Linux
Enable Gnome Video Thumbnails in Arch Linux
Gnome’s file manager Nautilus does a great job of automatically thumbnailing all kinds of files including pretty much any video file.
But, in a fresh Arch Linux install you still need a few gstreamer packages to enable totem-video-thumbnailer to do its job…
Sometimes Ghost is truly the best tool
Lately I’ve been loving Clonezilla for rolling out refurbed Dell workstations. It’s been really cool, boot from USB “liveCD”, clone disk to disk directly over gigabit ethernet, reboot, repeat. But after doing 10 of them, I ran into the true limitation of Clonezilla. Clonezilla relies on ntfsclone and partimage (great tools) but they share a [...]
Fix slow connections to Ubuntu SSH servers
As of Ubuntu 8.10 and older, connections to SSH servers with default configs can be annoyingly slow. This is because the OpenSSH daemon uses DNS to run a reverse lookup on the client to be sure that they aren’t faking their hostname. You can disable most look-ups by implementing the following setting:
As root edit “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” [...]
Atheros Wireless in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex
Did a fresh install + updates of Kubuntu 8.10 on a customer’s laptop and had no wireless even though it’s an Atheros chipset.
Useful find Commands
Recursive, multi-file find and replace with grep and xargs for performance:
Source: http://www.jonasblog.com/2006/05/search-and-replace-in-all-files-within-a-directory-recursively.html
grep -rl 'what_to_find' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/what_to_find/what_to_replace_with/g'
Put a not in front of that expression:
find ./ ! -type d
Escape wildcards to avoid the shell expanding them:
If you just quote it; “*.avi” you can often run into trouble.
find ./ -name \*.avi
Prune empty directories
find ./ [...]
Disable Recent Documents in Gnome 2.22.3
So even Windows lets you disable the Recent Documents feature, but for some reason Gnome really wants to remember what files you’ve been messing with. Personally I never use this menu item (usually under Places in the Gnome Main Menu) and find it to be a bit of a privacy concern.
Surprisingly enough there are no [...]
Join two .avi Videos with Mencoder/Mplayer
A lot of videos available from various sources are often encoded as .avi files close to 700MB in order to fit on a singleCD-R. This works out just great, but sometimes vids are split into two 700MB .avi files to fit two CDs so you get a Coolest-Movie-EVER_-_[2010][xVid](mp3)_dUff-mAn_CD1.avi and another but with “CD2” instead.
Warning: FileZilla FTP Passwords now Stored in Plaintext
I feel that this should be brought to the attention of FileZilla users out there even though it may be a huge concern. (Lots of apps do this but potentially giving up FTP access info to a bunch of servers you are responsible for is something to be avoided). Jump to the Important Stuff
Praise for eeeXubuntu
So when I first got my Black Asus Eee PC 4G xmas ‘07 I pretty much freaked out about all the possibilities but ended up installing my distro of choice, Arch Linux and all the Eee specific hardware support, then it kinda sat… and sat, until. I recently decided to review the current [...]
PhotoRec Saved My Butt
So my reckless typing really got me into trouble this time. I was attempting to zero-out a usb drive when I managed to put the wrong device in the dd command – I automatically typed sda1 (the primary HD) out of habit instead of sdb1 – the usb drive. I caught my mistake and gave [...]
