Linux Blog

I stumbled upon PulseCaster while searching through Fedoras repositories, I was intrigued and had to give it a try. By the website this is the description:
“PulseCaster is a simple PulseAudio-based tool for making podcast interviews. It is designed for ease of use and simplicity. The user makes a call with a preferred PulseAudio-compatible Voice-over-IP (VoIP) softphone application such as Ekiga or Twinkle, and then starts PulseCaster to record the conversation to a multimedia file. The resulting file can be published as a podcast or distributed in other ways.”
It works really well for phone interviews or just recording that call you want to remember. I wouldn’t advise recording conversations without the other parties permission. I don’t know what the law is on that, but if you’re using it for its intended purpose (podcasting) then it serves its purpose. I actually used it to record the Asterisk Area Code Lookup Script.

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I’ll be honest, I’m no expert on optimizing shell scripts. I’m hoping that readers will chime in with their tips / experiences. With that being said I do have a few tricks up my sleeve from hands on experience with code optimization using other languages.

(Read on …)

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One of the things that was on my whiteboard for some time was to set up a VPN for home use. Sure, I can do some remote SSH port forwarding, use ssh as a proxy or perhaps even use some Linux Tunneling Techniques but they’re not quite the same as a full blown VPN. You can use the VPN for access to remote services, to secure communications on untrusted networks or use it for mobile devices. Whatever your use its easy to set a VPN up with pptpd that can be used with your mobile and remote devices. (Read on …)

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I was having an issue with a preupgrade of Fedora, somehow an old package that was no longer in use decided it was going to cause the installation to fail. After rebooting, finding the guilty package and removing it I started the upgrade again. This is where the error message “The root for the previously installed system was not found” occurred.

I did some research, tried mounting the file system then upgrading that way and still nothing.

According to this Fedora Forums post other people have experienced this issue. In cagonto1980′s post it explains the workaround:
Mount the filesystem, vi /mnt/sysimage/etc/fedora-release and change the release to the previous version. You may need to remember the version, mine was set to “Fedora 13 (Goddard)” and I changed it to “Fedora 12 (Constantine)”. After rebooting it started the upgrade. It appears the issue is Anaconda updates the release file and doesn’t change it back if the installation fails causing the next upgrade to think that the newest version is installed.

Thanks to cagonto1980 for the workaround.

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I’ve written about my Asterisk meddling before in my Asterisk AGI IP Address lookup post. This time I’m writing about an Area Code Lookup Script I wrote that was inspired by Nerd Vittles WiFi Finder. The script prompts the user to enter a 3 digit area code and then reads the results back to the user.

The tar.gz file needs to be extracted and the resulting files placed into your agi-bin. The source can be found here.

Here is what it sounds like for the 404 areacode (ogg / mp3). After recording this I found out it would probably be a good idea to unique the array so items are not read twice, but it works for me.

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With 2010 in the rear view mirror I’d like to share some statistics that I thought were interesting.

Top Posts of 2010
1) Shell Script To Get User Input
2) iPhone SSH Client
3) Using Cut Shellscript String Manipulation
4) rsync to smb share
5) recursive md5 sum script
6) apache directory index forbidden by options directive

(Read on …)

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Hello readers! This post is a list of soft phones available for Linux. It is not an all inclusive list, more of a list of those I’ve installed or tested. These are just a handful of them, there are probable way more available that I’m not aware of. Some of these are cross platform and are listed if they are available in Ubuntu and Fedora’s repositories as of the time of this writing. Use the comments to let me know of any good ones or which ones you’ve used or recommend!

(Read on …)

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Over the years my office or workspace has had a lot of variations. From bedroom and dining room workspaces to hole in the wall space at an office, I now have my own home office and I recently got an office make over and have to say so far I’m liking it. I always have liked things to be neat and have there own place but sometimes, things get out of control I’m hoping that this time I can keep it tidy. I think the biggest challenge will be not having enough desk space, I guess having two laptops on it wont help either, I think its time to downgrade one to a netbook!

So, for the first time ever here’s a sneak peak into what my workspaces have looked like in the past and what my workspace currently looks like, starting from the oldest. Keep in mind, a lot of these photos were taken in the process of moving or organizing with the exception of the newest, which were taken recently and in their natural state. (Read on …)

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Whether its mandated by a job, dual boot or virtual by choice, sometimes people have to use Windows. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. People sometimes just have to use it, like it or not it’s a matter of life these days. Most of my work with Windows for the almost past 10 years now has been with Windows XP, but I assume the utilities mentioned within will work on other Windows flavors. If you know otherwise, post in the comments. This leads to the next question: What do you consider your essential utilities for Windows?

(Read on …)

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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?

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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 …)

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