Archive for the 'Tools' Category

Back to Ubuntu

Published
by
Dilantha
on November 8, 2009
in How To, Linux, Technology and Tools
. 0 Comments

I’m moving to Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) on my home pc. Its a big honking DELL Studio 1555 compared to my work MacBook 13. But hey it sits at home most of the time and grinds away at anything you give it.

It came with Vista. Hmm ya that wasn’t going to last. Within a few weeks of purchase DELL announced they would give a free upgrade to Windows 7. Ya I missed that. Within about a 1 1/2 months after buying it Vista got stuck and didn’t boot. I booted with a Ubuntu 9.04 cd got my files out and tested if it was worth moving to Ubuntu then. At the time the web cam didn’t work and I really couldn’t spend a lot of time hacking it back into existence. I did a DELL factory restore back to Vista and just waited.

Windows 7 came out. The upgrade was too expensive for a Vista user. If it was 50AUD or so I wouldn’t have minded. But 160-180AUD just for a upgrade was out. In the early stages there were not enough info about doing a clean install from an upgrade cd as well.

I didn’t want to do a in-place Vista upgrade and bring all that crap along, so that was out at the time, so I waited.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. Got it, put it on a flash drive, booted and loved it. The web cam works now. Only thing I noticed was that it didn’t power down when it was shut down.

So I waited a few more weeks, backed up everything and installed Ubuntu 9.10 dual-boot. I applied the latest updates and that fixed the previous shut-down issue.

So far so good, moved my Firefox profile over and installed a bunch of apps I needed.

KeePass – password manager

sudo aptitude install keepassx

FileZilla – FTP client

sudo aptitude install filezilla

F-Spot is okay but I had some meta data on my photos with Picasa so I’m going to use that.

Skype sees my web cam it should work fine.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Secure Email

Published
by
Dilantha
on February 1, 2009
in How To, Open Source, Technology and Tools
. 0 Comments

I just setup a secure email account for myself. I needed one to exchange some passwords etc with a friend. Here are a few links that will help you setup one.

First you need an email client. My choice was Thunderbird. The rest of the setup depends on this so if you pick another client the next steps will vary a bit.

You can get Thunderbird at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Now you need a Thunderbird extension called Enigmail https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/71

Enigmail helps you with the PGP tools within Thunderbird.

Now you need to download GnuPG http://www.gnupg.org/download/index.en.html which is an open source PGP tool.

I got version 1.4.9 Windows command line installer gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe.

How to do this in detail is on the Enigmail quick start guide.

Secure email is a good thing to have even for personal use. Most emails travel as plain text and get stored on servers for a long time. By using this setup you can exchange public keys and encrypt mails before sending. Only your private keys can open them.

I sometimes get spam or phishing mails from my friend’s computers. Those are from bad bots that got into their computers.

Also anyone can set the from field to any other email address and impersonate another person.

Using PGP you can sign your emails as well so the receiver can be pretty sure its you sending the mail.

Read more about PGP on Wikipedia.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Internet on the Road with WIFI, 3G and JoikuSpot

Published
by
Dilantha
on March 27, 2008
in How To, Mobile and Tools
. 1 Comment

I tried out JoikuSpot with my Nokia N80 and notebook. Its simple to setup and worked pretty well. This is definitely useful on the road.

This method can’t beat 3G modems since they can go up to 7.5Mbps. The Nokia N80 only supports 384 kbps. But its better than buying a dedicated 3G modem for me because I don’t need to use it often between ADSL points.

If you don’t already have a 3G phone it might be cheaper and faster to get a 3G modem.

I checked Mobitel and Dialog for 3G modems a few months ago. Back then I was on Linux only and they didn’t have drivers etc. This should work on Linux as well since its on WIFI.

JoikuSpot has a few limitations at this time. It only supports HTTP/HTTPS and the WIFI hotspot is not secure. They say other protocols and security is on the way.

Here is the introduction from the developers:

JoikuSpot is a free mobile software solution that turns a Nokia Smartphone to a WLAN HotSpot. You will carry internet in your pocket. Connect your laptop to web everywhere! FREE — INSTANT — EASY

Popularity: 2% [?]

SQLite Vacuum on F-Spot

Published
by
Dilantha
on March 26, 2008
in How To, Linux, Open Source and Tools
. 0 Comments

I heard on FLOSS Weekly 26: SQLite the other day about the vacuum command in SQLite and how it rebuilds the database and makes Apple Mail faster.

I started F-Spot to check some old photos and it was getting stuck. Hmm wait F-Spot uses a SQLite database too, so I tried something like this.

Went to the F-Spot directory.

cd /home/dilantha/.gnome2/f-spot

Backed up the current SQLite database.

cp photos.db photos.db.20080326

Opened the database

sqlite3 photos.db

Then in SQLite I got some help, listed tables and ran vacuum on photos and photo_tags.


.help
.tables
vacuum photos;
vacuum photo_tags;
.quit

Now F-Spot is running smooth as ever.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Running Bash Scripts in Windows Scheduler

Published
by
Dilantha
on March 25, 2008
in How To, Open Source and Tools
. 2 Comments

Normally you can run scripts in the Cygwin shell. But I wanted to run a bash script in Windows scheduler. Find the Cygwin.bat file probably located in C:\cygwin. It looks something like this.


@echo off

C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin

bash --login -i

This batch file doesn’t let you run an external script with it. Add a %1 at the bash command’s end like this. What you are doing is passing the first parameter in Windows to bash.


@echo off

C:
chdir C:\cygwin\bin

bash --login -i %1

Now drag and drop the Cygwin.bat file into the Windows scheduler window and edit running time properties etc. Now add the script to run at the end of the Cygwin command. For example like

C:\cygwin\Cygwin.bat ./bin/mysql/db.dilantha.info.sh

Windows Scheduler

Popularity: 3% [?]