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_