Tips, tricks, & insight from people who know.
At some point you may switch to a different OS and that OS might not include Gnome. If that is the case, then Nautilus is probably not the file manager either. I ran into this recently while running Xubuntu on one of my systems.
After googling around for a few, I came across another great blog that already had the answer. http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/dropbox_kde.html
I simply added /home/himuraken/.dropbox/dropboxd to my startup and it is working great.
–Himuraken
I have been playing around and trying different meda players in Linux. It had been quite some time since I had used Audacious and I was quickly growing tired of Amarok2’s missing features. One of the most obvious features that is missing is the equalizer, really?
After installing Audacious (sudo apt-get install audacious) and enabling the EQ I remembered that you could import the old trusty Winamp presets into Audacious. That is great, I was and remain a fan of the full bass & treble preset. After a mere 30 seconds of searching for the Winamp EQ file to import, I stumbled upon a very simple two step process for downloading and “installing” them.
wget http://www.xmms.org/misc/winamp_presets.gz
and
gunzip -c winamp_presets.gz > ~/.config/audacious/eq.preset
Restart / Audacious and you are all good to go.
–Himuraken
One of our readers just sent me the following info. If you are using DD-WRT with the effected version be sure to patch/resolve this. Follow this link.
*Update* You can test your router and see if you are vulnerable by entering this into your browser:
http://routeripaddress/cgi-bin/;reboot
–Himuraken
So I finally created a Twitter account and started checking it out. I quickly noticed that below everyone’s tweets, was the application or place that they were tweeting from. I noticed that a lot of people with using TweetDeck. So I headed over to their download page and clicked on the big yellow “Download now, it’s free” button and nothing happened.
Apparently their install is delivered via the Adobe Air application which I have never seen or used. Well it is pretty easy to get TweetDeck going once Air is loaded. So follow these short steps and you will be up and running.
Head over to Adobe’s Air download page which is here and download the .bin file. For simplicity sake, lets just say that you saved the file to your desktop. Open up a terminal window and
cd Desktop
Next we need to set the execute bit/permission so enter in
chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
Now start install by entering
./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
Just follow the wizard and complete the install. Head back to the TweetDeck download page and click on the download button. This should start TweetDeck download/install via the Adobe Air application. Follow the onscreen steps and you are good to go.
Update! 64 Bit Ubuntu users follow this link and use the step by step directions there. Cheers to Tony at OSSRamblings for this one.
Note* The Adobe Air install described here works for all browsers tested: Opera & Firefox.
–Himuraken
Virtualization Lab: Part 2 – Concepts and Terminology
Welcome to part two of my Virtualization Lab series. If you haven’t read part one, I would recommend reading it first.
In this post I want to go over the concepts and terms that are used so frequently. Understanding the gist of virtualization will help lay a steady foundation upon which advanced topics seem more natural and intuitive.
Commonly used terms:
Host – This term is used to describe the operating system and physical computer that exists and runs virtual software/hardware.
Guest – This term is used when referring to a virtual computer or operating system which is running on a host system.
VM – a Virtual Machine is the same thing as a guest and is used much more frequently.
Hypervisor: A hypervisor is a lower level operating system that exists somewhere between the physical hardware and the VM’s. A hypervisor usually takes the place of your user system and is essentially a small highly optimized operating system for running virtual machines.
P2V: This acronym stands for Physical to Virtual. P2V conversions are great when they work and help convert current systems into a VM.
There are many other terms and acronyms out there, but these are the most common.
Where to start:
For the absolute beginner and most others, I recommend installing VirtualBox which can be downloaded here. Go ahead and get VirtualBox installed since we will be going over it in more detail in part three of this series. You will also need to download a .iso file for next weeks post. I will be installing Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope 32bit which can be downloaded from here.
–Himuraken
So the other day I was making my usual password changing rounds on my accounts and devices. One of the things that I do change regularly is my password for DD-WRT. Somehow I changed it and could no longer access the device.
Alas, I did have SSH enabled and it let me log in using the original password that I had setup. I searched all over the place for documentation on doing this, and found nothing but people asking how to reset the actual router due to a lost password, and I wasn’t in the mood to rebuild my config. So here is the steps that I took.
1. Login to the router via ssh.
2. Type in nvram set http_passwd=
3. Then type in nvram commit
Finally, open your web browser and connect to your router. Change your password on the administration page and you are good to go.
–Himuraken
Open Source Storage
The online debate over Open Source storage options is fast and furious. The two common names that keep popping up are FreeNAS and Openfiler. Do a Twitter search for either and you will have an afternoon full of reading.
I evaluated Openfiler (see April 7 post for Openfiler info) and have not looked back. The first box I installed as NFS storage has been running for 54 days with no data loss or corruption. The only issue at all has been the failure of one of the on-board Ethernet ports. My second box installed as iSCSI storage has been in production for thirteen days.
Hardware breakdown (retasked servers – nothing new was purchased):
filer1: Dell PowerEdge 2650, dual Intel Dual-Core Xeon 2.4 Ghz CPU w/512KB cache, 4GB RAM, dual on-board Gigabit Ethernet ports, (1) Maxtor Atlas 10k 74GB harddisk for Openfiler system, (4) Seagate Cheetah 10k 146GB harddisks for shared storage.
filer2: Dell PowerEdge 2850, dual Intel Quad-Core Xeon 2.8 Ghz CPU w/2.00MB cache, 4GB RAM, dual on-board Gigabit Ethernet ports, dual-port Intel PRO 1000 NIC (for iSCSI), (2) Maxtor 15k 74GB harddisks in RAID 1 for Openfiler system, (3) Seagate 15k 146GB and (1) Fujitsu 15k 146GB harddisks for shared storage.
Filer1 reports used physical memory of 97% while filer2 reports 8% physical memory in use. This is interesting as filer2 has a much higer load at this point. IRC chats, blogs and forums suggest Openfiler likes all the RAM it can get its hands on.
Plan Moving Forward
I will continue to use filer2 as iSCSI storage for two VMware ESX 3.5 servers. Planning to rebuild filer1 with additional RAM and add Intel PRO 1000 card. May convert storage to iSCSI for Citrix XenServer evaluation.
I have been a user of Dropbox for about six months now and think that it is a great service. I have it installed and running on five systems, all of which run Ubuntu.
When Jaunty Jackelope was released a week ago, I decided to upgrade all of my Ubuntu boxes. While the upgrade went flawlessly on all five systems, Dropbox died. I went out and downloaded the latest version of Dropbox which has Ubuntu 9.04 listed. Reinstalling the package did not resolve the issue. So I started playing at the command line and realized that this is really easy to fix. Here is the fixed that I came up with:
Open up a terminal and type in dropbox status and you should see a message like Dropbox isn’t running!. If you try and run dropbox start you will get another error indicating that The Dropbox daemon is not installed! and the resolution which is to start with the -i option.
So the actual command to install the daemon is dropbox start -i. Once I ran that, the daemon and Nautilus extension launched and updated immediately.
Few people are aware of the command line use of dropbox. Play around with the utility and see what I mean. The dropbox filestatus command is pretty neat. Just run it from within your Dropbox folder.
–Himuraken