Free Software Linux

If you need an easy way to maintain backups on Linux which you can easily restore with a few clicks similarly to Apple's Time Machine BackInTime is probably

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When going to sleep I sometimes like to leave my computer on playing ambient music from an internet radio station. It's a really good intro to the dreams.

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WordPress.com: "From the time we started WordPress.com in 2005, we’ve focused on making it easy and rewarding to use so that anyone could get started with blogging. Along the way all of you who’ve been using WordPress.com and giving us your feedback have helped us figure out which features to roll out next. Thanks!

I took a look back at all the feature announcements we’ve made here, and it came to 370 posts, 82 in 2009 alone. That’s a lot of features. So in case you missed anything along the way here are some of my picks for cool things you can do with WordPress.com."

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TwitTip: "As much as many of us like to think that we’re highly organized and efficient when it comes to our use of Twitter, there is in fact a lot we can do to make our lives easier.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve adopted some fairly radical measures to streamline and improve my use of Twitter, which I’ll share with you here."

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In this post I will collect all commands which SHOULD NEVER be executed in Linux. Any of them will cause data loss or corruption, can freeze or hang up running system.

NEVER RUN THESE COMMANDS IN LINUX BOX CLI!

Even if somebody advises you in forum/im to do it.

1. Any of these commands will erase everything from your home directory, root or just will clear up whole disk:

Yesterday really serious security bug was found in FreeBSD (from 7.1 to 8.0). Using public exploit local user can gain root privileges on vulnerable system. Below is an easy way solution to fix this terrible bug:

% cd /usr/src/libexec/rtld-elf/
% fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~cperciva/rtld.patch
% cat rtld.patch | patch -p1
% make && make install && make clean

One of the easiest way to try Chromium browser in Ubuntu Linux (Google Chrome browser for Unix/Linux operating system is named as chromium) is to use daily binary builds at https://launchpad.net/chromium-project.

TwiTip: "Now, before you all go off and close your browsers, saying you’ve read it all before, consider the following. All the most popular people on Twitter (excluding celebrities who largely get by due to their fame) are very effective at balancing these five categories to create an interesting and engaging conversation with their followers. They’re not all about retweets or replies and they don’t just talk about their personal life all the time."

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Sometimes it is necessary to check whether server you want to run some big bash script is connected to Internet. Usually it makes sense while running scripts periodically using cron.  Below is the tiny bash script for this purpose:

#!/bin/bash

WGET="/usr/bin/wget"

$WGET -q --tries=10 --timeout=5 http://www.google.com -O /tmp/index.google &> /dev/null
if [ ! -s /tmp/index.google ];then
echo "no"
else
echo "yes"
fi

As you see it tries to download google’s index page, if it’s not empty script returns “yes”, if there is not Internet connection available script will return “no”. If it is impossible to fetch the page in more than 5 seconds script will return “no” as well.

Anything to add? You are welcome!

Imagine the following situation: you have to compile some Linux/Unix application or kernel module that requires kernel source present at your hard drive, say, in /usr/src/kernels/kernel-2.6.21-i386/ or elsewhere. But there is not enough disk space to copy these sources or install kernel-devel or linux-source packages (in Fedora/RedHat or Ubuntu/Debian distros respectively)… Sounds familiar? Believe me, sometimes it happens

Ubuntu as any other Linux distribution comes with netfilter iptables as default firewall. This is one of the best firewall software for Unix family operating systems: it allows to perform various filtering operations and makes it possible to match packets using numerous ways starting from data in IP packet header and ending with Layer 7 packet inspection (but this is another topic).

Silicon.com: "Here I've come up with ten steps which for me have led to a thriving IT
team. Some may work for you, some may not, but they should at least
provoke some thoughts to help you create your own steps."

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Few days ago I have upgraded my Ubuntu to latest 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and found that keyboard just doesn’t work in VMware Server Console. The problem was that I couldn’t use keyboard under guest operating system including Windows, Linux etc. After few hours of research I found simple solution which works for me:

$ setxkbmap
$ echo "xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true" >> ~/.vmware/config

Well, as for now it is not a problem anymore to open Microsoft Office 2007 .docx documents in any Linux distribution coming with OpenOffice suit. It may be Ubuntu (Feisty, Gutsy, Interpid whatever), almost any version of Fedora/RedHat/Centos, *SUSE, Mandriva and of course Debian (as per my personal opinion it’s the best one).

What is .docx actually? It’s Microsoft’s file format representing word processor documents and named OpenXML (as an attempt to create open and free international standard). Today .docx is default format for Microsoft’s word processor Word.

Well, let’s imagine rather trivial situation: you have Linux router connected to Internet via e.g. ADSL modem and some local network comprising several computers and servers connected to that router via switches and/or Wi-Fi access points.

Done? Ok.