A taste of Linux.

I've recently discovered "Revelation" http://revelation.olasagasti.info/ which is a password keeper in active development, and its been added to my startup programs. I originally docked it into the system tray with "alltray" but I was unable to use it properly then, so now it just sits in the bottom program tray waiting to be used.

Another password keeper is "KeePassX" at http://www.keepassx.org/ which I’ve used previously but it doesn’t seem so intuitive as Revelation. One thing in its favour though is that it docks into the system tray which Revelation doesn't.

Its easy to add programs to start when you start gnome from login, just run ALT+F2 and enter ......... gnome-control-center ...... and then click on 'startup applications' and then 'add'. Enter a short description of the program, and the path to its binary. Then close to bring you back to the gnome control center and then close that. When you next login your programs will be automatically started.

Using this method I've entered ;- kwikdisc, gdesklets, and gkrellm.

to create a new backup file for burning to dvd, use this command line tool ;-
tar cvzf 20120115.tar.gz 20120115
which is very effective and quite quick too.
to log the output use the following command;-
tar cvzf 20120116.tar.gz 20120116 >> /home/boztu/cron/log.txt 2>&1

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

to rename an external usb hard drive from /media/8eef3b99-c17b-4913-ae61-d34c7fd5d459_ to /media/backup
sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 backup
# disable the entry in fstab
sudo emacs /etc/fstab
unplug the drive
plug the drive back in
and lo and behold, its mounted as /media/backup and available for backups again. with a much simpler, and more memorable name.

To create space on my external USB hard drive for new backups, I need to delete all the August entries. This is done as follows;-

ls -l /media [#to check that it is root:boztu]
sudo /home/boztu/cron/permissions.sh [#to make it root:boztu if not already so]
cd /media/8eef3b99-c17b-4913-ae61-d34c7fd5d459_
rm -rf ????08??

This will erase all the August entries, thereby creating more space.

I've moved over to Gnome from KDE and I now prefer it and find it easy to use. As part of the move over I've changed my backup script, which is now ;-

USB_DIR="/media/8eef3b99-c17b-4913-ae61-d34c7fd5d459_"
BACKUP_DIR="$USB_DIR/$(/bin/date +%Y%m%d)"
if [ -d $USB_DIR ]; then
[ -d $BACKUP_DIR ] || mkdir $BACKUP_DIR \
>> /home/boztu/cron/backup.txt 2>&1
/usr/bin/rsync -avz \
--exclude-from '/home/boztu/cron/xclude.txt' \
/home/boztu/ $BACKUP_DIR \
>> /home/boztu/cron/backup.txt 2>&1
fi

As can be seen there is just one script and one target drive, which makes it very simple to maintain, and requires very little maintenance too.

But it now uses an external 'exclude' script, which contains the following;-

*.mp2
*.ogg
*.part
*.avi
*.rar
*.mkv
*.mp3
*.mp4
*.wmv
*.nfo
*.deb

But there is a problem with the external usb hard drive in that it reverts its permissions to "root:root" at odd intervals, for some unknown reason. My solution to this is to run this "permissions" script at 2355 every night, just before the backup starts which changes the permissions to "root:boztu".

chown root:boztu /media/8eef3b99-c17b-4913-ae61-d34c7fd5d459_
chmod 775 /media/8eef3b99-c17b-4913-ae61-d34c7fd5d459_

I spent a couple of hours backing up some of my cd's onto my hard drive where I can easily play them too. I used 'Sound Juicer' to do this and it more or less succeeded. But I didnt want to back them up to my external USB hard drive so I amended the rsync command and it now shows;-

if [ -d /media/disk/ ]; then
/usr/bin/rsync -av --exclude *.mp2 --exclude *.ogg /home/boztu/ /media/disk/`/bin/date +%Y%m%d`/ \ >> /home/boztu/cron/backup.txt
fi
if [ -d /media/usb/ ]; then
/usr/bin/rsync -av --exclude *.mp2 --exclude *.ogg /home/boztu/ /media/usb/`/bin/date +%Y%m%d`/ \ >> /home/boztu/cron/backup.txt
fi

In the testing that I've done it has the album titles but totally excludes the tracks themselves, which is what I wanted.

Because my external USB drive has differing paths, seemingly arbitary, when it is plugged in I've had to change the commands for my backup.sh. It now says;=

if [ -d /media/disk/ ]; then
/usr/bin/rsync -av /home/boztu/ /media/disk/`/bin/date +%Y%m%d`/ \ >> /home/boztu/cron/backup.txt
fi
if [ -d /media/usb/ ]; then
/usr/bin/rsync -av /home/boztu/ /media/usb/`/bin/date +%Y%m%d`/ \ >> /home/boztu/cron/backup.txt
fi

So I'm now testing it to see if it works as per the script, but the acid test will be when I reboot, we'll see for definite then.

I had a 96 page pdf file to convert to text, and it was named 'UK Households 2005.pdf' but pdftotext couldn't convert it at all. So I cd'd into the directory where the pdf file was located, and renamed the file as 'UKHouseholds2005.pdf', and then ran pdftotext on it, and it converted very easily.

And this is a good link for other linux programs that can work on pdf files ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software#Unix_.2F_Linux

On logging into gmail yesterday morning on iceweasel i got the following message ......

You are using an old version of Firefox that Gmail no longer supports. Some features may not work correctly

..... are there any plans for upgrading iceweasel to get round this problem, or should i install a more updated firefox?

Thats what I sent to the #debian chatroom on irc, and I got various replies like "don't worry, just ignore it" and one directing me to http://mozilla.debian.net/.

When I went there it was a page showing how to get backports for debian squeeze [debian 6.0.2] and I ended up installing a beta version of iceweasel, which is working very well.

It wasn't a real showstopper, more of an irritation than anything, but debian had a solution before I had the problem. :)

Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, died on August 16th 1977, whilst sitting on the toilet! Regardless of where he was when he died, it was a great shame and pity that he did so. He was arguably the greatest rock and roll singer and performer that genre of music has ever known. I, for one, miss him, as he was such a larger than life character. He was very generous to those in his inner circle, frequently giving cars and other gifts to them as he just liked giving stuff away. His films weren't too good, they were just really vehicles for his songs.

But when he was conscripted into the army he went and performed his patriotic duty, serving his full time in the army, part of which was spent in Germany. When he left the army he was a sergeant, and he then went back to civvy street and to his music career.

As I said, I for one, will miss him and his songs. Although many of his songs still remain on vinyl and cd's, it wouldnt surprise me to hear that a back catalogue of his recordings have been found. Many people have tried to imitate him, but all fail to one degree or another, he was priceless!

Rest in peace, Elvis Aaron Presley.

When running 'top' from the command line, the process 'GTK-gnash' always showed up usually with three instances of it. Killing it didnt seem to make much difference, it just reappeared again, and the killed ones became zombies. So, how to get rid of it?

The answer is to use apt-get to remove 'gnash' which is a GNU Shockwave Flash [swf] player. This also removes 'browser-plugin-gnash'. As I don't like watching flash programs/videos it was an easy decision to get rid of it.

Running 'sudo apt-get autoremove' also removes the following orphan files ;- gnash-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 libboost-date-time1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 , but I've yet to see any benefit of removing them, except to get rid of unused files.

Ever since I've been using debian and kde especially one thing has always bugged me, the date bars in kmail! These seperate the mails into small chunks according to the day they were received, which sounds like a good idea until you see it implemented, and then you realise how inadequate it is because it closes the nested emails and breaks the threads. So I've been looking for a way to get rid of the date bars, and I've found one way.

In kmail go to View -> Message List -> Aggregation and tick Standard mailing list. The result is to get rid of the grey bars completely and finally. Easy when you know how, its only taken me two months to find it out :).

By default under KDE, Debian 6 indexes files using nepomuk which can be suspended on the desktop, but that is only valid for one session. If you reboot then you have to suspend it again, so I've been looking for a way of turning it off completely.

And here it is - at the menu choose Settings -> system settings -> advanced tab -> desktop search -> disable Nepomuk Semantic. This kills it dead and should last until you either turn it back on again or you reinstall!

A new addition to my root.crontab is;-

00 3 * * * /home/boztu/cron/cache.sh

which calls the file cache.sh

#!/bin/bash -x
#shell script for use with rsync in root crontab
/usr/bin/rsync -av /var/cache/apt/archives/ /media/disk/cache/ >> /home/boztu/cron/archives.txt

which copies the debs from /var/cache/apt/archives/ to /media/disk/cache/ and then writes /home/boztu/cron/archives.txt. This runs every night at 0300 and means that if i do have to do a reinstall I dont have to redownload all of them again, just do a local install instead.

When I do a fresh install the first file that i install afterwards is vnstat which monitors your downloads and tells you in graphical form how much you've downloaded in the last 24 hours.
Then I install in no particular order ntp, logwatch and many others.

I tend to use emacs for file editing as I prefer it over vi, but I find it diffcult to remember the key sequences for various events. So here is my aide memoire;-
ctrl-x ctrl-s to save
Ctrl-x ctrl-c to exit
Ctrl-x ctrl-w to save as.

I've just discovered that you can kill any PID from TOP whilst its running by just entering 'k' and then the PID number. Sweet!