Category Archives: Technology

Auto Mount Drives at System Startup on Ubuntu

Ubuntu is capable of reading and writing files stored on Windows formatted partitions, but partitions must be ‘mounted’ before they can be accessed each time you start up the system. With these steps, you can auto mount the drives or partitions without the need to manually mount them for access.
Install Storage Device Manager if it has not been added.
– go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Ubuntu Software Center.
– enter pysdm in the Search Box.
– select Storage Device Manager, click the “Install” button.
– go to System > Administration > Storage Device Manager.
– extend the list of sda and select the sda you want to auto mount, click ‘OK’ to configure.
– click the “Assistant” button.
– uncheck “Mount file system in read only mode” and keep “The file system is mounted at boot time” checked.
– click the “Mount”, “Apply” then “Close” button, and restart the system.
In case you wish to remove the auto-mount of a certain drive or partition, you can similarly use Storage Device Manager to do the setting.

Note: If you need to identify disk partitions by label, paste ls /dev/disk/by-label -g in Terminal, or to view partition sizes and file systems, enter sudo fdisk -l. Disk Utility mentioned in “Name or Label a Partition” also gives you a glance of device numbers, partition types, sizes and labels.

Enable Windows 7 Aero Snap in Ubuntu

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In Windows 7, you can click and drag a window to the left or right edge of the desktop and it will fill half of the screen, or snap a window to the top edge of the desktop and it will be maximized.

In Ubuntu, you can click and drag a window to the left, right or top edge of the desktop to achieve the same result.

In addition to CompizConfig Settings Manager, install WmCtrl if not added:
– go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.
– enter sudo apt-get install wmctrl
– enter password when prompted.
– go To System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager.
– select “General” from the left panel and click “Commands”.
In Command line 0, 1 and 2, paste the following codes:

Command line 0, paste:

WIDTH=`xdpyinfo | grep ‘dimensions:’ | cut -f 2 -d ‘:’ | cut -f 1 -d ‘x’` && HALF=$(($WIDTH/2)) && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,maximized_vert && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,0,0,$HALF,-1

Command line 1, paste:

WIDTH=`xdpyinfo | grep ‘dimensions:’ | cut -f 2 -d ‘:’ | cut -f 1 -d ‘x’` && HALF=$(($WIDTH/2)) && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,maximized_vert && wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -e 0,$HALF,0,$HALF,-1

Command line 2, paste:

wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,maximized_vert,maximized_horz

In the same window, click “Edge Bindings” tab.
Change Run Command 0, 1 and 2 from “None” to “Left”, “Right” and “Top” respectively.
Click “Back” button and select “General Options”, change “Edge Trigger Delay” to about 500.

Set Aero Glass Effect in Ubuntu

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In Ubuntu you can set nearly the same aero glass effect to window borders with alpha transparency as available in Windows 7:

– press Alt+F2 to bring up “Run Application” window.
– type gconf-editor into the box, click “Run” to bring up Configuration Editor.
– browse to apps > gwd, look for “metacity_theme_active_opacity” on the right panel.
– change the value in “metacity_theme_active_opacity” from 1 to 0.75 (or smaller such as 0.5 for more transparency).
Then go to System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager:
– select “Effects” from the left panel.
– tick “Blur Windows” and click the “Close” button. (Note: default values in Blur Windows can be applied.)
Note: If the aero glass effect doesn’t work, check if you have updated your display driver. To check, go to System > Administration > Additional Drivers, activate the recommended graphics driver and restart the system.

Name or Label a Partition using Ubuntu

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Nautilus file manager shows the root directory as File System for your Ubuntu system partition. If you have other partitions (or volumes), it shows them as xx GB Filesystem if they’re not named or labelled.
Using Disk Utility is one of the effective ways to name a partition easily:
– go to System > Administration > Disk Utility
– select the item Hard Disk.
In the Volumes section, click a partition you want to label then:
– click “Edit Filesystem Label” (Note 1)
In the Label box, enter a name, e.g. Data-Disk, and click Apply.
The file manager should now show the partition label, such as Data-Disk, instead of xx GB Filesystem.

Note 1: If the option for “Edit Filesystem Label” is not shown, click “Unmount Volume” before hand. In case you can’t unmount a volume, try Storage Device Manager to unmount it. See Auto Mount Drives at System Startup.

Note 2: This tip is for naming a partition using Disk Utility, use other advanced features such as format, edit or delete partition with caution as they can delete data on your disk.

Set your Ubuntu Desktop Fully Transparent Panel

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When you set the panel to be transparent in the default Ambiance theme in Ubuntu 10.10 or 10.04, you will find that some panel items’ backgrounds are not transparent, but you can make them transparent and consistent with others, following these steps:
– Go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.
– Enter: cp -R /usr/share/themes/Ambiance ~/.themes/
– Enter: gedit ~/.themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/apps/gnome-panel.rc (for Ubuntu 10.10) OR gedit ~/.themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc (for Ubuntu 10.04), to open the file with gedit.
– Search for this line bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = “img/panel.png” (for Ubuntu 10.10) OR bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = “panel_bg.png” (for Ubuntu 10.04)
– Comment out the line by placing a # at the beginning of the line, like this: # bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = …
– Save the file.
– Go to System > Preferences > Appearance, switch to the other theme and then back to the Ambiance theme.
Note: If you’d like to change to the Radiance theme, replace Ambiance with Radiance in the above command lines, but you’d like to change to the New Wave theme, then enter: cp -R /usr/share/themes/”New Wave” ~/.themes/ in step 2, enter gedit ~/.themes/”New Wave”/gtk-2.0/gtkrc in step 3, search for and comment out this line bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = “Images/Panel/PanelBarLong.png” in steps 4 and 5 respectively.

Finding Files using – locate – on Linux

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Many Linux users use the ‘find’ utility when searching for files using the command line on their system. They’ll do a simple:
find / -name ‘pattern’
Really though, the power of find isn’t just in finding names of files but rather specific details about those files. For example, if you wanted to find files which are writable by both their owner and their group:
find / -perm -444 -perm /222 ! -perm /111
or perhaps find any file that’s been altered in your Download directory in the past 24 hours:
find /home/user/Downloads/ -mtime 0
As you can see, the find command is very versatile and can be used to find an array of different attributes of files. There are times though where I’m just looking for something and I don’t want to have to wait for the command to scan the entire directory tree in order to track it down. That’s where locate comes in with quick and simple results.
Using the locate command can only be accomplished if you install the mlocate package. Most major distributions have this available. If not, head over to the mlocate homepage and install manually. Once that is accomplished, you’ll need to manually run a command to index your filesystem with it…otherwise, you’ll have to wait for the command to run automatically as it registers with cron to do so on a system level. Open a terminal and change to your root user, then execute the following:
updatedb &
This updates the mlocate database that indexes your files and forks it to the background (the ‘&’ forks it to the background). You can now logout of the terminal as root and the process will quietly work in the background.
After the command completes, using mlocate is as easy as using the locate command:
locate firefox | less
The command above will look for all files with Firefox in the name and pipe the command through less so you can use the space bar or enter key to scroll the file buffer. Of course, the reason we pipe it through less is because any file that resides in the ‘firefox’ directory will be reported in the output. While this tool isn’t as granular as the find command, it is a quick way to track down paths, directories, and files you know should exist. Since the data is indexed using the updatedb command (by cron) the results are very quick and the command does not have to scan through the filesystem to return the results.
There are plenty more advanced options via flags (such as following symbolic links, making search term case-sensitive, and even using regexp). See the man page for details on how each of these options work. Play around with locate and see what you can do! It’s a powerful and quick search command!

Advanced use of – Find -: a handy command line tool for Linux

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This post is basically directed towards new users of Linux which are not much familiar with command prompt. This is a small but comprehensive article about ‘GNU find’ .
Find Your Lost Files!
Let’s start from a simple example:
Suppose you want to search for a file named ‘master.txt’ in your home directory.
Open the Terminal and issue the following command:
find . -name “master.txt”
‘find’ will immediately show the results. If ‘find’ does not show any result, this means that the file, in our case, ‘master.txt’, does not exist. It is not always the case that you want to find something in you home directory. The lost/desired file may be anywhere in your computer. Suppose you want to find a file named ‘space-01.jpg’ and you only know that is located somewhere in /usr directory. You can find it by issuing following command in Terminal:
find /usr -name “space-01.jpg”
and ‘find’ will tell you that this is located under /usr/share/backgrounds.
Using Wildcards
Maybe you want to search for a file but you don’t know its exact name? Don’t worry! You can still locate the file using ‘GNU find’ and wildcard will help you in this regard. Wildcards are a way of searching files when you don’t know much about your desired file.
One of the commonly used wildcard is asterisk (*). Lets consider an example to better understand the things.
Suppose you want to search a file named ‘Jumping_Flowers’ but you only remember the ‘Jumping‘ part of the file name. So issue the following command in Terminal:
find . -name “Jumping*”
And it will display all the files starting with the word ‘Jumping’. You can use asterisk (*) anywhere with a file name. For example:
find . -name “*Jumping*”
And it will display all the files which contain the word ‘Jumping’.
Here are some more examples of use of a wildcard:
find . -name “Jumping*Flowers*”
find . -name “*Jumping*Flowers.mp3”
Searching For Different File Types
Sometimes you are not looking for some specific file but you are looking for a group of files. For example, you may be looking for all the .txt files in your home directory. To find all the .txt files, you will give the following command in Terminal:
find . -name *.txt
In case of mp3 files, the above command will be:
find . -name *.mp3
When You Want to Search with Respect to Time
If you want to search for files by the last time they were accessed, you can use -amin flag with ‘find’. In this case you have to put a minus (-) sign before the time. The time here is in minutes. In order to search for .doc files which were accessed in last 10 minutes, you will give the following command:
find . -amin -10 -name “*.doc”
Similarly, to search for .doc files which were modified in last 20 minutes, you will use -mmin option as follows:
find . -mmin -20 -name “*.doc”
Search For Files which are Eating Your Hard Disk
There may be files on your system which are not only huge in size but also located obscure places. You may also may not know when they were last accessed. You have to use -size option with ‘find’ to locate them.
Let’s see how we can do this:
find . -size +100M
It will list all those files which are greater than 100 Megabytes. You can replace ‘M’ with ‘G’ (for Gigabyte) or with ‘k’ (for Kilobyte)
Copy, Move, or Delete Unwanted Files on the Fly
Copy – ‘find’ can also be used to copy or backup your files. You can use ‘find’ to copy certain files from one location to other with one simple command.
Suppose you want copy all of your mp3 songs from your home directory to your Windows Partition. Enter the following command in Terminal:
find . -name “*.mp3” -exec cp {} /path/to/Windows_Drive \;
And all of your mp3 files will be copied to the desired Drive/Folder.
Move – There may be situations that you quickly want to move all of your document files from your Hard Disk to your USB to keep them safe. To move all of your documents from your home directory to your USB, you will issue the following command:
find . -name “*.doc” -exec cp {} /path/to/USB \;
Delete – Suppose there are a lot of .tmp files and you want to get rid of them at once. Again ‘GNU find’ is at your service and does the work for you. Issue the following in Terminal and all of the .tmp files are gone…
find . -name ‘*.tmp’ -exec rm {} \;
Which Files are Owned by You and Which Are Not?
There may be a situation when you want to know that which files in some other directories (or even in your home directory) are owned by some other user of your computer.
Suppose there is another user named ‘blackstar’ with whom you are sharing your PC. Now you want to know that which .doc files in Windows Directory is owned by this user ‘blackstar’. You can do this by issuing the following command:
find /path/to/Windows_Drive -user blackstar -name “*.doc”
Just replace ‘blackstar’ with your username to search on your system.
Direct the Output of ‘find’ to a File
You can save the results of your ‘find’ command to a text file which will allow you to examine the results in detail at some later time (or to create playlist of your songs). For this purpose a greater than (>) sign is used (referred to as “piping the command”).
Suppose you want to save the list of all the mp3 songs in your home directory to a text file (which you can later share with your friend), you can do this by:
find . -name “*.mp3” > mp3.txt
It will save the complete path to all of your mp3 songs in the file named mp3.txt.

Installing YamiPod on Linux: a multi-platform, very versatile iPod Manager

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YamiPod is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod on Linux. It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation. It also has extra features such as rss news and podcast support, remove duplicates, easy notes editor (with multipage support), songs synchronization, playlists export, a built in music player and much more. It has been translated in 12 languages.

On Linux, the installation is really simple:

make sure you’ve used iTunes at least once (under Windows or Mac OS X)

have at least one song on iPod

copy the libfmodex audio library to /usr/lib (you need root privileges). You’ll find this file in the package you’ve downloaded

mount your iPod somewhere inside /mnt or /media with read/write access

make sure you have the df command installed, which is usually part of any standard linux distribution.

To run YamiPod just double-click on YamiPod’s binary.

Using YamiPod is also so simple when you want to Copy Music to iPod: Drag&drop files into the song listbox. You can even drag and drop folders, YamiPod will add all valid music files found in sub folders.

In the window that will appear you’ll be able to assign song information (title,album name, artist…) for each single file or setting them for every file ticking the All checkboxes.

In Playlist tab you can select:

Destination: select a playlist where to add all dragged songs.

Lyric filename: how lyric should be named.

Create playlist from folder: this will add all songs in a folder to a playlist named as the folder. For example if you dragged a folder called Music with 2 subfolders: 70’s and 80’s containing various files. Files in 70’s will be added to a newly created folder called 70’s. Files in the other folder will be added to a playlist called 80’s.

In Advanced tab you can select:

Auto capital first letter: will titlecase all song tags.

If duplicated: what to do if song exists on iPod.

Get song info by path and filename: if your song tags are missing but you named and placed your song following a particular order, you can tell YamiPod to get song tags out of filename a path.

Tips:
Holding SHIFT while dragging will add songs to currently selected playlist. If you’ve selected multiple songs to add you can quickly edit next (previous) song information by pressing ALT+down (up).

Kernel Development Using the Eclipse IDE

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Eclipse IDE is an open source platform useful to build an extensible development and develop application frameworks to build, deploy and manage through the complete SDLC of the software. Features wise Eclipse IDE is much more advanced than the conventional Java development Environment. As a first step you have to download Eclipse CDT from:

http://archive.eclipse.org/technology/epp/downloads/release/ganymede/SR2/eclipse-cpp-ganymede-SR2-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Use the following command to extract the tar:

$ tar xzvf eclipse-cpp-ganymede-SR2-linux-gtk,tar.gz

As the next step you have to change your directory in terminal window into the extracted folder and then start Eclipse as given below :

# cd eclipse

$ ./eclipse

Let us consider building a “C“ application using Eclipse IDE. Use the following command sequence to accomplish the first step :

Select File – New – C Project.

Assign the project a name and identify the location (it is advisable to retain the location field as the default value. Most important mention “Executable” under the Project type. Click “Next” followed by “Finish” to complete this step. Specify the Yes for “C/C++” perspective or not. Locate the Project explorer Select build project in Project Explorer with options like Console, Tasks and Problems. Next you have to compile this project using Eclipse IDE.

Let us now get down to the task at hand – Kernel compilation. Download a kernel tar file from the website – www.kernel.org.

The commands look like this :

$mv linux-2.6.34.tar.bz2 /usr /src.

Then the file has to be extracted into the respective folder through the following command :

$ tar -jxvf linux-2.6.34.tar.bz2

$cd linux-2.6.34

Configuration can be set as follows :

$ make menuconfig

Further steps in the process to compile a kernel using Eclipse IDE are fairly simple. Take care to disable the “Automatic building and indexing” to save time. This is accomplished as follows :

Window – Preference – General – C/C++ – Indexer. You have to select “No Indexer” Next give the following command – File – New – C Project. After assigning a name to the project undo checking of “Use default location” and browse to your kernel source code directory.

Project type – Makefile project – Empty Project. To cross-compile the kernel, use existing tool from “Toolchain”. Click on Finish to complete this beginning step. Give the following commands to complete the task :

Make all

CHK include/linux/version.h

CHK include/generated/utsrelease.h

CHK scripts/checksyscalls.sh

CHK include/generated/compile.h

On waiting for a few minutes the compilation is completed. To check that the kernel image file is created successfully type the following commands :

$ ls –l /usr/src/linux-2.6.34/arch/x86/boot/bzimage

–rw-r—r—1 manoj sc 3589920 2010-11-30 12:51 /usr/src/

Linux-2.6.34/arch/x86/boot/bzimage

Option readers and internet users will certainly admit that developing kernel using Eclipse ID is one of the simplest things anyone can do. However, to realize the true potential of the eclipse, You can gradually scale up the nature of projects to more complex projects to realize the full potential of eclipse IDE. A step-by-step approach would be wise in this regard.

System Recovery Tools: a possible cross-platform approach through open source and proprietary solutions

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The following system recovery tools will be useful to you if you are facing problem of data loss or if your system is simply crashing. It is advisable to burn copies of these tools much before any disaster strikes.

Open Source and Free approach:

G4L aka Ghost for Linux is one of the system recovery tools that is mainly a cloning and hard disk and partition imaging tool. This tool is similar to “Norton Ghost”. The images created are compressed optionally and transferred to a FTP server instead of opting for cloning locally. Ideally, of the several tools described above it is advisable to use the most suitable tool for your needs. The tool that will be most useful during a crisis like a crash or server failure will be a better tool.

The Ultimate Boot CD is one of the system recovery tools which will be very helpful when you want to run CDRom-based diagnostic tools thereby consolidating as many diagnostic tools into one bootable CD as possible. Since you can now boot from USB memory devices a script you can run “Ultimate Boot CD” from USB memory stick and a script on the script on the CD will enable you to boot newer systems from your USB sticks. This is many steps ahead than many of the other recovery tools. Moreover it gives you the flexibility of booting your system with a USB memory stick.

Knoppix is one of the system recovery tools which is essentially a bootable CD with GNU/Linux software. It ensures automatic detection of hardware and supports a wide range of devices like sound cards, most of the graphic cards, USB and SCSI devices and other peripherals. It can be used as an educational CD, a Linux demo or for system recovery purposes. Alternatively it can be used as a commercial platform for software demos. There is no need to install anything on the hard-disk as the CD is capable of storing 2GB of software installed in it. Thus this tool is a truly multi-purpose recovery tool.

Proprietary solutions:

O&O Disk recovery: This software tool scans every portion of your hard-disk, digital camera or memory card for lost files. It is so effective and reliable that it is possible to reconstruct data even when files systems have been destroyed or formatted. More than 350 types of files like music formats, word documents, movie, graphics, Excel workbooks, photo and access databases can be recognized, reconstructed and restored.

SuperDuper is one of the system recovery tools makes recovery effortless as it creates a completely bootable backup effortlessly. The strengths of this software are that it is user-friendly, easy to use with a built-in scheduler that it makes backup automatically. Moreover it performs well independent of the processor that is both on Power PC Macs as well as Intel PCs. It is particularly useful when your software application with the latest update is not working or when your hard drive begins to make noise. It is also very handy when you want to restore a stable copy of your system though you do not want t lose your existing system files or cases like this.