Linux Blog

Here’s an old video I made that demonstrates how to connect to a wireless network using NetworkManager.
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Emanuele gave me the heads up of a new release of Vatlator which is a live CD for anonymous browsing. This is the first I’ve heard of Vatlator so naturally I downloaded it to see what it was all about. After setting up a new virtual machine and disk it had no problems booting up and did it fast. From testing Firefox, tor is enabled by default and works well, although a little slower but thats expected from using Tor. You may want to note that that not all traffic is routed through Tor, it would be best test to make sure that what you need is before you need to use it.
I installed the Virtual Box add-ons, and after restarting X by logging out, then logging back in (took me a while to figure this out) the resolution was much better. By the way, the sudo root password is vatlator. Since it is based on Ubuntu installing software works with apt-get and has a great range of packages.

One thing that baffles me is the “F… the censorship” slogan, it just seems a little hypocritical, but I can relate to reasons behind it. I’m definitely going to keep it handy since it runs great in Virtual Box, boots up quickly and performs really well. Kudo’s Emanuele!

While not exactly a shell script, I figured it would be worthy to post something rather than nothing and technically it is a script none-the-less.
I was experimenting with Asterisk AGI scripts and needed a project. I decided that an IP address lookup would be a good one. Sometimes my dynamic IP changes but my dynamic DNS doesn’t update. With this script, I should be able to dial into my Asterisk machine and get it to tell me the IP address. At least, that’s the plan.

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Did you remember to backup the files…?
All of them?
What do you mean *MOST* of them?
Well, you should have used one of these flippin’ utilities.
Off with his head!
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Occasionally when scripting it is desirable to not perform an action when modifying or creating a new script. In this case it is nice to be able to do a dry run similar to –dry-run for make.

When I’m making a script I’ve learned the hard way to:

1. Make backups before hand
2. Make backups while performing operations
3. Perform mock dry runs by using echo liberally.

So next time you’re trying to do something complex and don’t want to do something goofy, stick an echo in there before running it and save yourself some time.

Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/redteam/

This has to be the coolest background for beginning Linux users. What a great idea. I could probably use one of these. Especially for emacs but thats because I’m church of Vi baby.
Source: http://www.tux-planet.fr/public/images/wallpapers/linux/shell/linux-wallpaper-for-beginners-1280×1024.jpg