Archive for the ‘linux’ Category

5 ways to drop yourself reminders/alarms in Linux

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

A lot of services on the web offer wake up calls, reminder calls, or just other services meant to drop you an e-mail or phone call at a specific time. You can do many of these things via a Linux box, and maybe save yourself some money in the process.

  1. Send yourself a one-time reminder e-mail about something.

    2. You can do this via the handy ‘at’ command. For instance, if I wanted to shoot myself an e-mail after work reminding me to pick up my laundry from the dry cleaners, I could do the following:
    echo "mail -s 'Get dry cleaning' me@myemailaddress.com < /dev/null" | at 17:45

    I can also send this e-mail to my cell phone, giving me another reminder away from my computer. US AT&T users can send messages to their telephone number @txt.att.net and it will be received as an SMS message on the phone.

  2. Pop up a one-time reminder on your computer about something.

    3. The ‘at’ command comes in handy again. If I want to remind myself to let my dogs in from the back yard, I can simply type:
    echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xmessage Let dogs in!" | at 18:15

    At 6:15, a little message box will pop up telling me to let the dogs in.
    You can also specify times for ‘at’ by using NOW + interval.
    For instance, using
    at "NOW + 30 minutes"

    will give me an execution time of 30 minutes from now. I could use hours, days, or weeks to get whatever effect I wanted. In addition, an e-mail log of everything will be sent to my local e-mail account, detailing what went on.

  3. Alarm Clock with ‘at’

    4. If you need to wake up early one morning, or you want to wake up from a nap, you can use your computer as an alarm clock and play an MP3 for you to wake up to. This one is straightforward enough. You’ll need mpg321 installed to use this, and know the path to the mp3 file you want to play.
    echo "mpg321 ~/Trivium/Rain.mp3" | at 5:30AM

    You’ll have to execute pkill mpg321 in a terminal to make it shut up, though.

  4. Alarm Clock with ‘cron’

    5. Now we’re going to do the same thing, but on every weekday of every month.
    Execute crontab -e and then type in the following:
    30 5 * * 1-5 mpg321 ~/Trivium/Rain.mp3 >/dev/null

    Now, every weekday at 5:30, you’ll get that mp3 blasting out over your speakers. Obviously you’ll need to specify your own MP3 file. You’ll also need to execute pkill mpg321 to make this one shut up. Your spouse may not like this idea, but assure your spouse that it will make you wake up more easily.

  5. Alarm Clock with KAlarm

    6. You’ll need to install KAlarm for this one. KAlarm will let you run XWindows applications (or even command line apps) via a cron-like process. It can also send e-mails and pop up messages. Check out their documentation here.
    You can schedule MP3s with XMMS and Totem much in the same way as you can mpg321.
    xmms ~/Trivium/Rain.mp3
    totem ~/Trivium/Rain.mp3

    You can set up Kalarm to run these programs and blast out your music for a specified time. If you haven’t killed the application within that set time period, Kalarm can kill it for you. Which is handy when you’re not home and you have heavy metal blasting through your 7.1 Surround Sound speakers at 5:30 in the morning for your neighbors to hear. Eviction isn’t high on anybody’s priorities list.

Did I miss anything? Leave it in the comments section.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash

Posted in linux, reminders | 1 Comment »

Making Ubuntu boot in 19 seconds, pt2

Friday, September 14th, 2007

I wrote before about my experiments in Ubuntu boot times and mentioned doing a fresh install and just disabling the dhcp and network manager. I got a lot of good input and wanted to expand upon that.

Setup
My secondary workstation is a Dell GX270 with a 3.0GHz P4 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 40GB Seagate ST340014A hard drive. I blew away the existing install again, reinstalled Feisty with the default settings, specified my static IP, and updated via apt-get. The current kernel version is 2.6.20-16-generic i686.

Getting started
I installed bootchart via sudo apt-get install bootchart and rebooted. My boot time was 29 seconds.
My /etc/network/interfaces file again contained entries for eth1, eth2, ath0 and wlan0. I deleted all of these.
Again, the if-up, if-down, and pre and post-up had entries for wireless and avahi stuff i didn’t want, so I removed the following
sudo -s
rm /etc/network/if-down.d/avahi-autoipd
rm /etc/network/if-post-down.d/wireless-tools
rm /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools
rm /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-autoipd
rm /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-daemon
exit

I rebooted and checked my boot time again

I reprofiled my boot sequence, then rebooted: 23 seconds.

Sysv-rc-conf
At this point I installed and fired up sysv-rc-conf (sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf)
I disabled the following:

bluetooth
cupsys
hotkey-setup
hplip
powernowd
rsync
wpa-ifupdown

Boot time after removing the services: 22 seconds

At this point, bootchart seems to be limited by a few particular processes:
Disk-related:
khubd
scsi_eh 1
modprobe
rc

CPU Related:
udevd
ckbcomp
hald
Xorg

It looks like udevd is still loading wacom junk
sudo find /etc -name '*wacom*' -type f -delete
hehe, took care of that.
I also enabled concurrent shell scripts while I was at it.
Still at 22 seconds.
I cleaned up /etc/acpi, as there were a ton of modules loaded that I didn’t use: 22 seconds.
I installed prelinking and then rebooted: 22 seconds.
I blacklisted ipv6 and a handful of other modules that were loaded for no reason whatsoever: 22 seconds.
I reprofiled and rebooted: 20 seconds.
At this point it looks like readahead itself takes up about 5 seconds of uninterruptable I/O.

Now to try out some of the stuff that my readers posted.
mgarces said to try initNG. So I grabbed the deb files for initng and the initng ifiles from initng.org and did a dpkg -i initng*.deb
But it didn’t boot……so I googled and ran across this page. I followed the directions there and got it to boot. HAL is complaining and I don’t feel like troubleshooting it right now.
But wait, bootchart isn’t working either. Crap.
Oh, even better, eth0 didn’t come up.
sudo dpkg -r initng
sudo dpkg -r initng-ifiles
Bye-bye initng!

So I figured, why not play with the schedulers?
CFQ=22 seconds
deadline=23 seconds
noop=23 seconds
as=23 seconds

So, even now, nothing really helps.

Well, I’m really getting burned out, maybe there will be a part 3 for this sometime.

Until next time!
-LightningCrash

Posted in boot, grub, linux, ubuntu | 2 Comments »

Getting Linux functionality on a Windows desktop.

Friday, September 14th, 2007

When I was forced to run Windows in a support environment, I was faced with a number of challenges. Mainly, how to get my favorite OSS functionality back in my Windows desktop. Luckily, there are many tools that can help you.
I’ll go through them in the order I usually install them on a Windows box, and add in some others that I’ve found and considered.

  1. BBLean

    2. BBLean gives you a Blackbox environment in Windows. I like BlackBox, especially in a Windows environment, and it’s probably the biggest visual indicator that you’re making progress in getting OSS on your Windows box.

  2. UnxUtils

    3. Oh how nice it is to have native GNU tools in Windows. I put the utilities into the Windows/System32 folder, renaming find.exe to gfind.exe, as Windows won’t let you replace find.exe (Who knew?)
    Notable programs in the package include dd, diff, grep, find, head, tail, gzip, gunzip, wc, tr, sed, gawk, and touch.

  3. Cygwin

    4. From Cygwin.com: “The Cygwin tools are ports of the popular GNU development tools for Microsoft Windows. They run thanks to the Cygwin library which provides the UNIX system calls and environment these programs expect.”
    Worth the install, definitely.

  4. GnuWin32

    5. GNUWin32 has Windows ports of GNU or other open source software. The list is much more comprehensive than UnxUtils, and you can pick and choose which packages you want to download. Useful if you want a native version of a specific tool not included in UnxUtils.

  5. PuTTY

    6. PuTTY gives you SSH to other machines, and also includes SOCKS proxying, port redirection, SCP, SFTP, and other useful tools for the command-line.

  6. BitVise Tunnelier

    7. This item isn’t GPLed, so it diminishes its value in my mind. However, if you need an easy client to just run a SOCKS proxy, do graphical SCP, or run SSH tunneling of any kind, the BitVise Tunnelier client is great for this. I don’t use it for CLI administrative tasks, as PuTTY does better terminal emulation, but it’s still very good at what it does. If you’re SSHed into a Windows box, it will let you do one-click, SSH Tunneled Remote Desktop sessions to the box you’re SSHed into. Which leads me to my next item….

  7. BitVise WinSSHD

    8. If you’re not a big fan of Cygwin but still want to SSH into a Windows box, get WinSSHD. This is a closed source SSH server for the Windows environment that runs as a service. It costs money, though, $40 for a personal license and $100 for a business license. This also only gives you 5 user licenses. Closed source, costs money, and a diminished value in my book. May be necessary for some, though.

  8. WinSCP

    9. If you wish they made a SmartFTP-like application to do SCP file transfers in Windows, you’re in luck. This program is open source and free as in beer. It’s definitely more secure than plain FTP, and the program is very polished. Tunnelier does some of the same things, but for large or complicated transfers, this is the way to get it done. Plus, Tunnelier is closed source.

  9. Unison

    10. There aren’t any particularly good Rsync options for Windows (except for via Cygwin), but Unison comes pretty close and brings you a lot of the same features. To synchronize folders, there is no other. Unison is also open source (GPL) and free as in beer!

You can find a veritable gaggle of other Open Source windows software via the OSSwin site. So if there’s something else you like in Linux but want in Windows, you might just happen to be in luck. We still don’t have Yakuake/Tilda or Compiz Fusion on Windows yet, but this will make Windows more tolerable for OSS geeks like myself, and give more functionality to the Windows power users.
That’s a Win/Win in my book.

Did I miss anything? If so, use the comments section to slap me upside the head.

Until next time!
-LightningCrash

Posted in gnu, gpl, linux, port, windows | 1 Comment »

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo released, leaves Linux users out in the cold

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

I was really excited to hear the the ET:QW demo was released yesterday. However, for reasons unknown, iD decided not to release Linux binaries of the demo.

But for as much as I like iD software’s products, and as much as I really, really want to play ET:QW, I’m not even going to consider buying it until there’s a release for the Linux platform.

I don’t usually take a hard-line stance on these things, but the only desktop I have that would even be capable of playing ET:QW is the centerpiece of all of the technology in my house, and I can’t “Just install Windows,” run ‘dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda’, or any other ideas you may have for screwing up my perfectly good build.

So you can take your Windows binary and shove it, oh tosser of the Vista salad. I’ll wait for the real thing.

Fortunately, the retail release should be followed in a few months by a Linux installer, so I only have to wave my middle finger in the air until, oh, November or December.

Posted in etqw, games, linux | No Comments »

Xargs is your friend

Monday, September 10th, 2007

If you don’t know what xargs is, here’s the definition of xargs from Wikipedia:

xargs is a command of the Unix and most Unix-like operating systems which eases passing command output to another command as command line arguments.

It splits its often piped input at whitespaces (or the null character) and calls the command given as an argument with each element of the split input as parameter. If the parameter list is too long, it calls the program as often as necessary. It often covers the same functionality as the backquote feature of many shells, but is more flexible and often also safer, especially if there are blanks or special characters in the input.

This is often used in conjunction with the Unix commands find, locate and grep.

So, what can you do with xargs?

Well, let’s say you want to put up a torrent on a tracker, but you want to include a file with the MD5 checksums of every file. We’ll assume that the files you want to put on bittorrent are in /home/me/mytorrent/
To generate an MD5 sum of every file in the directory and dump it to a file, you can do the following:
find /home/me/mytorrent/ -type f|xargs md5sum >> /home/me/mytorrent/md5sums.txt

Now you’ve got a list of the MD5 sums for every file in the torrent you want to publish.

You can also use xargs to call grep to look inside files. For instance, if you’re editing a web page and you want to find all instances of a PHP class, you can execute the following:

find /home/me/mywebpage -name '*.php'|xargs grep -Hn adminClass

This will return a list of each file ending in php, and then for each item in the list, grep will check for the string adminClass. The -H flag will make sure that grep prints the filename in each match, and the -n flag will make grep print the line number as well.

xargs is an invaluable tool in command-line work because it prevents you from having to write a for or while loop in a shell script. xargs will run the command you specify on every line of output. Granted, find has an -exec capability, but xargs has its utility. Being slightly paranoid, you might like to check the output of a command before you pipe it to xargs or run an -exec in find. For instance, if you were removing everything in a cache directory, it would probably be better to pipe the find output to more first, and then after you have verified the output, you can pipe it to xargs rm -f -r

For usenet users, you can also use xargs to PAR check all of your files.

ls *.par2|xargs par -r

Windows users take heart, there is an xargs for windows in the Findutils package for Windows .

Have any other xargs tricks? Leave yours in the comments.

Posted in linux, xargs | No Comments »

10 ways Linux can breath life into your old PCs

Friday, September 7th, 2007

Yesterday, I was trying to figure out what to do with a spare Athlon XP 1600+ box that I have. I wrote down some of my ideas and threw in some others I’ve used in the past. If you’re looking for ways to reuse that old PC, just peruse this list.

  1. MythTV:

    2. If you haven’t at least heard about MythTV, you’re missing out. For the uninitiated, you should probably try out Knoppmyth. You can spec out hardware a few ways with this, but for run of the mill SDTV, you can get by with older hardware via the use of hardware encoding/decoding. A Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 can handle the encode and decode operations just fine, even on slow hardware. Look at the EPIA C3 boxes for proof. a 1GHz C3 seems to be about the floating point equivalent of a Pentium III 500. You just need enough CPU power to write to/from the disk, and you’re set. A Hauppauge PVR-350 and a 500GB SATA drive should set you back about $250, and then you’re on your way to your own home-brew DVR!

  2. Firewall:

    3. You can use just about any computer you want for a Linux-based firewall. I use an old Pentium II 233 with 128MB of RAM and a 4.3GB hard drive. It works great. You’ll need two network cards in the unit, but those are easy to come by. For a software selection, I highly recommend IPCop. Before I set up my IPCop router, I handily froze 4 variants of consumer grade Cable/DSL routers. I set up the IPCop router at home and I have been trouble free ever since.

  3. Photo Frame:

    4. Ok, so this may not be the most electric-bill-friendly use of older hardware, but it works. Install any version of Linux that will run on the box, load up your pictures in a directory, and point your screensaver to that directory. I have a Dell GX110 connected to a 17″ LCD just for this purpose and it never fails to start conversations (usually due to the crazy photos I’ve taken throughout the years.) Set up a Samba share and let your spouse/roommates drag some photos over, too. It can also serve double duty with some other tasks in this list.

  4. CNC Controller:

    5. The only real requirement for this is that your computer have 192MB of RAM in it. That’s the minimum requirement to install Xubuntu. The folks at LinuxCNC.org have given the world a great little CNC package for Linux. You need not be limited there, you can do other sorts of Linux-powered work with an old PC. This is a prime example. He’s using DOS to run his BASIC programs, but there are plenty of BASIC interpreters for Linux, too!

  5. Classic Game Console:

    6. You can run Linux and ZSNES on just about anything, but you’ll probably want something with at least USB ports on it. Pick up a couple of cheap USB game controllers, grab some NES ROMs, fire up ZSNES and you’ll be playing Street Fighter 2 in no time! Not to mention all of the other emulators you can find. The MAME project will let you run your favorite arcade games, as well. This doubles up well with a MythTV box

  6. Home Server:

    7. So you’ve been eyeballing Windows Home Server for a while and want one of those fancy HP boxes with the 4 hard drives? Save yourself the trouble. You can build a Linux box that will do that and more, including BitTorrent downloads, FTP, NFS, Windows Shares, print serving, iSCSI, whatever you want. A Linux home server is really a how-to in itself, and I think bit-tech.net did a fine job of explaining it, so I’ll just leave it to them.

  7. Kitchen Computer:

    8. If you’re planning on actually browsing the web with this computer, you will probably want at least a 1GHz processor, just to preserve your sanity. However, a computer in your kitchen can really be handy whenever you’re cooking. You can look up recipes, or just kill time while you’re waiting for the food to finish cooking. Aged laptops work well for this purpose as you can keep more of your precious counter real-estate. Xubuntu, Ubuntu or Fedora Core would be fine for these.

  8. Mp3 JukeBox:

    9. If you’re a party kind of person, this would be perfect for you. Have a computer where your party crowd could pick out and queue up the music that they want to hear from your personal collection.
    LinuxDevices had a great article on setting up a Music Server, go have a look here.

  9. Webcam Feed:

    10. Any computer with a USB port and a network card could qualify for this one. Tired of your neighbor relieving himself in your lawn? Well, put that computer next to your window and follow this guide.

  10. Asterisk Home PBX:

    11. Admittedly, this isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to be ready to tinker for hours and hours and hours to want to do this. Still, there’s no easier way to get an Asterisk PBX up and running than with Trixbox. You can go all VoIP, you can go hybrid VoIP/Telco, or even all Telco. Asterisk is very flexible and has many very cool features for the tinkerer at heart. Just don’t forget to take your blood pressure medicine.

Oh, and I still haven’t decided what to use the old PC for. Then again, there’s always the option of tax-deductable donation to a charity!

Posted in cnc, firewall, linux, mame, mythtv, webcam | 2 Comments »

Linux and the most-wanted Windows applications, pt1

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

Earlier this week I asked on my local LAN party’s forums, “Windows users: What would it take for you to make the jump to Linux?” I got a lot of good commentary and many well thought-out answers, you can read it here.

But there’s a problem. Nobody really asks these questions on a larger scale. I set out on Google to find a list of the top requested Windows applications for Linux. Surprisingly, nobody has really asked this question in the past. That is, except for Novell. In 2006, Novell hosted a survey asking what Windows applications Linux users wanted. You can read the published results at Linux.com here.

The list isn’t all too surprising, most of the big-ticket applications are listed:

  1. QuickBooks
  2. AutoCAD
  3. Photoshop
  4. iTunes
  5. Dreamweaver
  6. Visio
  7. Lotus Notes
  8. Quicken
  9. Macromedia Studio
  10. Act!

Nothing unexpected here, although you can tell this survey ended up with more business respondents than home users. Although with iTunes at number 4, you can tell that the home users still made a big showing.

So, where do these applications stand right now in Linux? Do they work via WINE? Are there any plans for a Linux port? I want to know these things. First, I want to focus on the applications that aren’t typical business/profession oriented software.
Which, arguably, only make up 3 items:

  • Photoshop
  • iTunes
  • Quicken

These are important pieces of software for many people. I don’t know why more focus isn’t put onto 100% support for these products, but it seems to fall by the wayside. A number of editors and writers come up with these catchy headlines for Linux as a whole, like “Is 2007 the year of the Linux desktop?” but they miss the boat. Until a user can install these applications as easy in Linux as they can in Windows, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop. These three just have to work and work well, period.

So I guess we’ll go through the list one at a time. I’ll start with Quicken.

Quicken
Is it possible to make Quicken run under Linux? The short answer is maybe. See this thread here. We’re still miles away from just popping in the CD and installing, though. This is a big hangup for would-be users who have jobs and pay taxes. Not so much of a hangup for Ed and Elaine Brown, though.
What do people do when they have 10 years of Quicken data and are faced with the temptation of Linux? They stay right where they are, in a Windows environment.

iTunes
Doesn’t work. From scouring the internet, I’ve yet to see anyone get a fully functional iTunes installation operational via WINE. While your iPod may work with a WINE install of iTunes 4.0, you still can’t buy anything from the iTunes store, and just for another kick in the pants, the iPhone requires iTunes 7, which isn’t even close to useable in WINE. It’s just not there under Linux.
Luckily, though, there is an alternative which even the most devout iTunes users end up liking if they have to: Amarok. Here‘s a post on how to switch from iTunes to Amarok.
It’s little consolation. If you have an iPhone, you’re going to end up booting OS X or Windows anyway.

Photoshop
From my research thus far, it looks like none of the Photoshop CS releases work properly in WINE right now. It seems that Photoshop 7 works rather well, which would be fine if you’re content with the best that 2002 has to offer. It seems that Photoshop CS has a bronze support rating from the WINE apps db, which means it works with some gotchas. CS2 and CS3 appear to be right out, though.

What to do
So you wish these applications worked, and you want to know if you can do something to help?
Fortunately, you can help contribute to the process in the following ways.

  • Register for the WINE App Database and contribute your results in getting these applications to work.
  • Vote for your favorite applications at the WINE App Database
  • Donate to WINE (down the page and to the right) via PayPal and tell them to get these apps working ASAP.
  • Write Apple, Adobe, and Intuit and voice your desire for a native Linux port of these applications.

As it stands, there are only two paths for full support: Native Applications for Linux, and 100% WINE compatibility.

Part 2 of this series will cover the other 7 apps in the list. Part 3 of this series will involve me personally testing every one of these Top 10 applications that I can get my hands on, and reporting my findings.

See you on the next go-around!

Posted in linux, windows, wine | 1 Comment »

Getting Evolution mail into Gmail

Friday, August 24th, 2007

Recently, I got into the Gmail kick and decided to get all of my POP e-mail accounts pointing to Gmail. The search functionality just really made it worthwhile.

However, I was posed with a problem: I had almost 2 years worth of e-mail in Evolution. How do I get my Evolution Inbox to the land of Gmail? (Oddly enough, a lot of this e-mail went from Outlook 2003 -> Thunderbird for Windows -> Evolution)

Fortunately, Evolution makes this easy for sysadmin types. Evolution will export e-mail in mbox format.

In Evolution, you’ll want to dump all of your e-mail back into one folder, if you had filters that sorted it to hell and back. Then, you’ll want to hit Select All, and then File->Save Message. Name it something meaningful, and add .mbox on the end if you wish. I compressed the little booger into a tarball and then gzipped it.

Now on my e-mail server, which runs Qpopper and Exim, I made a new e-mail account. I uploaded the mbox archive to my home directory on my mail server, extracted it, and shoved it over to the /var/spool/mail directory in place of the original spool file for the new account I made.

Then I just pointed Gmail at the new account. Presto! I have all of my old e-mail in Gmail.

I really can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.

I’m considering offering a free service where you can upload an mbox file into a webapp, and then a temporary POP account from that mbox will be made just so you can pull the e-mail in to Gmail or etc.

Leave me your thoughts in the comments!

Posted in evolution, gmail, linux | No Comments »

The 10 most useful applications in Ubuntu

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

Many of these applications are the reason I switched to Ubuntu at home, and I have made them a staple of my technology lifestyle. If you’re someone who has just gotten started tinkering with Ubuntu (or GNU/Linux in general), you should give these a shot.

10. vim / gvim
 Vim is the editor of choice for everything I do (well, except excessive copying and pasting from Firefox.) The capabilities of vim will far exceed anything I’ll ever do with it. Periodically, though, I have to do something ridiculous to a file, and vim saves the day. Want to run a macro that will trim the first three characters off of every line in a file, add a semicolon at the end of every line, and replace every instance of FOO with BAR? Vim can do it. To install, simply the following a command prompt:

sudo apt-get install vim

Now you can execute vi (or vim) from the command prompt and get to editing away. Here’s a cheatsheet for how to get around. There are hundreds of pages about the vim editor, search the net to find more!
Even if you run Windows, you can still enjoy some of the vim goodness. Just to go www.vim.org and grab the Win32 Installer. You won’t get the command-line vim, but you will get the always-handy gVim.

9. The GNU find command
The GNU find program is part of the Ubuntu default installation, so there is no need to install it.
A lot of people rely on the locate command to find files, and that does serve its purpose very well. Where the GNU find command is useful is finding files of a specific nature, or acting upon those files in particular. For instance, if you want to get the MD5 checksum of every file in a directory, just CD to that directory and execute the following at the command prompt:

find ./ -type f -exec md5sum {} \;

You can even use the GNU find command to delete files that haven’t been updated in a given timeframe (for instance, log files older than 90 days.) First, you should open a terminal and cd to the directory with the log files, usually /var/log. Then, running the following will print those files to the command line:

find ./ -type f -mtime +90

Adding -delete to the end of that line, and executing it again, will delete all files older than 90 days in that folder and every folder underneath it, as long as your user account has file permissions to do so!

8. Midnight Commander
If you remember Doubletree from the DOS days, then Midnight Commander will probably be your new best friend. If you haven’t enabled the additional apt-get repositories yet, please visit the Ubuntu Guide and complete that before taking the next step.
To install Midnight Commander, type the following at a terminal prompt:

sudo apt-get install mc

Midnight Commander is great for traversing the filesystem quickly, and even moreso when you’re doing the same remotely via SSH. You can edit files from within MC, and even browse a remote filesystem via an SSH connection with it (and without installing SSHFS.)
To run, simply open a terminal window and execute ‘mc‘

7. Mplayer
I know you can get mplayer for Windows, but it’s just not the same. Again, you’ll want to visit the Ubuntu Guide to enable the additional apt-get repositories if you haven’t already. To install mplayer, open a terminal window and execute the following:

sudo apt-get install mplayer

Mplayer has a special place in my heart as the media player that would play just about everything, even in the days when other players wouldn’t. Other media players have made some headway, but mplayer still has tricks up its sleeves. It will even play VCDs directly from a .bin file!

6. Rsync
Looking back, this was probably one of the main reasons I went to Ubuntu at home. There is just not a suitable Rsync application for Windows. Period. I have a directory that follows me around wherever I go, it resides in my home directory as ‘sync’. When I log in at work or on my laptop, it is copied down from my main desktop at home. When I log out, the directory is synchronized back with my main desktop at home. Here is a great article from Linux.com detailing how to use rsync in some practical ways. To install rsync, pull up that terminal prompt and type:

sudo apt-get install rsync

5. Alltray
Alltray allows you to take any window and minimize it to an icon. If you like the way that GAIM/Pidgin stashes away, and want other windows to do the same, try out Alltray!

sudo apt-get install alltray

After you’re done installing, go to Applications->Accessories->Alltray, then just click on the window you want to turn into an icon. To bring the window back, just click on the icon.

4. TightVNC Server
Oh, I know what you’re thinking: “TightVNC is available for Windows, LC! Why is this worthy of mention?!” The Windows TightVNC implementation allows you to remote in to your existing desktop. The Linux implementation, however, allows you to remote in to a discrete desktop environment. You can even run multiple discrete VNC servers on the same Ubuntu box. I use this to give an Xorg environment to items I want to leave running all the time. Azureus, among other applications, stays running in the VNC session and I can check up on my seeding efforts from afar. To install, simply open a terminal window and execute the following:

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

To run a VNC server, simply execute ‘vncserver‘ from any terminal. You can set a password for the VNC server by executing ‘vncpasswd‘ from a terminal. You can automate the startup of vncserver, but I usually just launch it when I need it and then tromp around from there.

3. Fuse SSHFS
Got SSH access to another computer, but want to view the files on that computer as if they were on your own filesystem? SSHFS has you covered. The Ubuntu Blog has a better HOWTO on this than I could ever write, so go pay them a visit. I find SSHFS very handy when I want to listen to my home music collection from another computer on another network, but don’t want to carry multiple copies of everything around with me. Editing PHP files on my remote webserver got a lot easier, too.

2. SABnzbd
If you download anything at all from Newsgroups, you’ll appreciate some of the things that SABnzbd offers. SABnzbd will download, PAR check, unRAR and clean up any NZB that you throw at it. It offers a web interface and will monitor a directory for automatic pickup. I installed SABnzbd manually, but you can always check out this thread on the Ubuntu Forums to pick up a script that will install everything for you. There are no packages in apt-get repositories to install SABnzbd, so everything must be done the less convenient way. The results are well worth the effort, though.

1. Yakuake
If you’ve ever played any of the Quake series games (or games derived from iD software game engines,) you probably remember hitting the tilde (~) key to bring down a console where you could mess with game settings. Yakuake stashes a terminal window in the same manner, tied to the F12 key. You can reassign the key to any keystroke or combination that you like. I have mine set to CTRL + * at work (since they’re right next to each other on a Northgate keyboard), and Windows Key + Open Dialog Menu Key on my personal machines.
To install, execute the following at a terminal prompt:

sudo apt-get install yakuake

To run, type ‘yakuake &‘ at a terminal, and you should see a message that Yakuake started! Now you have a stowable terminal at your fingertips. Just press F12 to make it drop down.

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