Owner: micrux.net URL:http://micrux.net/ Join Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:43:07 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Tips and ramblings about computers and Linux. Site statistics:Click here
DJing on Linux 2007-06-18 02:17:40 Long long ago before I became enlightened by Linux
, I used to have Windows on all of my computers. I also used to have a program for windows for DJing which was called VirtualDJ. Basically, there are two mp3 players next to each other skinned to look like turntables. Each one could be controlled like a turntable (i.e. you could grab it and scratch the song, you could control the playback speed of the track, etc.) It also had beat matching features, a cross-fader, and different effects. It was a fun way to mix music on your computer using your entire electronic music library if your vinyl collection was limited.
Those days are long gone now that I’ve made my new home with Linux, and VirtualDJ is no reason to switch back to windows. So I’ve been without this sort of app for a year or so. I’ve made some attempts to find similar applications for Linux, but most of them were pretty lame or didn’t include one essential feature or another. But just the other day I was
SSH Reverse Tunneling 2007-06-14 22:13:20 I recently came across a unique networking problem. I had a computer that was behind a NAT firewall which needed to be accessible for Remote Desktop. Actually, it was behind 2 NAT devices, but that’s sort of irrelevant. After spending a lot of time trying to get the correct ports forwarded, I found out that my ISP was blocking incoming traffic anyways. The next obvious solution was SSH tunneling. But this was also problematic, because not only was this computer behind a NAT, but the computer that needed to access it was ALSO behind a NAT. Not to mention, the client computer would be coming from an unpredictable IP address. So my attack plan was to have a third machine sitting on the internet which could act as an intermediary between the client and the remote desktop server. I already had a third machine available, but this was where using SSH tunnels became tricky.
An SSH tunnel is basically a connection from one computer to another computer across the internet which is encrypte Read more:Reverse
Renewed 2007-06-14 02:18:43 It’s been almost 2 months since I’ve posted. Isn’t that the lamest and most commonly found line in blogs? Anyways. I’m planning on getting back on the ball here with this thing. I just got hooked up with a sweet hosting company, so this site should be rockin’ now. Props to Dreamhost for putting up with my craziness. One of the neater features of Dreamhost is that they give you a utility to turn video files into flash movies to put on your site, just like in my previous post. So, since my camera also takes video, I might just start carrying that with me and seeing what happens. Anyways, I feel a sleep crash coming on.
Beluga Ball Prank 2007-06-14 01:43:55 We busted in on Beluga while he was on the john, check it out.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Read more:Prank
Update: Feisty 2007-04-20 03:14:31 Well after a few hours of kicking and screaming at my computer, I finally got Ubuntu 7.04 working on my desktop. I don’t know what originally caused my video card drivers to get messed up, but it was my own stupidity that drove the problem even further. I set my VideoRam in my config to what I thought was logical, 128. I know my video card is 128MB, so that just seemed right. Hours later I noticed that my xorg log said something to the effect of “Video Memory is 128KB overrides 131057KB.” That’s when I relealized it was measuring in KB rather than MB. Well, apparently the driver doesn’t like being so memory restricted. I got rid of the offending line and my entire install immediately began to work perfectly. Plus, I’m running the Ubuntu-recommended ATI drivers, so I won’t have to worry about future updates.
Now that I’ve cleared that up, I’m very happy with Feisty
. Gaim is a new version, OpenOffice is new and snazzy, Amarok is rocki Read more:Update
So Far, Disappointed with Feisty 2007-04-19 21:20:01 I waited all night, and I waited all morning for the newest release of Ubuntu. I was hanging out on #ubuntu-release-party channel on freenode. I was so excited! When I got home from classes it was finally released. I started the torrent… I found my nearest mirror… The servers were being clobbered. By the time I finally finished with the upgrade, I couldn’t wait to hit the restart button. Immediately upon reboot…. Wham! I got an xorg error. I spent the next 40 minutes working on the command line trying to get my ATI driver working. My last resort finally got me into the GUI, but only on a generic driver. It turns out that I was stuck in the middle of a partial upgrade. I’m finishing the upgrade now, but my Internet connection is capped. I hope these last 215 packages fixes the problem. I seem to always have ATI driver problems. Why can’t they just work? Why can’t everybody just be linux-friendly? 17 more minutes. I just want my Feisty
:(
sudo 2007-04-18 13:32:28 Ubuntu 7.04 comes out tomorrow! How exciting. I’ll celebrate by posting this geeky comic I found on the Internet.
Props to the author.
Google Apps 2007-03-26 00:52:36 Everybody likes Google
’s gmail! I’ve been using gmail for 2 or 3 years now, and it’s fantastic. Just when I thought life couldn’t get any better, I discovered Google Apps
. Google Apps is a package of services that Google offers which you can bind (pardon the pun) to a domain of your choosing. The services that Google Apps currently includes are, of course, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendars, and more. Best of all, it’s free. This means that you can have all the goodness of Gmail, AND the awesomeness of having an e-mail address at your own domain. So, for example, I can set up Google Apps with the domain I already own, micrux.net. This lets me set up as many as 50 e-mail accounts @micrux.net. I can set up multiple e-mails for myself, or set one up for my friend at john@micrux.net. You can also set up a google talk account at your own domain. Nobody will ever have to know that you’re using google’s services.
Also, since Google Apps is configure
Whoops… 2007-03-18 03:25:04 Don’t you hate it when you do something really stupid? Like when you’re drinking something and you accidentally open your mouth and it spills all over the carpet? Yeah I hate it too. Read more:hellip
Dell Sucks 2007-03-17 22:55:45 Grandma needs help with her computer. Simple enough. I went over to Grandma’s house today to take a look at her computer, and after some routine maintenence and cleaning I found a boot error. “Alert Previous Fan Error. Strike the F1 key to continue or hit F2 to enter setup.” So I opened up the computer, and sure enough it has a dead CPU fan. The fan is encased in a special assembly. I figured no problem, I checked around online for the replacement, and I was finding the whole assembly for ridiculous prices… $45, and some upwards of $100! Who is going to pay more than $10 to replace their FAN?! And even if it was cheap, I wasn’t going to order it and wait for it to ship; I’m leaving town in less than 24 hours. I’ll just go buy a new fan, snap it into the assembly and we’ll all be happy. Hardly.
The fan is attached to the assembly with the most bizzare-looking rubber fasteners. Rubber! I could yank on them, but I can’t get the stup
Sun’s Project Looking Glass 2007-06-20 02:20:13 I recently found a video demonstrating one of Sun’s new open source projects called Project
Looking Glass
(also here). Looking Glass is a 3D desktop environment which can display any regular 2D window in 3D space. It’s based on Java, so it’s cross-platform and can run on Linux, Solaris, or Windows. It also incorporates transparency effects into normal program windows to complete the effect. One of the cool things you can do is drag a window off to the side and it will tilt itself out of the way so that you can see more of your desktop while still viewing the window. You can also flip any window completely around and write notes on the back of it. I thought that feature was pretty original. Unlike many other 3D environments like Beryl, Looking Glass doesn’t have the classic 3D spinning cube effect. Instead, Looking Glass allows you to grab all of your open windows and rotate them arbitrarily in 3D space. While you’re rotating the windows in 3D, Looking Glas
Better than Dual Boot 2007-06-24 17:25:39 One of the biggest issues people have with switching to Linux is dependence on applications that will only run on Windows. One solution to this problem is to set up a dual boot system. You can partition your hard drive into two logical drives, install Windows on one and Linux on the other. Then you can set up your bootloader to ask you which operating system you want to load on boot. This is an excellent way to transition into Linux. You can run Linux to learn it and get acclimated with it, and whenever you need to use a Windows-specific application, you can just reboot into windows. But what if you want to run both operating systems at the same time? You could use VMware to set up a virtual machine on which you can install your secondary OS. I tried this for a while, but I found it to be clunky, slow and unreliable. It had lots of quirks (like trying to transparently use USB, or bizarre installation problems.) If you have an extra PC lying around, you can set up a much more reliable a
Internet Radio Day of Silence 2007-06-26 00:46:27 I know that everybody else has already posted about this, but I figured I would help try to spread the word. If today were a normal day, I would tell you about how awesome Pandora is. It’s an Internet
radio station that plays a customized stream of music tailored to your own preferences. It’s one of the coolest things I have ever found on the Internet. But if you haven’t tried it yet, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Today, June 26, 2007, is Internet Radio
Day of Silence. Most Internet radio stations today are going off line in observance of this day. They’re doing it to raise awareness about a new royalty rate increase that would require Internet radio stations to pay more than three times as much royalty fees as they’re paying right now. This would drive virtually every Internet radio station out of business. You can help by going to SaveNetRadio.org where they have tools to help you contact your representatives. There already is a bill in congr Read more:Internet Radio
Enhance Web Browsing with OpenDNS 2007-07-10 02:33:19 Using OpenDNS
is an easy way to improve several aspects of your Internet connection. OpenDNS is a free DNS service which incorporates several helpful features transparently. OpenDNS can make your Internet connection safer, faster, smarter and more reliable.
OpenDNS incorporates an anti phishing database into its services to protect you from phishing websites. If ever you come across a phishing website, OpenDNS will identify it before the page loads and display a warning message. The anti phishing feature is turned on automatically with OpenDNS service. OpenDNS also optionally allows you to block adult websites by type, as well as block any domain you specify. OpenDNS also removes DNS resolving from your ISP’s servers which makes it harder for your ISP to track which websites you visit. Keep in mind, though, this is not an anonymizer serivce.
Since OpenDNS has lots and lots of users, they are able to cache large amounts of DNS data in their servers. Typically, there are many more Read more:Browsing
Firefox Bookmark Shortcuts 2007-07-09 21:27:11 Firefox includes a feature which allows you to quickly and easily access your bookmarked websites directly from the address bar. For each bookmark in Firefox, you can specify a keyword. Putting this keyword into the address bar brings you to your bookmarked web page. So, for example, you could set up a bookmark for micrux.net, and create the keyword micrux. Then, just type micrux in the address bar and the bookmark will be immediately accessed. But this feature is much cooler than that. Firefox allows you to put a %s in the address location which will be replaced on-the-fly with whatever text you put after your keyword in the address bar. Here’s a simple example to quickly bookmark a Google search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s
Put that string in as your bookmark location, and then you can put any convenient keyword, let’s use google as the keyword. Now save it. When you go to your address bar, type google micrux and Firefox will pass micrux as the search term Read more:Firefox
, Bookmark
, Shortcuts
Fixing Azureus Core Dump Issue 2007-07-13 15:47:34 I’ve been running the Azureus
BitTorrent client on Ubuntu for a while. Recently it’s started having problems starting up. Usually it will be running and then it will crash spontaneously, and then when I restart it it loads until it gets to the main window and the immediately crashes. It will then crash every time I load it after that. Launching Azureus from the command line yielded a Java core dump error message. After searching around on the Internet and in forums, I found a tip that if you delete the files in ~/.azureus/logs, and then start it again it won’t crash. It works every time for me. The problem now is that this issue keeps popping up. A few days after fixing it, Azureus will crash again in the same fashion. So, here’s how you can modify Azureus to make sure that this issue gets taken care of automatically.
Before I continue, I should mention that I don’t have much experience with shell scripting. I just hacked around with this and it worked. If
Google Reader Helps You Manage Your Feeds 2007-07-12 22:14:28 If you have a lot of websites that you like to visit regularly, GoogleReader
can help you consolidate and coordinate your daily web browsing ritual. Google Reader
is an RSS feed reader for tracking updates to all of your favorite websites. Anytime you find a website that you want to check regularly, can add that website’s feed to Google Reader. The feed is basically a specialized web page that tells Google Reader when updates happen on that site and what the updates are. Almost every modern website offers these RSS feeds, and it’s pretty easy to find the feeds on the site’s homepage.
There are many different RSS feed readers available. Sometimes they’re called aggregators. In principal they all do almost the same thing, but Google Reader has Google’s special touch.
(more…)
aggregator, feed, google, reader, rss Read more:Manage
Microsoft .NET Patch Trouble 2007-07-12 14:34:27 The SANS Internet Storm Center and The Register are reporting that Microsoft
’s MS07-040 patch is causing people’s computers to go ‘haywire.’ According to the reports, any number of problems could happen to your computer after this patch is applied. If any part of your system seems to be going haywire, then you might have already applied this patch.
It’s these kinds of stories that make me glad I’m not running Microsoft Windows on my computers. It’s not too late for you to switch! If you haven’t applied the patch yet, you should probably wait until this whole thing gets figured out.
.NET, haywire, microsoft, MS07 040, patch, windows Read more:Patch
, Trouble
How To Shutdown Linux on a Timer 2007-07-11 22:57:56 This is a relatively simple tip, but if you’re new to Linux
you might not be familiar with it. I don’t believe there is a built-in feature for doing this within Gnome or KDE, but this uses the command line so it will work in any environment. Shutting down your computer on a timer can be useful if you want to do something like put on a music playlist, and then have your computer automatically turn off after an hour. Kind of like the sleep timer on your TV.
This is quite simple to implement. You will need to open the command line to use this, but don’t fear! You don’t need to know anything about how to use the command line. In fact, I’ll even tell you how to make a handy little button for this.
(more…)
linux, shutdown, sleep timer, timer, ubuntu, unix Read more:Shutdown
, Timer
Google Releases Google Desktop for Linux 2007-07-11 01:12:46 I know this news is a few days old, but it’s still pretty cool. Google
has finally released a Linux
version of their popular desktop search application. The cool thing about Google Desktop
is that it doesn’t just search for files, it also searches within files. It will search within any text file, and also within files like pdf. It sits quietly in the background and indexes your system, and to call it up just hit Ctrl twice. It even searches in your e-mail history if you want.
I’m glad to see that Google is keeping Linux in the loop with their software (Google Earth, Picasa.) A lot of companies blatantly exclude Linux even when they claim they’re being “Cross-Platform.” That’s a topic for another time.
desktop, google, google earth, linux, picasa Read more:Google Desktop
Fix a b0rk3d Linux Terminal 2007-07-11 00:09:24 If you’ve used Linux
or Unix terminals, then you may have come across the problem of having a messed up terminal. I’m not entirely sure about how it happens, but some programs send exactly the right stream of data to your terminal so that all you see is nonsense. Sometimes only the window title gets messed up, but more commonly the entire character set will be replaced with nothing but nonsense.
Usually, you can just close the terminal and open a fresh one to mitigate this problem. Other times, say when you’re not using a windowed terminal in X, you simply cannot close and restart the terminal. In this case, you need to reset the terminal. This program should come with your system. The command is simply:
reset
If you read the manual page on this command, it tells you that all it’s doing is re-initializing the terminal. So the next time X won’t start and you’re trying to fix it and this happens to your terminal, you have no reason to freak out! If you
Optimize Google For Your Website 2007-07-16 16:09:20 If you have your own website, then getting your website to cooperate with search engines is critical to getting traffic to your site. There are many strategies for optimizing your website for Google
, but optimizing Google for you website can also be beneficial. Google Webmaster Tools allows you to submit information to Google about your website and tweak how Google crawls and indexes your website. It also gives you feedback and statistics about how Google’s search bot sees your website. With Webmaster Tools you can be sure that Google is bringing the most amount of traffic to your website.
The first thing you can do with Webmaster Tools is to verify your website with Google. You can either insert a special meta tag within the HTML of your homepage which Google woud then verify, or you can create a specific filename on your server. Once you’re verified, Google gives you access to the rest of their tools for your site.
In order to ensure that Google can get to every content p
New House 2007-07-15 09:51:27 This is off-topic, but I’m probably going to be a bit slow on the updates over the next few days because I’m moving into my new place. I’ll try to get to posting by the end of the day, but moving can be pretty exhausting. I do have a few writeups coming down the pipe, so all hope is not lost.
No Tags Read more:House
Upgrade Your Linux Process Manager 2007-08-14 02:52:14 In the Unix/Linux
command line environment, exploring the running processes is accomplished chiefly by two programs. top gives you a real-time list of running processes which updates periodically showing the most active processes at the top (hence the name.) ps takes a snapshot of the running processes and dumps them to the command line for you. Both of these methods work well, but a program called htop brings a little bit more sanity and convenience to the situation.
htop is ‘an interactive process-viewer for linux.’ It runs on the command line in real time like top does, but it utilizes ncurses and allows you to browse and interact with the processes. htop also features a colored interface making process management easier and more visually appealing.
htop has easy-to-read resource meters at the top of the interface which make it easy to survey the status of your system at a quick glance. The CPU meter shows you your CPU usage in a way that makes sense to humans. Where top Read more:Process
Ubuntu 30-Mount Check Annoyance 2007-08-13 02:31:25 If you’ve used Ubuntu
Linux for longer than a month, you’ve no doubt realized that every 30 times you boot up you are forced to run a filesystem check. This filesystem check is necessary in order to keep your filesystem healthy. Some people advise turning the check off completely, but that is generally not a recommended solution. Another solution is to increase the number of maximum mounts from 30 to some larger number like 100. That way it’s about 3 times less annoying. But this solution is also not recommended. Enter AutoFsck.
AutoFsck is a set of scripts that replaces the file system check script that comes shipped with Ubuntu. The difference is that AutoFsck doesn’t ruin your day if you are so unfortunate to encounter the 30th mount. The most important difference is that AutoFsck does its dirty work when you shut your computer down, not during boot when you need your computer the most!
The 30th time you mount your filesystem, AutoFsck will wait until you shu Read more:Check
, Annoyance
Note Taking on Linux! 2007-08-24 12:19:34 When I started college at UCF a few years ago, I received a free copy of Microsoft OneNote 2003. I was running Windows XP on my laptop at that time. OneNote was very useful for taking notes during class. I could organize each lecture onto its own note page, and organize all of my note pages into categories for each class. It took care of a lot of the little annoying problems that you encounter when using a plain text editor or a word processor to take notes. Those programs are really not geared towards taking notes.
A couple of semesters later, I upgraded my laptop from Windows XP to Linux
. I’m currently running Ubuntu Linux 7.04 on my laptop. Obviously, I cannot run OneNote on my laptop anymore. I have a separate box at home running windows, but OneNote is really only useful on a laptop, right? I tried taking notes with OpenOffice, AbiWord and various other applications, but they’re not note taking programs.
I recently discovered a program in the KDE suite called BasKet No Read more:Taking
Quick Tip: Toggle Previous Directory 2007-08-26 17:00:17 People who use the Linux/Unix command line to any extent are certainly familiar with the cd (change directory) command. In fact, this is probably one of the first commands you ever learned on the command line. When you’re working with the command line, a lot of times you need to switch to a directory and then come back to the same directory. The cd command allows you to use a dash as an operand for just such a situation.
/var/log $ cd /etc
/etc $ cd -
/var/log
/var/log $
Using cd with a dash instead of a directory location, you can easily jump back to the previous directory. In this example, I started at /var/log and then jumped to /etc and then back to /var/log. It also acts like a toggle, so if you keep doing cd - you will go back and forth between the two most recent directories.
cd, directory, linux, previous, tip, unix
Read more:Quick
, Directory
Restarting a Locked Linux Box Without Using Reset 2007-09-17 12:51:05 Everybody always talks about how Linux
is a very stable operating system. That may be true, but once in a while a Linux machine can become unstable. A lot of times, a Linux machine becomes unstable not because of Linux itself, but because of the software that’s running on top of it. For example, if X (which is the program that controls your graphics and your keyboard/mouse) crashes, then your computer may appear to be locked up when in fact Linux is still operating properly underneath X. Linux has a feature called Magic SysRq Key which allows you to communicate directly with the kernel in these types of scenarios. The Magic SysRq Key allows you to send signals to the Linux kernel for safely rebooting your computer in a last-ditch effort. Using this method instead of the reset button should greatly reduce the possibility of data loss or corruption. Only use the reset button on your computer if the Magic SysRq Key method doesn’t work.
Before using the Magic SysRq Key method, Read more:Locked
, Reset
Gutsy Gibbon Released 2007-10-18 13:52:28 Version 7.10 of Ubuntu Linux codenamed “Gutsy Gibbon
” was released today. This release is the first Ubuntu release to include Compiz Fusion desktop effects by default. I played with this feature during Gutsy’s beta testing phase, and there are a lot of interesting features. There were only a few minor bugs when I was testing it, but hopefully they’ve cleared those up for the final release.
This release will also finally support full read/write access to NTFS partitions. In a nutshell, this means that if you have Linux and Windows installed on your computer, you will be able to read and write to your Windows partition. This makes dual booting less painful since you don’t have to worry about how to share files between the two operating systems.
This release includes a host of other features, include Gnome 2.20, fast user switching, improved firefox plugins support, a graphical configuration tool for X, automated printer support, a new Linux kernel with power
Linux Kernel Source Code Screensaver 2008-01-08 23:36:04 I consider myself to be a geek. Linux
and geeks have a long history together. So, naturally there are a bunch of geeky things available for Linux. In this case, I’m talking about screensavers. I was looking for a screensaver that would show me something really cool about my system. Then I got the idea [...] Read more:Source
, Screensaver
, Source Code
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