But, in a fresh Arch Linux install you still need a few gstreamer packages to enable totem-video-thumbnailer to do its job…

1. Install necessary packages (as root):

pacman -Sy --needed totem gstreamer0.10-{{bad,good,ugly,base}{,-plugins},ffmpeg}

2. Delete old video thumbnails to force generation of new ones:

rm -rf ~/.thumbnails/fail

3. Browse a folder of video files in Nautilus:

In some cases you may need to restart Nautlius for the changes to take effect:

killall nautilus

…or simply log out and log in again.

System Info

• Arch Linux – Kernel 2.6.31-ARCH
• Gnome 2.28.0
• packages gnome & gnome-extra

Source

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_codecs

So, its 4:00 AM and I’m in the lab finishing up my Ghost disk-to-disk imaging on the remailing machines: total time to break remaining boxes and yank HDs + Ghost imaging time = 30 mins, time wasted to get to this point = 3 hours.

If anyone can prove me wrong concerning the shortcomings of Clonezilla, please do (and comment, duh).

As root edit “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” and add the line “UseDNS no“.

This can also be done by running the following command:

sudo echo "UseDNS no" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Sources:

This issue is documented at OpenSSH.org

Fix and more details available at: http://tech.waltco.biz/2008/02/02/ssh-slow-to-connect-in-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon/

UPDATE:

I recently tried this method on a similar Acer laptop with Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64 with no results. After searching, I used another guide that makes compiling madwifi from source simple. If my method doesn’t work for you, remove the backports modules:

sudo apt-get remove linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic

then reboot, and try out the below guide. Thank you Hyperandy.

Link: http://blog.hyperandy.com/2008/11/01/atheros-ar242x-ubuntu-810-ibex/

Hardware:

• Laptop: Acer Aspire 4520
• Wireless Card: Atheros AR242x Communications Inc. 802.11abg

lspci | grep "Atheros"
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

Resolution:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic

After above install completes, reboot, then open up the Hardware Drivers manager (jockey-gtk or jockey-kde) and disable “Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” and make sure that “Support for 5xxx series of Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards” is enabled then reboot. You may need to reboot to see both drivers in the Hardware Drivers manager.

This is at least a temporary fix, you’ll end up with the ath5k drivers- hopefully a stable universal method for Atheros card support will become available soon.

Source:
8.10 Release Notes | Ubuntu

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 ./ -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir -v {} \;

Source: http://duramecho.com/ComputerPrograms/DeleteEmptyDirectories/index.html

Surprisingly enough there are no documented settings for Recent Documents, not even something in gconf-editor, so people have been going stone age to prevent this functionality. In the past you could change permissions for the file that stores the data in your home directory, but it seems in later versions of Gnome the following is the current method of choice.

METHOD:

Enter the following into a terminal:

rm ~/.recently-used.xbel
mkdir ~/.recently-used.xbel

When you’re done, go check your menu and Recent Documents should be grayed out.

This works because the data concerning your recent documents can’t be written to a directory and the Recent Documents menu item is simply disabled. (I played around with retaining the text file and changing its permissions, but they were eventually always overwritten.)

NOTES:

It has been mentioned that you may receive GTK related warnings in the console after applying this, since we did a sort of end-run that’s kind of expected.

There was another method that involved making the file immutable (sudo chattr +i ~/.recently-used.xbel) but this is only for ext2/ext3 filesystems (I prefer JFS whenever applicable).

There may also be a left over file, ~/.recently_used that you can also remove:

rm ~/.recently-used

SOURCES:

Arch Linux Forums /  Disable Gnome Recent Documents [solved]

Disable recent documents – Ubuntu Forums

I take no responsibility for coming up with this hack, I just wanted to clearly document it. BTW, this has been a problem since 2005 > Bug 30942 – Request to add option to disable ‘Recent Documents’ lists

Well I tend to just let these vids chill on my hard drive where space isn’t an issue, so I’d rather just have one 1.4GB vid file instead. In order to cleanly join two halves of a .avi together I use MEncoder in the following command:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -idx -o Final_Big_Output_File.avi First_Half_Video_File.avi Other_Half_Video_File.avi

So, Final_Big_Output_File.avi = the big output file to be created,

First_Half_Video_File.avi = the path to the first half of the video,

and Other_Half_Video_File.avi = the path to the file with the second half.

Note: This method assumes that both halves have the same codec, resolution, etc.

MEncoder is usually packaged with its close friend MPlayer which is available on pretty much any platform. I’ve successfully tested this command on Arch Linux with MEncoder 1.0rc2-4.3.1 and Windows XP with MEncoder 1.0rc2-4.2.1 (just grabbed a binary from MPLayerHQ) – besides, this is a popular method.

I know there are other ways to combine two .avi s but this was the cleanest and most reliable for me, if you have any others worth looking into please leave a comment.

I love the FTP client FileZilla, and I used to share my filezilla.xml file between machines because it stored all my recent servers and passwords (encrypted). Recently I tried to do the same and came to find out that the most recent versions of FileZilla version ~ 3.0.9.2+ (and possibly older) store all saved FTP account connection info in plaintext .xml files. This applys to both Linux and Windows installations (Mac OS X has yet to be tested but I would bet the same applies).

In some cases this is convenient – often I connect over FileZilla then don’t have access to the password but need to use it in a different app/machine, I could just look it up in these plaintext config files.

But in other cases this is a serious problem. From a practical standpoint, let’s say we connect to our FTP server using FileZilla on a semi-public machine like at a buddy’s place where you may not be concerned about keyloggers but don’t necessarily want your stuff available in plaintext after you walk away.

And let’s not forget that someone could write an app that runs in the background, slurping up that info and putting it in the hands of people you may not trust.

Personally, I am not gonna stop using FileZilla at my primary FTP client on my Linux and Windows boxes, it really is a great app – one of the best clients if not the best. But I feel that awareness pertaining to storage of sensitive data should be a major concern to any serious user.
Text to be displayed
The following files are what you need to know about:

filezilla.xml – Stores most recent server info including password in plaintext.
recentservers.xml – Stores all recent server info including password in plaintext.
sitemanager.xml – Stores all saved sites server info including password in plaintext.

These files can usually be found in the following directories:

Windows XP/2K: “C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\FileZilla”
Windows Vista: “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla\”
Linux: “/home/username/.filezilla/”

It seems that this has been brought to the developer’s attention but it also seems that this won’t be changing any time soon. There seems to be a bit of a dispute as to how this should be handled, but I say why not use weak cryptography/obfuscation like they used to, at least that way it would take someone some minor effort/know-how to get to these passwords.

If you have further information regarding the subject, please comment.

Related resources:

Security posting: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Apr/0511.html

FileZilla Password Recovery Apps/Scripts: (may only apply to older encryption scheme)

http://www.reactive-software.com/filezilla-password-recovery.html

http://www.ianwootten.co.uk/2008/01/05/decrypting-filezilla-passwords-with-php/

I downloaded the Live CD .iso and booted it in VMware Server on an XP host, then plugged in a 1GB Corsair Voyager USB drive and enabled it for the VM so the Live CD virtual machine would have access. From there I just followed the guide on the eeeuser.com wiki and ran the USB drive install script, booted off the USB stick on the Eee and BAM! this s**t was fast! I was super impressed, I mean Arch is a KISS fast distro but eeeXubuntu destroyed my Arch install by comparison.

Anyways, after playing on the USB stick live OS for a while I opted to install, one partition at ‘/’ (no swap) and MurderFS... I mean ReiserFS. The current eeeXubuntu Live CD is based on Xubuntu 7.10 while the current version of Xubuntu is Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS but I think there’s a guide on the eeeuser Wiki to run the upgrade manager to get to 8.04.. I’m cool with 7.10 for now though.

Wireless worked with NetworkManager Applet OUT OF THE BOX, thank god. I followed the guide (again on the eeeuser.com Wiki) to install ucview to have some fun w/ the webcam (cheese was giving me some issues I couldn’t resolve).

DUDE, this thing flies! General responsiveness is awesome by my standards, and I’ve run all major operating systems on a huge range of hardware with all sorts of configs (let’s not get into that). I can even freakin’ watch the bigger Flash vids that straight up refused to work on my Arch install. Don’t think I’m bashing Arch, heck no, I like to think I have a darn good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Ubuntu based distros vs. Arch Linux and bottom line is I believe that eeeXubuntu is just a super well-put-together distro for the Eee. Color me impressed. But maybe Ubuntu or Debian in general is better suited to the Eee platform?.. I don’t care cause I’m more than happy with eeeXubuntu.

Gripes? out of the box it likes to complain about my battery capacity there’s a bit in the eeeuser.com Wiki about setting up ACPI correctly – I’ll fix it soon / when I get pissed. Whatever, this is sweet.

I had to release my excitement so I spewed this out, comments welcome.
eeeuser.com Wiki eeeXubuntu Home

eeeuser.com Wiki: Customize eeeXubuntu

At first I was confused because the system seemed to still be running just fine, then… eh dreaded full lock up. Of course on reboot I got a grub error and from there it was “so, what exactly was on that drive?…” Turns out that my coworker had a few months worth of work in Blender files in his home directory, WHY he didn’t ever think to backup to the RAID 1 NAS we have, I have no idea…

So my dilemma was that I had wiped out the partition structure, making it a bit hard to rescue data. Besides that I had totally forgotten how his partitions were laid out in the first place. After messing up the superblock further by screwin’ around with jfs_debug I decided to give PhotoRec a go at the drive. PhotoRec by CGSecurity is an absolutely amazing tool. If the files you wish to recover are supported by it (and they have a huge list) then you are in good shape – and holy crap! .blends are supported! PhotoRec is cross-platform and cross-filesystem unlike nearly any other tool out there. The great thing is that I was able to select the whole disk to search (not just the two partitions that were supposedly both swap) and PhotoRec ignored the filesystem – perfect for my situation.

I was so glad to see the # of found .blends growing steadily… until it got to about 900. Oh yeah, bad thing about file recovery software is that it not only finds the files that were last written to the drive but the deleted and reformatted ones as well, (it’s that good) and due to the nature of the recovery process file names aren’t preserved. So my buddy has a lot of files to look through, a lot better then nothing!

BTW I originally started using PhotoRec on failed customer hard drives – again a bit a of a chore because you get lots of files you don’t want, but this is sort of the curse of file recovery, and it really is great when you dig out the files you need.