When re-installing or performing a fresh installs of Linux, I’ve found that packages often disappear from default installations. These are the tools I install from the get-go. I’m sure there is more that I’m missing, next time I re-install I’ll update the list. Feel free to contribute your favorites to the list in the comments!
I recently got a new computer. Part of the upgrade process was backing up and moving a large amount of data off of my old PC and onto my NAS so that I could sort through it later. One of the annoying things about copying files is it’s difficult to really know how long its going to take, either way I still like to monitor progress when copying or rsyncing data. This post shows two methods of checking your transfer status without the GUI. (Read on …)
Accredited online
colleges have web development classes for those who want to learn more.
TOR is a nice little network service application that lets you do things over the Internet more anonymously. I’ve always been fascinated by it but never really used it. I always assumed it was hard, but getting set up to use tor doesn’t have to be hard. If you want a virtual machine that is configured to browse anonymously, check out Vatlator.
Tor comes with most distributions these days, in Fedora and Ubuntu you can just install Vidalia. Once installed open Firefox (if thats what you use) and install TorButton from the Add-ons. Fire up Vidalia from Menu->Internet->Vidalia (Gnome), wait for a connection and then toggle the Tor Status in FireFox.
To verify you are connected to the Tor network, goto check.torproject.org
Thats it, its a simple as that!
Connecting to WPA networks isn’t the hassle it used to be, it is often very handy to be able to connect without the use of Network Manager. Today I’ll share with you a quick way to get connected to a WPA encrypted network from the shell.
This may be a no brainer for some of you elitists out there but if you need to (I don’t ask questions) remove all .svn folders within a project there is an easy way to do so. This would also work for other directories, but my main purpose for writing this is for .svn files / folders.
find . -iname “.svn” | xargs rm -r $1
I suppose you could also use svn export to get similar functionality, but if you’ve already checked out code, you wouldn’t want to waste precious internets and do it again would you?
Opening Apple .dmg files on Linux is actually quite easy. I had to open one to try and find a .ppd but I won’t judge you for whatever reason you need to open one for. You’ll need to install a basic tool called dmg2img (http://vu1tur.eu.org/tools/). Use your apt-get or similar tool (I didn’t see it in Fedora’s yum) to install it.
(Read on …)
Here’s an old video I made that demonstrates how to connect to a wireless network using NetworkManager.
(Read on …)
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:
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/
If you have ssh access to a remote machine and wish to browse the file system SSHFS is a great utility.
It can be easily installed by your favorite package manager, or compiled from scratch. It has been a dear friend of mine for at least a couple of years.
To mount a file system with SSH, it is almost simpler than making an SSH connection:
sshfs [user]@[host]: [mountpoint]
to unmount is just as simple. Either:
fusermount -u [mountpoint]
OR
sudo umount [mountpoint]
Once your remote file system is mounted, you may bask in its glory and take advantage of everything a local file system has to offer although you may notice a slight delay.
If you’re an mplayer user and wish to stream media, you can use the -cache option to give you a little bit of a buffer.
I’m going to keep this one short since time I’ve had a serious lack of time recently. If you need to free up some time by putting repetitive commands into loops, you can use the command seq.
Basically, you can use any generic loop such as the while or for loop. Here are two examples:
for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo $i; done;
seq 1 10 | while read i; do echo $i; done;
These both count and echo from 1 to ten. Replace the echo $i; with whatever it is you want to do. You can use sleep, to sleep for a number of seconds, and any other logic you wish here.
I’m a fan of the Daily Vim. While reading, I came across the old long command line edit: http://dailyvim.blogspot.com/2009/06/easier-command-line-editing.html
Since I don’t have emacs installed (fire away) after Pressing CTRL-x CTRL-e to edit the command, this is what I got:
[owen@LinuxBlog ~]$
bash: /usr/bin/emacs: No such file or directory
There is a simple fix for this:
sudo ln -s vim /usr/bin/emacs
I’m sure there is a correct way to do this, but this is what I did and it has worked well for me so far.
