This is part of a small series of postings about linux software being at the bleeding edge, i.e. the active development versions. And we kick off with emacs which went into development freeze on the 23rd December last year, and this is version 24.4.50.xx. This is …

So there I was quietly working away in emacs when suddenly the tab-bar and the mode-line started flashing purple! Disaster had struck, but what disaster? In the mini-buffer it was saying that there was no free space left on the drive, and so it was unable to save a file …

For about a month now I've been using 'QupZilla' as my default web browser and am using the development version. QupZilla is a new, fast and secure open-source WWW browser, and can be found at http://www.qupzilla.com/ and looks like this -

It has source files for most of …

Yasnippet is an extremely good system of 'boiler-plate' text for emacs which can be called on for inserting text at the cursor. So far, this post has used two snippets, 'New Post' and 'Lorem Ipsum'. 'Lorem ipsum' is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. It has been …

I thought this was a rather novel and rather easy solution to passwords that it was worth passing on.

"Most people I know tend to simply use the same password on ALL websites. Email, Paypal, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter. This is obviously a very bad idea.

Passwords are always a …

Whilst generally surfing around I came across a new launcher, which is similar to docky but called plank. And this is what it looks like -

Plank is a very lightweight and quick to launch launcher, and easy on resources. Looking at the above screenshot of plank you can see the …

I've been using this script for quite some time and it works very well and is nice and simple to use. But, it didn't log what I did and when, until now! :)

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I'm having great difficulties in getting themes to display properly, this screenshot shows the problem.

Basically I’m having a theme with a light background self-imposing on a theme with a dark background, as seen in the left fringe where the line numbers are, in essence, its a mess!

The …

I have about 57 rather nice wallpapers in my ~/wallpapers directory, most of which I hardly ever see, so I've written a script that will randomly choose and display one every thirty minutes. For once it isn't called from a cron job, but from an alias, and quite happily sits …

If you use this script you will get some amazing radio stations, from ones that just play Elvis Presley, or The Beatles, or solid Goon Shows! I'm currently listening to Elvis, and its stuff that I've never heard before, and I thought my Elvis collection was pretty comprehensive!

To use …

Having your email account hacked is horrible, but here's how to defeat the criminals by using cast-iron passwords.

It seems almost inevitable that we will have our email hacked into, or some other violation of any of the online services upon which we depend. While it may be distressing and …

We now know that "password", "iloveyou" and "123456" are some of the most common passwords in use. If you are still using a similarly weak password, it's time to change to one that's so secure and unguessable that it stumps even the cleverest of computers, robots and devious humans. Here …

In today’s digital age, we are needing more and more passwords to secure out data and our identity. The problem is that there’s just so many to remember and often different systems need different types of passwords - like needing a special character, or a number or something. It …

I had overwritten one very important file, it was the ’org2blog dashboard’ which held the database of all my org2blog postings so it was quite important. But, I’d overwritten it with another posting saved as ‘org2blog.org’! The creation date of that file was 28 December 2013, so I …

Another testing blog posting, but this time using BlogWith and everpad to see if it actually works with this too. If it does its a major step forward, although for writing long posts, I still prefer to use emacs. Emacs does spell-checking, everpad doesn't, not yet anyway. :) This should use …

I've long been a fan of 'Evernote' which I use on my smartphone and also with its web interface on my linux desktop. I've recently started using Everpad on the desktop to write articles with as well. Now I'm trying out a new service called 'BlogWith', so lets see if …

Org2blog is a brilliant piece of coding and extremely easy to use, but it does have one failing - it can’t handle tables! I've found that if you want to use a table in a posting, then create it in a separate buffer, and then export it to html. From …

I recently bought myself a new 3TB external USB drive and had all the joy of moving my obnam backups on to it, but it was relatively easy by using this new 'mv' as it has a progress bar! To use it you have to -

mv -g /home/user/foobar …

This is my first post using the emacs org2blog mode, where I write the post in my emacs editor and can then just publish it to my wordpress blog with just a few key-presses. This will make things so much easier and means that I won’t necessarily have to …

I've long been a fan of 'Evernote' and last wrote about it on 19-11-2012 New phone and Evernote http://www.sharons.org.uk/2012/11/19/new-phone-and-evernote/. But today someone on IRC suggested that I have a look at Everpad - https://github.com/nvbn/everpad which is a linux client …

This is a rather nice online music player which can play one tune at a time or download one tune. It has few requirements and can -

• Search and stream music
• Download music
• Works with Python 2.7 and 3
• Works with Windows, Linux and Mac osx 10.9
• No Python …

I've recently been working on two new fluxbox scripts and both are concerned with menu generation. First up is mengen -

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#!/bin/bash
#: Title            : mengen
#: Date             : November 2013
#: Author           : Sharon Kimble, James Morris
#: Version          : 2 …

I've just updated fluxwant to ask you if you want to quit at any time, so now you can answer 'yes' or 'y' and it will continue, you can answer 'no' or 'n' and it can continue without installing something, and 'quit' or 'q' and you exit cleanly. So here …

I'm moving all my files and stuff to 'Bitbucket' as I think that they provide a better service than Github, so I'm shortly closing down the Github site. Do come and look at the new bitbucket site which is at https://bitbucket.org/boudiccas/dots

Yesterday you saw the introduction of want, today I give you fluxwant, which is the same as want but gives you the opportunity of creating a fluxbox menu. And here it is -

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For a long time I've been using various formats of apt-cache search and stuff, and its such a crushing bore having to type in commands one after another, so I've written a script to do it all for me, whilst I've been listening to "Dad's Army"! :)

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For a long time I've been using an alias to shortcut the usage of apt-get show, but I wasn't happy with it. So today I've written a new script that shows a description of the programme you're interested in, and then shows whether you've already installed it, and what repo …

For several days now my MPD has been very choppy, dropping connections and having great difficulty in starting it again. So I finally decided to look at 'mpd.log' which is in my '/home/boudiccas/.mpd/mpd.log'. And in it I found this -

Nov 09 17:56 : output: Failed …

This is not a post showing how to unlock an account in obnam, but a down and dirty unlock script that I use for those occasions when I get a locked backup and I cant be bothered to work out the configuration of 'force-lock'.

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To use obnam-fuse, you may have to amend your obnam.conf, as shown here -

[config]

repository = /media/boudiccas/backup/obnam-home2

root = /home/boudiccas/

client-name = london

#exclude = .mp2$, .part$, .rar$, .nfo$, .m4v$,
#    .tmp$, ~\.cache$

keep = 8h,14d,10w,12m

log = /home/boudiccas/logs/obnam.txt
log-level = info
log-keep = 7
log-max = 50 …

After much experimenting I've been able to mount an obnam generation back to 20th July 2013, my oldest backup that I have. To do this you need to have python-fuse and fuse-plugin.py installed. It is quite possible that you already have 'fuse-plugin.py' installed as part of your obnam …

The reinstall script that I use so succesfully has been amended by Markus Kalb, and his version is shown here, and will be in the git repo too'

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I've long been interested in git, which is described as - 'Git is a popular version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency; it is used for many high profile open source projects, most notably the Linux kernel'. It scales very nicely for home use as …

Obnam restore

Having done a restore and re-install recently of my Debian wheezy box, I made notes on what exactly I did. This was a 'planned' restore in that I decided at about 1430 to start the restore now rather than wait for doing it tomorrow. Whilst Obnam was completing …

This is the first post on a new hosts server, as I've moved this site from 1and1 to "cassidywebservices.co.uk" http://cassidywebservices.co.uk/. The reason for the move was that with every post that I made to this blog I was hitting memory problems, and there was virtually …

Protecting files from unwanted deletion is very important security on the tasklist of Unix Administrators. On Linux boxes you can use the chattr command.

Let’s give you some examples how chattr work under Linux -

To make a folder undeletable, run -

sudo chattr +i -R foldername

After that, you can …

I've found that the 'linux counter' has changed from when I last wrote about it on the 20th June 2011 Linux Counter

It is now at http://linuxcounter.net/ where you can register yourself and download a script which silently works behind the scenes on your computer. It is described …

I've just discovered GreatLittleRadioPlayer which has quite probably got the longest programme name I've ever seen! But its a streaming radio player for ubuntu and fedora, but I've got the 32-bit version working on Debian testing, with only one easily fulfillable dependency too. It can be found at https://sites …

I've mentioned this before, when I was talking about 'user.menu' for fluxbox, back in Part 4 - usermenu but having just configured it to use the root menu I'll explain further. It describes itself as 'A media player written in python, GTK and utilising gstreamer. Similar to totem but without …

If you want to have a system menu that is generated by the system rather than you, it is possible like this -

You need to move the current fluxbox menu out-of-the-way so that you don't overwrite it, and you can save it with today's date so it's still available if …

Much has been written about free software, yet many people still think: What good is it for regular users? They buy or copy software, not caring if doing so is legal, and they have no need for source code they wouldn't understand anyway. I heard that a couple times lately …

If you want to have a decent status bar in fluxbox, then you really have several choices - tint2, lxpanel, cairo-dock, docky, perlpanel, awn, but which is best? Only you can decide, but I'll try to show all of them so you can see what they are like.

Lxpanel

Lxpanel comes …

Probably the best music player I know of is pogo, written for Ubuntu but as its a python script it plays very nicely on this Debian box. It can be found at https://launchpad.net/pogo and describes itself as 'Probably the simplest and fastest audio player for Linux. Pogo …

Has my backup succeeded?

At the end of 'obnamhome.txt' there is a block of text which is very interesting to see how your backup has gone -

2013-09-04 16:31:48 INFO Backup performance statistics:
2013-09-04 16:31:48 INFO \* files found: 163789
2013-09-04 16:31:48 INFO \* files backed …

Sooner or later you will need to restore from your backup, and it doesn't hurt to create a situation where you do need to restore a file. I am going to show how I restore files which does work as I have had to use it for real.

Restore to …

obnam.conf

[config]
repository = /media/boudiccas/backup/obnam-home/
root = /home/boudiccas/
exclude = ~/.thumbnails$, .iso$
exclude-caches = false
keep = 8h,14d,10w,12m
log = /home/boudiccas/cron/obnam/obnamhome.txt
log-level = info
log-keep = 5
log-max = 50 mb
log-mode = 0600

notify-send

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I spend a lot of time listening to the radio or to my music, and I used to use Radio Tray for streaming radio off the internet but it kept dropping the connection and wasn’t very satisfactory. And then I heard about MPD and started reading about it and …

I have long had the problem with running cairo-dock under fluxbox in that it locks up the workspace [think 'desktop'] so you are effectually useless! I've reported it to the cairo-dock community and developers, and was told that it was a fluxbox problem, which I denied as it only occurred …

Recently I've been looking about for a good programme for keeping notes in of various things, and I've narrowed my list down to three, which are 'zim', 'KeepNote' and 'WikidPad'.

Zim

Zim can be found at http://www.zim-wiki.org and is in the Debian repos, but, do bear in …

I now think that I have the perfect usermenu! Its got absolutely loads of styles, and also backgrounds, and they're all available from the menu. And here it is -

[begin] (FluxBox)
         [exec] (Claws-Mail)    {claws-mail} 
         [exec] (google-chrome) {google-chrome} 
        [exec] (TEA Text Editor) {tea}
        [exec] (Pogo music player …