Linux Blog

In the last Shell Script Sunday’s article I wrote, I said that I’d show you some more ways to rework shell scripts to make them easier to use. I’ve got some more tricks up my sleeve that I’d like to share, its  been rather busy this site of the internet at TheLinuxBlog.com. So why I write up some more shell scripting methods, here are some previous posts that can enhance your shell scripts. Be sure to comment on them if you find them useful, or would like more information.

Creating Dialogs with Dialog
If you have a shell script that you use on a regular basis, you may want to consider using dialog to make it more user friendly. Dialog makes it easy to create easy to use dialogs that are intuitive and easy to use. There are so many combinations of dialogs that can be created that the possibilities are ended. Dynamically create dialogs for select lists, input boxes, progress bars and much much more.

Graphical Shell Scripting
This article I wrote introduces graphical shell scripting. Similar to dialog this is an updated “Dialog” and works within X. If you support end users, or your target audience is Ubuntu/Linspire users (j/k) then XDialog may be the better choice. Its got most of the same functionality as Dialog except it depends on X. You can even support both Dialog and XDialog as they pretty much use the same syntax.

I was reading my RSS feeds and happened to stumble across the OpenPandora. Until now I’d never heard of the OpenPandora, and had no idea what it was. Its actually a cool little device which they claim is the most powerful hand held computer in the world. Here are the specs from OpenPandora.Org

* ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
* 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
* PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
* 800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
* Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
* Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
* Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
* 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
* Around 10+ Hours battery life

The CPU is a decent speed, and the OpenGL supported video means the video will probably run better than it did on my old Toshiba laptop. While this is aimed at gamers, the console could be a good device for students or people who currently own Nokia N770’s, N800 or N810’s that are not satisfied. Although I wouldn’t use the gaming controls and it has a touch screen I can see why they put them in if they are going after a gaming crowd. If they want to get taken seriously out side of the gaming industry they may want to make a version that does not have the controls. They have some cool video demos available on their blog (here they are in case they get buried: http://www.gp2x.de/video/1080i.avi, http://www.gp2x.de/video/720p.avi) It still looks like they need to tweak it a little bit and make a graphical interface but even still it looks awesome.

It’s currently available for select developers and pre-orders on September 30th for about $330 USD and I really hope that this takes off. So if you’re asking who opened pandora’s box, OpenPandora did!

If you happen to have a SMB share with a lot of disk space laying around, then you may have considered backing up to it. There is more than one methods that you could back up to a SMB share but this article will show how to rsync to a smb share. This blog post assumes that you have successfully set up your SMB share and have installed RSync.
(Read on …)

Tech Crunch posted an article today on Linux programmers and T-Shirt sizes. As normal Tech Crunch didn’t write any compelling content or make the graph. The graph is a graph that was taken from a slide show presentation at Linux Symposium. They did however link to FitBit and provide the following quote for me to blog about:

“obesity is a growing problem, particularly in the geek world”

(Read on …)

htaccess allow from gives you the ability to allow (or deny) specific IP’s or domain names from a directory on your server. To do this the syntax is quite simple. Using VIM or nano open up the .htaccess file in the directory that you want to restrict access to. You need to add the following:

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1

This allows access from your local host and the IP address you specify. Using .htaccess you can also allow by host name. This is useful if you wish to allow or deny a friend access to a directory. (note: it will also work if you have them in your hosts file)

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from LinuxBlog
Allow from .thelinuxblog.com

Using htaccess to allow from your LAN is also pretty easy. You use your CIDR address (ip/subnet) to do this try something like this (changing to match your LAN):

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 192.168.1.1/24

I run into htaccess allow problems a lot, and hope that this will clear the air up for me. htaccess can be very handy if you do not want to keep turning your firewall on and off, but do not want your directories wide open. Just remember, if you want to stop everyone except those you choose to access your apache web directories, use htaccess allow from!

The 2.6.26.4 Kernel was released at 11:47UTC with a lot of fixes. Notably the eeepc-laptop module got a fix that should stop it from failing to unload if anyone has an eeepc and had that problem. There were 40 unique commits to this update and I think that everyone involved should be thanked for their hard work.

A new Wine was released on Friday the 5th putting Wine on version 1.1.4, so those of you that use Wine may want to update to see if your apps run better. They’ve fixed a lot of applications and reimplemented parts of WinHTTP. Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ll know about Google Chrome, and this Wine version includes several fixes to better support this. I might do a writeup of getting Google Chrome to work under Linux.

In security its just about the usual, SQL injections and XSS holes everywhere. Tomcat has some information disclosures that if your running the newest versions will not affect you.

Wireshark has some denial of service attacks and possibly arbitrary code execution, but only the DOS attacks have been confirmed. Your distribution probably has an older version in its repositories so, unless your running 1.0.3 which was released on September 3rd, you may want to update if your mission relies on this.

If you run postfix and notice your mail servers load is unusually high, look out for a denial of service against that also.

This ones an oldie but a good one: Get Pwnd by your Coffee machine of course its just one coffee machine, but as we see more household appliances being connected to the web. Which might get you thinking about Linux on Household Appliances.

Hey there guys and gals,

I’ve got a few pieces of news to report today, mostly to do with this site so if you are interested, give it a read. If you couldn’t care less then skip right along to the next post :)

Advertising
I will be adding the adbard network to this site one day soon, which will get rid of the Google ads and display some that are more of an open source theme. I may from time to time pop in some links to Amazon affiliate links to help with the costs involved in running this site. I don’t think that you’ll mind, and besides you don’t really have a choice. If you don’t want to see advertisements; learn How to set up a Squid Proxy Server.

I’ve changed my name!
I’ve changed my name (not legally) to display as TheLinuxBlog.com. I’ve done this because many people syndicate my content and are not correctly attributing my work. Don’t worry, I’ll still post guest posters names and sign my posts with my name so you’ll know its me (But I doubt you care anyway, just as long as there is decent content here or you find the answer to the Linux problem that has you stumped.)

Feeds Shortened
I’ll be shortening my RSS feed in effort to draw more people to participate in the site. After all, we all like comments and contributions, so why not contribute? This may also help out with spam also. If you’d still like my full feed in your RSS feed reader, send me an e-mail or leave a comment and I’ll hook you up with a private feed.

Artwork
For those of you that enjoy laughing I mean, reading my blog I’ll be providing some artwork. I’d appreciate links to me with or without the artwork. I may in the future start giving out free swag so be on the lookout!

Thanks for your interest and time,

- Owen.

You can get into a special area of SSH that you by using the SSH Escape key sequence.It can be set at the connection time to a custom character but if you didn’t set one it is probably set to the Tilda (~). To open the SSH Escape dialog to manage your connection (I assume you know what you want to do, but your wondering how you use it)

Its simple to use; just hit shift, then the back tick (`) to get the Tilda (~) then type the command you want to use.

For example to pull up the SSH Escape dialog help up you use the question mark (?) so do the following:

[owen@Linux_Blog ~]$ ~?
Supported escape sequences:
~. - terminate connection
~B - send a BREAK to the remote system
~C - open a command line
~R - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
~^Z - suspend ssh
~# - list forwarded connections
~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
~? - this message
~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

For more information on the SSH Escape Sequence check out the SSH Man Page

Post By: Owen From: TheLinuxBlog.com

I was using a piece of software that I had heard about a while back that manages collections. Its called Tellico and is actually quite good. While using Tellico I discovered that when you click on the “Amazon link” for the product, it has an affiliate code in it.

For those of you who don’t know what an affiliate program is, its basically a way for people to make money just by refering people to products. Most of the big guys have these sorts of “programs” including Amazon. Affiliate programs are very popular in the triple X industry.

What frustrates me is that this is included in Tellico, so in effect when you visit a product from your own personal collection, Tellico gets a percentage of sales from Amazon for any other items you purchase. While the affiliate link doesn’t bother me so much as it can be changed (and I also participate in the program), its the fact that it came right out of the Fedora repositories like this.

What about if Ubuntu reworked its software and included affiliate links for everything? Perhaps a FireFox plugin that manipulated all Amazon requests to include Mandriva’s affiliate link. I think that this is against Amazons terms of service but this method is a potential way for open source developers and organizations to get some additional funding. But is it right? Preying on your end users ignorance for profit? Although it doesn’t harm anything is it moral?

Post Source: http://www.TheLinuxBlog.com

Everybody knows how annoying the <input type=”file”> HTML tag is right? Does it make you mad when you have to browse and upload each file individually? Sure you can use JavaScript to add / remove the input boxes, but you still need to browse for each file individually, which if you’re uploading lots of files doesn’t make sense.

Would you like a multiple file uploader like Facebook has? Perhaps more of a simple explorer like interface that will allow you to select multiple files? Possibly previewing them, and perhaps processing them on the client side?

Well, I wouldn’t say it was the easiest thing in the world to implement but there is an open source multiple file uploader that might suit your needs. Since its written in Java, its highly expandable (if you know how or pay a development company or freelancer) and can also be partially configured with JavaScript.

What is this fantastic sounding multiple file uploader you speak of?

Its called jupload and can be downloaded from jupload.sourceforge.net. Don’t let the website fool you because this tool is actually pretty neat.

If any one would like examples on how to use it, just write a blog post linking to me saying how cool it is and how much you need it, offer me cash, comment or participate in this blog, offer me goods / services, give me links from your website or just e-mail me politely asking for help and I’ll see what I can do.

If you don’t like it: start reading the documentation like I did, seriously its not that hard.

Before you ask why your Java applications don’t work, or why your applet doesn’t initialize in Firefox, Seamonkey or Whatever browser you use do you know what version of Java you are using?

“Yes, I installed the JRE 1.6.0_XX”,

Thats nice, but is it running? Now, it may seem as obvious as “Is your computer on?”  to some, but to others and I admit myself it isn’t always that obvious. I had installed the Java Runtime /JDK and tested my firefox. Programs worked from the command line, java -version provided me the correct Java version, but why were my applets failing to load?

The firefox plugin is the answer. Open up about:plugins in firefox and take a look at the Java providers. If you don’t see the Java(TM) plugin there then there is a problem. Refer to the Correct Java documentation on how to get this corrected. Basically you symlink a file and disable the other Java providers.