8thString

Remotely connecting to Linux securely in Android is like a walk in the park, ssh clients abound in Google Play Store. But ssh clients are not created alike. Some are designed with specific hardware in mind and for those who like to use physical keyboards, like Droid 3, you probably want to use all the keys. I have tried Terminal IDE, ConnectBot, Android Terminal Emulator but none of them work as I would have hoped. Like using ~, tab key for command line completion, display mc (Midnight Commander) properly. But one actually meet my need today, VX ConnectBot . In my understanding it is based on ConnectBot with changes to allow a much more pleasant experience using hardware keyboard. Try it for yourself, download from Google Play Store. Note: * Tested using Droid Razr Maxx using stock OS and Droid 3 using ICS.

Not sure if this is the right way to do it, searching the blogoshpere seems to indicate that this might be the case. Steps to change default port that Apache listens on: As good practice make a copy of the file ports.conf to somewhere safe. Like mkdir ~/bak cp /etc/apache2/ports.conf ~/bak Open and edit ports.conf, like sudo vim /etc/apache2/ports.conf . In Ubuntu 12.10, change Listen 80 to Listen 81 . This should be around line 9, of course change 81 to a value that you need. Restart Apache to enforce the changes, like sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart . References: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/name-based.html http://ubuntublog.org/how-to-change-apache-ports-in-ubuntu.htm

To check if a file exists on a remote site (say a web site), do the following: $: wget --spider https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb The above command checks if a stable version of Google Chrome exists in the remote location specified.

How to get IP address in Arch Linux? Well, it turns out to be easy: #: ip addr You should see something like: 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 16436 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN     link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00     inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo     inet6 ::1/128 scope host        valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000     link/ether 00:1f:c6:d5:32:4d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff     inet 192.168.0.105/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global eth0     inet6 fe80::21f:c6ff:fed5:324d/64 scope link        valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN qlen 1000     link/ether 00:15:af:92:3e:8a brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff !Enjoy ts

Got a spanking brand new Fedora 17 install, it looks a lot different from Fedora 16 on the surface which is a welcome change, quite refreshing actually. Tried to do a software update but instead got the following error message: ERROR: database disk image is malformed  Seems like my rpm database got corrupted for some reason but this is a new install on VirtualBox. Anyway, got it fixed by doing the following: $ sudo yum clean dbcache ~ts

I am running openSUSE under VirtualBox to play around with the distribution. I am not really using it on a regular basis so it can be in the "Saved state" for several days. I am also using the guest additions that comes with it and for some reason it is not syncing with the host automatically. Got no time to investigate today but I would like to sync the time so that I can check for updates. As always in Linux land, there are thousand ways to do this and below is one quick way of doing it. sudo /etc/init.d/ntp restart Of course you have to do this at the command line. Reference(s): http://www.krazyworks.com/force-ntp-time-update-on-linux/ Have fun!!! Technos

Coming from Debian/Ubuntu camp, I know that ifup eth0 or ifdown eth0 can be used to bring a network interface down/up. Unfortunately, ifup and ifdown is not available by default on an Arch netinstall. Also, it seems like ifup/ifdown are now in the list of deprecated tools. So, what's the alternative? Use ip  command, like to bring down an interface do: #: ip link set eth0 down Conversely, if you want to bring up an interface, do: #: ip link set eth0 up Enjoy! Tags: Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, interface, ifup, ifdown, replacement, alternative

Work in progress!!! I have been pretty intrigued with Arch Linux for sometime. I have read numerous times in Distrowatch forum that this distribution can easily replace Ubuntu and that Ubuntu actually makes the name of Linux bad. It is touted by most that it is one of those real Linux, in the same ranks as Debian or Gentoo. My recent experience with Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 on VirtualBox were not good to put it mildly. Now I am in quest for the best Linux distro that can be installed on VirtualBox. By the way, Ubuntu 11.10 works like charm on VMware ESXi 5.0. Should I just dump VirtualBox? Maybe not just yet. With VirtualBox, I can run it on Windows and Linux and still be productive. With VMware ESXi, I need to dedicate a machine for that. I do have 5 boxes running VMware ESXi for software testing but I do need access to Windows on my work laptop. I can also move to VMware Workstation but I have higher hopes for VirtualBox as it is developed at a much faster pace. Plu

Is it just me or GNOME 3 based distributions are getting buggy? I have tried Ubuntu 11.10, Linux Mint 12, Fedora 15 (I should update to Fedora 16 soon), but I can't help but complain about the performance of this latest distributions virtualized using VirtualBox. Or is VirtualBox that's getting really buggy??? :( Ubuntu 11.10 feels really slow, clicking on an application using Unity takes forever to bring up the applications main GUI (even gedit is slow). Linux Mint 12 while looks nice but also is problematic. Clicking on Mint Menu shows blank items ... and it only shows up the entries once I wiggle the mouse around. Picture speaks a thousand words, so see below. Figure 1. Mint Menu shows blank on the left side :( Another issue I have observed with Linux Mint 12 is that the menu gets out of sync. So like if select Internet it does not move focus to it. But the items to the right gets updated. Again, see below for a screen capture. Figure 2. Menus are out of syn

Linux Mint 11 (Katya) was released 2011-05-26. As usual it comes with all the goodies but this time user can download an ISO without all the codecs. Below shows version numbers of the major packages. Release: Linux Mint 11 Code name: Katya Linux: 2.6.38-8-generic GNOME: 2.32.1 X.Org X Server 1.10.1 So here goes how the installation looks like. Figure 1. Boot screen, looks really nice and clean Figure 2. Linux Mint 11 Live CD desktop Figure 3. Install to hard drive, select English as language Figure 4. Preparing for installation Figure 5. Allocate drive space Figure 6. Erase disk and install Mint Figure 7. Select time zone Figure 8. Select keyboard layout Figure 9. Create user Figure 10. Install complete, ready to reboot Figure 11. Login screen Figure 12. Linux Mint 11 desktop

To get X Org servers version from command line, do: Xorg -version Sample output from the command above looks like this: X.Org X Server 1.7.7 Release Date: 2010-05-04 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.32.29-dsa-ia32 i686 Debian Current Operating System: Linux deb6 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Mon Jun 13 04:13:06 UTC 2011 i686 Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-686 root=UUID=6df69de5-fdf6-4729-a83b-c56fb0d8af3f ro quiet Build Date: 19 February 2011  02:37:36PM xorg-server 2:1.7.7-13 (Cyril Brulebois <kibi@debian.org>) Current version of pixman: 0.16.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Tags: X Server, X Window, version, command line, console, cli

Connecting from Windows Server 2008 R2 from Linux is made easy using rdesktop. But if you want to connect from your W2k8 box to another Windows box, as part of Windows security you are requested to send CTRL+ALT+END. Doing so does not work. So what's the key sequence to send secure attention sequence ? It is Control+Alt+End :(

Just installed Google Chrome v12 in openSUSE 11.4, everything seems great. But when I tried to run it nothing happens. I fired up konsole and this shows up timus@opensuse114:~/Downloads> google-chrome /usr/bin/google-chrome: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory timus@opensuse114:~/Downloads> Looks like we have missing dependencies. Searching repo, like: zypper search libpng shows the following... S | Name                  | Summary                                                      | Type   --+-----------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------+--------   | libpng12-0            | Library for the Portable Network Graphics Format (PNG)       | package   | libpng12-compat-devel | Development Tools for applications which will use the Libpng | package   | libpng12-devel        | Development Tools for applications which will use the Libpng | package i | li

Tools to clean up xml files abound in  the internet. But if you have a need to do batch processing of a bunch of files or just the plan joy of doing it from the command line then you can use xmllint . If you are using openSUSE, Ubuntu or Linux Mint 10 (and many other Linux distro) then this is come pre-installed. xmllint is flexible and have way more features than shown below but this should give you a taste of the tools usefulness. So to tidy up an xml file do: xmllint –format ugly.xml –output pretty.xml ~ts

I own an Asus Eee PC 900 (Intel Celeron M processor 900MHz). Of course you can only do so much with this machine so having an optimized OS does help a lot. Just recently I have replaced my OS/Linux distro with Puppeee (Linux 2.6.35.7celeron). This distro does feel light and fast. It comes with what you would expect from a descent distribution. The default web browser is Midori 0.2.9 (based on WebKit) which works okay. Unfortunately it does not work well with Pandora. It maybe because Pandora requires Flash support which I am not sure if Midori is configured in Puppeee to work with the plugin. I have used Pandora with Google Chrome so I was hoping that it might work with that browser. Installing Chrome is quite straightforward in Puppeee. First, download the latest from  http://puppeee.com/files/distsfs/ , I picked chrome-10.sfs  using Mindori. Once done, click Puppy menu -> System -> Control Panel . Select Software tab, then SFS-Loader load squash files . Browse to where you s

Say, you have a USB thumb drive that you want to donate or give to a friend and you want to ensure that nothings left that might embarrass you, don't worry my friend. As always in the Linux/Unix land there is a tool for that. So to wipe clean a USB drive, do: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc "/dev/zero" is a special file  that provides a stream of null characters. "/dev/sdc" is the USB thumb drive. dd is a low level system utility used to copy raw data from a source to a destination. Source being a stream of zeros and destination the thumb drive. So, we just wiped clean our storage media. Note that this is applicable to most storage devices, so be careful. ~ts

There are many ways to do this. One way of would be open up konsole, then do: kwrite --version Kwrite is one of the default applications the comes with KDE. This should show something like: Qt: 4.6.3 KDE Development Platform: 4.4.4 (KDE 4.4.4) "release 3" KWrite: 4.4.4 (KDE 4.4.4) "release 2

Fedora 14 does not include Adobe flash player in their repository as it is non-free. To install the plugin for Firefox, Mozilla or SeaMonkey you have to do it manually. To do this go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ , select YUM for Linux. Download this to a convenient location, by default  this goes to /home/[user]/Downloads if you are using Firefox. Open a console and do: cd ~/Downloads su -c 'rpm -ivh adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm' What we have just done is install the repositories file, if you check /etc/yum.repos.d, you should see adobe-linux-i386.repo. This allows Fedora update manager to automatically update our copy of flash player should new version is available. To complete this part we have to import GPG key, thus say: su -c 'rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux' Now to install the plugin do: su -c 'yum install nspluginwrapper alsa-plugins-pulseaudio flash-plugin' You can check if the plugin is working by hitting th

Fedora 14 was released last Nov 2, 2010, awfully long time ago in the Linux world. Anyway, I am just documenting here how it looks like installing Fedora 14 in VirtualBox. I have done this for the top 5 distributions and I am gonna do this for Fedora again. In terms of the installation screens, nothing much that meets the eye. I have no doubt that internally much has changed. Anyway, what follows are the screen capture while I was installing Fedora 14. As usual, you can use the images as you see fit, no need for permission. Figure 1. Boot splash Figure 2. Live installer login screen Figure 3. Live installer desktop Figure 4. Installer first screen Figure 5. Keyboard Selection Figure 6. Initialize disk Figure 7. Set machine hostname Figure 8. Storage Type Figure 8a. Figure 9. Root password Figure 10. Storage allocation Figure 11. Timezone selection Figure 12. Installation complete Figure 13. Welcome screen Figure 14. License Information Figure 15. Creat

I have a custom Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat install using alternate install. Part of the minimal install was a lean GNOME configuration with only the bare minimum applications installed. I have added synaptic and update-manager to keep the system up to date using GUI application. The issue was that when I open up Synaptic, I keep getting: Enter your password to perform administrative task To fix this, add desktop-base, thus say: sudo aptitude install desktop-base Enjoy! ~ts