*The* significant point about LindowsOS is that you can buy preconfigured systems at Wal-Mart. Further, the systems are *cheap*. $199 for a PC with an OS installed. For GNU/Linux to be widely embraced as a desktop that is accessible by everyone, this is what needs to happen. We wondered just how easily Lindows was to […]
LindowsOS 3.0 Review
Getting Rid of Plain Bash Prompts
Are you tired of looking at an ugly bash prompt like this?: -bash-2.05b$ Well, if you add this line to your .bash_profile: export PS1=’\[\033[01;31m\]\h \[\033[01;34m\]\W \$ \[\033[00m\]’ You will get a red hostname (up to the first .) and a blue current working directory: servername directory $ For more info, see the prompting section of […]
Free Program That Prints Clipboard Text
We ran into an interesting problem with PuTTY. PuTTY doesn’t have a print-screen function. We looked around for an application that would simply print the clipboard. True, you could do something like ctrl-v, ctrl-p in notepad, but then you have to change focus, which is distruptive. With PuTTY, you simply highlight text with the left […]
Using Dynamic Backgrounds With KDE
In this article I showed how to update the background of an X desktop with various text status dumps. I have been using IceWM because it has always been the most stable window manager. It was also useful when bringing up an OS from source, as IceWM can be compiled quickly. KDE has a lot […]
Firefox Passes 25 Million Mark
Firefox has enjoyed 25 million downloads in 99 days. We have been using Firefox here at NetAdminTools for the last couple of months, and are very impressed. For more info, see this article. We have to celebrate with a nice image from factorycity.net: The popup blocker works well, and the rendering is beautiful, at least […]
Setting the Gnome Desktop Background With a Script
You can use these two commands to set the Gnome desktop background: gconftool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /path/pic.png gconftool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options “centered” This will put the picture in the center. If you want to fill the background with the picture use stretched.
Using Ldconfig To Set Library Locations
Gozer needs libgiblib to work right. I like to install strange libraries like this into /usr/local/lib. I put all of the source into /usr/local/src that isn’t part of the main RPM system. Even when I compiled and installed giblib, though, it wouldn’t work right: [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ gozer gozer: error while loading shared libraries: libgiblib.so.1: cannot […]
Reading RSS Feeds with Outlook 2007
Outlook 2007 has the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds. Just scroll down to the RSS Feeds folder under Personal Folders, click on the RSS Feeds. Right click on RSS Feeds. Choose Add a New RSS Feed. Enter the location of the RSS feed into the box: Here is what the NetAdminTools.com RSS feed looks […]
Rotating a Video with Mencoder
If you import a rotated video off of your phone or other device, here is a quick command to rotate it 90 degrees: mencoder -vf rotate=1 -o hx.avi -oac pcm -ovc lavc hx.mo Some more details are in How to rotate an AVI or MPEG file taken in Portrait.
Xfce Tips
If you lose your borders around your windows in Xfce4 and your mouse pointer over the desktop is wonky try: xfwm4 –replace rm -rf ~/.cache/sessions
Funky MP3 Car Players, and the Scripts That Load Them
Oh my. I had no idea about what was running my music. Now I know quite a bit more, and I thought I would share. My collection is very convoluted, but I didn’t know it. No, I had no idea. How did I get to the messy state I’m at today? I started converting my […]
Creating a JavaServer Pages Application
In this article we installed Tomcat so that we could serve JavaServer Pages (JSP). JSP is pretty easy to start off with, since you merely add the script parts to regular HTML, much like PHP. For instance, we could call this HTML hellow.jsp: <html> <body> Hello </body> </html> If we browse to our JSP server, […]
Setting up Initial Tomcat Administration
There are a couple web-based administration tools that come with Tomcat, but you have to set up the admin and manager access first. This is done by adding a line to tomcat-users.xml: [root@srv-1 conf]# pwd /opt/tomcat/conf [root@srv-1 conf]# vi tomcat-users.xml Add the line with admin,manager in it: <?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’utf-8′?> <tomcat-users> <role rolename=”tomcat”/> <role rolename=”role1″/> […]
Compiling Java Telnet (jta25b)
There is an applet that can be used to serve up telnet sessions via a Java applet at Javatelnet.org. Note that this site is often down, although it is the current main site. There is an older version available here. Now, we have been trying to use this to provide a web interface for a […]
Upgrading Tomcat
In our article on installing Tomcat, we used version 5.0.18. Well, it has been awhile, and we want to upgrade our system. First, we download the new binary from here. On our system, we put this all in opt. Let’s remove the old symbolic link and extract the tarball: [root@srv-1 opt]# rm tomcat rm: remove […]
Using Whois With PHP
If you would like to provide whois queries via PHP, a good package to use is available here. An example script that uses this package is: <?php include(“whois/main.whois”); $whois = new Whois($_GET[‘query’]); $result = $whois->Lookup(); echo “<pre>”; for($i=0;$i<count($result[rawdata]);$i++) { $row = each($result[rawdata]); echo $row[“value”].”\n”; } echo “</pre>”; ?> The query variable is arbitrary. You can […]
Adding Modules to httpd.conf With Apache 2
We recently converted from a source version of Apache 2 to an RPM version. We wanted all of the PHP/MySQL stuff compiled in and working quickly. Yes, we were very lazy. Now, we tried to use our old httpd.conf file; however, since the compiled version had many of the options built in, our httpd.conf file […]
Adding PHP Support to Apache
Assuming that you have PHP installed, and the module available for Apache, these lines need to be in httpd.conf for PHP support: DirectoryIndex index.php index.html <Files *.php> SetOutputFilter PHP SetInputFilter PHP LimitRequestBody 10000000 </Files> AddType application/x-httpd-php .php Now, these lines are often in other files that are included; however, if .php pages just spew the […]
Parsing Web Logs Into Calendar Text/Stats
We aren’t quite happy with the web stats software we use. The information is not brief enough. Mostly, we want to see the last couple months, with the weekends visible, and the unique hosts and pages viewed. Also, we have a lot of content that gets snagged that isn’t really what we consider a valid […]
Apache Tip – Take Clues Away from Bad Guys
Like the needy stranger who tells us his or her entire life story on the occassion of our first meeting, Apache spews out way too much information in every HTTP header. And like the unscrupulous sharpies who take advantage of lonely folks they meet on buses, there are those who would use this information to […]
