blog.zelut.org

I’ve been auditing some of the applications that I use day-to-day and thought I might share some tips about them. I’ve found that most people tend to get comfortable with a certain set of applications and rarely break out of that set. The beauty of the Free Software world is that the number and quality of available applications is constantly expanding. Hopefully some of the applications I can share here will make your computer usage more efficient and more fun! Today I wanted to talk about Dropbox. It is a really simple way to store and share files online. I have been using it for a while now, primarily to share files between multiple laptops but also to share quick files and screenshots with people. I’ve got it installed on my work laptop (Dell D630), personal laptop (Macbook) and work Desktop. Anytime I need to quickly share a file from one machine to another (or even all) I simply drop it into my Dropbox folder and its instantly synchronized to the other machines. Read more

I’m a keyboard junky. I’ll admit it. Anytime I *have* to use the mouse I feel like I’ve just slowed down my work. Considering most of the work (at least my work) is done directly into the keyboard, taking my hand off the keys to move something is time I’m not getting back. To that extent I’ve collected a number of keyboard shortcuts to allow me to do as much as I can without ever leaving the keys. The shortcuts I wanted to share today are regarding maximizing, minimizing, un-maximizing, moving and resizing the gnome-terminal. Shortcuts Maximize: alt-F10 Minimize: alt-F9 Un-Maximize: alt-F5 Move: alt-F7 Resize: alt-F8 With these few shortcuts you should new be able to resize your terminals, shrink or enlarge them and even move them without leaving your keyboard. Thank goodness for shortcut keys. Where would we be without them? Ohh, yeah, I think its called Mac OS X 😉

I’ve spent the last week casually hunting around for alternate feed readers. I’ve been using Google Reader for some time now. but I’ve been growing tired of it. Desktop clients just don’t quite cut it for me as, just at work, I’m regularly between three different machines. I think I’ve found one that I like! It’s small, simple to install and configure and Free Software. Gregarius. Gregarius has been in development for a number of years now, although has recently slowed down. I’d like to see things pick up again but, as usual in the Free Software world, that usually requires a community of users. It currently has a fairly thorough wiki, forum, devlog (blog) and a list of features and configuration options. The main reasons I like it are: Lightweight and responsive Very configurable. Includes plugins and themes. Simple feed management (categories, tags, etc) Very clean default theme Detailed search options more… For those that might be interested in trying out a server-side feed reader I thought I might outline some of the steps toward installing it. Read more

I recently migrated my VPS from Slicehost to Linode and I’ve been very happy with them. One of the changes that I made during this move was to try out Debian 5.0 as my base OS instead of Ubuntu 8.04. So far I have been pleased with the change–although I’ll admit there isn’t much that is different on the server installation. One of the few differences that I have found is in regards to the repository configuration. One feature in Debian that is not available in Ubuntu is the ability to configure your sources.list to the stable release.. whatever version that happens to be. Let me explain. Repository Configuration Ubuntu, a variant of Debian, uses the /etc/apt/sources.list to configure which repositories to subscribe to for available packages and errata updates. Generally these repositories are subscribed to by way of development codename. For example: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid main restricted universe multiverse Read more

Update: I’ve submitted a patch to the existing PKGBUILD in the AUR which brings the Chromium Browser up to yesterdays nightly build. Much improved from the previous. I saw a post recently on the Planet Ubuntu Users, again by Stefano Forenza, regarding installing and testing the latest daily Chromium browser builds. That got me curious so I started poking around and found an available package for Arch Linux by way of the Arch User Repository. Installation was simple enough and the browser works, but I should mention that it is *very* alpha quality. None of the menu buttons worked for me and I wasn’t able to make use of tab functionality. It is nice to see that some progress is being made though on the Linux platform. Download the chromium-browser tarfile from the Arch User Repository. tar xf chromium-browser.tar.gz cd chromium-browser/ makepkg -i At the time of this writing the Arch User Repository package is marked as out of date. Read more

Shell aliases are commonly used to replace a command with a different or longer string. Some very common bash shell aliases are: (taken from my Debian 5.0 .bashrc) alias ll='ls -l'<br /> alias la='ls -A'<br /> alias l='ls -CF'<br /> alias ls='ls --color=auto'<br /> alias dir='dir --color=auto'<br /> alias vdir='vdir --color=auto'<br /> alias grep='grep --color=auto'<br /> alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'<br /> alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'<br /> As you can see, these aliases are assigning either an alternate command for a command + argument, or defining that a default command should work with extended options. Many of these are commented out by default, but you can edit your .bashrc file and remove the comments if you like. Now the question remains, if I have a command set to an alias, how can I run the command *without* the alias additions? There are two methods. Method 1 The system comes with a unalias command. Read more

I read a blog post recently outlining how to install the ttf-droid package — Android Fonts — on Ubuntu. Because I’m using Arch Linux on my two machines at work I decided to look into the possibility of installing them on that platform. Turns out, thankfully, the ttf-droid package is available in the Arch User Repository. I’ve now switched both of my office machines to this new font set and I really enjoy it. It has a very clean, crisp look. It’s not boxy or thick like a lot of other fonts I’ve seen used (I’m looking at you, Fedora). Here are the instructions on installing the ttf-droid fonts on your Arch Linux machine: Yet Another User Repository Tool (yaourt) If you are using the unfortunately named yaourt package management frontend you can install directly from the AUR using the command: yaourt -S ttf-droid If you are simply using pacman you’ll need to grab the PKGBUILD from the AUR and manually install. Read more

I setup a new Desktop at work today and I thought I’d try out Arch again. I’ve had it running on my work Laptop for a few months now, but there were some things I wanted to figure out and learn, “The Arch Way”. One of the little tips that I found in my continued reading and setting up was the use of the rankmirrors tool. Rankmirrors will find and configure your system to use the fastest repository mirrors for your connection. Getting Started Let’s assume you’re on a fresh installation. If not, the steps are really the same, you just likely don’t have to worry about resolving the dependencies. So, on that note, the only dependency for the tool is python. If you don’t have python installed (which is likely only the case if you’re on a fresh installation), you’ll need to install it: pacman -S python<br /> Read more

This afternoon I was doing a little reading about the best method for installing Arch Linux on LVM. The process is easy if you’re familiar with LVM–if you’ve setup LVM manually. If you don’t understand how LVM works or if you’ve only ever done automated or graphical LVM creation it’ll be more work. It has to be done manually and outside of the main setup utility. In any event, an explanation of LVM is for another post. During the reading I did learn a little tip about how to force your logical volumes to use contiguous partitions/disks/extents. In situations where disk performance is critical, forcing your logical volumes to use contiguous extents (or not span multiple physical drives, in the case) can be beneficial. To force your logical volume to use contiguous extents at creation you need to use the -C option. Example: lvcreate -C y -L 10G VolGroup -n swap<br /> Read more

I ran into this little tip today on Command-Line-Fu. It automagically finds and deletes all non-english language sets installed on your machine. This is, of course, a Mac OS X tip so you wont get very far running it on your Linux machine. I have two OS X desktops at home so I found it applicable. I know there are quite a few of you closet OS X users out there as well. We’ll just let this one be our little secret. sudo find / -iname "*.<span class="searchhit">lproj</span>" -and ! -iname "en*" -print0 | tee /dev/stderr | xargs -0 rm -rfv<br /> Can anyone suggest making this command any more efficient? Just looking at it (without testing) I may have tried something like this: sudo find / -iname "*.lproj" -and ! -iname "en*" -exec rm -rf {} \;