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Posts Tagged linux

Net Radio Exec Says “Don’t Mention Linux”

Sep 22

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

A succinct reply to an article on Slashdot. The gist is that while marketing a new piece of hardware, a marketing professional was asked about the software that powers the device (being Linux). To which he replied: “I don’t like the using the word ‘Linux’ on a radio.”

Is just the mention of the word ‘linux’ that scary? Apparently so.

Seriously, this is not how it works. For a quick anecdote, when people ask me how I have all these rotating workspaces and crazy ass widgets and stuff, I reply ‘Linux’. Most people look blank at this point. Then I say ‘It’s an operating system, like Windows but not’. Usually, still blank looks. Remember, these are people who’ve never installed an OS in their lives, who’s points of comparison between XP and Vista were ‘It’s gone shiny and see-through, look!’, and who don’t know what you mean when you say that their computer is slow because they wanted their printer to work and installed the drivers for it.’Normal’ folks don’t know what Windows is, what Microsoft do, or the difference between a PS/2 port and a TCP port. These things are all irrelevant to them, or at least they think they are. It’s frickin’ marketing, you said it in your own post – people recognise that little wavy window thing, and don’t know that there is an alternative. Unfortunately, people don’t yet recognise Tux, or the Ubuntu blobby thing, or any of the myriad mascots and logos of the FOSS community.When marketing a product, you can say ‘Powered by Windows’ or ‘Intel inside’ and people just recognise the terms, making them feel a bit techy, but have no idea what it actually means. If you say ‘Powered by Linux’ then the majority of people may as well have heard ‘Powered by Snarblax’ – They still have no idea what it means, but this time they know they don’t know what it means, and that makes them feel stupid, and that makes them dislike whatever they associate with that stupid feeling. In conclusion, you, Anonymous Coward, are a moron.

via Slashdot Linux Story | Net Radio Exec Says “Don’t Mention Linux”.

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Crontabbing VLC

Aug 26

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

My nightly routine for years has involved falling asleep to music. The few times in my life (hospital, sleep clinic, basketball camp) that I didn’t have music to fall asleep to can be counted as some of the most miserable of my life.

What started as a radio, became a boom-box playing cassettes. Then cassettes gave way to CDs. Recently (as in the past 5 years) I’ve come to love internet radio. For a long time I had an old windows laptop that wouldn’t hold a charge and had to be plugged in serving as the nighttime jukebox.
A Little Night Music
Unfortunately, I had an idea one day (my wife hates when she hears that) and that idea ultimately destroyed the old laptop. Meh. No problem. I substituted my netbook. Better CPU, more memory and it ran linux!! I was able to script a cron job to turn the machine off (sort of a sleep timer) automatically at different times during the week and on weekends. It worked great!

Eventually, I started just leaving my netbook at home. That made me sad. The little netbook was good at a lot of things. Being stuck as a dumb jukebox seemed like such a waste.

Until now.

I recently came into possession of an old desktop machine that I stripped for parts. One of those parts was a D-Link wireless PCI card.

Last night I installed the wireless card in Pugsley (another low-power, headless linux server that lives in my living room). After screwing around for a while figuring out how to get a wireless connection from the command line, I moved Pugsley to the bedroom and set him up next to my nightstand.

I installed VLC, because I know it can handle streaming audio and will run from the command line. I stopped by .977 and grabbed some streaming addresses for a couple music channels (80′s and Smooth Jazz!) and set up vlc to play the streams from a script. Cool.

Now to schedule the music. I knew I wanted to have Pugsley start the music at 9:00pm every night (jazz during the week, 80′s on weekends) and shut the music down in the mornings (4:00am during the week, 11:00am on weekends)

First I created a cron job from the root shell to stop the music. That was an easy ‘killall’ command:

# Nighttime music
00 04 * * 1-5 killall vlc
00 11 * * 0,6 killall vlc

Then I wrote the cron job to start the music (depending on the day) from my user shell (VLC doesn’t like being started by root):

# Turn on Night Music (every night @ 9:00pm)
# Friday & Saturday
00 21 * * 5-6 /home/chuck/scripts/80s.sh
# Sunday Thru Thursday
00 21 * * 0-4 /home/chuck/scripts/jazz.sh

Now I just needed to write the scripts to play the music. While the script is an easy one liner, the real trick was specifying a dummy interface to VLC. Without an interface (such as the terminal) VLC will die with an error. So calling it from within a cron job won’t work.

Googling around I found this forum entry

So I wrote my scripts:
80s.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
vlc --volume 30 -I dummy http://www.977music.com/tunein/web/80s.asx

and jazz.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
vlc --volume 30 -I dummy http://www.977music.com/tunein/web/smoothjazz.asx

So now, every weeknight, the computer starts up some smooth jazz and and shuts it down before my alarm goes off for work. Every weekend, it serenades us with 80′s music and shuts it down the next morning before noon! Plus, I got my netbook back! Awesome.

Now, to get some sleep.

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Say “Hello” to my little friend.

Jul 16

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

About a year ago I scavenged a “to-be-decommissioned” PC out of our closet here at work and installed Ubuntu Server on it.  I stuck it under my desk and proceeded to familiarize myself with some administration tasks.

I installed a LAMP stack and moved my web development stuff over to the new box.

Then I set up a bunch of disorganised CRON jobs to back-up all my files.

I installed SAMBA and set about connecting to our Windows Server.

Then I found instructions online about how to connect to a Novell server, so I created a bunch of mount points and wrote a couple scripts to access our Novell server.

doesn't look like much, does it?

doesn't look like much, does it?

Shortly thereafter, I wrote some new scripts to do some routine nightly file maintenance between our Novell network and our Windows network.

I had an old legacy MS Access application that was giving me fits and I wanted to upsize it to something a bit more robust – so I ported it into MySQL.

Then I wrote a web front end for it.

Then I had an idea to create a corporate help-desk application that would allow users to fill out a form online and submit work requests to our department.  Simple, but effective.

One day we were overrun with viruses (annoyances, actually) that our current corporate anti-virus wasn’t aware of yet.  So I installed Avast Antivirus on the linux box and spent a couple weeks cleaning up flash drives, memory cards and external media of all sorts until the corporate AV got updated with the new virus signatures.

Most recently,  I’ve embarked on another we-based front-end to a older application.  Sticking it on the web will save tons of money on paper alone.

While modifying my cron jobs to backup the most recent project files, I began to remember this machine’s humble beginnings.  Destined for the trash heap, linux breathed new life into an old machine and turned it into a little workhorse.

Eventually, I’m going to need to move my files onto a larger, more secure machine, but I think I’ll keep this little baby around long after that.

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How to Burn and Normalize MP3 to Audio CD in Ubuntu Linux

Jun 30

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

I needed to burn some CDs for our weekend at Put-In-Bay. This was be my first foray into CD burning under linux. After a couple minutes of searching, I found these instructions and the rest was easy!

The most usual and popular way to create a “mix-tape” Audio CD is to burn it from a collection of MP3 songs taken from several sources.

However as the mp3′s are ripped from several sources, there would be inconsistencies in the volume which would create an annoyance if one had to readjust the CD player volume from song-to-song.

A “Normalization” process would automatically fixed the audio so that all song would have the same amount of volume, but sadly the default Serpentine Audio CD creator that comes with Ubuntu does not support normalization.

How to normalize MP3s

First of all open a terminal and install normalize-audio package:

sudo apt-get install normalize-audio

Then change directory to your mp3 collections to be burned and execute:

normalize-audio -m -v  .mp3

normalize-audio will then compute the files level one-by-one and then will apply normalization on all mp3 files.

You can then use your favorite CD burner application like Serpentine to burn the normalized MP3 files to make an audio CD.

Normalize-audio also supports ogg files for normalization.

Happy burning!

via How to Burn and Normalize MP3 to Audio CD in Ubuntu Linux : mypapit gnu/linux blog.

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Hardy to Jaunty = PITA!

Jun 25

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

So I’ve been messing with python again lately and have been having fun writing some scripts to do tedious maintenance on my MySQL and SQL Server installs. I’ve got a desktop running Ubuntu’s Jaunty Jackalope and once I got things working the way I wanted, I tried to copy all the scripts over to the work laptop. (Running Hardy Heron)

I ran into a problem trying to install pymssql in Hardy. I couldn’t find it in the repositories. That was weird, but possible. So after googling for a while and getting no where, I just decided to upgrade the laptop to Jaunty (figuring that I’d be able to install pymssql once I was running Jaunty)

I set about following the script I got from here: How to Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10. Knowing that I had two separate upgrades (Hardy -> Intrepid, Intrepid -> Jaunty) to do, I started the upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid first.

Well, about halfway through the upgrade failed. I don’t know what happened, but it looked like the wireless connection burped or something and only about half the packages downloaded. So I restarted it. After watching it for a while I thought that maybe doing this over a wireless connection wasn’t the best idea. So I Control-C’d the upgrade and hooked up the laptop to my router with a nice long cat5 cable. I felt pretty good about myself, because the downloads were moving a lot faster too.

Once the upgrade finished I restarted and noticed some weirdness. The boot screen started scrolling by and I could see things like “update failed” and “read-only filesystem”. Soon after I was looking at my desktop. Hmmm. Well, maybe some of the packages got corrupted during the two interruptions during the download. Figuring that the Jaunty upgrade would fix it, I started phase two.

Long story short – it didn’t. I wound up looking at a “read-only filesystem” with no access to the terminal from X. Booting into recovery mode and starting GDM manually undid the read-only part, but I still didn’t have a terminal (I kept getting something about a child process failing).

By this time it was late and I didn’t want to screw with it anymore, so I left it til this morning, whereupon I decided I didn’t want to mess with it then either. With the help of the recovery console, I was able to back up my home folder and I popped in a Jaunty install disk.

Twenty minutes later all was back to normal. Restoring my programs was easy and copying my documents back over was a breeze.

(NOTE: I recently had the occasion to reinstall Windows XP on my sister’s machine and I can tell you, without a doubt, that Microsoft needs to take a look at the Ubuntu install process. Ubuntu – yay! Windows – DAMN IT!)

So what did I learn from this?
1.) With big upgrades like this – always go wired! Wireless is too slow and the possibility of error is too great.
2.) Only upgrade to one release at a time. If you want to go more than one release, it’s easier to back things up and start fresh.

But, in the end, it was fun and I learned something so… cool.

P.S. Against my own advice, I recently upgraded a server machine at home from Hardy to Jaunty with no problems using the same steps I attempted above. The only difference? The machine was wired the whole time. Maybe that really was the whole problem?

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Medibuntu – Community Ubuntu Documentation

Jun 7

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

Adding the Repositories

Below are the instructions to add the Medibuntu repository to your system’s list of APT repositories. These are commands that should be run in the Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal).

If you are new to Ubuntu, please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu for an overview of repositories.

Add Medibuntu to your sources.list, as well as its GPG key to your keyring. Make sure to use the correct sources.list that corresponds to your current distribution.

Any Ubuntu Release and keyring:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list; sudo apt-get -q update; sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring; sudo apt-get -q update

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake”:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/dapper.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Then, add the GPG Key:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

You may be asked to accept this package even though it cannot be authenticated. This is normal; typing “Yes” means you trust Medibuntu.

If you have added the entire Medibuntu repository, you just need to install the package using APT:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs

via Medibuntu – Community Ubuntu Documentation.

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Rip a DVD into a DivX with Mencoder on MisterHowto.com

Jun 7

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

Rip a DVD into a DivX with Mencoder

We’re going to use Mencoder and Mplayer to backup a DVD you own into a DivX file.

Find out which part and language we want

mplayer dvd://2

A DVD can have several “titles” (parts), and the actual movie is not always the first one. Replace “2″ in the command above with any number, beginning from 1, until you find the part you want. Keep that number in mind.

The language you want is not necessarily the default one either. Run this command:

mplayer -alang en dvd://2

Replace “2″ with the number you found earlier, and “en” (English) with a two-letter code for the language you want (fr for French, etc.).

Make the right crop

The DVD will probably have black borders at the top and bottom of the movie, and we don’t want them in our DivX (they would make the file pointlessly larger), so we need to crop them out. Run this command:

mplayer -ss 60 -vf cropdetect dvd://2

This will make Mplayer start playing the movie 60 seconds after the beginning (replace “2″ with the right title number). Navigate in the movie (Right and Left arrows) until you reach a sequence that is bright enough to let you clearly see the movie’s borders. Close the movie and look at what Mplayer has been outputting in the terminal: lots of lines like this one:

crop area: X: 0..719 Y: 72..503 (-vf crop=720:432:0:72)30.0% 33 0

The part between brackets is exactly what you’ll need to use in a few moments to get the right crop.

Encode!

We’re all set, let’s encode the movie. We’re going to do it in two passes (better quality).

mencoder -alang en dvd://2 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=-700000 -oac mp3lame -vf crop=720:432:0:72 -o Movie.avi

Of course, replace “en”, “2″ and the crop options with what you need. The “bitrate” value is usually set to how much disk space (in Kb) the video will use for each second. However, by using a negative value (here -700000) you can just ask for a (very) approximate file size (here about 700 M) and Mencoder will calculate the bitrate for you.

via Rip a DVD into a DivX with Mencoder on MisterHowto.com.

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ASP syntax Highlight for BlueFish

Jun 3

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

Re: ASP syntax Highlight for BlueFish
this reply is way overdue, but just in case someone is still looking for it:
add this to the bottom of the ~/.bluefish/highlighting file:
Code:

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patterns: asp:Numbers:0:\\-?([0-9]*\\.)?[0-9]+::2:^ASP Block$:#330099::2:1:
patterns: asp:Operators:1:[\\+\\-\\*\\/\\.\\\\,<>=\\(\\)_]+::2:^ASP Block$:blue::1:1:
patterns: asp:Variables:1:[a-z_][a-z0-9]*::2:^ASP Block$:#cc0000::1:0:
patterns: asp:Comment (single line):0:'.*?$::2:^ASP Block$:#7777aa::1:2:
patterns: asp:String (double quoted):0:":":1:^ASP Block$:green::1:1:
patterns: asp:String (double quote escaped):0:""::3:^String \\(double quoted\\)$:::1:1:
patterns: asp:Flow Control:1:\\b(if|and|or|then|else|elseif|case|select|while|until|wend|do|loop|for|to|step|next|end|each|in)\\b::2:^ASP Block$:#000000::2:0:
patterns: asp:Keywords:1:\\b(session|server|request|response|dim|redim|end|sub|function|set|nothing|not|true|false)\\b::2:^ASP Block$:#000000::2:0:
patterns: asp:String (SQL Functions):1:\\b(MATCH|AGAINST|ASCII|CHAR|SOUNDEX|MAX|MIN|MD5|LCASE|UCASE|PASSWORD|ENCRYPT|RAND|LAST_INSERT_ID|COUNT|AVG|SUM|NOW|CURDATE|CURDATE|FROM_DAYS|FROM_UNIXTIME|PERIOD_ADD|PERIOD_DIFF|TO_DAYS|UNIX_TIMESTAMP|USER|WEEKDAY|CONCAT|DATE_(FORMAT|ADD|SUB))\\b\\(:\\):1:^String \\(double quoted\\)$:#999966::2:1:
patterns: asp:String (SQL Keywords):1:\\b(SELECT|INSERT|UPDATE|DELETE|DROP|GROUP BY|FROM|IN|INTO|ON|AS|AND|NOT|OR|NULL|SET|VALUES|WHERE|ORDER BY|LIMIT|LEFT|RIGHT|FULL|INNER|OUTER|JOIN|ASC|DESC|AND|OR)\\b::2:^String \\(double quoted\\)$:green:yellow:2:1:
patterns: asp:ASP Block:1:<%:%>:1:^(top|HTML|HTML Attribute Contents)$:#0000FF::0:0:
patterns: asp:Comment:0:<!--:-->:1::#aaaaaa::1:2:
patterns: asp:HTML Entities:1:&[^; ]*;::2::#999999::2:0:
patterns: asp:HTML DocType:1:<![a-z0-9]+:[^?-]>:1::#bb8800::1:1:
patterns: asp:HTML Attribute Contents:1:2::3:^HTML Attributes$:#cc0000::0:0:
patterns: asp:HTML Attributes:1:((?\:xml\:)?[a-z][a-z-]*=)[ \\n\\t]*((?\:"[^"]+")|(?\:'[^']+'))::2:^HTML$:#660099::0:0:
patterns: asp:<html> Tags:1:1::3:^HTML$:#000066::2:0:
patterns: asp:HTML:1:<(/?[a-z][a-z0-9]*):>:1::#0000ee::0:0:

and add this line to the ~/.bluefish/rcfile_v2 file:
Code:

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filetypes: asp:.asp:::1::0:

via ASP syntax Highlight for BlueFish – Ubuntu Forums.

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How To Upgrade Ubuntu

Jun 2

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

First become root:

sudo su

Then run

apt-get update

and install the package update-manager-core:

apt-get install update-manager-core

Open the file /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades…

vi /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

… and change Prompt=lts to Prompt=normal:

[...]
 
Prompt=normal

Then run

do-release-upgrade

to start the distribution upgrade.

Confirm that you want to do the upgrade:

Do you want to start the upgrade?
 
2 packages are going to be removed. 48 new packages are going to be
 
installed. 376 packages are going to be upgraded.
 
You have to download a total of 242M. This download will take about 6
 
minutes with your connection.
 
Fetching and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the
 
download has finished, the process cannot be cancelled.
 
Continue [yN]  Details [d] Y

At the end of the upgrade process, you should remove obsolete packages:

Remove obsolete packages?
 
21 packages are going to be removed.
 
Continue [yN]  Details [d] Y
 
The server needs to be rebooted to complete the upgrade:
 
System upgrade is complete.
 
Restart required
 
To finish the upgrade, a restart is required.
 
If you select 'y' the system will be restarted.
 
Continue [yN] Y

via How To Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) To 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) (Desktop & Server) | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.

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How To Convert Any Video File Format Under Linux

May 19

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

This video tutorial will explain how to losslessly convert any video file format, including quicktime .mov, flash .flv files, open source .ogv, .mp4, .wmv, .asf and more. I show you how to install ffmpeg, check the formats and codecs available to you, convert a file to a new format (windows media and .asf in this example) without any loss in quality during the decoding and encoding process, and create and run a script file that will enable you to run a batch conversion on any number of files at the same time.

Anyone who has tried to convert multimedia files in Windows knows how challenging it can be. There are a ton of different programs out there to do it, but most of them either leave a watermark in your video, lower the resolution of your video, or both, unless you pay hundreds of dollars. ffmpeg can do this for you quickly, conveniently, and completely free – and can even be used in Windows! This video was created for Ubuntu, but will work for most Linux distributions, and the code you learn here to convert a file can be applied to the Windows version as well, though Windows’ scripting language is different so you will need to adjust the batch conversion script.

Single File Conversion

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

ffmpeg -formats (lists all available formats based on the currently installed codecs, to be used with -vcodec, -acodec, and -f)

ffmpeg -i inputfilename.ext -vcodec wmv2 -sameq -acodec wmav2 -f asf outfile.asf

ffmpeg – start ffmpeg

(-i inputfilename.ext – tells ffmpeg the file name and extension from which to convert)

(-vcodec wmv2 – use video codec wmv2)

(-sameq – use same video quality as source file)

(-acodec wmav2 – use audio codec wmav2)

(-f asf – choose output format, sometimes known as a container, in this case asf)

Bonus Batch Conversion

sudo touch convert.sh (here we use touch to create a blank file, not always necessary to do that rather than through a text editor but it is safer with permissions and such)

gksu gedit convert.sh (this is only available for gnome desktops, i.e. ubuntu and the like, so you can tell people to use whatever text editor they like)

sudo chmod 0777 convert.sh (like last time, chmod changes file or directory permissions, in this case giving access to everyone to read, write, execute the script)

./convert.sh (runs the script convert.sh on files in the /Videos directory)

ls (ls -l lists all files and directories plus permissions)

script:

for f in *.MOV; do ffmpeg -i “$f” -vcodec wmv2 -sameq -acodec wmav2 “${f%.MOV}.asf”; done

via How To Convert Any Video File Format Under Linux | LinuxHaxor.net.

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N810 – The new addition to the Family

May 7

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

Well, it’s been just over three weeks, so I guess it’s time to introduce the newest member of the family. The Nokia N810 Internet tablet.

Yes, I got another computer.

I’ve been researching for a while and had my choice narrowed down to another netbook or the N810. My EEEPC 701 is awesome but the lack of a big hard drive means it’s relegated to podcasts, remote access and mobile internet. It’s poor battery life means it’s relegated to short trips or use around the house.

A new netbook with a big hard drive and 6-cell battery would mean I could keep more of my stuff with me and use it longer before the battery died. It also meant a bigger device. I’ll admit that my favorite feature,of the EEE is it’s ability to fit into the pocket of my jean jacket.

A new internet tablet would mean ultimate portability, but even less storage than a netbook. Battery life would far out-do any netbook, but really only be useful online (meaning I’d need to be near a wi-fi hotspot).

Decisions, decisions.

The deciding factor came down to the operating system. I’d decided long ago that any new device would have to have linux rather than windows. Try as I might I could not find any netbooks that came preinstalled with linux anymore. Even mail-order shops tended to prefer WinXP on netbooks. It was possible to order linux, but it was terribly inconvenient and I didn’t want to wait any longer than I had to.

So I made the choice to go with the tablet.

In a nutshell – great decision! The off-line usefullness of the tablet has far exceeded my expectations. The media player(s) play any audio or video I throw at them. I can sync my tablet calendar with google calendar. The built-in bluetooth lets me grab photos off my cellphone. I can remote into home or work via ssh or remote desktop. And yes, I can even watch YouTube videos. And the battery lasts all day.

I forgot to mention the built-in GPS! While it’s no TomTom or Garmin replacement, it’s functional and expandable via tons of open-source software.

So, there you have it. Another computer to add to the collection and the smallest yet!

Welcome to the family.

P.S. I wrote this entire post on the N810 using the WordPy blog client.

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3 Steps to Perform SSH Login Without Password Using ssh-keygen & ssh-copy-id

Apr 28

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

You can login to a remote Linux server without entering password in 3 simple steps using ssky-keygen and ssh-copy-id as explained in this article.

ssh-keygen creates the public and private keys. ssh-copy-id copies the local-host’s public key to the remote-host’s authorized_keys file. ssh-copy-id also assigns proper permission to the remote-host’s home, ~/.ssh, and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.

This article also explains 3 minor annoyances of using ssh-copy-id and how to use ssh-copy-id along with ssh-agent.

Step 1: Create public and private keys using ssh-key-gen on local-host

jsmith@local-host$ [Note: You are on local-host here]

jsmith@local-host$ ssh-keygen

Generating public/private rsa key pair.

Enter file in which to save the key (/home/jsmith/.ssh/id_rsa):[Enter key]

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): [Press enter key]

Enter same passphrase again: [Pess enter key]

Your identification has been saved in /home/jsmith/.ssh/id_rsa.

Your public key has been saved in /home/jsmith/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

The key fingerprint is:

33:b3:fe:af:95:95:18:11:31:d5:de:96:2f:f2:35:f9 jsmith@local-host

Step 2: Copy the public key to remote-host using ssh-copy-id

jsmith@local-host$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remote-host

jsmith@remote-host’s password:

to make sure we haven’t added extra keys that you weren’t expecting.

Now try logging into the machine, with “ssh ‘remote-host’”, and check in:

.ssh/authorized_keys

Note: ssh-copy-id appends the keys to the remote-host’s .ssh/authorized_key.

Step 3: Login to remote-host without entering the password

jsmith@local-host$ ssh remote-host

Last login: Sun Nov 16 17:22:33 2008 from 192.168.1.2

[Note: SSH did not ask for password.]

jsmith@remote-host$ [Note: You are on remote-host here]

The above 3 simple steps should get the job done in most cases.

via 3 Steps to Perform SSH Login Without Password Using ssh-keygen & ssh-copy-id.

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HOWTO: Oh no! I forgot my password! – Ubuntu Forums

Apr 8

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

Q: I am a complete moron and forgot my password. How can I get back into my system?

(Hey, YOU forgot it, I think that gives me the right to do some degrading before letting you back in!)

A:

1. Turn off your computer.

2. Tap it 3 times

3. Say your favorite magic word.

—- If that doesn’t fix your problem, do the steps below… #-o

4. Turn your computer on.

5. Press ESC at the grub prompt.

6. Press e for edit.

7. Highlight the line that begins kernel ………, press e

8. Go to the very end of the line, add rw init=/bin/bash

9. press enter, then press b to boot your system.

10. Your system will boot up to a passwordless root shell.

CAUTION: This is a FULL ROOT SHELL! You can damage your system if not careful!

11. Type in passwd . Set your password.

12. Type in reboot.

NOTE: steps 1-3 may help at this point.

13. Bow down to me….

via HOWTO: Oh no! I forgot my password! [Archive] – Ubuntu Forums.

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Vista versus The Gutsy Gibbon – Ubuntu 7.10 – Mixed Signals – Rupert Goodwins's Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community

Apr 8

Posted by chuck in WebSnip | Comments off

Running Vista is like being in a candy store that only sells black liquorice (I _hate_ black liquorice) at exorbitant prices. Oh, and you’re only allowed to eat the candy in the store. Plus each individual piece is really small and is wrapped in seven layers of cellophane, and the store won’t let you throw the wrappers away. You have to take them with you and throw them away at home. Plus they set off a grenade in the chocolate store across the street in the middle of the night and mugged the proprietors of the penny candy stand. Oh, and Microsoft are the ones behind the urban legend that red M&Ms cause cancer. That’s the kind of candy store Vista is.

via Vista versus The Gutsy Gibbon – Ubuntu 7.10 – Mixed Signals – Rupert Goodwins’s Blog at ZDNet.co.uk Community.

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Peapod rescues me from bad radio

Mar 23

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

I’ve started listening to podcasts on my drive to and from work.  Mostly because Cleveland radio sucks (other than Maxwell in the afternoon, but sometimes he’s boring too – Sorry Maxwell).

The hardest part of the podcast process is finding cool or funny things to listen to and then trying to remember to grab the latest podcast from each site during the week.  Until now.

I’ve touted the virtues of CrazyHouse before (haven’t I?  Maybe not.  CrazyHouse is my linux server at home).  Now I have one more nice thing to brag about:  Every night at midnight, CrazyHouse runs Peapod.  Peapod is a podcatcher that checks all my podcast subscriptions for new podcasts and downloads them.  I also have CrazyHouse mail me a copy of the podcast folder every morning so I can see if there’s anything new in the queue.  By the time I wake up, all I have to do is connect my mp3 player and load up my playlist!

No more boring radio!

I know you’re dying to know what I listen to.  (OK, again… maybe not) but here’s the current lineup:

Diggnation – the hottest headlines from Digg.com

Going Linux – for the geeky side

Nobody Likes Onions – What Maxwell would be like if he could swear on the radio.

That’s it.  For now.  Each show updates at least once a week and each show runs close to an hour.  This playlist keeps me entertained on the drive to and from work all week long.

Bye-bye boring radio.

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