- Recover deleted files using Foremost

Foremost is a console program to recover files based on their headers, footers, and internal data structures. This process is commonly referred to as data carving. Foremost can work on image files, such as those generated by dd, Safeback, Encase, etc, or directly on a drive. The headers and footers can be specified by a configuration file or you can use command line switches to specify built-in file types. These built-in types look at the data structures of a given file format allowing for a more reliable and faster recovery.

Originally developed by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and The Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research and now foremost has been opened to the general public.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/06/135781677519020.html

- Keed track of Configuration file changes under /etc - etckeeper

etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow. It's quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.

etckeeper installation:
Open your terminal and type following command to install etckeeper:

sudo apt-get install etckeeper

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/06/135781677512073.html

- Download or Stream Video/Audio files from Youtube - Gmediafinder

Gmediafinder is a software to search stream an/or download audio or video files form YouTube and other similar sites and you also don't required browser or flash player, Gmediastreamer support full screen mode (double click on the video), visualizations, you can also select the preferred resolution for the playing the video files.

In addition to YouTube, Gmediastreamer supports the following search engines:
Dilandau: A European-run MP3 search engine that allows you to “Download music for FREE”, though with a limited catalogue.  
MP3Realm: Now pointing to azmp3s.com, another slightly shady looking MP3 search engine that offers streaming, downloading and a lyrics lookup service. I’ve noticed not all files will stream, for some unknown reason. 
Skreemr: An MP3 search engine that claims to deliver music, remixes, podcasts and ringtones and works well. 
Tagoo: A Russian MP3 search engine, quite possibly legal in Russia but probably not anywhere else. Some adverts on the site are probably NSFW (not safe for work) but accessing via Gmediafinder gets rid of those anyway! 
Imusicz: Another questionable search engine that comes with its own status page that you can check if your results aren’t showing up.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/06/13578167758367.html

- How to Install Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

Unity is a shell interface for the GNOME desktop environment developed by Canonical for its Ubuntu operating system. Unity debuted in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10. It is designed to make more efficient use of space given the limited screen size of netbooks, including, for example, a vertical application switcher called the launcher. Unlike GNOME, KDE Software Compilation, or Xfce, Unity is not a collection of applications but designed to be used with existing GTK+ programs.

Ubuntu has traditionally used the full GNOME desktop environment; founder Mark Shuttleworth cited philosophical differences with the GNOME team over the user experience to explain why Ubuntu would use Unity as the default desktop instead of GNOME Shell, beginning April 2011, with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (11.04).

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/06/135781677510263.html

- Utility for automatic management and monitoring of Information Technology Systems - Monit

Monit can start a process if it does not run, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses too much resources. You can use Monit to monitor files, directories and filesystems for changes, such as timestamps changes, check-sum changes or size changes. You can also monitor remote hosts; Monit can ping a remote host and can check TCP/IP port connections and server protocols. Monit is controlled via an easy to use control file based on a free-format, token-oriented syntax. Monit logs to syslog or to its own log file and notifies you about error conditions and recovery status via customizable alert.

Monit Features
 * Daemon mode - poll programs at a specified interval
 * Monitoring modes - active, passive or manual
 * Start, stop and restart of programs
 * Group and manage groups of programs
 * Process dependency definition
 * Logging to syslog or own log file
 * Configuration - comprehensive control file
 * Run-time and TCP/IP port checking (tcp and udp)
 * SSL support for port checking
 * Unix domain socket checking
 * Process status and process timeout
 * Process cpu usage
 * Process memory usage
 * Process zombie check
 * Check the systems load average
 * Check a file or directory timestamp
 * Alert, stop or restart a process based on its characteristics
 * MD5 checksum for programs started and stopped by monit
 * Alert notification for program timeout, restart, checksum, stop resource and timestamp error
 * Flexible and customizable email alert messages
 * Protocol verification. HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, SSH, DWP,LDAPv2 and LDAPv3
 * An http interface with optional SSL support to make monit accessible from a web browser

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/06/13578167755239.html

- Video Transcoder for Linux and Unix systems built using GStreamer - Transmageddon

Transmageddon supports almost any format as its input and can generate a very large host of output files. The goal of the application was to help people to create the files they need to be able to play on their mobile devices and for people not hugely experienced with multimedia to generate a multimedia file without having to resort to command line tools with ungainly syntaxes.

The currently supported codecs are:
 * Containers:
  - Ogg
  - Matroska
  - AVI
  - MPEG TS
  - flv
  - QuickTime
  - MPEG4
  - 3GPP
  - MXT
 * Audio encoders:
  - Vorbis
  - FLAC
  - MP3
  - AAC
  - AC3
  - Speex
  - Celt
 * Video encoders:
  - Theora
  - Dirac
  - H264
  - MPEG2
  - MPEG4/DivX5
  - xvid
  - DNxHD

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/13578167755712.html

- Earth wallpapers for Ubuntu Linux - xplanetFX

xplanet (by Hari Nair) is a great piece of software capable of creating renderings inside our solar system. To raise the quality of it’s output adding some graphical effects, it was a great candidate to link with imagemagick.

The result is xplanetFX, a user-friendly piece of software to configure, run or daemonize xplanet with h/q capabilities to create wallpapers of mother earth on your desktop.

More realistic maps and backgrounds and a sophisticated graphics handling produce nearly photo realistic images of our mothership. It’s GTK GUI makes it really easy to use and provides a lot of settings and a user friendly access to xplanetFX. And even the templating capabilities give xplanetFX an individual and stylish touch.

The features of xplanetFX
 * Fluffy clouds with bumps and shadows floating above the earth
 * High quality earth map with bump, color corrections and subtle sea levels
 * Corona with realistic lighting
 * Atmospheric gleam towards the lit edge
 * Specular reflection of the sun on water, ice and clouds
 * Templates with online pool to download from
 * Post processing with contras and color correction and a subtle “washed out” effect
 * Seamless wallpaper change in GNOME, FLUXBOX, KDE < 4.3, XFCE and XFCE4, Fluxbox and feh wallpaper changer
 * Option to render to a specific file and invoke a command afterwards (change wallpaper of any other envrionment)
 * Startup delay to load desktop first
 * Creating single renderings for use in shell scripts
 * detailed logging
 * CLI Setup with customization depending on actual config (reconfigurable)
 * Small Toggle window for placing a starter in the panel
 * Daemon with nice value (less aggressive)
 * GTK user interface (english, russian, italian, french, spanish, japanese, dutch, czech, greek and german by now)
 * Different list views
 * Online theme pool
 * Extensive functionality in customization
 * Previews

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/135781677516134.html

- Suite of educational games for children - Childsplay

Childsplay is a collection of educational activities for young children and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
Childsplay can be used at home, kindergartens and pre-schools. Childsplay is a fun and save way to let young children use the computer and at the same time teach them a little math, letters of the alphabets, spelling, eye-hand coordination etc.

Childsplay is part of the schoolsplay.org project

Childsplay includes the following games:
 * Numbers - Put the correct operator between two numbers.
 * SoundNpic - A toy for young children with pictures and sounds.
 * Packid - A pac-man game, try to catch the letters.
 * Soundmemory - The classic memory game, with sounds.
 * Fallingletter - Type them before the reach the ground.
 * Findsound - Listen to a sound and find the image to which it belongs
 * Findsound2 - The same as findsound, now with numbers and letters.
 * Pong - The classic game, play alone or against another child.
 * Billiards - Try to shoot the balls into the hole.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/135781677510519.html

- Share folder between Windows (Host) and Ubuntu (Guest) under Virtual Box

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD.

When you run two operating systems you may required to share files/folders between host and guests, virtual box comes with an option to share files and folders between host and guest, for this you need to install Virtual box guest additional software on your guest OS, you can do this by using virtual box menu (Devices → Install Guest additional), once this is done, do the following ....

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/13578167751584.html

- Multimedia (MP3, MPEG-4, AVI, DiVX, etc.) support in Fedora 15

Why doesn’t Fedora support MP3 ‘out of the box’?

Fedora cannot include support for MP3 or DVD video playback or recording. MP3 formats are patented, and the patent holders have not provided the necessary licenses. Fedora also excludes other multimedia software due to patent, copyright, or license restrictions, such as Adobe Flash Player and RealNetworks RealPlayer.

That doesn’t mean you can’t play .mp3 files in Fedora, it just takes a bit of work (not much).

Follow these instructions to get mp3 and other multimedia support on your Fedora 15.
Open a terminal and run this command:

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/135781677518992.html

- Installation and Configuration of Apache Traffic Server under Ubuntu

Global data networking has become part of everyday life: internet users request billions of documents and terabytes of data, on a daily basis, to and from all parts of the world. Information is free, abundant, and accessible. Unfortunately, global data networking can also be a nightmare for IT professionals as they struggle with overloaded servers and congested networks. It can be challenging to consistently and reliably accommodate society’s growing data demands.

Traffic Server is a high-performance web proxy cache that improves network efficiency and performance by caching frequently-accessed information at the edge of the network. This brings content physically closer to end users, while enabling faster delivery and reduced bandwidth use. Traffic Server is designed to improve content delivery for enterprises, Internet service providers (ISPs), backbone providers, and large intranets by maximizing existing and available bandwidth.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/13578167755892.html

- Free and Open Source Web Browser based Security Framework - Mantra

Mantra is a collection of free and open source tools integrated into a web browser, which can become handy for students, penetration testers, web application developers, security professionals etc. It is portable, ready-to-run, compact and follows the true spirit of free and open source software.

Mantra is a security framework which can be very helpful in performing all the five phases of attacks including reconnaissance, scanning and enumeration, gaining access, escalation of privileges, maintaining access, and covering tracks. Apart from that Mantra also contains a set of tools targeted for web developers and code debuggers which makes it handy for both offensive security and defensive security related tasks.

Mantra is lite, flexible, portable and user friendly with a nice graphical user interface. You can carry it in memory cards, flash drives, CD/DVDs, etc. It can be run natively on Linux, Windows and Mac platforms. It can also be installed on to your system within minutes.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/13578167757924.html

- Allow Normal user to Install Software without root privileges - ZeroInstall Injector

The ZeroInstall Injector makes it easy for users to install software without needing root privileges. It takes the URL of a program and runs it (downloading it first if necessary). Any dependencies of the program are fetched in the same way. The user controls which version of the program and its dependencies to use.

Zero Install is a decentralised installation system (there is no central repository; all packages are identified by URLs), loosely-coupled (if different programs require different versions of a library then both versions are installed in parallel, without conflicts), and has an emphasis on security (all package descriptions are GPG-signed, and contain cryptographic hashes of the contents of each version). Each version of each program is stored in its own sub-directory within the Zero Install cache (nothing is installed to directories outside of the cache, such as /usr/bin) and no code from the package is run during install or uninstall. The system can automatically check for updates when software is run.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/135781677519760.html

- GUI Tool to dump (clone/image) Files, Disks, Partitions - Gdiskdump

dd is a common Unix program whose primary purpose is the low-level copying and conversion of raw data. dd is an application that will "convert and copy a file" dd can also be used to copy regions of raw device files, e.g. backing up the boot sector of a hard disk, or to read fixed amounts of data from special files like /dev/zero or /dev/random.

The dd utility copies the specified input file to the specified output with possible conversions. The standard input and output are used by default. The input and output block sizes may be specified to take advantage of raw physical I/O. Sizes are specified in bytes; a number may end with k, b, or w to specify multiplication by 1024, 512, or 2, respectively

There is a command line involved in using dd command and if you are afraid of using command line or you are just a normal desktop user you can use the GUI version of the dd command know as - Gdiskdump

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/13578167753955.html

- Energy Saving Software for Windows / Linux - Granola

There are any number of great ways to help save the world. Recycling, eating locally, replacing your light bulbs, walking everywhere - these are all powerful ways to lower your cost to the environment, but they all cost YOU something in return, whether time or money. Furthermore, it can be difficult to visualize the effects of your actions. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to measurably reduce your environmental impact without a lot of cost or work?

Granola gives you a way to do just that. With Granola intelligent software power management, you can reduce the energy consumption of your laptops, PCs, and servers by 15-35% without any impact on the way you use these devices. Whether you use Granola as part of your own personal quest to save the world, or as a way to help conserve in your business, you can know that you are part of a thriving community of individuals and businesses worldwide all saving energy.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/07/13578167758102.html

- How to Install Latest Kernel 3.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)

It's been nearly twenty years since Linus Torvalds let loose Linux on an unsuspecting world, and on July 22 he finally updated the open source OS kernel to version 3.0.

Total Torvalds has integrated over 9,800 changes to Linux 3.0, the last of which 2200 were mainly corrections. As is usually two thirds of all new or updated driver changes.

Summary:
Besides a new version numbering scheme, Linux 3.0 also has several new features: Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation, XEN Dom0 support, unprivileged ICMP_ECHO, wake on WLAN, Berkeley Packet Filter JIT filtering, a memcached-like system for the page cache, a sendmmsg() syscall that batches sendmsg() calls and setns(), a syscall that allows better handling of light virtualization systems such as containers. New hardware support has been added: for example, Microsoft Kinect, AMD Llano Fusion APUs, Intel iwlwifi 105 and 135, Intel C600 serial-attached-scsi controller, Ralink RT5370 USB, several Realtek RTL81xx devices or the Apple iSight webcam. Many other drivers and small improvements have been added.

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source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2011/08/13578167755767.html