Gnome-Do

Discovered Gnome-Do recently. With it I can:

• launch applications (like Alt+F2, but better)
• find files & folders (by name)
• act on your pidgin contacts
• lookup google contacts
• lookup/create google calendar events
• search google maps
• do a google search

There’s many more plugins to use.

Notes:

• It has some stability/hanging issues in karmic
• The Thunderbird plugin (community-supported) is abandoned and does not work

concatenate in openoffice calc

If you want a cell in OpenOffice Calc to contain multiple types of text (e.g. a fixed string and the result of a function), use the CONCATENATE function. For example, if the sum of column D is 19, then a cell containing =CONCATENATE(“YES=”, SUM(D2:D40)) will display YES=19.

tcprobe

To get info about a video file on the command line, install transcode and then run tcprobe -i <video_file>

Example output:

[tcprobe] RIFF data, AVI video
[tcprobe] summary for <filename_here>, (*) = not default, 0 = not detected
import frame size: -g 656x346 [720x576] (*)
 frame rate: -f 23.976 [25.000] frc=1 (*)
 audio track: -a 0 [0] -e 48000,0,2 [48000,16,2] -n 0x55 [0x2000] (*)
 bitrate=112 kbps
 length: 146626 frames, frame_time=41 msec, duration=1:41:55.532

printer sharing in Linux

To make an Ubuntu computer act as a printer server, follow these instructions.

The device URI on the server will look like this:

hp:/usb/<printer_name>?serial=<serial_number>

while on the client it’s:

ipp://<server_ip_address>:631/printers/<printer_name>

D-Link SharePort not for Linux

Got a D-Link DIR-655 router; it has a USB port on the back, that can be used in 3 modes:

• Network USB: D-Link SharePort technology to share a hard disk or printer on your network
• 3G USB Adapter: share your 3G connectivity on your local network
• WCN Configuration: Windows Connect Now technology to transfer network settings on a USB flash disk

D-Link provides a Windows-only utility to use SharePort, while the actual manufacturer (Silex) also provides a MacOS utility. However (as usual) nothing for Linux…

reverse mapping failed

When you ssh into a machine from the same subnet, it tries to reverse-lookup you IP address. When that failes, sshd writes a message in your /var/log/auth.log saying:

reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for rfc-1918 [ip_address_here] failed – POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!

To stop getting that, add the names of your subnet machines in /etc/hosts

Exploring iPhoneOS

Preparation:

1. Jailbreak (blackra1n for 3.1.2)
2. Install openssh, sudo, top
3. Plug in (charging) to keep WiFi from going to sleep
4. Ssh into it (username: mobile, default password: alpine)
5. Change the default password immediately!!!

Some notes so far:

• Your home directory: /var/mobile
• Shell type: bash (configuration: /etc/profile)
• Add yourself to /etc/sudoers
• Change your prompt:

export PS1='\e[32;1m\u@\h\e[00m:\e[34;1m\w\e[00m$ '

• Advanced ls output:

alias ls='ls -FhlX --color=auto'

• More doesn’t seem to work (/bin/more: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable)
• Some more customizations in /etc/profile.d: coreutils.sh and terminal.sh
• Run updatedb

package information staleness

To find out when your package information was last updated, run:

/bin/ls -l /var/lib/apt/periodic/update-success-stamp|awk '{print $6" "$7}'

Otherwise, have a look at the _get_last_apt_get_update_text function in /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/UpdateManager/UpdateManager.py

retired packages

Here’s Fedora’s strategy about retired packages:

• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Retired_packages
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/PackageEndOfLife

sound problems

I’ve been having sound problems on Karmic for a while now. My audio is provided by an onboard Intel HDA ICH7 [8086:27d8]. I went through everything in:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingSoundProblemsMisc

The only thing that fixes it (for just one song) is sudo alsa force-reload, which basically unloads and re-loads all related kernel modules. Will investigate further…

Notes:

1. cat /proc/asound/cards gives you a list of your sound cards
2. aplay -l does more-or-less the same
3. lsmod|grep snd lists the currently loaded kernel modules related to sound
4. lspci -vvnn|grep snd tells you which module actually controls your sound card (for me it’s snd-hda-intel)
5. look inside /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf for the options of the module above. for me they’re options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

UPDATE: Removing this last line (so my sound doesn’t go to sleep anymore) seems to have fixed it, let’s see if it’s true.