Gnome-Do

•November 11, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•November 6, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•November 2, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•November 1, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•November 1, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•November 1, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•October 30, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•October 29, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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

•October 28, 2009 • Leave a Comment

sound problems

•October 25, 2009 • Leave a Comment

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:

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.