Archive: Linux Software

Wow.... Let me just say that I have typically been inundated with junk mail on my primary address. It's associated with this domain and has been hosted in an older sendmail setup for quite some time …

Just a quick note for what is really a simple fix. I have been using rsnapshot to back up several machines lately. If you haven't taken a look at rsnapshot on linux for managing snapshot backups (whe…

This post is going to be somewhat of a "link dump" for me of some pages that I've been perusing lately. After playing with RT (request tracker) - I added a few ticket items for the home network. Now,…

Once upon a time I wrote of manually extracting a file from a mondorescue backup. Sometimes it's just easier to do that, than have mondorescue go through 30 some cds or dvds just to find one file. (N…

Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had starte…

I've spent a bit of time over the last week putting some scripting together to build a new website. The site is morseringtones.com and as you might imagine there are morse code mp3 ringtones availabl…

Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It's rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windo…

So, I've spent some time recently working with Zarafa. It's an exchange replacement that has a completely open source version as well as a version with licenses for outlook if you want that level of …

On my (somewhat older) laptop, I've noticed that MPlayer sometimes gets the audio and video out of sync. The audio is moving faster than the video. I've noticed this in octoshape streaming as well as…

This is for Mac or Linux. Their servers are VERY busy right now as you might imagine. But, if you've always wondered about crossover wine, see if you can get a copy today at Codeweavers main site. I …

Adobe has released the new version 10 of Flash Player. What's notable is that the Linux version is out at the same time as the Windows version. Thanks VERY much to Adobe for making this happen. Linux…

Good linux format review of the new features and the overall feel (if you can get to it this morning. The main openoffice.org site is down at the moment. New features include a plugin for pdf import,…

Recently I've run across a realmedia stream that I really want to convert to mp3 (mainly because my portable player can't read rm files. I'll talk about capturing rm streams in another post, but this…

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck... users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there's also a utility called TestDisk that looks p…

I'm tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house - and use VOIP for additional lines. Here's an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.

I've mentioned X-Plane before - it's a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it's also unique in that it's available for…

The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I've installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what's what and so far haven't had much time to play around. I seem to recall the loca…

Good article

I've mentioned offline wikipedia access before mainly because for all it's flaws, wikipedia is probably the single largest, most comprehensive and best information resource out there. There may be ot…

I've been puzzled a bit by the graphing output of gramps - it leaves me with a file with a .dot extension that I didn't know quite what to do with. It opened in text editors as just markup, no image …

For years I've been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I've absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I've had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an …

A few days ago I was researching possibilities for linux boot without rebooting to a cd. I found something interesting in instlux. Essentially, it's a windows installer style download that can bootst…

One recent task was install opengroupware on a dapper drake 6.06 install in a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here and ran into a slight problem. The default install from Ubuntu do…

I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn't find the article, so I'm posting it now... if it's a duplicate, sorry... I'm still using Ubuntu's Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a…

Might should have typed this up sooner, but... a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these…

In the last few days, I had to set up something a bit unusual with apache. Basically the goal was to have apache listen for connections on two different ports (the standard port 80 and an alternate p…

http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/ is an interesting bundle of linux designed to be an out of the box network service swiss army knife of sorts. Here are the network services that it provides.... Kerberos…

http://www.sleuthkit.org/ Sluethkit... is a collection of tools for forensic analysis of a system. Usually it's something that would be done when you've had a suspected rootkit on the system and you …

This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that wo…

It seems silly with multiple machines to download the same file multiple times. At some level it's not THAT inconvenient. It really depends on your connection speed and the size of the files in quest…

In the US and Europe and many more developed parts of the world we take our internet connectivity these days for granted. (And some go into panic attacks when it's not available...) In some parts of …

Openvpn has been one of the tools of choice this week, so as I was tinkering on my ubuntu boxen.... I thought why don't I install openvpn there as well for a little broader testing. So, I did, but wa…

This is a good quick reference for some command line linux commands.... pixelbeat.org - linux command line tips. Nice reference. (of course you can also make use of man/apropos and -h to find out mor…

I saw yesterday that Dell has a page advertising computers with NO preinstalled OS. Dimension line... n series and they are targetted towards people that want to install an Open Source operating syst…

One of the slickest video editing tools I've used in linux is kino. The only problem is that it's geared towards dv files which comes straight from a camcorder (using the dv format.) Most of my video…

One of the utilities under Linux I've made use of in the last few months is Dvdstyler. It essentially will take your dvd ready video and make the DVD filesystem (as well as menus). Simple menus are v…

Haven't had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I've been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions o…

Anyone that's setup software raid on a system with multiple storage adapters has probably run into this kind of issue, but I thought I'd mention it. Last weekend I built a machine to replace my serve…

I've noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false p…

I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here.... The situation is this... Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has us…

One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key - web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to…

Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First... from the software raid howto, I've…

I like nx server and client, it can really make good use of low bandwidth connections to get a gui link. But, by default it's quick and easy to setup gnome and kde login sessions within nxclient, but…

Lacie has released a tool to write the back of cds using HP's lightscribe technology under linux. I seem to recall there being a possibility of future support in k3b, but I don't think that has been …

The newest Ubuntu (K/X/Edu as well) is out, Edgy Eft 6.10 is finalized and will be supported for 18 months. (Longer support/users seeking stable proven base should stick with Dapper Drake...) One of …

from the command line in linux... or generating them from Wavs.... So, I've got this CD that I've made and is up for sale at lulu.com traditional hymns done as "chimes". I've spent quite a bit of tim…

Now... available in Beta form... The Linux version of the Flash player has been stuck at 7 for some time, while many sites require flash 8 for video/etc... (The page to find the beta download is here…

I've been using vmware server quite a bit of course, I've mentioned it before. I had never played around with accessing a usb device in the guest environment though. When I tried (host operating syst…

Baring big problems, the final release candidate for the new 2.0 version of Mozilla Firefox is out reported here and here. Mozilla.com page for the RC is here.

The other day I was trying to partition a drive hooked up via usb. (So it get's /dev/sda as it's device in linux)... I tried a few utilities to access the partition table and all failed, finally, I r…

OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking.... "Hello where has he been?" when I'm talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but.... in spite of all …

NX server and client is a GREAT remote X approach that can tunnel over fairly narrow links well and does phenomenally well over a LAN. I frequently use NX in place of VNC when working with Linux base…

First, I should disclaim that this is going to be a brain dump of the resources and experience of a quick setup of Ubuntu 6.06 on a software raid based storage system. This may be less than ideal, bu…

Several days ago there were announcements of the release of Mandriva 2007, only thing was, the download wasn't available yet. Well, today the download appears available. I haven't looked to see what …

I saw a comment somewhere else that zero-day was overused and in essense ANY previously unknown vulnerability in open source software is technically zero day... the intent here though is to use the w…

As I've just posted to the security-update-notice category, Firefox and Thunderbird both have been released in 1.5.0.7 version.... the release fixes a number of known security issues and you should u…

Yesterday, of course, Microsoft released it's monthly patches. I found the Windows update site to be painfully slow (and in some cases unresponsive.) It wasn't quite a huge update day by recent stand…

So, the stories are out of the analysis of the code for Mozilla Firefox. It seems there were a large number of potential flaws found (71 potential security vulnerabilities) according to the article. …

More than once I've wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it's capable of hosting multiple graphi…

For most people here in the US, this last weekend was known as Labor Day weekend, for me though... it was more like Audio on Linux weekend. I've mentioned before that I use my computer for most EVERY…

Mozilla is soliciting people to test the candidates for version 1.5.0.7 of both Firefox and Thunderbird, so that sounds as though release is VERY close for that version. It sounds as though there are…

First, Linspire released the freely available "freespire" release of their operating system (based on debian linux). Now, users will no longer have to pay an annual subscription for the click n run s…

I've got to admit, I hadn't caught the notice of this until it was at incidents.org. I don't currently administer sendmail on any machines, but.... Sendmail released version 8.13.8 on August 9th to a…

One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one …

Macromedia Flash player 9 running on linux? Impossible? No... many things that seem impossible, well... aren't This morning there's a good writeup at how-to-forge about installing flash player 9 on l…

I NEVER knew you could use screen for this.... Let multiple users connect to the same Console (command shell/bash shell) session simultaneously. I've looked at screen before. It's a great *nix utilit…

There used to be a tool called ethereal and then it changed it's name to wireshark. Today a number of security vulnerabilities were disclosed. A new version is available and workarounds. Please upgra…

One of the things I didn't mention in my first skype post was the "getting skype to work with linux" bit... The version available via urpmi in Mandrake was 1.2, so I installed it (before I had the us…

Incidents.org has been running their security tip a day this month and I really liked this one. It's essentially a way to encrypt your wireless traffic using ssh. That's something I've covered here b…

WMV and WMA file formats (Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio) have been one of those sore spots for desktop linux. Yes, I KNOW mplayer and other players can handle them. (If the codecs are i…

It looks as though Ubuntu has released the first maintenance release in the Dapper Drake life cycle. So, now 6.06.1 can be downloaded. (In analagous terms this might be considered the first service p…

You can find updated rpms for Mandrake 10.0 of the recent clamantivirus update at https://www.averyjparker.com/wp-content/downloads/clamav-0.88.4/.

In my wife's profile on the desktop she said she was getting an error message sending and receiving messages so.... when doing a send/receive of mail I saw evolution giving an error message of "summa…

HDR - recently I heard someone talking about this with regards to digital imaging. The idea is that you have three identical images (landscapes) taken from a stationary (tripod) camera. The only diff…

Linux.com has a great writeup on making banner images quickly and easily from the command line (or a script). The catch here is that text is the content for the image. Under linux that will require t…

One of the real frustrations with phone tech support is translating step by step what is needed to the person on the other end. I know it sounds easy, but in reality - what if they've got xyz theme f…

According to incidents.org a denial of service vulnerability has been noted in all versions of clamav prior to 0.88.4 (inclusive). At incidents last report the download for 0.88.4 was back after disa…

I use wget a LOT. Many times in working with a website I've got a ssh console opened to the site and if there's a plugin that I'd like to download it doesn't make sense to download and then upload, I…

The Channelinsider is reporting that Lenovo will be the first tier one OEM to preinstall a linux distribution on generally available PC's. For years, you either had to order large volume, or find a s…

The forums over at LXer.com have a good list underway of vendors that sell linux preinstalled on PC's (desktops and laptops.) They also list those vendors that sell pcs without an operating system.

Linux.com has a good explanation of using binfmt_misc to directly launch a windows (or java or python) application just by typing in the application name. *(without all the contortions of ... /home/u…

That was a quick turn around.... It appears as though some of the multimedia streaming issues were severe enough to require a quick turnaround for Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 Sans had the initial heads u…

Sometimes you run across a site that's a browser snob. You know the type.... you visit it in Mozilla Firefox or (anything other than IE) and it says, "you must use Internet Explorer version 6 or newe…

Again.... this article referring to an exploit related to the cross platform plugin capability in firefox, is a GOOD reminder to be cautious when looking at potential plugins to install for mozilla f…

Feh..... what a name... well, linux.com has an article up on feh which is a nice lean image viewer for linux. It has quite a few command line switches so it should make cli users happy with the choic…

Here is a link to the info page. It sounds as though there are several images available. Mandriva 2007 Beta 1 has Gnome and KDE centric 586 and x86_64 versions of cd images for download as well as an…

Well, let's start with the extensions first. Like ANY software, you should be cautious installing something from an untrusted source. If you think an extension looks neat and cool - look for reviews …

I noticed this evening that I wasn't getting the usual thumbnails of jpg images in Konqueror (KDE's file browser.) On investigation, there were error messages like this.... konqueror: WARNING: Pixmap…

We're planning a quick trip out of town and I'm using the lowly free version of Google Earth that doesn't integrate with a GPS device. So, I had got a series of places tagged in "My Places" and had s…

Blocking Aggressive Outbound Traffic with IPtables. For starters, I've tested this on a test system that started out with NO iptables rules, and then moved on to an IPCop install (the vmware download…

SANS has a story on another local kernel vulnerability for linux. I've got to say that I typically haven't looked as much at "local" vulnerabilities on this site as I have talked about remote vulnera…

Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS …

I've been keeping an install of Vmware virtual Server through their beta and Release Candidate phase and have seen several places that they've released the 1.0 version today. This release is free (as…

I just read that Codeweavers has managed to get World of Warcraft working in Crossover Office in their development builds it should be possible. Of course, it's been possible for some time to run it …

and Internet Explorer use has dropped below 80% in the US. Currently 12.93% of online users browse with Firefox. Almost 40% of German web-browsers use Firefox to view the web. It's nice to see Firefo…

July 11th will mark the end of Microsoft's support for Windows 98 and ME. Which means that there will be no further security updates for those systems after that date. In SOME ways, those systems may…

I hope there aren't too many browser developers that have planned on taking July off..... I ran across browserfun.blogspot.com where it is planned to release information on a web browser vulnerabilit…

Sometimes I wish I wasn't curious about things.... The other night I was working on something on the testbox in the back room and saw the switch lights flickering fairly actively between the server a…

Version 2.0.3 of OpenOffice.org has been released. It includes quite a few bugfixes, including three security related fixes. The security vulnerabilities were apparently found in an internal audit. O…

As I've mentioned I've got an ubuntu based test system. Most of my linux experience has been from a red-hat derivitive-based background and for that, at the command line, you have chkconfig which is …