install afraid-dyndns with the command:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      sudo yum install afraid-dyndns
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Now open the configuration file /etc/afraid-dyndns.cfg and we need to change the following:

Notify = root@localhost # leave empty to suppress notifications
CacheFile = /var/cache/afraid-dyndns/IP
AccountHash =

For the Account hash, head over to http://freedns.afraid.org/api/ login and then click one of the XML or the ASCII links there. Once the page has loaded, look at the URL which is of form:

Gnome Tips

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:03:43 +0000

Add/Edit GDM Sessions

Each session is a *.desktop file located at /usr/share/xsessions.

GDM appearance

You can change background image, gtk/icon theme by hands (as described at Gnome_2.28_Changes#Configuring_gdm_2.28), or you can use gdm2setup from the AUR.

Tweaking

If your gnome applications seem sluggish and gnome hangs at start-up after killing the previous session, it’s likely you haven’t set your /etc/hosts file correctly and your /etc/hosts file includes:

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain     localhost      YOURHOSTNAME

Then run “/bin/hostname YOURHOSTNAME” and “/sbin/ifconfig lo up” as root.

Using ssmtp to send mail using gmail.

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 15:18:03 +0000

First install the package ssmtp using the command:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      sudo yum install ssmtp
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Open the configuration file for ssmtp as root user:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      vim /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Make the following changes to the configuration file:

root=**username**@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
hostname=**username**@gmail.com
UseSTARTTLS=YES
AuthUser=username
AuthPass=password
FromLineOverride=yes

In order to make the default (root) “from” field be the server name,
edit the /etc/ssmtp/revaliases file as root user :

vino – connect to running GNome session like RDP

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:31:48 +0000

One thing that all of us Linux users have probably missed is connecting to the running GNome session to see what is going on in the running session. This can be quite handy in couple of situations:

Debugging remote sessions – where you do not want a new session, instead want to connect to running session.
Maintaining running session from another PC. If you are running some applications on some Linux box and want to gracefully stop it using some commands other than kill -9 then it is best that you connect to the running session, if you are not using screen.

bash mathematical calculators.

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:46:34 +0000

To start with , the most simple and easy to use should be “bc”. but just for some guys who want to be more experimental, here are few more bash calulator programs. These are completely command line and thus you can completely integrate them in your shell script or use them in shell script to do some really crazy maths calculations.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      sudo yum install calc clac
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Lets start with installing these. Before we start, don’t blame and flame me if your favourite is not there in the list. If it is not, better is you drop me a comment or email, and I will see, if I can include it in the list above, but remember this is only for console based calculators.

Find all the missing paths in the PATH variable in bash script

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:36:00 +0000

Here is a simple script that will list out all the paths in the PATH variable that do not exist.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      #!/bin/bash -<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> #<br /> #          FILE:  wrong_path.sh<br /> #<br /> #         USAGE:  ./wrong_path.sh<br /> #<br /> #   DESCRIPTION:  Show Directories in the PATH Which does NOT Exist<br /> #<br /> #       OPTIONS:  ---<br /> #  REQUIREMENTS:  ---<br /> #          BUGS:  ---<br /> #         NOTES:  ---<br /> #        AUTHOR:  Amit Agarwal (AKA), amit.agarwal@amit-agarwal.co.in<br /> #       COMPANY:  Individual<br /> #       VERSION:  1.0<br /> #       CREATED:  09/20/2009 09:15:48 AM IST<br /> #      REVISION:  ---<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> <br /> set -o nounset                              # Treat unset variables as an error<br /> <br /> (IFS=:;for p in $PATH; do test -d $p || echo $p; done)
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

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bash 4.0 – new feature mapfile

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:27:15 +0000

Recently I encountered a problem where I had to create couple of arrays in bash and these were quite dynamic in nature. This script was supposed to be used by couple of guys whom I did not trust too much in opening the script and modifyikng the array. So, the solution was to put these in different files and then put them in array using bash script itself. This is when I went through the bash man page again and found an interesting new inbuilt mapfile

perl is faster than bash in some cases.

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:45:47 +0000

Some days back, I had to generate some data to be uploaded to a database. As usual I assumed that bash should be faster and hence wrote the script to create the files in bash. But I found that even after 5 hours I was only 10% done with the data generation. Now that would mean that it would take around 50 hours to complete the data generation. Something did not look correct to me and I asked one of my colleague. He suggested I do a strace.

Install a fully functional terminal server capable of accepting connections from RDP(Windows).

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 03:28:43 +0000

Inoformation on xrdp:

The goal of this project is to provide a fully functional Linux terminal server, capable of accepting connections from rdesktop and Microsoft’s own terminal server / remote desktop clients.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      &nbsp;sudo yum install xrdp
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

There is not much configuration needed for this so I will not go into details. If you are stuck with something though, you can ask in the comments for the post.

List all installed rpm packages and it’s size

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 03:12:44 +0000

If you are looking for a command to see the disk usage by each of the rpm‘s then you can use this command:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      &nbsp;rpm -q --queryformat "%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n"
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

And if you use this command very regularly then you can create an alias like

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      &nbsp;alias rpm_size='rpm -q --queryformat "%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n" '
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

and use it like

New feature in Gnome/Nautilus

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 01:39:10 +0000

One of the things that I never realized that I am missing in Nautilus until they put the feature in was this. When a file is being copied and there is conflict, there should be option to rename the new file being copied. Also, if the file being copied is image then a small preview/thumbnail would be good.

Yesterday while copying some files, suddenly I noticed that this feature is there now. Pretty useful feature to have. Here’s the screen-shot.

Make any command read line enabled (on *nix)

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:02:18 +0000

Make any command read line enabled (on *nix)

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      rlwrap sqlite3 database.db
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Enable readline even if the command line application is not using it.

* View this command to comment, vote or add to favourites * View all commands by pykler

commandlinefu.com

by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Command-line-fu/~3/mKEgYoyHCMA/make-any-command-read-line-enabled-on-nix

Use the last command’s output as input to a command without piping and bind to it to a key sequence in bash. (amit-agarwal.co.in)
DTerm: A command line anywhere and everywhere Oh, man. DTerm =… (kungfugrippe.com)
Python command line = Linux Bash command line (hackerz4u.com)
Data Hacks: Command Line ASCII Bar Charts (infosthetics.com)
Hack of the Day: commandlinefu – Linux Command Heaven (readwriteweb.com)

intercept stdout/stderr of another process or disowned process

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 12:51:27 +0000

The command is definately going to save your day if you have disowned the process by mistake. Only uses strace so might as well work on Solaris also, though not tried it.

intercept stdout/stderr of another process or disowned process

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      strace -e write=1,2 -p $PID 2>&1 | sed -un "/^ |/p" | sed -ue "s/^.{9 }(.{50}).+/1/g" -e 's/ //g' | xxd -r -p
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Useful to recover a output(stdout and stderr) “disown”ed or “nohup“ep process of other instance of ssh.

Broadcast your shell thru port 5000

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 12:47:31 +0000

Broadcast your shell thru port 5000

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      mkfifo /tmp/fifo;(nc -q0 -l 5000 < /tmp/fifo &);script -f /tmp/fifo
    </div>
  </td>
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run

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      nc yourip 5000
    </div>
  </td>
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elsewhere will produce an exact same mirror of your shell. This is handy when you want to show someone else some amazing stuff in your shell without giving them control over it.

Print all environment variables, including hidden ones

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:46:15 +0000

Print all environment variables, including hidden ones

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      for _a in {A..Z} {a..z};do _z=${!${_a}*};for _i in `eval echo "${_z}"`;do echo -e "$_i: ${!_i}";done;done|cat -Tsv
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

This uses some tricks I found while reading the bash man page to enumerate and display all the current environment variables, including those not listed by the ‘env‘ command which according to the bash docs are more for internal use by BASH. The main trick is the way bash will list all environment variable names when performing expansion on ${!A*}. Then the eval builtin makes it work in a loop.

Announcing the release of Fedora 14 and upgrade procedure.

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 14:44:02 +0000

Before you read the release announcement, you can update/upgrade to F14 with :

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      &nbsp;sudo yum upgrade --releasever=14
    </div>
  </td>
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Note : You might get some un-resolvable dependencies, you can remove those pakages and continue and it should be a smooth migration.

It’s here! It’s here! It’s really here! Fedora 14 has been officially released! Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release approximately every six months.

Photo Editing with nice border and preparing for print.

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:43:36 +0000

Working with photos in Linux is very easy with lots of viewers/editors/managers and what not. Not that there are not many options in Windows but most of them are not free. BEST case scenario is that you might get a evaluation version (i.e. if you do not use pirated/cracked version) of software‘s. Me, being completely against pirated and cracked version or evaluation version (if not, planning to buy the same) like the freedom of choice with Linux.

taskcoach – one of the best approach to manage your tasks

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 10:02:15 +0000

Task coach is task planner with reminder, subtask and time tracking, simply put. More elaborate description :

Task Coach is a simple open source todo manager to manage personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of a frustration that well-known task managers, such as those provided with Outlook or Lotus Notes, do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities. Task Coach is designed to deal with composite tasks.

List all the rpms by size – quick way to find out what is eating your disk space in root partition

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:38:35 +0000

Here is a quick command to check the list of installed packages by their size in reverse order. Very useful if you want to remove unwanted rpms just to clean up some space on your disk:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      rpm -q -a --qf "%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n" | sort -k1,1nr |more
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

Sample output:

78070452   kernel
78060477   kernel
50708634   jre
50316408   libgcj
48581593   wireshark
47778643   gimp
47674675   jre
47303084   qt-x11
45838912   otrs
45657248   chromium-libs
42070128   wxPython

viewnior – another image viewer on Linux (with support for GIF)

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 16:21:26 +0000

Here is another Linux viewer (Image) that is worth a mention. URL : <a href="http://xsisqox.github.com/Viewnior">http://xsisqox.github.com/Viewnior

Description :

Viewnior is an <a class="zem_slink" title="Image viewer" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_viewer">image viewer program. Created to be simple, fast and elegant. It’s minimalistic interface provides more screen space for your images. Among its features are:

Fullscreen & Slideshow

Rotate, flip, save, delete images

Animation support

Browse only selected images

Navigation window

Simple interface

Configurable <a class="zem_slink" title="Mouse (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29">mouse actions

The best part about the viewer is the ability to display gif inherently. Worth a look if you are using a lot of gif images.

bash script to run a command and take screenshot in every loop.

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:02:14 +0000

Couple of days back, I had posted a command to display a stop timer with bash and echo. There I had also put the following gif file:

Here the tricky part was to capture the jpg’s to create the gif file.

Preparation:

Rename the terminal to aka – amit-capture

Execute the command once with the import command and check the output and jpg’s

bash – echo command with option to display the output on the same line.

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:15:05 +0000

Here is a nice little trick to display the output in the same line :

  <td>
    <div class="bash codecolorer">
      &nbsp;<span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re5">-ne</span> <span class="st0">"output\<span class="es1">\r</span>"</span>
    </div>
  </td>
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The trick here is simple, first we disable the <a class="zem_slink" title="Newline" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline">newline printed by <a class="zem_slink" title="Echo (command)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_%28command%29">echo command with the ”-n” option and then we enable the interpretation of the <a class="zem_slink" title="Backslash" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash">backslash characters with the ”-e” option. As the ”\r” is used as <a class="zem_slink" title="Carriage return" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage_return">carriage return which brings you to the start of the line without the newline (like in <a class="zem_slink" title="Typewriter" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter">typewriter), we will use the same to get the desired effect. So, if you wanted a stopwatch for a 100 seconds on the console then this simple bash <a class="zem_slink" title="For loop" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_loop">for loop would do the same:

cURL – Tutorial

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 07:22:57 +0000

Here are linkw to two nice tutorials on curl and how to use curl to login before we try to fetch a page. Hope you find them useful.
http://curl.haxx.se/docs/httpscripting.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcgQUsorF_8

http://scriptasy.com/php_11/tutorial-curl-login_44.html

How To Display Just The HTTP Response Code In CLI Curl (beerpla.net)

15 (More) Awesome Conky Configurations

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 07:17:02 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

15 (More) Awesome <a class="zem_slink" title="Conky (software)" rel="homepage" href="http://conky.sourceforge.net/">Conky Configurations You may have already seen our list of awesome Conky scripts or configurations, and perhaps applied or used some of them on your own <a class="zem_slink" title="Linux" rel="homepage" href="http://www.kernel.org/">Linux desktop. Since that collection was quiet popular, I decided to scour the web once again to gather more Conky scripts that I could share with all of you. Now, here is another list of some of the most excellent and unique conky configurations that you could freely use. Enjoy!

Fedora Linux – Display information about users currently logged on – whowatch

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:01:14 +0000

Here is description of program/utility to display the currently logged in user in a Linux box (tried on Fedora 13 Goddard):

Whowatch is an interactive console utility that displays informations about the users currently logged on to the machine, in real time. Besides standard information (login, tty, host, user’s process) you can see type of login (ie. ssh, telnet). You can also see selected user’s processes tree or all system processes tree. In the process tree mode there is ability to send INT or KILL signal to selected process.

Use the last command\’s output as input to a command without piping and bind to it to a key sequence in bash.

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:42:55 +0000

Use the last command’s output as input to a command without piping and
bind to it to a key sequence in <a class="zem_slink" title="Bash (Unix shell)" rel="homepage" href="http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashtop.html">bash.

  <td>
    <div class="bash codecolorer">
      &nbsp;<span class="kw3">bind</span> <span class="co3">\'</span><span class="st0">"\\C-h"</span>: <span class="st0">"\\<span class="es5">`fc\\ \\-s\\`</span>"</span><span class="co3">\'</span>
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

My comment : fc is the fix command of the bash builtin.
This is similar to using `!!` or

Gmail Videochat Comes to Linux

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:24:40 +0000

?Gmail Videochat Comes to Linux
”The long wait is over and Linux users can finally use the Gmail
Videochat! The <a class="zem_slink" title="Gmail" rel="homepage" href="http://gmail.com">GMail team recently announced the availability of voice
and <a class="zem_slink" title="Videoconferencing" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing">video chat on Linux. This feature is currently supported on <a class="zem_slink" title="Ubuntu (operating system)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu
and other <a class="zem_slink" title="Debian" rel="homepage" href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian-based <a class="zem_slink" title="Linux distribution" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution">Linux distributions. <a class="zem_slink" title="RPM Package Manager" rel="homepage" href="http://rpm.org/">RPM Support for <a class="zem_slink" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora Linux
and other <a class="zem_slink" title="Red Hat" rel="homepage" href="http://www.redhat.com">Red Hat based distributions (like <a class="zem_slink" title="CentOS" rel="homepage" href="http://www.centos.org/">CentOS) is going to be added
soon.” Some screenshots of GMail Video Chat on Linux in action

gphotoframe Free digital photo frame for your desk.

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 02:46:01 +0000

First install the gphotoframe application with the command :

sudo yum install gphotoframe

and if you want gnome-screensaver compatibility then install the package gphotoframe-gss also.

Gnome Photo Frame is a photo frame gadget for the <a class="zem_slink" title="GNOME" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gnome.org/">GNOME Desktop. Let’s see how this works.. run the command gphotoframe from a terminal:

Here is what you will see :

Don’t panic on seeing the blank/black page. You need to add the source first. So <a class="zem_slink" title="Mouse (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29">right click on the window and go to preferences:

Using mtpaint of Fedora to modify your images and make them look different.

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:16:35 +0000

Here is the description of mtpaint :

mtPaint is a simple painting program designed for creating icons
and pixel-based artwork. It can edit indexed palette or 24 bit <a class="zem_slink" title="RGB color model" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model">RGB
images and offers basic painting and palette manipulation tools.
Its main <a class="zem_slink" title="File format" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_format">file format is <a class="zem_slink" title="Portable Network Graphics" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics">PNG, although it can also handle <a class="zem_slink" title="JPEG" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG">JPEG, <a class="zem_slink" title="Graphics Interchange Format" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format">GIF,
TIFF, <a class="zem_slink" title="BMP file format" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format">BMP, <a class="zem_slink" title="X PixMap" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap">XPM, and <a class="zem_slink" title="X BitMap" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_BitMap">XBM files.

Find who is using my network – top for network utilization

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:09:37 +0000

Ok here is something that I have been looking for something. Now that I have conky installed, so I can see the bandwidth usage on my desktop but was wondering for sometimes, where actually so much is being used. So did some quick search to see if I can get that info and did not have to go too far 🙂

There is s utility called iftop in the Fedora repo and at the <a href="http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/" target="_blank">URL. Oh and how to use it, just type sudo iftop or if you have multiple network interface then you can do ”iftop -f ”. Thats pretty simple and cool.

importing outlook pst files in evolution in Fedora 13 ( Goddard)

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 03:53:09 +0000

If you were using outlook and moved to some other <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/e-mail_client" title="Email client" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client">mail client then you know the pain of moving the mails from outlook mail from outlook to any other client.

If you are using evolution on <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora, then you are in luck. Just install the plug-in and select the file to import as simple as that.

sudo yum install evolution-pst

Get the information on all the rpms installed on the system

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:04:32 +0000

Here’s a one-liner to get the info on all the packages installed on your system.

rpm -qa –info |tee All_rpms_Info

This is what it does, when you query the rpm database with the –info parameter, then the output looks something like the below, which is quite helpful.

Name        : rpm                          Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version     : 4.6.0                             Vendor: Fedora Project
Release     : 0.rc3.1.fc10                  Build Date: Sat 13 Dec 2008 12:38:24 AM IST
Install Date: Tue 13 Jan 2009 09:22:50 PM IST      Build Host: x86-5.fedora.phx.redhat.com
Group       : System Environment/Base       Source RPM: rpm-4.6.0-0.rc3.1.fc10.src.rpm
Size        : 3662666                          License: GPLv2+
Signature   : DSA/SHA1, Tue 06 Jan 2009 08:20:24 PM IST, Key ID bf226fcc4ebfc273
Packager    : Fedora Project
URL         : http://www.rpm.org/
Summary     : The RPM package management system
Description :
The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven
package management system capable of installing, uninstalling,
verifying, querying, and updating software packages. Each software
package consists of an archive of files along with information about
the package like its version, a description, etc.

How To Install Ailurus 10.05 On Fedora | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:04:31 +0000

For those of you who don’t know about ailurus:

Ailurus is cross-<a class="zem_slink" title="Linux distribution" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution">Linux-distribution <a class="zem_slink" title="GNU General Public License" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License">GPL <a class="zem_slink" title="Computer software" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_software">software, which aims at making Linux easier to use, for newcomers.

And the features include:

Ailurus can …

display Linux skills

install popular software

change <a class="zem_slink" title="GNOME" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gnome.org/">GNOME settings

display <a class="zem_slink" title="Hardware" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware">hardware information

enable some third party repositories#

clean apt/yum cache#

backup and recover apt/yum status#

the features marked with ”#” support Ubuntu/Fedora only

Kernel ata exception — found workaround.

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:47:13 +0000

I have been getting the below errors in my system for quite sometime now, I think since F9 or before that. The offending hardware is CD drive. I looked all around the net for a solution but did not find anything. Will keep looking to solve the problem. I found various solutions being suggested like adding noirq or nobiosirq or noacpi and such. None of this helped. So for now I am happy with turning off the haldaemon as soon as the system comes up. Problem: it takes lot of time to go down 🙁

autoten- install nvidia, gnome color chooser and many others in one click on Fedora.

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:38:53 +0000

There is a application/GUI called autoten from Dangermouse, find <a href="http://dnmouse.org/autoten-2-12.fc10.noarch.rpm ">here, which will help you install these.

designed to help get basics up and running fast
dvdplayback plus other codecs needed
parental controls
flash plugin
video card drivers
wireless drivers
set up sudo
java 6u7
realplayer
googleearth
frostwire
Limewire
lightscribe
compiz-fusion
skype
parental controls
plus many others

I tried it to install couple of things and it was a breeze. Here is a screenshot of the application.

Try a live Distro without burning on CD or running in VM

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:38:51 +0000

I keep trying a lot of distributions and mostly I try them once and get the configurations and put them on my box :), this works best for me so that I dont have to keep re-configuring my system again and again. So, burning the disc for one time use is overhead and wastes a lot of time for me.

Why burn a disc when GRUB is there to help. So today we will try to use the installed grub run a extracted iso image. Lets go step by step:

Right click menu in Gnome desktop with user entries.

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:38:49 +0000

I, along with couple of others I think, have been looking for this for quite some time. What I wanted is that when I right click on the desktop with GNome, I should see my entries in the default menu. I did quite some search on this but no luck. Finally today, I did it and that too in two ways.

Lets do it the Gnome way first:

Install nautilus-actions using the command

Bashstyle rpm for Fedora 11 – Style up your bash prompt.

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:10:31 +0000

For those of you who like to show off your desktop or want your bash prompt to be colorful and useful at the same time.

Lets start the day with a cartoon.

[[danscartoon]]

There is a nifty application called bashstyle at the sourceforge. The application helps you create a new bash prompt or select from the existing ones like the below ones:

Hotmail login from Linux machine using Firefox.

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:10:30 +0000

Today I learnt two things. One is that Hotmail has changed the look of the email on the web. Quite good change. Looks good.

Second is that when loggin in to the hotmail using my Fedora box with Firefox, I was always getting the annoying, you are not on supported browser and saw the fix on <a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/hotmail-problems-683894/?posted=1#post3345089" target="_blank">this link. The solution is as simple as changing the ”general.useragent.vendor” for firefox. The way to do this is :

concatenate compressed and uncompressed logs

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:10:28 +0000

<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Command-line-fu/~3/iwFUyltYgjM/concatenate-compressed-and-uncompressed-logs">concatenate compressed and uncompressed logs

$ find /var/log/apache2 -name 'access.loggz' -exec <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000001abd9" title="Gzip" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gzip.org/">zcat {} ; -or -name 'access.log' -exec cat {} ; This command allows you to stream your log files, including gziped files, into one stream which can be piped to <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000000584b" title="AWK" rel="homepage" href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/index.html">awk or some other command for analysis.

Note: if your version of ’find’ supports it, use:

Gnome Icons, themes and window decorator.

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:06:34 +0000

Yesterday, I had tried fusion theme, but that did not work our that good for me. Reasons multifold:

I like the features of GNome
I am used to GNome
Other window managers did not look that lucarative to me.
Compiz was chocking my CPU..
and so on..

So I went back to my GNome but wanted to change the looks so searched enough today to get the right set of Icons and themes. I think I finally got some decent ones and here are the links for the icons that I liked:
<a href="http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/10-really-cool-icon-sets-for.html" target="_blank">http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/10-really-cool-icon-sets-for.html
and this one <a href="http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/05/ultimate-gnome-icon-theme.html" target="_blank">here.

Configurable Linux Distro You Might Want To Try – Fedora

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:06:33 +0000

Rounding out the fall releases from the big cheeses in Linux comes <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora 12. <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora is a popular <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/linux_distribution" title="Linux distribution" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution">Linux distribution funded by <a href="http://www.redhat.com/">Red Hat, the most profitable Linux <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000006ae3af5" title="Company" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company">corporation active today. Fedora usually sits within the top three or four most popular distributions at <a href="http://distrowatch.com">distrowatch.com.

Much of the company and community work that goes into Fedora will find its way into <a href="http://www.redhat.com/rhel/">Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the commercial Linux version used by governments and <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000004e02d" title="Business" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business">businesses around the world. You might compare the relationship between Red Hat and Fedora to <a href="http://www.novell.com/linux/">Novell and <a href="http://www.opensuse.org/en/">openSUSE.

Are you swapped? Increase the performance of Linux machine.

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:06:31 +0000

With the ever increasing cost of the Hardware, the amount of physical RAM available on the system is increasing day by day. For example, couple of years back, I had a system which was very high end Desktop with 256MB RAM and today I have a 2GB RAM Desktop. So, whats the point.

The Linux systems (right word should be kernel) are desiged to use both RAM and swap partition. Swap partition is a partition on Hard disk and is used mostly like RAM. Problem is that HDD access is always slower than RAM access and hence inherently, the system will work little slower even if you have enough RAM not to use swap. The term ”swappiness” is used to determine how the kernel should try to seam-balance between the use of RAM and swap. By default, most of the distro’s have a swappiness of 60. A higher value of swappiness means that the RAM will be swapped out faster.

gnomecc color scheme - my favourite.

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 07:59:26 +0000

my favourite <a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/gtkrc-2.0-gnome-color-chooser">gtkrc-2 file.

Snapshot of how it looks.

CLI Color and bash prompt.. some colored fun with prompts in bash

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:23:10 +0000

There are two ways to do it, one is with tput command. We will see that some other time, today we will consider the escape sequence way.

First we need to understand the colors as understood by bash. Some time back a fried of mine gave me this little script to find the colors. You can download it <a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/2009/03/bash_colors" target="_blank">Script bash colors. Here is the script

#!/bin/bash

T=’amit agarwal’ # The test text

Recovering Deleted Files With lsof

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:23:08 +0000

Quick update, found this nice article on how to recover deleted file, if its still open by some process.
<a href="http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3822816">Recovering Deleted Files With lsof

wordpress blog stats monitoring from remote using curl and bash and send it in mail.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:20 +0000

Here’s something that I had been planning to do for sometime now. I have my blog on wordpress and have Statpress plugin installed. The plugin does give me a good idea of the visits to my site. Now, I have to keep logging in every now and then to check the stats. Also since I did not want to spend some more amount 🙂 so I do not have the shell access to the server, too bad 🙁

6700 free and redistributable fonts for Linux.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:19 +0000

Today I was searching for some good fonts for my desktop running Fedora 11 – Leonidas. In my quest to find the required fonts that I would liked, I reached some good sites so just thought would share the same with you.

First, how do you use them, simple steps:

mkdir ~/.fonts

Now you can put your fonts in this directory. You can make sub-directories to keep your fonts organized. On F11, I did not need to refresh the font server or logout and login. 🙂

rawtherapee -- raw image processor.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:18 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

<a href="http://www.rawtherapee.com/?mitem=3&artid=47">Download RT v3.0 alpha 1:

http://www.rawtherapee.com

Rawtherapee is a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/raw_image_format" title="Raw image format" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format">RAW image processing software. It gives full control over many parameters to enhance the raw picture before finally exporting it to some common <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/image_processing" title="Image processing" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processing">image format.

Mod your gnome desktop, change the colors the easy way.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:16 +0000

Install the autoten application. You can find the instructions in my earlier post today <a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/2009/04/20/autoten-install-nvidia-gnome-color-chooser-and-many-others-in-one-click-on-fedora/">here.

Gnome color chooser is an application to allow you to change the color of your gnome DE in all aspects. Very easy to use GUI. Just install it and run it as gnome-color-chooser. Here’s a screenshot of the application.

The beauty of this application is that it allows to use XML files as input so there are lot of possibilities. And one of the most lucarat5ive ones is to download a pack of color schemes from <a href="http://gnome-look.org/CONTENT/content-files/84941-daX_UltraPack220_3v2_gnomecc.tar.bz2">here. This has 220 theme colors to select from in the form of XML files which can be used directly with Gnome Color Chooser. So enjoy.

solang – Photo collection viewer.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:11 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Name       : solang

Arch       : i686

Size       : 1.8 M

Summary    : A Photo Manager for <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/gnome" title="GNOME" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gnome.org/">GNOME

URL        : https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/solang/

License    : <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/gnu_general_public_license" title="GNU General Public License" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License">GPLv3+

Description: Solang is a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/free_content" title="Free content" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content">free photo manager that will act as a front-end for

directory based local storage as well as remote photo-storage

systems, as can be said, on the ”Cloud”. Basic editing support is

also planned as well as a small pipelaine for RAW processing.

The aim of this project is to break the performance charecteristics

of current popular photo management <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/computer_software" title="Computer software" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_software">softwares and provide a fast

and reliable alternative that does not place humongous demands on

user’s <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/hardware" title="Hardware" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware">hardware resources even to meet basic functionality.<h6 class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta <ul class="zemanta-article-ul"> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/ubuntu-1010-to-be-codenamed-maverick-meerkat.ars">Ubuntu 10.10 to be codenamed Maverick Meerkat (arstechnica.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-fedora-12-i686-gnome">The Perfect Desktop – Fedora 12 i686 (GNOME) (howtoforge.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://boycottnovell.com/2009/12/19/euphemism-for-lobbying/">Why GNOME Funding is Equivalent to Lobbying and Why Novell is Likely Against GPL Enforcement (boycottnovell.com) <div class="zemanta-pixie"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" title="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/bb959a48-b5f0-4e5f-8997-6c86961e6eff/"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/reblog_b11.png" alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" /><span class="zem-script more-related more-info pretty-attribution paragraph-reblog">

Magic space on the current command line

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:08 +0000

# For how to set up magic space for Bash see:
# – http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/papers/bash_tips/#slide15
# – http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/1690

man bash 2>/dev/null | less -p ’magic-space’

man bash 2>/dev/null | less -p ’Event Designators’

man bash 2>/dev/null | less -p ’\!#’ # ”The entire <a class="zem_slink" title="Command-line interface" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface">command line typed so far.”

<a href="http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/10265">Read more :<h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em;">Related articles by Zemanta <ul class="zemanta-article-ul"> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/trigger-wake-lan-mac-address/">How To Trigger Wake On LAN Using The MAC Address (makeuseof.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://smarterware.org/4271/projectview-lists-your-todo-txt-by-project">Projectview Lists Your Todo.txt by Project (smarterware.org) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://helpdeskgeek.com/linux-tips/shell-script-backup-directory-linux/">Back Up a Directory in Linux using a Shell Script (helpdeskgeek.com) <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" title="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/038d79c3-59e6-41ad-a8ad-31d1af669509/"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" style="border: medium none; float: right;" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/reblog_e39.png" alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution">

bash one liner to change/remove test pattern from config file or text file.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:05 +0000

Problem:

I had a directory with a lot of config files in the ini file format, i.e. name and value separated by equals. Some/all of these contained some directory names and other values which had to be replaced. But there were other place where I should not not replace them, if there was no exact match. I also needed to have a backup copy of the file that I was modifying. Since the number of files that I needed to change was multiple so was quite difficult to do it without using some script.

Change the look and feel of Fedora with emrald, change to openbox, fvwm, emerald, metacity or openbox

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:02 +0000

I have been looking for this information for quite sometime now. Did not quite find this information in the net. Finally looked through some of the packages in the repository and found the one that I was looking for. There is a rpm called fusion-icon that has quite a lot of features. The description for the package goes like this:

The Compiz Fusion Icon is a simple panel applet for starting and controlling Compiz Fusion. Upon launch, it will attempt to start Compiz Fusion automatically. You may need to select a window decorator, if one does not appear.

wordpress Fedora 11 desktop client.

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:01 +0000

Another wordpress client on Fedora for wordpress. Simple and easy to configure and use. Here’s how it looks.

sudo yum install lekhonee

Twiiter from Pidgin on Fedora 11 -Leonidas

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:47:00 +0000

If you are twitter fan but find it difficult to follow it on your web-browser then this is for you. Just install the plugin and get going to see the twitter messages in the pidgin window.

sudo yum install purple-microblog

After installation you can add your twitter account like all other accounts and start seeing your messages.

:))

Quick one liner bash function to navigate parent directories quickly

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:46:59 +0000

up () { for i in $(seq 1 $1) ; do cd ..; pushd +1 ; done; }
— if you like the popd and pushd way ..

up () { for i in $(seq 1 $1) ; do cd ..; done; }
— otherwise .. <div class="zemanta-pixie"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/pixy4.gif" />

find duplicate entry in a list in bash with sed

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:46:58 +0000

Here I will take an example of rss2email list, but I guess I will be able to pass on the concept.

Here is example of the output of the r2e list command:

1: http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/feed (default: amitag@localhost)
2: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AllAboutLinux (default: amitag@localhost)
3: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Command-line-fu (default: amitag@localhost)
4: http://blogs.members.freewebs.com/Members/Blogs/viewBlogRSS.jsp?userid=29731143 (default: amitag@localhost)

Target here is to get the list of all duplicate entries if any. So, first we need to remove the numbers from the begining and the email ID from the end.

bash script to change the vim colorscheme from the list of locally available schemes

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:51:35 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Today I was just wondering how good it would be to have a script to change the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">vim colorscheme from the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/cmd_exe" title="Command Prompt" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_Prompt">command prompt. The plan for the script was simply to print the list of available schemes and then let the user select the actions from there on. So, here is the result:

Use GIMP to create awesome looking collage in minutes

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:51:33 +0000

Here is an example to begin with:
<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/300x200-dscn0161.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1228" title="300x200-dscn0161" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/300x200-dscn0161.jpg" alt="300x200-dscn0161" width="267" height="200" />

I will make another collage as an example with screenshots to take you through the process.

First decide on the size of the collage. I will take 8×12 inches as example. Now, decide on what kind of collage you want. If you want similar to one above then we would need some similar photos to go in the background otherwise you can use some brush strokes as the background image. Now fire up gimp and select new image and enter the properties:

Check file usage using fuser

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:51:30 +0000

There is a package called psmisc that provides a useful application fuser. The package provides the below (on fedora):

/sbin/fuser
/usr/bin/killall
/usr/bin/peekfd
/usr/bin/pstree
/usr/bin/pstree.x11

There are couple of options you can provide on the terminal to fuser. The main purpose of the binary is to check the process id of the process using the file. This can be useful if some file operation on a file is blocking something for you 🙂

Google chrome on Fedora 11 Leonidas.

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:51:28 +0000

Earlier I had posted a article on installing <a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/2009/07/20/chrome-chromium-on-linux-repo/" target="_blank">chromium on Linux. Chromium is the open source version of the browser which is used by Google to develop its famous browser Chrome. Now chrome rpm is available from google site to install on F11. Here’s how to do it. First we will add a repo for google. As root user do the following:

cat «EOF >/etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo

[google]
name=Google – i386
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

Script to add all the partitions to the fstab.

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:51:27 +0000

I wrote a simple script today to get all the partitions on all the disks and then create <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fstab" title="Fstab" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab">fstab entry with them. The script also gets the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/universally_unique_identifier" title="Universally Unique Identifier" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier">UUID and uses the same to make the entry 🙂

  <td>
    <div class="bash codecolorer">
      <span class="co0">#!/bin/bash -</span><br /> <span class="co0">#===============================================================================</span><br /> <span class="co0">#</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;FILE: &nbsp;mount_add_all.sh</span><br /> <span class="co0">#</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; USAGE: &nbsp;./mount_add_all.sh</span><br /> <span class="co0">#</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; DESCRIPTION: &nbsp;Find all the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/disk_partitioning" title="Disk partitioning" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning">disk partitions</a> and all those that are not present</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; in the fstab.</span><br /> <span class="co0">#</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; OPTIONS: &nbsp;---</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp;REQUIREMENTS: &nbsp;---</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;BUGS: &nbsp;---</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; NOTES: &nbsp;---</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;AUTHOR: &nbsp;<a class="zem_slink" title="Digital Inspiration" rel="homepage" href="http://amit-agarwal.co.in">Amit Agarwal</a> (AKA), amit.agarwal@amit-agarwal.co.in</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; COMPANY: &nbsp;Individual</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; VERSION: &nbsp;1.0</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; CREATED: &nbsp;06/19/2010 10:44:34 PM IST</span><br /> <span class="co0"># &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;REVISION: &nbsp;0.1</span><br /> <span class="co0">#===============================================================================</span><br /> <span class="re2">file</span>=<span class="st0">"/tmp/fstab"</span><br /> <span class="re2">disk_types</span>=<span class="br0">&#40;</span>hd sd<span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="re2">count</span>=<span class="co1">${#disk_types}</span><br /> <br /> find_disks <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#123;</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="co1">${#disk_types}</span> <span class="re1">$count</span><br /> <span class="kw1">for</span> i <span class="kw1">in</span> $<span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="kw2">seq</span> <span class="nu0">1</span> <span class="re1">$count</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">do</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#40;</span> <span class="re2">j</span>=i-<span class="nu0">1</span> <span class="br0">&#41;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$i</span> <span class="re1">$j</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$j</span> <span class="co1">${disk_types[0]}</span> <span class="co1">${disk_types[1]}</span><br /> disk_array<span class="br0">&#91;</span><span class="re1">$j</span><span class="br0">&#93;</span>=$<span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="kw2">ls</span> <span class="sy0"><</span>a <span class="re2">class</span>=<span class="st0">"zem_slink freebase/en/device_file_system"</span> <span class="re2">title</span>=<span class="st0">"Device file"</span> <span class="re2">rel</span>=<span class="st0">"wikipedia"</span> <span class="re2">href</span>=<span class="st0">"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_file"</span><span class="sy0">>/</span>dev<span class="sy0"></</span>a<span class="sy0">>/</span><span class="co1">${disk_types[$j]}</span><span class="br0">&#91;</span>a-z<span class="br0">&#93;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="co1">${disk_array[$j]}</span><br /> <span class="kw1">done</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#125;</span> &nbsp; &nbsp;<span class="co0"># ---------- &nbsp;end of function find_disks &nbsp;----------</span><br /> <br /> find_partitions <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#123;</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="st0">"In find_partitions"</span><br /> <span class="re2">l</span>=<span class="nu0"></span><br /> <span class="re2">count</span>=<span class="co1">${#disk_types}</span><br /> <span class="kw1">for</span> i <span class="kw1">in</span> $<span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="kw2">seq</span> <span class="nu0">1</span> <span class="re1">$count</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">do</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="re2">j</span>=i-<span class="nu0">1</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">for</span> k <span class="kw1">in</span> <span class="co1">${disk_array[$i]}</span><br /> <span class="kw1">do</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$k</span><br /> <span class="sy0"><!</span>--loginview start--<span class="sy0">></span>disk_partitions<span class="br0">&#91;</span><span class="re1">$l</span><span class="br0">&#93;</span>=<span class="sy0">`</span><span class="kw2">fdisk</span> <span class="re5">-l</span> <span class="re1">$k</span> <span class="sy0">|<</span>a <span class="re2">class</span>=<span class="st0">"zem_slink freebase/en/grep"</span> <span class="re2">title</span>=<span class="st0">"Grep"</span> <span class="re2">rel</span>=<span class="st0">"wikipedia"</span> <span class="re2">href</span>=<span class="st0">"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep"</span><span class="sy0">></span><span class="kw2">grep</span><span class="sy0"></</span>a<span class="sy0">></span> <span class="st0">"^/dev"</span> <span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">grep</span> <span class="re5">-v</span> <span class="st0">"Extended$"</span><span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">cut</span> <span class="re5">-d</span><span class="st0">" "</span> -f1<span class="sy0">`</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="co1">${disk_partitions[$l]}</span> <span class="re1">$l</span><span class="sy0"><!</span>--loginview end--<span class="sy0">></span><br /> <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#40;</span>l++<span class="br0">&#41;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">done</span><br /> <span class="kw1">done</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#125;</span> &nbsp; &nbsp;<span class="co0"># ---------- &nbsp;end of function find_partitions &nbsp;----------</span><br /> <br /> add_fat <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#123;</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="st0">"# Added with script for <span class="es2">$label</span> and <span class="es2">$k</span>"</span> <span class="sy0">>></span> <span class="re1">$file</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="st0">"<span class="es2">$uuid</span> /mnt/<span class="es2">$label</span> vfat&nbsp; nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks,uid=500,gid=500,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077&nbsp; 0 0"</span> &nbsp;<span class="sy0">>></span> <span class="re1">$file</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#125;</span> &nbsp; &nbsp;<span class="co0"># ---------- &nbsp;end of function add_fat &nbsp;----------</span><br /> <br /> add_<span class="sy0"><</span>a <span class="re2">class</span>=<span class="st0">"zem_slink freebase/en/ext3"</span> <span class="re2">title</span>=<span class="st0">"Ext3"</span> <span class="re2">rel</span>=<span class="st0">"wikipedia"</span> <span class="re2">href</span>=<span class="st0">"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3"</span><span class="sy0">></span>ext3<span class="sy0"></</span>a<span class="sy0">></span> <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#123;</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="st0">"# Added with script for <span class="es2">$label</span> and <span class="es2">$k</span>"</span> <span class="sy0">>></span> <span class="re1">$file</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="st0">"<span class="es2">$uuid</span> /mnt/<span class="es2">$label</span> ext3     defaults     0 0"</span> <span class="sy0">>></span> <span class="re1">$file</span><br /> <br /> <span class="br0">&#125;</span> &nbsp; &nbsp;<span class="co0"># ---------- &nbsp;end of function add_ext3 &nbsp;----------</span><br /> <br /> find_UUID <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#123;</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="st0">"In find_UUID with <span class="es2">$l</span>"</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="br0">&#40;</span>l--<span class="br0">&#41;</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">for</span> i <span class="kw1">in</span> $<span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="kw2">seq</span> <span class="nu0"></span> <span class="re1">$l</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">do</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="co1">${disk_partitions[$i]}</span><br /> <span class="kw1">for</span> k <span class="kw1">in</span> <span class="co1">${disk_partitions[$i]}</span><br /> <span class="kw1">do</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$k</span><br /> <span class="sy0"><!</span>--loginview start--<span class="sy0">></span><span class="re2">temp</span>=$<span class="br0">&#40;</span>blkid <span class="re1">$k</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="re2">label</span>=$<span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$temp</span><span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">grep</span> <span class="st0">"LABEL="</span><span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">sed</span> <span class="co3">\'</span>s<span class="sy0">/</span>.<span class="sy0">*</span><span class="re2">LABEL</span>=<span class="st0">"//\'|sed \'s/"</span>.<span class="sy0">*//</span><span class="co3">\'</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="re2">uuid</span>=$<span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$temp</span><span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">grep</span> <span class="st0">"UUID="</span><span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">sed</span> <span class="co3">\'</span>s<span class="sy0">/</span>.<span class="sy0">*</span><span class="re2">UUID</span>=<span class="st0">"//\'|sed \'s/"</span>.<span class="sy0">*//</span><span class="co3">\'</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><br /> <span class="re2">atype</span>=$<span class="br0">&#40;</span><span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$temp</span><span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">grep</span> <span class="st0">"TYPE="</span><span class="sy0">|</span><span class="kw2">sed</span> <span class="co3">\'</span>s<span class="sy0">/</span>.<span class="sy0">*</span><span class="re2">TYPE</span>=<span class="st0">"//\'|sed \'s/"</span>.<span class="sy0">*//</span><span class="co3">\'</span><span class="br0">&#41;</span><span class="sy0"><!</span>--loginview end--<span class="sy0">></span><br /> <span class="kw1">if</span> <span class="br0">&#91;</span> <span class="re1">$atype</span> = <span class="st0">"vfat"</span> <span class="br0">&#93;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">then</span><br /> add_fat <span class="re1">$label</span> <span class="re1">$uuid</span> <span class="re1">$k</span><br /> <span class="kw1">fi</span><br /> <span class="kw1">if</span> <span class="br0">&#91;</span> <span class="re1">$atype</span> = <span class="st0">"ext3"</span> <span class="br0">&#93;</span><br /> <span class="kw1">then</span><br /> add_ext3 <span class="re1">$label</span> <span class="re1">$uuid</span> <span class="re1">$k</span><br /> <span class="kw1">fi</span><br /> <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re1">$label</span> <span class="re1">$uuid</span> <span class="re1">$atype</span><br /> <span class="kw1">done</span><br /> <span class="kw1">done</span><br /> <span class="br0">&#125;</span> &nbsp; &nbsp;<span class="co0"># ---------- &nbsp;end of function find_UUID &nbsp;----------</span><br /> <br /> find_disks<br /> find_partitions<br /> find_UUID
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

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Fedora 11 – Mount options for vfat and other volumes for automount. (amit-agarwal.co.in)
ESX4 cannot create datastore (edugeek.net)
Creating a Partition on an External Hard Drive (brighthub.com)
Partition Assistant v2.1 (lockergnome.com)

Fedora 11 Leonidas — Fix HDD (Hard Disk) and CD/DVD automount issues for users other than root.

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:37:48 +0000

I have been thinking of putting this for quite some time now. By default no user (other than root) on Fedora 11 has the permission to mount CD/DVD and or ntfs/vfat partitions. So HAL automount does not work for these.

Here is something you can do to fix this:

Open System-> Preferences -> Authourizations

Now, go to org -> hal -> storage and make the changes to suit your needs. You can add or remove a particular user for the operation with the Grant or Block buttons or for all the users system-wide with the Edit button.

Oracle GUI client on Linux with mysql support

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:37:46 +0000

I was looking for some nice client for Oracle and mysql. I did find mysql-administrator and navicat to be useful but this is much better. <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/tora/" target="_blank">Tora is the client that I am talking about. Installation did not take much time for me..

downloaded the instant client from oracle.com and then the tora rpm from sourceforge.net. Also downloaded the tora-mysql from http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/21/year/2002/month/01/day/28

Then tried to install all the rpms found the rpms that were missing and installed them using yum. Once this is done install the downloaded rpms with ”–nodeps” option of rpm.Put the entries in bashrc

Fixing the Xorg X server after removing nouveau and nvidia and installing a nVidia graphics card.

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:37:45 +0000

I updated my destop configuration recently, well thats not the news. But I was a idiot doing certain things at that time might be something interesting to my readers. I got a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/nvidia" title="Nvidia" rel="geolocation" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.3707277778,-121.963738889&spn=0.01,0.01&q=37.3707277778,-121.963738889%20%28Nvidia%29&t=h">nVidia <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/video_card" title="Video card" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_card">graphics card, that was not the issue but I uninstalled the drivers for it after putting it in was the issue.

So, here is the story and the fix.

Enhance photos quickly with GIMP

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:56:52 +0000

Okay today I will show you how to enhance or make the photo look better with GIMP. Digital photos are good but can be made better with GIMP. I will take you step by step with the process. There are many other things that you can do but I will cover only basic stuff. So here we go.

Take a photo of your choice.

Change pidgin status from the command line

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:17:06 +0000

$ purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message=AFK" Thanks for the comment oshazard, i wasn’t aware of purple-remote existence.

<a href="http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4554/change-pidgin-status">View this command to comment, vote or add to favourites
<a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/commands/by/unixApe">View all commands by <a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/commands/by/unixApe">unixApe

by David Winterbottom (<a href="http://codeinthehole.com">codeinthehole.com)

URL: <a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Command-line-fu/~3/Ky02xAVnP7w/change-pidgin-status">http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Command-line-fu/~3/Ky02xAVnP7w/change-pidgin-status

wmctrl – window control manager

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:17:04 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

What is <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/wmctrl" title="Wmctrl" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wmctrl">wmctrl?

wmctrl is a command that can be used to interact with an X Window manager that is compatible with the EWMH/NetWM specification. wmctrl can query the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/window_manager" title="Window manager" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager">window manager for information, and it can request that certain window management actions be taken.

Periodically download and use as wallpaper from Flickr in Fedora using Webilder.

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:17:03 +0000

Ever wanted to have wallpaper downloaded from Flickr directly using the tags and then apply them as wallpaper, then the way to go is download Webilder <a href="http://www.webilder.org/static/downloads/Webilder-0.6.3.tar.gz">here. Just do the regular stuff to install the same.

tar xvfz

cd

./configure

make

sudo make install

And then right click on the gnome panel and add the widget. Configure the tags to download and the duration to change the wallpaper and enjoy.

17 Cool firefox tweaks.

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:17:02 +0000

A very nice article on firefox can be found here. Though written for Ubuntu should be applicable to all distro’s.

<a href="http://www.ubuntu-inside.me/2009/07/17-cool-firefox-aboutconfig-tricks.html">http://www.ubuntu-inside.me/2009/07/17-cool-firefox-aboutconfig-tricks.html

Most of it was done in my machine even before I read the article but good to see all of them together 🙂

First Fedora 13 Features Listed: NFSv4, DisplayPort

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:52:03 +0000

Fedora 12 will not see the light of day for a few more weeks still, but the first features for Fedora 13 are now known. On the Fedora Project Wiki is now the Fedora 13 feature list. Added so far to the Fedora 13 feature list are mostly the few features that didn’t make it in time for Fedora 12: NFSv4 protocol by default, support for mounting NFS servers over IPv6, and yum language package plug-in…

Let the cow speak what you want it to – ascii art with cowsay

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:52:02 +0000

A picture is worth a thousand words. So here’s the thousand word posting.

To install it, just execute:

sudo yum install cowsay

It does install a couple of other timepass things like cowthink and animalsay. So, here are some more screenshots:

email with templates (with variables) from the command line with sendmail or any other MTA.

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:57:10 +0000

I was trying to get templates to work on evolution and found that although templates are there in evolution mail client, its not that efficient to use. What I thus wanted was to have something that could allow me to send mails to (and cc and bcc) to specified people with predefined template, only some values changed, like changelog and so on. So I wrote a set of files and below files to achieve the same. Hope it helps you too 🙂

Scripts to create logins from bash command – for creating multiple accounts

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:57:05 +0000

Heres the script:

cat «EOF > login.sh
for i in `cat logins` ; do
login=`echo ”$i”|awk -F”:” '{print $2}’`;
comment=”`echo ”$i”|awk -F”:” '{print $1}’`”;
gr=”`echo ”$i”|awk -F”:” '{print $3}’`”;
echo ”login –» $login –Comment –» $comment –Group –»$gr –”;
echo ”useradd -c ”$comment” -d /export/home/$login -m -g $gr -s /bin/bash $login”
useradd -c ”$comment” -d /export/home/$login -m -g $gr -s /bin/bash $login
done

You would need to create file called logins to store the comment, login name and the group. The group must have already been created. Here is an example of the file:

bash completion not working on Fedora

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:58:13 +0000

I had bash completion installed and after that I had made huge changes to my bashrc and also installed bashstyle. After this the bash-completion stopped working.

I had to spend a lot of time to figure out that the easiest solution was to source the bash-completion again in the end. 🙂

. /etc/bash_completion

colors in bash -- script to display all the possible colors.

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:58:11 +0000

If you wanted to have colors in the bash output (including the colors in PS1-4), don’t you keep wondering how the color code would look on the terminal. So, I wrote this small script to show the complete color codes. This is how the output would look:

And here is the script:

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      #!/bin/bash -<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> #<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;FILE: &nbsp;colors.sh<br /> #<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; USAGE: &nbsp;./colors.sh<br /> #<br /> # &nbsp; DESCRIPTION: &nbsp;Bash colors<br /> #<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; OPTIONS: &nbsp;---<br /> # &nbsp;REQUIREMENTS: &nbsp;---<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;BUGS: &nbsp;---<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; NOTES: &nbsp;---<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;AUTHOR: &nbsp;Amit Agarwal (AKA), amit.agarwal@amit-agarwal.co.in<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; COMPANY: &nbsp;Individual<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; VERSION: &nbsp;1.0<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; CREATED: &nbsp;09/21/2009 06:12:07 PM IST<br /> # &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;REVISION: &nbsp;---<br /> #===============================================================================<br /> <br /> for c in `seq 0 255`;<br /> do<br /> t=5;<br /> [[ $c -lt 108 ]]&&t=0;<br /> for i in `seq $t 5`;<br /> do<br /> #Display the codes also for easier lookup in terminal<br /> <!--loginview start-->echo $i;${c}<!--loginview end--><br /> echo -e "<a class="zem_slink" title="Path (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_%28computing%29">\\</a>\e[0;48;$i;${c}m|| $i:$c `seq -s+0 $(($COLUMNS/2))|tr -d \'[0-9]\'`\\e[0m";<br /> done;<br /> done<br /> <br /> # setup_colors - Adds colors to array CC for global use<br /> # 30 - Black, 31 - Red, 32 - Green, 33 - Yellow, 34 - Blue,<br /> # 35 - Magenta, 36 - Blue/Green, 37 - White,<br /> # 30/42 - Black on Green \'30\\;42\'<br /> <!--loginview start-->function setup_colors(){<br /> declare -a CC;<br /> for i in `seq 0 7`;<br /> do<br /> ii=$(($i+7));<br /> CC[$i]="\\033[1;3${i}m";<br /> CC[$ii]="\\033[0;3${i}m";<br /> done;<br /> CC[15]="\\033[30;42m";<br /> R=$\'\\033[0;00m\';<br /> X=$\'\\033[1;37m\';<br /> export R X;<br /> }<br /> function display_colors(){<br /> for i in $(seq 0 $((${#CC[@]} - 1))); do echo -e "${CC[$i]}[$i]\\n$R"; done<br /> }
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

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unbound variable – bash completion not working and having issues with other stuff like command not found. (amit-agarwal.co.in)
Modifying the bashrc or bash startup files. (amit-agarwal.co.in)
Nature-Inspired Colors for Home Interiors (interiordecorating.suite101.com)
Dark and Light Blue Colors in Feng Shui (feng-shui-concepts.suite101.com)
Delete all files in a folder that don\’t match a certain file extension (amit-agarwal.co.in)

How To Install Ailurus On Fedora

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 02:08:34 +0000

For those who have not yet heard about ailurus:

<img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ailuruslogo.png" alt="" width="24" height="24" />What is Ailurus?

Ailurus is cross-Linux-<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/linux_distribution" title="Linux distribution" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution">distribution <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/gnu_general_public_license" title="GNU General Public License" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License">GPL <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/computer_software" title="Computer software" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_software">software, which aims at making Linux easier to use, for newcomers.

<img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ailuruslogo.png" alt="" width="24" height="24" />What does Ailurus hope to do?

Ailurus hopes to reduce the difficulty which newcomers encounter when they are using Linux.

Security — Installing and monitoring snort logs.

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:06:49 +0000

Snort is a very good security tool to install if you are concerned about the security of your system. I find it really useful but the problem is I keep forgetting to monitor the logs so what did I do, I installed snort and configured cron to send to logs everyday, here’s how.

On fedora, snort is available in the repository but the rules are not. So to install snort just type in the following in a terminal:

redet – build regular expression (regex) for any program.

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:06:46 +0000

Even if someone is a regex guru there are times that people get confused with some regular expression and want to either test it out or want to some help. Behold, redet is here. Lets start with installing redet:

sudo yum install redet

Once you are done with installation, just run it with redet. First you need to load the sample data, select your program and then enter the regex to test it out. Here are some screenshots to get you started.

Logwatch for Linux Systems.

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:53:36 +0000

On my personal <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/client" title="Client (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_%28computing%29">desktop at home, I like to see the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/statistics" title="Statistics" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics">statistics at least once a day, for what was installed, what was run with <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/sudo" title="Sudo" rel="homepage" href="http://www.sudo.ws/">sudo and other such details like <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/kernel" title="Kernel (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_%28computing%29">kernel errors.

Running this monotonously every day is quite boring, so comes to rescue is logwatch. I have <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/installation" title="Installation (computer programs)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_%28computer_programs%29">installation so I will talk about the location with respect to that so for your distribution it might be a little different.

gdialog on F11 – Leonidas

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:15:12 +0000

If you are using some old application or want to install some application that was developed quite some time back with GTK GUI, then you may find the application using gdialog. gdialog is no more available and is deprecated in Fedora and same functionality is provided by zenity. But the options to call zenity are slightly different so what do you do. I did a google search and found the following script. The credit of script is not mine and credit goes to ”Mike Newman mikegtn@gnome.org”

UFRaw – Open open format raw images in Linux.

Thu, 27 May 2010 20:26:36 +0000

<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/ufraw" title="UFRaw" rel="homepage" href="http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/">UFRaw is quite an essential program if you are using <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/linux" title="Linux" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux">Linux and have a camera that supports <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/raw_image_format" title="Raw image format" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format">raw format.

UFRaw is a tool for opening raw format images of <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/digital_camera" title="Digital camera" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_camera">digital cameras.

UFRaw supports a long list of camera’s. You can see the list of supported camera’s <a href="http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Cameras.html">here.

Checking the links to your site (from affiliates) using cron and bash script.

Thu, 27 May 2010 20:26:33 +0000

If you have some affiliate links and are concerned about their presence then you can setup <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000045c9c5b" title="Cron" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron">cron to check the links for you regularly. For this you need a very simple script (as below) and a cron entry (example further down).

#!/bin/bash –
#===============================================================================

#          FILE: checklinks.sh

#         USAGE: ./checklinks.sh

#   DESCRIPTION: Check if the links exists on affiliate sites

#       OPTIONS: —
# REQUIREMENTS: —
#          BUGS: —
#         NOTES: —
#        AUTHOR: <a class="zem_slink" title="Amit Agarwal" rel="homepage" href="http://amit-agarwal.co.in">Amit Agarwal (AKA), amit.agarwal@amit-agarwal.co.in
#       COMPANY: Individual
#       VERSION: 1.0
#       CREATED: 04/07/2010 08:19:29 AM IST
#      REVISION: —
#===============================================================================

Fedora 12 Beta now available

Thu, 27 May 2010 11:44:43 +0000

<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/357770/rss">Fedora 12 Beta now available

The Fedora project has released Fedora 12 Beta. ”We have reached the Fedora 12 Beta, the last important development milestone of Fedora 12. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading up to the general release of Fedora 12, scheduled to be released in mid-November. We invite you to join us and participate in making Fedora 12 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing us your valuable feedback.” Click below for a list of new features.

command not found – packagekit plugin

Thu, 27 May 2010 11:44:42 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

If you run into problems where you run some command and the command is not found and you have to install it and run the program again then why not use the command not found <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/plugin" title="Plug-in (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_%28computing%29">plugin for Packagekit. Here is the description:

vim - get mappings from the help tex files available with the scripts.

Thu, 27 May 2010 11:44:39 +0000

Here is a simple script that will show all the vim mappings from the tex file (help file that comes with the vim scripts).

This will prove to be very useful in usin gthe mappings 🙂

#!/bin/bash –
#===============================================================================

#          FILE: get_mappings_from_tex_for_vim.sh

#         USAGE: ./get_mappings_from_tex_for_vim.sh

#   DESCRIPTION: Get the mappings from tex file

#       OPTIONS: —
# REQUIREMENTS: —
#          BUGS: —
#         NOTES: —
#        AUTHOR: <a class="zem_slink" title="Amit Agarwal" rel="self" href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in">Amit Agarwal (AKA), amit.agarwal@amit-agarwal.co.in
#       COMPANY: Individual
#       VERSION: 1.0
#       CREATED: 09/06/2009 09:19:19 PM IST
#      REVISION: —
#===============================================================================
file=$1
IFS=$(echo -e ’\n’)
for i in $(cat $file |<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/grep" title="Grep" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep">grep ”^..line”)
do
#echo $i |<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/awk" title="AWK" rel="homepage" href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/index.html">awk -F”’” '{print $2” ” $3” ”$4}’|awk -F”&” '{print $1” ”$2}’
echo $i |awk -F”’” '{
if ( NF >= 4 )
{
print ($2”\t ->”$4”\t==»”$NF);
}
else
{
print($2”\t–>”$3);
}
fi
}’ |<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/sed" title="Sed" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed">sed ’s/\h.*(/(/’ |sed ’s/>.*&/>/’ |sed ’s/\t*-.>$//’ |sed ’s/\//’

more powerful grep – ack

Wed, 26 May 2010 11:41:56 +0000

For last couple of days, I have been using ack instead of grep. Here is description of ack:

Ack is designed as a replacement for grep.

There are couple of reasons I am using ack. First and foremost being it does not require a filename. So, for seaching amit in all files recursively under the current directory I can simply use

ack amit

More reasons to use ack:

It supports pager option and there can be a rc file that can be used to define the default options that needs to be used with ack. Here is the contents of my $HOME/.ackrc file.

gnome-disk-manager – the easier way to manage disks in Gnome with Palimpsest

Tue, 25 May 2010 11:34:00 +0000

I had been using quite different set of tools to this but this is really good. Just install the gnome-disk-manager with

sudo yum install gnome-disk-manager

The interface is very clean and easy to understand and is it very very fast when compared to the other Graphical utilities.

Here are some screenshots to take you through.

mussh - Multihost SSH wrapper

Tue, 25 May 2010 11:33:59 +0000

Description:

Mussh is a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/shell_script" title="Shell script" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_script">shell script that allows you to execute a command or script over ssh on multiple hosts with one command. When possible mussh will use <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/ssh-agent" title="Ssh-agent" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh-agent">ssh-agent and RSA/DSA keys to minimize the need to enter your password more than once.

It is a utility for <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/system_administrator" title="System administrator" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator">system administrators maintaining more than one hosts. The utility will help the admin to execute the same command on multiple hosts with a single command.

LPI Certification help and tutorials

Thu, 20 May 2010 16:43:32 +0000

For the last couple of days I have been very busy but not too away from my desktop. Though I did not get time to publish anything. Here’s one of my other favourite distributions. Its known as elpicx. This distribution is oriented towards LPI certification exams and contains some documents and links that are quite helpful.

Good thing is now it supports F9 with KDE.

I found that the documents in the distro are GPL and thus I dont think that there should be any issue in re-distributing the pdfs and the links, so <a href="http://amit.with-linux.com/elpicx/" target="_blank">here it is. If you find anything in these docs or links that I should not link or upload them, let me know. I wil remove them.

Startup animation and theme for Fedora 12 onwards.

Thu, 20 May 2010 16:43:31 +0000

Since the release of <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora 12, fedora is using plymouth. Plymouth kicks in just after grub and before the Xserver starts.

Description:

Plymouth provides an attractive graphical <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/bootsplash" title="Bootsplash" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootsplash">boot animation in
place of the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/text_messaging" title="Text messaging" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging">text messages that normally get shown. Text
messages are instead redirected to a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/data_logger" title="Data logger" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_logger">log file for viewing
after boot.

bash script to change icon theme to check out all the installed themes (personal)

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:38:44 +0000

I am really annoyed with the time that is required and the number of clicks that it takes to change the gnome icon theme. So here’s a small script that I wrote to quickly check out all the icon themes that I have in my ~/.icons folder.

#!/bin/bash
[[ ”$1” == ”” ]] && time=5 || time=$1
[[ ”$2” == ”” ]] && (
cd ~/.icons
cont=”y”
echo ”Select one of the icon themes”
echo ”When you like some theme just press Ctrl+c”
for i in *
do
[[ -d $i/cursors ]] || (
echo ”Now trying …. : $i”
gconftool-2 –type string -s /desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme ”$i”
sleep $time
)
done
) || gconftool-2 –type string -s /desktop/gnome/interface/icon_theme ”$2”

Awk Introduction Tutorial – 7 Awk Print Examples

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:38:43 +0000

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

awk examples

Awk Introduction Tutorial – 7 Awk Print Examples This is the first article on the new awk tutorial series. We’ll be posting several articles on awk in the upcoming weeks that will cover all features of awk with practical examples. In this article, let us review the fundamental awk working methodology along with 7 practical awk print examples. Note: Make sure you review our earlier […]

Mirror or download a website with a tool much better than wget

Wed, 19 May 2010 16:38:39 +0000

If you want to mirror a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/website" title="Website" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website">website, the simplest tool I know if is <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/wget" title="Wget" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/">wget. Once you have used wget, you know the troubles associated with it. You also get added couple of files as search html files, which are useless and wastage of bandwidth for you as well as the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/web_server" title="Web server" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server">webserver.

lftp -e ”mirror -c”

How to write a Linux virus – well or a trojan.

Tue, 18 May 2010 16:35:20 +0000

<a href="http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/6229" target="_blank">How to write a Linux virus

and the folloup thereof

<a href="http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/6236" target="_blank">Follow up: How to write a Linux virus

Thats quite a lot of discussion and an interesting one too. I too liked the point that the authour is trying to make, that is Linux too is not completely safe. I would rather like to put it as not ”Fool Proof”.

But no one is fool. Its just the matter of time when you do something foolish. People do keep thinking about various things and keep working. That being the case, it is not too difficult that someone would actually run the program. But the caveat is that the program/virus/trojan would still show up at some places. So you need to do few more things for this to work. If you are keen on doing this, then you need to atleast add these:

List all the installed firefox addons from the bash script

Tue, 18 May 2010 16:35:18 +0000

Here is a one-line that would help you get the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/mozilla_firefox" title="Firefox" rel="homepage" href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/">Firefox addons in the bash script:

grep -hIr \<em:name ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/extensions|sed ’s#\s*##’|sed ’s#.*$>.*<$.*#\1#’|sed ’s/[<\|>]//g’|sort -u<h6 class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta <ul class="zemanta-article-ul"> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.ghacks.net/2010/05/16/firefox-3-6-4-build-4-released/">Firefox 3.6.4 Build 4 Released (ghacks.net) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/05/first-look-firefox-4-preview-delivers-speed-revamped-interface/">First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface (webmonkey.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.ghacks.net/2010/05/15/protect-firefox-bookmarks-with-link-password/">Protect Firefox Bookmarks With Link Password (ghacks.net) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/12/mozilla-firefox-4-upgrade_n_573062.html">Firefox 4 Upgrade Offers Simpler Design, More Privacy Control (huffingtonpost.com) <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mozilla_talks_firefox_4_sleeker_interface_better_privacy_controls.php">Mozilla’s Plans for Firefox 4: Faster, Sleeker Interface, Better Privacy Controls (readwriteweb.com) <div class="zemanta-pixie"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" title="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/6a3ffd4a-91cf-47e3-85ff-7dc3b27ffd7d/"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/reblog_b89.png" alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" /><span class="zem-script more-related more-info pretty-attribution paragraph-reblog">

Script to download all the related videos from youtube with youtube-dl

Mon, 17 May 2010 15:59:20 +0000

Lets cut the long discussion <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/short_subject" title="Short film" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_film">short and directly give you the script. The script is combination of all the posts that I did in the past about youtube <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/uploading_and_downloading" title="Uploading and downloading" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uploading_and_downloading">downloads. You need to copy all the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/uniform_resource_locator" title="Uniform Resource Locator" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator">URL’s in a file called ”~/youtube.urls” which you want to be downloaded. Or if you need to donwload the related videos, then save the html of the page and give it as the first argument for the script. So, here’s the scrit:

Downloading all related videos from youtube with youtube-dl

Sun, 16 May 2010 15:53:16 +0000

How many time did you want to see all the videos (related) to the one you were watching on youtube but decided otherwise as the downloaded was not fast enough. Or has it happened to you that you wanted to <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/uploading_and_downloading" title="Uploading and downloading" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uploading_and_downloading">download all the related videos, in either case you can use the youtube-dl utility I blogged about some times back. First you need to get all the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/uniform_resource_locator" title="Uniform Resource Locator" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator">URL’s in a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/text_file" title="Text file" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_file">text file, and the simplest way to do this is :

Remote X applications on local display in Fedora 11 (leonidas).

Thu, 13 May 2010 17:04:34 +0000

I wanted to open some X applications on my Fedora 11 local display over the ssh connections. I have used this in the previous versions of the Fedora and was looking to do the same in F11. Here are the things that can be done to enable this :

Allow tcp connections to X server by removing -nolisten in the X server. Set the following parameter in the gdm.conf

DisallowTCP=false

Easier Reinstalls

Mon, 10 May 2010 15:07:46 +0000

<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://www.howtoforge.com/easier-reinstalls">E<a href="http://www.howtoforge.com/easier-reinstalls">asier Reinstalls

Easier Reinstalls

I typically reinstall my computer operating system every six months. The reasons for this are that it cleans out the system and reinstalls require me to be in front of the computer for a total of about ten minutes so it’s painless. Notice I said ”in front of the computer”, the system does all of the work for me with some specially crafted bash scripts.

coproc help - a new feature in bash

Mon, 10 May 2010 15:07:45 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

In the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/bash" title="Bash" rel="homepage" href="http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashtop.html">bash version 4.0, there is a new concept called coproc. This is very useful for some of the daily tasks.

co-<a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000005a409" title="Process (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_%28computing%29">process starts a process in the background, optionally with a NAME, with which other processes can communicate. This can be a very <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/substitute_good" title="Substitute good" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good">good substitution for <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000048fac5" title="Pipeline (Unix)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28Unix%29">pipes in lots of cases. You can learn more about coproc in the link below:

Download with browse with bash and wget

Sun, 09 May 2010 13:34:18 +0000

Been pretty busy for last couple of days. Will be busy for another few days, but here’s something to munch in the meantime (Script may need changes depending on the type of file you want to download or the site you are browsing, but the chnages should be minimal):

file=”/tmp/temp.dir”
url=”URL Here”
IFS=’
’
cont=”y”
while [ $cont != ”n” ]
do
name=””
wget ”$url” -O $file -o /dev/null
for i in $(grep href $file |grep -v Parent)
do
name=${i##href=”}
name=${name%%”>}
echo $name
if [[ $name == *gz ]]
then
cont=”n”
fi
done
if [ ! $name ]
then
echo ”No files here.. Exiting”
exit -1
fi
echo
if [ $cont == ”n” ]
then
echo ”Enter the filename for download :”
read file
fi
echo ”Select one of the options:”
read product
url=”$url/$product”
echo ”About to get $url”
done
wget ”$url” -O $file -o /dev/null

Transfer all the google feed URLs to rss2email.

Sun, 09 May 2010 13:34:17 +0000

Next step in restoring my settings was to get the working rules and all the blogs into rss2email. I have subscribed to more than 150 blogs. So, adding all of them manually was difficult.

For a time like this, I subscribe to all the blogs using google reader and then add them to rss2email. So I had quickly exported the google feeds list and then had to find a way to extract the URLs for the blog to the rss2email. The command to add a url is r2e add, so I wrote this one line just now to do the task for me.

bash script to periodically change the cursor theme.

Fri, 07 May 2010 03:27:41 +0000

#!/bin/bash
[[ ”$1” == ”” ]] && time=5 || time=$1
[[ ”$2” == ”” ]] && (
cd ~/.icons
cont=”y”
echo ”Select one of the icon themes”
echo ”When you like some theme just press Ctrl+c”
for i in *
do
[[ -d $i/cursors ]] && (
echo ”Now trying …. : $i”
gconftool-2 –type string -s /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/cursor_theme ”$i”
sleep $time
)
done
) || gconftool-2 –type string -s /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/cursor_theme ”$2”

top - looks better and is more useful with a rc file...

Fri, 07 May 2010 03:27:39 +0000

top is a very useful command to find out who is eating up the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/central_processing_unit" title="Central processing unit" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit">CPU or the memory. But sometimes the plain and simple look simply would be boring so how about some fun. Copy the below code to file : ~/.toprc

RCfile for ”top”
Id:a, Mode_altscr=1, Mode_irixps=0, Delay_time=5.000, Curwin=0
Def   fieldscur=mfcAbdEgHIursOpQTvyzWjKNLX
winflags=32184, sortindx=10, maxtasks=0
summclr=4, msgsclr=5, headclr=5, taskclr=4
Job   fieldscur=ABcefgjlrstuvyzMKNHIWOPQDX
winflags=62777, sortindx=0, maxtasks=0
summclr=6, msgsclr=6, headclr=7, taskclr=6
Mem   fieldscur=ANOPQRSTUVbcdefgjlmyzWHIKX
winflags=62777, sortindx=13, maxtasks=0
summclr=5, msgsclr=5, headclr=4, taskclr=5
Usr   fieldscur=ABDECGfhijlopqrstuvyzMKNWX
winflags=62777, sortindx=4, maxtasks=0
summclr=3, msgsclr=3, headclr=2, taskclr=3

Solved -- Errors with afraid-dyndns in Goddard (Fedora 13)

Thu, 06 May 2010 13:31:17 +0000

Since I updated to the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora 13, I was getting error from the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/dynamic_dns" title="Dynamic DNS" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS">Dynamic DNS client for afraid. I was not getting enough time to fix this, so finally I decided to fix this in the night itself 🙂

Problem:
On running

afraid-dyndns

I was getting the error:

Entity: line 100: <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/parsing" title="Parsing" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing">parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: br line 99 and div

xterm – select font name and size from command line and set it as default

Wed, 05 May 2010 15:19:19 +0000

I have been very busy last week and specially yesterday with 20 hours of continueous work, but managed to get this working :).

When you right click on Xterm with Ctrl pressed, there pops up a menu for selecting the size of the font. I have always wondered how to set this as default font and/or use this from the command line. So I searched my old homedir and looked for few of the docs that I had to get the information. Here is what I found.

Find out why a program can't seem to access to a file

Wed, 05 May 2010 15:19:18 +0000

$ strace php tias.php -e open,access 2>&1 | <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/grep" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep" title="Grep" rel="wikipedia">grep foo.txt Sometimes a program refuses to read a file and you’re not sure why. You may have display_errors turned off for <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/php" href="http://www.php.net/" title="PHP" rel="homepage">PHP or something. In this example, fopen(’/var/www/test/foo.txt’) was called but doesn’t have read access to foo.txt.

Strace can tell you what went wrong. E.g., if php doesn’t have read access to the file, strace will say ”EACCESS (Permission denied)”. Or, if the <a class="zem_slink freebase/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000000220ffa" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_%28computing%29" title="Path (computing)" rel="wikipedia">file path you gave doesn’t exist, strace will say ”ENOENT (No such file or directory)”, etc.

Download youtube video directly from the command line with youtube-dl

Mon, 03 May 2010 17:38:07 +0000

If you keep searching for applications to <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/uploading_and_downloading" title="Uploading and downloading" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uploading_and_downloading">download the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/youtube" title="YouTube" rel="homepage" href="http://www.youtube.com/">youtube videos or you keep searching for the firefox addons to download the embedded the video, then this is for you. Ofcouse that is the case, only if you do not want to copy it after you have watched it in the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/web_browser" title="Web browser" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser">browser :). If you have already watched it then you can copy it from the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/mozilla_firefox" title="Firefox" rel="homepage" href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/">Firefox cache. I will post on that later for now lets see youtube-dl.

Local DNS Server for faster DNS response time

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:01:54 +0000

Here’s a quick tip for faster DNS response time. I installed a local DNS server which can contact the remote DNS server and enabled caching for the local DNS server. This ensures that the response time for the DNS queries is much faster.

I am on Fedora 10, so here’s what I was required to do:

yum install dnsmasq

After this I created a file called /etc/resolve.dns with the nameserver address’s and heres what it looks like:

Delete all files in a folder that don't match a certain file extension

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:01:52 +0000

$ rm !(.foo|.bar|*.baz)

Deletes all files in a folder that are NOT *.foo, *.bar or *.baz files. Edit the pattern inside the brackets as you like.

<a href="http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/5351/delete-all-files-in-a-folder-that-dont-match-a-certain-file-extension">View this command to comment, vote or add to favourites
<a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/commands/by/hutch">View all commands by <a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/commands/by/hutch">hutch

by David Winterbottom (<a href="http://codeinthehole.com">codeinthehole.com)

25 Awesome GIMP Brush Sets (Download 1000+ FREE Brushes)

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:46:31 +0000

Tech Source From Bohol: ”To help you further enhance the functionality of GIMP, I have here a huge collection of awesome, high-quality brushes that can be utilized for whatever projects you may have.”

URL: <a href="http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-10-11-005-35-MM-SW">http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-10-11-005-35-MM-SW<h6 class="zemanta-related-title" style="font-size: 1em;">Related articles by Zemanta <ul class="zemanta-article-ul"> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://www.slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com/2009/10/10/five-super-simple-photo-fixes-with-the-gimp/">Five Super Simple Photo Fixes with The GIMP (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com) <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" title="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" href="http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/a5cb830f-a1ff-41d0-b3e7-27bd261ff52c/"><img class="zemanta-pixie-img" style="border: medium none; float: right;" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/reblog_e12.png" alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" /><span class="zem-script more-related pretty-attribution">

Spruce up your firefox with lightweight themes – Personas

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:46:30 +0000

Head over to Firefox addons site for persona <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10900" target="_blank">here. This addon will give you the ability to change the look and feel of the browser without restarting it. Though it is not completely like themes and does not change the look and feel of the buttons and plenty of other things but this does make the browser a lot better. Here are some screenshots to show you how it feels like:

Lock the hardware eject button of the cdrom

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:46:29 +0000

$ eject -i 1 This command will lock the hardware eject button of your cdrom drive. Some uses are:

1: If you have a toddler and has discovered the cdrom button

2: If you are carrying a laptop in a bag or case and don’t want it to eject if the button is inadvertently pressed.

To unlock the button use:

eject -i 0

<a href="http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/5390/lock-the-hardware-eject-button-of-the-cdrom">View this command to comment, vote or add to favourites
<a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/commands/by/mdelatorre">View all commands by <a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/commands/by/mdelatorre">mdelatorre

Upgrade to Fedora 13 from your existing version using yum.

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:47:06 +0000

Well. this time it seems to be very simple :

yum –releasever=13 upgrade

update 22/April/2010:
The key file will not be there so there are two options for you in this case:

Install the following rpms from the downloaded rpms with ”yum –nogpg localinstall”
a) fedora-release
b) fedora-release-notes
Run the whole upgrade with –nogpg option.

Issue observed after the upgrade:
The new kernel was not added in the grub menu and I had to manually add the below entry in the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/gnu_grub" title="GNU GRUB" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/">menu.lst file:

Liquid rescale and remove objects from the images.

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:38:01 +0000

Ever wanted to remove some unwanted object from an image. Wonder how many thinkgs you have to do, clone and delete and what not:)

There is a simpler way, just paint it in foreground color. Does that sound ridiculous, not any more with Liquid Rescale. First install the plugin for liquid rescale for gimp.

yum install gimp-lqr-plugin

Now, just follow simple instructions below:

in the menu, choose Layer and then Liquid Rescale

click on the New button in the Discard features section on the right: a new layer will be created

put the plugin window on one side of the screen without closing it, and go back to work on the gimp main windows

choose the paint tool and paint over the area you wish to remove

go back to the plugin window

click the Refresh button at the bottom: you should see your discard mask appear in the preview

optionally, in the Mode box on the left choose Lqr + scale back or Lqr + Lqr back

click the Auto size button at the bottom of the Discard features section (optionally choose the scaling direction in the box at the side of the button before clicking it).

click OK

Could it get any simpler.

recursively add directory and files to cvs from Linux.

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:37:59 +0000

Go to the directory which you want to add to cvs and execute the following:

cvs login

find . -type d -exec cvs add {} \;

find . -type f -exec cvs add {} \;

cvs commit

That was simple 🙂

Afraid Dynamic DNS client in Fedora with Email indicating the changed to original IP.

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:37:54 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

If you have your domain in the Dynamic DNS located at : <a href="http://freedns.afraid.org">Freedns then you know how difficult it is to get the Dynamic DNS client to work with Fedora. Not that it does not work, but you need to configure it properly and there are lot of parameters. But not any more. Now you can install the afraid Dynamic DNS client and just put your Account Hash in the config file and you are ready with the setup to update the DNS entry whenever your IP changes. So lets get started:

F12 Wallpaper Sprinting

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:11:59 +0000

I’ve been working with Jon McCann, Charlie Brej, Nicu Buculei, Jeremy Perry, María Leandro, and Ian Weller’s help and critique the past few days on trying to come up with a slicker version of the F12 background for the final. 1 newly color-managed Thinkpad, 4 Gimp brushes, several CC-BY and CC-BY-SA textures from Flickr, 2 dozen SLR photos of shower water, and <a href="http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/art/f12/oct%2020/">62 mockups later… this is what we have so far. Please let me know what you think. We are working to get it packaged by this coming Tuesday so we can make it, and be awesome while we’re at it. If you have any suggestions or modifications you’d like to propose please reply here or on design-team at lists dot fedoraproject dot org.

Jokes – many to be downloaded once..

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:11:55 +0000

All work and no fun makes Jack dull boy. So lets do something for fun. Here is a one liner I wrote sometime back. The original idea is not mine and I don’t remeber where I got the idea from but it was some other one liner that I was browsing for some oracle query. Anyway here’s the one liner to get lot of jokes in one file.

#!/bin/bash
for i in `echo 000{0..9} 00{10..99} 0{100..999} {1000..1600}` ; do links -dump http://www.robsjokes.com/$i/index.html | sed ’/Random Joke/,/Next Joke/!d’ | sed ’/^$/,/^$/!d’ » ~/Rob.jokes ; echo ’%’ » ~/Rob.jokes ;echo $i; done

Linux Links — collection of universe.. all links on everything about linux

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:11:46 +0000

<a href="http://loll.sourceforge.net/linux/links/">LoLL is a sourceforge project which maintains a well commented and categorized list of links on linux. This is a very nice list and has very nice links. Probably there is nothing that you will not find here which do not interest you. Definately worth a look.

Bugzilla Automation with perl — add, update or query any bug in Bugzilla using perl and www series modules for perl.

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:11:43 +0000

Today I was trying to do some queries and see if I could create a new bug or update a existing bug in the Bugzilla. The one that I was trying to access was on version 2.0 and not on 3.0. This being the case, the XMLRPC interface was not working properly and to top it all, I was wanted to query quite a lot of bugs. So, I went out to evaluate how to avoid the manual work and get this done faster. Here’s some of my findings:

bash script to change vim colorscheme based on the available themes

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 09:11:41 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Here’s one script that you may find useful. A little variation or wrapper for this script can make your life colorful 🙂

You can write a wrapper to this to take one of the inputs randomly and then use it in alias to start <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">vim.

Adding date to Photographs.

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:56:12 +0000

This is one of the common things that I want to do when I want to print the photos and its truely boring job to do given the fact that the Date Photo taken is already in the image taken by the Digital Photos. So finally I wrote a simple script to do this. Here it is for anyone who might be interested:

(Note you will need the program called anotate, written by me, posted earlier and exiftool)<pre style="padding-left: 30px;">

Create your own splash screen for gimp

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:36:26 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Gimp allows you to set the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/splash_screen" title="Splash screen" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splash_screen">splash screen very easily. All you need to do is copy the image to ~/.gimp-/splashes/. There is <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/betting" title="Betting (poker)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betting_%28poker%29">no limit on the size or color. You just copy all the images you like to have as splash and one of them would be randomly picked up from the said direcotory for the splash image.

using gigolo for all your network mounting needs

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:43:19 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever thought that there should be one central location or application to connect to all you required servers with whichever <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/protocol" title="Protocol (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_%28computing%29">protocol. If you did, the you wishes are granted.

Change cursor and couple of other settings in window managers like fluxbox and fvwm (except gnome and KDE)

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:58:34 +0000

First off, get cursor theme from <a href="http://gnome-look.org/index.php?xsortmode=high&page=0&xcontentmode=36" target="_blank">here. You can download the one of your choice. Now create a directory ”~/.icons” if it does not exist. Extract the file you just downloaded in this directory. [If you are using GNome then you could have dropped the tar file itself in the Desktop properties window and selected the theme from there. I have since the days of RH9 not used KDE and so am not sure how to do this in KDE, sorry guys.]

Break Free and let firefox remember all the passwords even the ones that are not saved by default

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:58:33 +0000

Here we go against one more security policy of most of the sites like Bank and paypal and so on. These sites do not allow Firefox or any other browser to save the password. This is using some tags in the html/code of the page that would mark the field as not completeable or savable. So, what do you do?

I am on a home computer to which no one has access so why not save the password!! Let do it. There are couple of hacks that have been found to make firefox remember all the passwords. Here are a few of them (but Linux is not covered in any of them).<h1 id="article-title"><a title="Permanent Link to Tweak Firefox’s Password Saver Without An Extension" rel="bookmark" href="http://cybernetnews.com/2006/06/07/tweak-firefoxs-password-saver-without-an-extension/">Tweak Firefox’s Password Saver Without An Extension <h1 id="article-title"><a title="Permanent Link to Make Firefox Remember Passwords without a Bookmarklet" rel="bookmark" href="http://cybernetnews.com/2009/02/13/firefox-remember-passwords/">Make Firefox Remember Passwords without a Bookmarklet

Fedora 11 ready for deployment.

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:30:51 +0000

Couple of days back, Fedora removed the directory for the release 11. But if you were on Fedora 11 Preview then the update automatically moved the version up to Fedora 11. So, update and install of any application using the repo was not working.

Now it looks like this time the date should be met, as today I saw that at-least the directories for staging are created and so hopes of having a update tomorrow looks positive and also I would be able to install the other applications that I have been trying to install since Friday.

Recursive Regular Expressions

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:39:42 +0000

<img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/yo-dawg-regex.jpg" alt="Yo dawg, I heard you liked regular expressions, so I put a regex in your regex so you can match while you match!" align="bottom" /> The <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/regular_expression" title="Regular expression" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">regular expressions we use in our daily lives are actually not that “regular.” Most of the languages support some kind of extended regular expressions that are computationally more powerful than the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">regular” regular expressions as defined by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language">formal language theory.

bash – change theme for gtk in gnome and take screenshot from script.

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:39:41 +0000

I wrote a blog on bash script to change the icon/cursor theme using a bash script. Lets extend the same concept a little more and use the script to change the gtk theme for gnome and at the same time take a screenshot also.

#!/bin/bash
path=”/tmp/screenshot”
[[ ”$1” == ”” ]] && time=5 || time=$1
[[ ”$2” == ”” ]] && (
cd ~/.themes
cont=”y”
echo ”Select one of the icon themes”
echo ”When you like some theme just press Ctrl+c”
for i in *
do
[[ -d $i/cursors ]] || (
echo ”Now trying …. : $i”
gconftool-2 –type string -s /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme ”$i”
sleep 1
j=$(echo ”$path/$i”).jpg
import -window root -quality 95 ”$j”
sleep $time
)
done
) || gconftool-2 –type string -s /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme ”$2”

Add a image to the list of background files in gnome

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:29:10 +0000

In Gnome, when you right click on the desktop background you will get a menu for ”Change Desktop backgound. The images displayed in this menu are quite a few but if you want to add your own (read: more than some 5-6 files) then it takes really some time in using the GUI to add them. And if you want to add a few 10’s of file, like say 50 then you are done.

Just days wait to a great operating system.

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:11:43 +0000

Was thinking about writing this for some time now.. but guess someone already did that <a href="http://www.junauza.com/2009/05/fedora-11-leonidas-is-almost-ready-to.html" target="_blank">here.

To get the list of features you can check out this <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList" target="_blank">page.

Here is a brief from the page:<table border="0">A simple, modular system service to manage devices and designed to partially replace

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      hal
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

. Users gain a graphical disk management application called

More windows Microsoft like openoffice and keet it working.

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 03:11:42 +0000

Some people say that <a href="http://www.openoffice.org/" target="_blank">OpenOffice doesn’t completely suit their requirement as compared to the Microsoft Office. Though most of the times I do not have that problem 🙂 But there are still couple of things that do not work with OO seamlessly and thus if you want better OO (with respect to working with MS files more seamlessly) here’s something worth a try.

You can try the <a href="http://go-oo.org/" target="_blank">go-oo OO.

Fedora 12 Released

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:24:31 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

Fedora 12, the latest version of the popular open-source operating systems for desktops and servers, has been released: ”The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 12, the latest version of its free, open-source operating system distribution…..

Fedora 11 - Mount options for vfat and other volumes for automount.

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:57:29 +0000

I have been searching to look for how to change the default umask and dmask for the auto-mounted directories. I searched all the google and bing pages that I could, but to no avail. But I found some interesting info though.

Fedora now uses DeviceKit for managing the disks and Devicekit calls udev for actually mounting and unmounting the disks. The operation is controlled by policykit to determine who can do what?

Mount and unmount/umount images(iso/img) from nautilus (Fixed not mounting in Fedora)

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:52:03 +0000

Get the Nautilus Script <a href="http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/moiso?content=84301" target="_blank">here. So what is required is that you have the necessary permission to run mount and umount as normal user with sudo command. If you are using gksu or gnomesu then you can change this in the script that you will get. Once you have got the script then you can run the installer for the script that comes in the package.

If you are running this is Fedora then you would need to make one more change other than the ones done by the installer, which is to allow sudo from non tty devices. Since this will be running from the nautilus so the script will not have any tty device and hence you would need to comment the following in the /etc/sudoers file:

swaks – Swiff army nife for SMTP

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:52:02 +0000

If you are having issues with the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/simple_mail_transfer_protocol" title="Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol">SMTP Server, then sometimes you just wish you had a swiss army knife to test the same and then you would not have to spend your precious time on some silly mistake that you may have made. Your wish is now fulfilled.

<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/military_of_switzerland" title="Military of Switzerland" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Switzerland">Swiss Army Knife SMTP: A <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/command_line_interface" title="Command-line interface" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface">command line SMTP tester. Swaks can test various aspects of your SMTP <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/server" title="Server (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_%28computing%29">server, including <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/transport_layer_security" title="Transport Layer Security" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security">TLS and AUTH.

Email web statistics from the hosted website using awstats page.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:48:33 +0000

I want to see the stats for my websites mailed to me directly like Google analytics does. Sure enough I can see them on the hosting cpanel page on awstats, but I dont want to check that everyday. An easier solution would be to have that mailed to my email address everyday using cron. Let’s try to do that today:

First we would need to get the address of the page for the statistics, which would look like this:

New GTK and metacity themes from Ian

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:07:45 +0000

Here are two themes from Ian.. Link: http://ardchoille42.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-gtk2-and-metacity-themes.html

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/GTK-DarkTurrican.tar.gz">GTK-DarkTurrican.tar

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/GTK-LightTurrican.tar.gz">GTK-LightTurrican.tar

FVWM window manager.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:07:44 +0000

<a href="http://www.fvwm.org/" target="_blank">Home Page of fvwm.

So Now I am trying different window managers. My requirement is simple, alt+tab should allow me to swicht the windows and the window manager should be light but configurable and should show the programs/applications that are installed on my system. The last requirement comes from the fact that I am quite forgetful person and keep forgetting about the application to use for the particular purpose. So Window Manager should not be CPU and Memory hogging like Gnome or KDE but still should be decent and not like ”X” or hackedbox.

Minimize the download size for updates.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:19:52 +0000

Fedora has rolled out presto repositories. What this means to the users is that the download size for the updates would be greatly reduced. To use the feature, first install the yum plugin:

sudo yum install yum-presto.noarch

Presto uses delta rpms. These delta rpms are quite small in size (eg few kbs instead of 15 MB for firefox 3.5). These delta rpms are used to re-create the original rpm and this is completely transparent to the end user. So, next time when you update with the plugin installed you will see the difference in the download size.

Openoffice.org and/or Excel useful tips.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:19:48 +0000

Today I was working on Excel sheets and had to do quite a lot of manipulations. Here are some of those:

Find the value of the cell whose number is stored in another cell.

You can use the indirect function.

Here is example:

That’s cool and easy.

Indirect reference with some constant values.

You can add constant and cell id with ”&”

Annotating the photograph with comments.

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:19:46 +0000

There is a nice Linux command called convert. This command can be used in various ways to do image manipulation. One of them is to embark your image with some text. Here is how to do it.

**echo ”Annotating the image ”$2” with $1”
convert -font Verdana -pointsize 40 -fill red -draw ”text 100,100 ”$1”” ”$2” ”$2”
**

It will be good idea to save this as ”annotate” as we will use this later too.

PackageKit error File \”/usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/yum/yumBackend.py\”, line 1215, in _get_depends_not_installed – Resolved

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:58:45 +0000

In packagekit, if you getting the error below:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File ”/usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/yum/yumBackend.py”, line 1215, in _get_depends_not_installed
rc, msgs = self.yumbase.buildTransaction()
File ”/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/__init__.py”, line 719, in buildTransaction
self.plugins.run(’postresolve’, rescode=rescode, restring=restring)
File ”/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/yum/plugins.py”, line 179, in run
func(conduitcls(self, self.base, conf, **kwargs))
File ”/usr/lib/yum-plugins/remove-with-leaves.py”, line 71, in postresolve_hook
if opts.remove_leaves or remove_always:
AttributeError: ’NoneType’ object has no attribute ’remove_leaves’

then you can resolve it. The solution to the problem is there in the traceback, luckily this time.

Packagekit Error

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:58:36 +0000

With the latest update on my Fedora 10(F10) I started getting this error when ever I wanted to use the gnome package kit (I was able to use yum though):
failed to get a TID: A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected message had interface ”org.freedesktop.PackageKit.Transaction” member ”SetLocale” error name ”(unset)” destination ”org.freedesktop.PackageKit”) (0)

I searched couple of forums but did not find any good resource on what was happening. Finally I decided to rollback Packagekit and dbus. And Yahoooooooooooo, it started working again.

kernel source code — the easier way to get it with git.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:58:34 +0000

The simplest way to get the kernel code is :

git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git

If you want to get the other branches then head over to <a href="http://git.kernel.org">”Kernel Git Page”

This will get the Linux kernel tree. As of today , 12 days ago, the tree was tagged to 2.6.31.

Now thats cool, but do you want it to be simpler and do not want to know the git command get to what you want to do that is learn linux kernel then here\’s what you can do :

sudo yum install teamgit

Here is the interface that you will get to add new repo:

Crossfire game server.. free connection.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:58:27 +0000

I have setup a Free to use Crossfire game server. If you want to play the game, you can connect to amit.themafia.info

For playing the game you would need the client to connect to it which you can install with

yum install crossfire-client

then you can run the game with ”cfclient” and then connect to amit.themafia.info.

Teddy on Desktop just for fun.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:58:24 +0000

People often complain that Linux users are mostly geeks. Does that seem to be true if you have a package that is just to display a teddy in the desktop. True, its completely true that Fedora has a package called xteddy, whose whole purpose is to display a teddy on the desktop and I must admit that it really looks very good on the desktop 🙂

Here’s a snapshot:

Seders\’s grab bag – Tutorials

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:45:56 +0000

<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/">http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/

<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/">seder’s<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/"> grab bag

<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/">scripts
<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/">tutorials
<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/seders/">seders
<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/ssed/">ssed
<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/links/">links
<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/#intros">Intros
<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/#advanced">Advanced
<a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/tutorials/#misc">Miscellaneous

<span style="font-size: large;">Sed Tutorials

If you have written anything about sed – whether an introduction, how sed got you out of a real-life situation, or perhaps an advanced technique you’ve discovered – you may like have your work published here. <a href="mailto:bonzini@gnu.org">Your contribution will be very welcome.

shotwell- Photo organizer for Linux in Gnome

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:08:00 +0000

Here is description of shotwell:

Shotwell is a new <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/open_source" title="Open Source" rel="wikinvest" href="http://www.wikinvest.com/concept/Open_Source">open source photo organizer designed for the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/gnome" title="GNOME" rel="homepage" href="http://www.gnome.org/">GNOME <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/desktop_environment" title="Desktop environment" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment">desktop environment. It allows you to import photos from your camera, view and edit them, and share them with others.

Link to shotwell:

<a href="http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/" target="_blank">http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/

Here are some <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/screenshot" title="Screenshot" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot">screenshots from the application.

Get a lot of spam — use spamassasin.

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:11:19 +0000

If you get a lot of spam into your local inbox and do not want your service provider to filter them for you, like me :), then you can use spamassasin.

The benefit with this approach is that all the spam will be delivered to your local inbox and you do not need to do anything on the server. You can blacklist, whitelist, report message as spam all on your client and it would not change anything on the server. So you control your mail, isn’t that great. What to do, start with minimal things:

Mail Server Setup With Exim, MySQL, Cyrus-Imapd, Horde Webmail

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:24:08 +0000

I was thinking of doing this for some time but never got time to do this. So finally I took some time off yesterday to do the setup. <a href="http://www.howtoforge.com/exim-mysql-cyrus-imapd-horde-centos5.1-p2" target="_blank">Here is a good link on the instructions for the CentOS, but on Fedora also they hold good.

So what you need to do is basically install exim, imp, horde, horde-enhanced and cyrus* packages and then configure imap server and exim to do the mailing part and setup horde to view the mail. To install the packages use the command below:

View information on all the rpms installed.

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:52:17 +0000

This post if applicable to all the distro’s which are based on rpm.

If you look at the number of rpms installed on your system, you will see it somewhere around 500-2000. Noe thats a pretty huge number. So sometimes I keep wondering what are these rpms for. Heres a command that can help you figure out what these rpms are for:

rpm -qa –info

And if you want to find info on all the files and put it in a file too:

using mypaint of linux continued.

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:52:16 +0000

Some more screenshots here:
<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Screenshot-3.resized.jpg"><img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Screenshot-3.resized-150x150.jpg" alt="Screenshot-3" title="Screenshot-3" width="150" height="150" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-1283" />

[ad#ad-1]

GoOo released new version of Open Office.

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:33:19 +0000

GoOo repository for Fedora at http://go-oo.mirrorbrain.org/stable/linux-i586/ has released the new version of GoOo packages.

Send mail to yourself and read in your favourite client and configure the rules to move to directory.

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:31:11 +0000

By default when you send a mail using sendmail, the mail goes to the default directory. What I wanted to do was, use rss2email, to send the mails and then sort them in different folders depending on the From address.

Sendmail uses procmail to deliver mail locally. So here’s what I had to do:

Configure the rss2email to send the mail to amit@localhost

Next, configure the procmail to deliver mail to my home directory. To do this we will use the procmailrc file in the home directory. The contents of the file are :

The document editor that is revolutionary and breaking the typewriter paradigm.

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:02:51 +0000

Today, I thought I will try something different for word processor requirements, for non-text files. For text files, vi rocks for me 🙂

So, I tried LyX, here is the description of the editor:

Description: LyX is a modern approach to writing documents which breaks with the

obsolete ”typewriter paradigm” of most other document preparation

systems. It is designed for people who want professional quality

output with a minimum of time and effort, without becoming

specialists in typesetting. The major innovation in LyX is WYSIWYM

(What You See Is What You Mean). That is, the author focuses on

content, not on the details of formatting. This allows for greater

productivity, and leaves the final typesetting to the backends

(like LaTeX) that are specifically designed for the task. With

LyX, the author can concentrate on the contents of his writing, and

let the computer take care of the rest.

Simple rss to email service for your feeds on Linux with your/ISP server.

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:35:04 +0000

I like couple of blogs and feeds but the problem is that I keep forgetting to run the rss reader and would rather like to have the rss article’s emailed to me at regular intervals so that I can read them when I want to without having to make sure that I am at my desktop at home computer or remembering to start the rss client. That sounds simple and do-able so lets try to do that.

query and downgrade selected packages based on version or repository

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:37:11 +0000

If you have worked on rpm based distro then you know how difficult it is to downgrade packages. And unluckily I upgraded some packages to fc12 and was still on FC11. Completely my mistake while doing some R&D. Anyway to downgrade I had to device some mechanism and here it is:

rpm -qa –qf ”%-30{NAME}%-20{RELEASE}\n” |grep fc12 |awk '{print $1}’|tr ’\n’ ’ ’ >downgrade

yum downgrade `cat downgrade`

Finding all numbers that are bigger than 1 in vim

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:37:08 +0000

/^([2-9]d*|1d+)
If we have a csv like structure

The trick here is simple, lets look at the regex from the begining:

^ – start from the begining
() – start and end of block
[] – digits within this. So we are looking from 2 to 9 to exclude the numbers begining with 1
d – search for digits

– search for one or more
| – or operation
1 – search for numbers begining with 1

– containing atleast one occurence or more.<h6 class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta <ul class="zemanta-article-ul"> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://sparksspace.blogspot.com/2009/10/adding-leading-zeros-in-excel.html">Adding Leading Zeros in Excel (sparksspace.blogspot.com)

Chrome – Chromium on Linux (repo)

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:51:51 +0000

Fedora people put up a repo for the chrome web browser and it is quite frequently updated. All you need to do to install the browser is following:

sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/chrome.repo

and add the following lines

name=Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Once this is done, you can install the browser with yum as follows:

sudo yum install chromium

[[danscartoon]]

Compiz/Beryl issue on Fedora.

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:04:12 +0000

Since quite some time I was getting the below error when I am trying to run compiz. I was busy and also was not working in Gnome so did not look at this until today.

compiz (core) – Fatal: Root visual is not a GL visual.

on doing a grep in the Xorg log files found that the error is due to the mismatch of version between kernel module and the nvidia driver. The command to check the errors in the Xorg log file is

gnome-shell and gnome-do on F11 Screenshots

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:02:25 +0000

Here are some screenshots of gnome-shell :

Using snmp trap receiver on Fedora (Linux)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:25:19 +0000

First off install the net-snmp things:

sudo yum install net-snmp net-snmp-utils

After that it will run out of the box with the command:

sudo snmptrapd -A -d -n -Lf trap.log

Some interesting links:

<a class="fixed" href="http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/TUT:snmptrap" target="_blank">http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/TUT:snmptrap
<a class="fixed" href="http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/TUT:Configuring_snmptrapd#Matching_SNMPv2_OIDs" target="_blank">http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/TUT:Configuring_snmptrapd#Matching_SNMPv2_OIDs
<a class="fixed" href="http://www.net-snmp.org/tutorial/tutorial-5/commands/snmptrap.html" target="_blank">http://www.net-snmp.org/tutorial/tutorial-5/commands/snmptrap.html

internal error from PackageKit — packagekit Error Type:

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:25:18 +0000

If you get the below error then there is a bug files <a href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=476352" target="_blank">here.

Error Type:
Error Value: ’NoneType’ object is unsubscriptable
File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/yum/yumBackend.py, line 2280, in

main()
File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/yum/yumBackend.py, line 2277, in main
backend.dispatcher(sys.argv[1:])
File : /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/packagekit/backend.py, line 600, in
dispatcher
self.dispatch_command(args[0], args[1:])
File : /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/packagekit/backend.py, line 526, in
dispatch_command
self.refresh_cache()
File : /usr/share/PackageKit/helpers/yum/yumBackend.py, line 1130, in
refresh_cache
self.yumbase.repos.populateSack(which=[repo.id], mdtype=’metadata’,
cacheonly=1)
File : /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/repos.py, line 223, in
populateSack
self.doSetup()
File : /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/repos.py, line 71, in doSetup
self.ayum.plugins.run(’postreposetup’)
File : /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/plugins.py, line 178, in run
func(conduitcls(self, self.base, conf, **kwargs))
File : /usr/lib/yum-plugins/rpm-warm-cache.py, line 31, in postreposetup_hook
if commands[0] in (’upgrade’, ’install’, ’remove’):

feh – versatile image viewer works from command line too.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:13:27 +0000

To install :

sudo yum install feh

From the info for the feh package:

feh – versatile image viewer works from command line too
premier image file handling library. feh has many features,
from simple single file viewing, to multiple file modes using
a slideshow or multiple windows. feh supports the creation of
montages as index prints with many user-configurable options.

One of the reasons, I install feh as one of the first packages on any installation is the reason that it can open multiple images like in stack. To make things even more simpler I create a alias like this:

Calculations

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:18:34 +0000

<img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/perl-one-liners.jpg" alt="Perl One Liners" align="bottom" />This is the third part of a seven-part article on famous Perl one-liners. In this part I will create various one-liners for calculations. See <a href="http://www.catonmat.net/blog/perl-one-liners-explained-part-one/">part one for introduction of the series.

Famous Perl one-liners is my attempt to create “perl1line.txt” that is similar to “<a href="http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-one-liners-explained-part-one/">awk1line.txt” and “<a href="http://www.catonmat.net/blog/sed-one-liners-explained-part-one/">sed1line.txt” that have been so popular among Awk and Sed programmers.

The article on famous Perl one-liners will consist of at least seven parts:

No sound on Fedora 11 Leonidas – resolved.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:59:31 +0000

I have been trying to get the sound working on the F11 install that I had. Searched all the sites and blogs I could find. Nothing seemed to be working.

Finally I did a

alsactl init

and WOW, I have got my sound. Worht a try if you too are having issues with sound.

Access the disk image created by Qemu using guestfish in Fedora.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:57:06 +0000

If you are used to using Qemu for doing some experiments with different distro’s then you would also understand the problem of having to do ftp/ssh to copy the files from virtual machine to local machine. Also you have to run the machine to do that. How would you like to have a application that can help you copy the files to and from the image without having to run the VM. That’s exactly what the guestfish does. How to do it, quick demo here:

Linux xdg-open — replacement for start in windows

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:56:30 +0000

if you want to open any document with the default document handler from the bash prompt or command prompt in linux then the simplest way to do that is use ”xdg-open”.

This can also be used in bash scripts to allow users to select which document to open without worrying about if a particular application is installed or not. Example could be where you have list of documents in the current directory (same kind or of different format.) and you want the user to select the document. In such a scenario you can take the user input for the filename and user ”xdg-open filename” to open the file irrespective of the file type or worrying about if xpdf is installed or abiword is installed or not.

rebuild rpm from installed rpm with rpmrebuild

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:16:19 +0000

Ever happened to you that you downloaded and installed a rpm and then deleted the package? If your answer is yes, then there is a solution.

Come to the fairyland of rpmrebuild. Create the rpm from the installed files and give a new number if required.

sudo yum install rpmrebuild

Simplest use is to

rpmrebuild

but I personally like the one mentioned below:

rpmrebuild -R -v -P –pug-from-db

RPMFusion release for YUM.

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 02:46:59 +0000

For people who have used yum on Fedora, you must have seen that couple of packages that you require are on Livna and couple of them on DAG and some others on FreshRPMs and Dribble. And for those of you, who have tried to install the packages from all these repositories, I know it is difficult. The repo’s never worked too well together.

So finallly there is a nice solution to all these problems, <a href="http://rpmfusion.org/" target="_blank">RPMFusion is the solution. This is a effort to merge the repo in all the four above mentioned repo. just now installed the repo and am updating my system and definately hope to get a lot lesser problems now. 🙂

On screen display of a command

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:23:02 +0000

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/category/linux/">Bookmark this category
delay: 2d On screen display of a command. $ date|osd_cat This is very useful if you need to show someone some text from a distance. (Like someone standing over your shoulder…)

I’d recommend aliasing it to something like:

alias osd_cat=”osd_cat -o 400 -s 8 -c blue -d 60 -f osd_cat -f -*-bitstream vera sans-*-*-*–200-*-*-*-*-*-*-*”

xosd is the utility that provides osd_cat.

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root shell auditing and syslog entry for all commands of shell

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:28:51 +0000

A lot of times there is a need to log all the messages and the output of the shell to the file or syslog. Sometimes I need that for some user too. script command can be used to do this but then sometimes you cannot tell the user the session is logged or you can ask the user to run this command and it should be automatically done. And sometimes there is a need put the output in the syslog so that the root user has more control and also mail for syslog is sufficient to be analyzed rather than looking for other files. Finally I found this :

top command with rc to make it more useful and beautiful.

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:28:48 +0000

Just for fun, somedays back I was reading the top command. This command is something that I have been using since long time and have never read the man page so I thought let me do that. And yes, it was worth while to look at that page. I came to know that top supports toprc file and that it can be used to configure the way top looks. So:

Managing your remote site locally – sitecopy.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:49:34 +0000

If you are managing a remote site, web server that you do not have direct access to (terminal or ssh) and you have to do it with cpanel, then I know how much pain it is. I had the same issue until recently when I discovered <a href="http://http://www.manyfish.co.uk/sitecopy/" target="_blank">sitecopy.

Description of sitecopy:

sitecopy allows you to easily maintain remote Web sites. The program will upload files to the server which have changed locally, and delete files from the server which have been removed locally, to keep the remote site synchronized with the local site, with a single command. sitecopy will also optionally try to spot files you move locally, and move them remotely. FTP and WebDAV servers are supported.

Diary and Journal on your linux Desktop

Tue, 26 May 2009 15:34:04 +0000

<a href="http://digitaldump.wordpress.com/projects/rednotebook/" target="_blank">RedNotebook is a diary and journel for the *nix OS. This is a great software with some very good features.

This is available on fedora repo and hence to install you can just type:

sudo yum install rednotebook

Some features to note are:

Enter text for individual days and navigate using a fancy calendar
Add Categories to days and fill them with small content
Tag your entries
Format your text bold, italic or <span style="text-decoration: underline;">underlined
Insert Images, files and links to websites
Links and mail addresses are recognized automatically
(Live-) Search
Automatic saving
Backup to zip archive
Word Clouds with most often used words and tags
Create a template for each day
Export the journal to HTML, Latex or plain text
RedNotebook is Open Source Software, you are free to use and redistribute it under the terms of the GPL

MinGW – compile windows software on Linux

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:52:37 +0000

For all the windows developer out there, it is impossible to switch to Linux just because someone is looking for the Windows exe. Sooooooo bad. Not any more. There has been the MinGW compiler (and others) to compile the C programs on Linux box to run on Windows box. These cross compilers create windows exe and thus these can run on Windows natively without additional dll’s. That’s quite good, so how to do it.

Fedora on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

Creating and using ackrc

mussh-run-commands-on-multiple-hosts

terminal.sexy – make your teminal sexy

Check your session type – wayland or X11

Running dnsmasq with NetworkManager in Fedora

Fedora – dnsmasq with NetworkManager

Gnome with i3 on Fedora 29

bash function for rpm whatprovides

rats – source code analysis

systemctl enable and start service

recoll – Desktop search tool

sigil – ebook editor

ranger – try terminal file manager

glances – new way to look at contention

vagrant box to libvirtd (QEMU) VM

Send history of current host to some other host over ssh

asciinema – video for your terminal session

remind – set and manager reminders the easy way

Fedora – change from one edition to some other

flatpak – get latest libreoffice

systemd – start service when you enable it

Kernel dropped packet analysis

journalctl command to see kernel messages

ansible with docker dynamic inventory

power saving on laptop

enki editor – amazing for md and rst files

xsos – a tool for sysadmins and support

sysreporter on Fedora – basic system report in email

{#user-content-sysreporter.anchor}SysReporter

firewalld – enable logging

speed up journalctl

Most simple and fast lightweight container with Fedora systemd

virsh – show ip address of all running VMs

Disk usage by file type

Text file based presentation tool – pinpoint

Executing commands on multiple hosts

Network Manager post-up script (dispatcher script)

dnsmasq local name resolution with NetworkManager

ShellCheck – check basic POSIX shell script errors

evvsubst – substitute variables in text in shell

Easily monitor and archive your system log reports.

tlp – optimize and maximize your battery power.

retext – Editor for restructured text

tracer – trace outdated files on your system

PID File for squid in Fedora – 21 ( Fedora.next)

Fedora/Ubuntu issue with assigned IP by dhcp server.

speedtest cli

shell script for some quick tests on Linux

colorize your logs

apache in docker to serve local website

repotrack and repoquery -commands to resolve dependencies.

script to get hard disk health in fedora/ubuntu

Whaaw! light weight media player

ncurses based eFTE editor – programmers lightweight editor

nomacs – light weight image viewer

nall – schedule your tasks like a pro

Download Ticket Service – dl is now on fedora.

tlp – optimize and maximize your battery power.

Backup – simple and intelligent

x2go – possible replacement to VNC

unrar or unar – go open source way

terminal in browser.

sunflower – file manager.

Xephyr – Nested X Server

xca – Graphical X.509 certificate management tool

Related articles across the web

Fedora.next – what is it?

Related articles across the web

Sandbox apache (httpd) for better security.

Sandbox Firefox – First step to security

get all the urls in html file (local or on server).

Related articles

nautilis fork ( File manager ) with tree view in sidebar.

mpd – change the music directory context for selinux.

Related articles

cgroups – use to control your cpu and memory

more clients for mpd.

get systemd journal entries on web interface.

sxiv – image viewer