- How to use Dropbox with KDropbox

For those of you who don't know, Dropbox is a simple on-line virtual storage utility that allows you to make your files accessible from almost anywhere. Designed for those who are tired of e-mailing files to themselves and carrying around flash drives, Dropbox looks to revolutionize the way you store and share files.

Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they'll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you've installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox's secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.

KDropbox is an application which offers almost the same features as the official Dropbox Linux application, but works on KDE.

KDropbox comes with .rpm and .deb packages for Mandriva, Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian and Ubuntu (and derivatives).

KDropbox requires the official Dropbox daemon to run. Step by step installation instructions for both the official Dropbox daemon as well as KDropbox (and KDropbox download) can be found here

Installation:
OpenSuSe user can install KDropbox using "1-click" installer - here

Ubuntu / Debian:
Download KDropbox for Ubuntu / Debian - here
Using the terminal go to the directory containing the file and type:

sudo dpkg -i kdropbox_0.2.1_i386.deb

Fedora / CentOS:
Download KDropbox for Fedora / CentOS - here
Using the terminal go to the directory containing the file and type:

sudo rpm -ivh kdropbox-0.2.1-9.fc12.i386.rpm

After successful installation, go to terminal and type command kdropbox to start the application

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/13578167758209.html

- How To Harden PHP5 With Suhosin on Linux

Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations. It was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core.

Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections.

Installation
OpenSuSe user can install Suhosin using "1-click" installer - here

After successful installation check the entries in your /etc/php5/conf.d/suhosin.ini configuration file to suite your requirement.

Restart apache using following command:

# /etc/init.d/apache restart

Make sure Suhosin is working, type following command:

php -v
PHP 5.3.1 (cli) (built: Feb 15 2010 17:27:14)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies
    with XCache v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 2005-2009, by mOo
    with Suhosin v0.9.29, Copyright (c) 2007, by SektionEins GmbH

Check Suhosin project for more detail

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/13578167754215.html

- Linux based operating system for netbooks - Jolicloud

Jolicloud is a new Linux-based operating system for netbooks. The OS provides a beautiful interface, an application directory and a set of social features that make it easy and fun to use.

Initial List Of Compatible Devices:
- Acer Aspire One, Aspire 150
- Compaq Mini 700EF
- HP Mini 1000
- Lenovo S-10
- Samsung NC-10, N-310
- Asus Eee PC 700, 701SD, 900, 901, 904HD, 1000, 1000H, 1000HD, S101 / Eee Box B202 / Eee Top 1602
- Dell Mini 9, Mini 10v
- Intel Classmate and derivated
- MSI Wind 100, Wind 120

Jolicloud is an Internet operating system. It combines the two driving forces of the modern computing industry: the open source and the open web.

Jolicloud transforms your netbook into a sophisticated web device that taps into the cloud to expand your computing possibilities. The web already hosts a significant part of our lives: mails, photos, videos, and friends are already somewhere online. Jolicloud was built to make the computer and web part of the same experience.

A walkthrough of Jolicloud



More about Jolicloud- here

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/13578167752337.html

- Ailurus makes Linux easier

Ailurus is an application which tells its users about tricks for enhancing their use of Ubuntu / Fedora Linux. It puts tricks in tool-tip text and a "Tip of the day" window. It also displays information about the system's BIOS, motherboard, CPU, and battery. It has an interface for changing some GNOME settings. It can install and remove some applications which are not provided in the official Ubuntu apt repository. It can detect the speed of apt mirrors and find the fastest one. It can enable and disable some third party repositories.

Features:
  * Help users learn some Linux skills
  * Install some nice applications
  * Enable some third party repositories
  * Display basic hardware information
  * Clean APT/YUM cache
  * Backup and recover APT/YUM status
  * Change GNOME settings

Installation:
Ubuntu / Mint:
Open a terminal window and copy and pasting the following commands into your terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ailurus
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ailurus

Fedora:
Open a terminal window and copy and pasting the following commands into your terminal:

su -c 'wget http://homerxing.fedorapeople.org/ailurus.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/ailurus.repo'
su -c 'yum makecache'
su -c 'yum install ailurus'

In order to launch Ailurus, click menu "Applications -> System Tools -> Ailurus".

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/135781677518151.html

- Working with CAB file on Linux

A cabinet (.cab) file is a library of compressed files stored as a single file. Cabinet files are used to organize installation files that are copied to the user's system. A large compressed file can be spread over several .cab files. If you're using Windows XP or Windows Vista, then your operating system has built-in support for opening Cab files. They are described as "Cabinet files." Just double-click on a Cab file and it will open in Explorer, just like a folder

Linux does not include support for CAB files by default. To add the support we need to install the cabextract.

cabextract is Free Software for extracting Microsoft cabinet files, also called .CAB files, on UNIX or UNIX-like systems. cabextract is distributed under the GPL license. It is based on the portable LGPL libmspack library. cabextract supports all special features and all compression formats of Microsoft cabinet files.

Installation:
To install the RPM, use the command rpm -ivh cabextract-1.2-1.i386.rpm.
To install from the source code tarball:

$ gzip -cd < cabextract-1.2.tar.gz | tar xf -
$ cd cabextract-1.2
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

Ubuntu user can install cabextract using following command:

sudo apt-get install cabextract

Using cabextract:
Enter man cabextract to read the cabextract manual page. Also, running the cabextract command with the --help option gives a brief summary of usage

A simple example of extracting the cab file using cabextract:

$ cabextract test.cab

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/135781677514979.html

- How to manage apache's htpasswd files on Linux

HT Password manger manages apache's htpasswd files. Manage multiple password files with separate per-file administrator. Administrators can add/delete/search and reset password for all users & users can change their own passwords.

Features:
* Manages multiple htpasswd files
* Administrators can be specified for each file.
* Identifies the role of logged in user and redirects apporpriately
* Administrators can: Add/Remove/List/Search/Reset Password for all users
* Normal Users can reset their own password

Installation and configuration.
Download the package - here
Copy the package into a desired location under your webroot and open config.php file.
For each passwd file, set the following three values:

$realm[0] -> A friendly name to identify the passwd file.  Users will see only this name.
$pwdfile[0] -> Path to the passwd file(can be absolute or relative to webroot).  The file should be writable by webserver user(nobody/apache).
$admin[0] -> User with administrative privilege.  Should be a memeber of the $pwdfile.  Multiple administrators can be specified by comma seperation.

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/13578167757264.html

- Workign with Package Repositories in OpenSuSe - zypper

Zypper is a command line tool for installing and updating packages. It is especially useful to accomplish remote software management tasks or to manage software from shell scripts.

To list all repositories known to the system, use the command: zypper repos
The result will look similar to the following output:

Adding Repositories:
To add a repository use command:  zypper addrepo URI Alias
URI can either be an Internet repository, a directory, or a CD or DVD. The Alias is a shorthand and unique identifier of the repository.

# zypper addrepo http://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/SuSE/11.1 vlc
Adding repository 'vlc' [done]
Repository 'vlc' successfully added
Enabled: Yes
Autorefresh: No
URI: http://download.videolan.org/pub/vlc/SuSE/11.1

Removing Repositories:
Use following command to remove any repository

# zypper removerepo vlc
Removing repository 'vlc' [done]
Repository 'vlc' has been removed.

Modifying Repositories
To Enable repository use following command:

# zypper mr -d 15
Repository 'vlc' has been sucessfully disabled.

To Disable repository use following command:

# zypper mr -e 15
Repository 'vlc' has been sucessfully enabled.

Refreshing Repositories:
After adding of a repository or when a repository becomes out of date, it needs to be refreshed. This mean downloading package metadata from it and preprocessing the data into .solv cache for quick reading.

# zypper refresh
Retrieving repository 'KDE:KDE4:Community' metadata [done]
Building repository 'KDE:KDE4:Community' cache [done]
New repository or package signing key received:
Key ID: 27C070176F88BB2F
Key Name: KDE OBS Project
Key Fingerprint: 4E8E6DE2961F3083EAC5008627C070176F88BB2F
Repository: KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/135781677513750.html

- How to convert between packages (deb, rpm, tgz) using alien on Linux

alien is a program that converts between Redhat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats. If you want to use a package from another linux distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it. It also supports LSB packages

Warning:
Alien should not be used to replace important system packages, like init, libc, or other things that are essential for the functioning of your system. Many of these packages are set up differently by the different distributions, and packages from the different distributions cannot be used interchangeably. In general, if you can't remove a package without breaking your system, don't try to replace it with an alien version.

Installation:
Ubuntu user can install alien using following command: apt-get install alien
OpenSuSe user can install alien using "1-click" installer - here
Fedora user can install alien using command: yum install alien

Examples
Convert the package.rpm into a package.deb
alien --to-deb package.rpm

Convert the package.deb into a package.rpm
alien --to-rpm package.deb

Convert the package.rpm into a package.deb (converting to a .deb package is default, so you need not specify --to-deb), and install the generated package.
alien -i package.rpm

alien --to-deb --to-rpm --to-tgz --to-slp foo.deb bar.rpm baz.tgz
Creates 9 new packages. When it is done, foo bar and baz are available in all 4 package formats.

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/13578167756284.html

- Block / Remove Internet Advertisements (Ads) using BFilter on Linux

BFilter is a filtering web proxy.

BFilter was originally intended for removing banner ads only, but since then its capabilities have been greatly extended. Unlike most of the similar tools, it doesn't rely on blacklists (although it does support them). The problem with blacklists is that advertisers are always one step ahead. You see an ad slip through, you update your blacklist, and in case it didn't help, you add a new entry yourself, here BFilter would detect ads heuristically, much like modern anti-virus software manages to detect many viruses unknown to it.

Features
  * HTTP/0.9 - HTTP/1.1, WebDAV support.
  * Persistent connections (HTTP/1.1 only).
  * Pipelining (HTTP/1.1 only).
  * HTTP compression.
  * Forwarding to another proxy (HTTP and SOCKS proxies).
  * A built-in javascript engine.
  * Heuristic Flash analyzer.
  * Ability to apply regular expressions to a page.
  * Blacklists, white-lists, hint lists.
  * All processing is done on the fly. It doesn't load the whole page before processing.

Installation:
Download Linux autopackage for BFilter UI - here
Make it executable and execute it using command: ./bfilter-gui-1.1.4.x86.package

Using  BFilter:
Using BFilter is very simple, go to terminal and type command: bfilter-gui to open up the application, here you can notice the bfilter icon in the system try, right click on the icon and select the configuration of type - Basic, Advance, Forwarding and Filter

Below example show the "Forwarding" setting for bfilter where Squid proxy server (cache server) sits between bfilter and Internet

After Bfilter configuration you also need to configure your web browser to point to Bfilter.

There are other ways to block Internet Advertisements:
Block Ads by using squid and Ad Zapper
Block Ads / Malware / Spyware using hosts file (Windows / Linux)

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/13578167757686.html

- How to view and download lyrics for various Music Players on Linux - OSD Lyrics

OSD Lyrics is an application for downloading and showing up the lyric while you play your media on following supported media players.

Media Player Support
OSD Lyrics communicates with music players through IPC.
OSD Lyrics currently supports following media players: 
 * Amarok 1.4 (use --enable-amarok1 to compile)
 * Amarok 2.0
 * Audacious
 * Banshee
 * Rhythmbox
 * XMMS
 * Exaile

OSD Lyrics can download lyrics from following web sites:
 * Sogou http://mp3.sogou.com/
 * Qianqian http://www.qianqian.com/index.html 

Installation:
Ubuntu 9.10 or later
Go to terminal and type following command to install osd-lyrics:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:osd-lyrics/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install osdlyrics

Fedora:
Go to terminal and type following command to install osd-lyrics:

su -c 'wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1352061/liangsuilong.repo -P /etc/yum.repos.d/'
yum makecache
yum install osd-lyrics

or you can install osd-lyrics directly using rpm command
Download the osd-lyrics rpm file from here and install it using following command

rpm -ivh osd-lyrics-0.3.20100330-1.fc12.i686.rpm

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/135781677514767.html

- How to mount samba share on Linux client

Samba can be used to allow connectivity between Linux and Windows. Samba can be used to share printers, share directories, connect to an windows domain, and many other useful features.

In order to mount your samba share to your Linux client open up the /etc/fstab file and insert the following line into this file

//172.19.12.137/Music /mnt/samba cifs credentials=/etc/accessfile 0 0

Now create a new file: /etc/accessfile with following contents

username=nikesh
password=some_password

Save the above file and restart your Linux client (or type command mount -a), after restart you should now able to access the share content from the samba server under /mnt/samba directory.

This is preferred over having passwords in plaintext in a shared file, such as /etc/fstab. Be sure to protect any credentials file properly and also note that there should not be any extra space in this file.

It there are any space in this credentials file you might get the following error on trying to mount the file system

mount error(13): Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g.man mount.cifs)

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/135781677518318.html

- Performance tuning Linux Kernel with swappiness parameter

The swappiness parameter controls the tendency of the kernel to move processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk. Because disks are much slower than RAM, this can lead to slower response times for system and applications if processes are too aggressively moved out of memory.

swappiness can have a value of between 0 and 100

swappiness=0 tells the kernel to avoid swapping processes out of physical memory for as long as possible
swappiness=100 tells the kernel to aggressively swap processes out of physical memory and move them to swap cache

The default setting in Linux is swappiness=60. Reducing the default value of swappiness will probably improve overall performance for a typical desktop installation. A value of swappiness=10 is recommended, but feel free to experiment.

To check the swappiness value use command: cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

To make a change permanent, edit the configuration file with your favorite editor:

vi /etc/sysctl.conf

and add following parameter to the end of the file like so:

vm.swappiness=10

Save the file and reboot.

Still, there are users who insist that, for example, a system backup should never force OpenOffice out to disk. They don't care how quickly a system maintenance application runs at 3:00 in the morning, but they care a lot about how the system responds when they are at the keyboard. This wish was expressed repeatedly until Andrew Morton exclaimed:

I'm gonna stick my fingers in my ears and sing "la la la" until people tell me "I set swappiness to zero and it didn't do what I wanted it to do.

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/135781677516027.html

- How to Temporarily Switch Languages for One Application Only on Linux

To run a single application in another language (that has already been installed), use one of the following commands:

LANG=de_DE application to start any standard X application or GNOME application in German. For other languages, use the appropriate language code. Get a list of all language codes available using the locale -av command.

KDE_LANG=de application to start any KDE application in German. For other languages, use the appropriate language code.

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/05/135781677519203.html

- ACPI related Linux kernel parameters

Some hardware types, mainly fairly old or very recent ones, fail to install. In many cases, this might happen because support for this type of hardware is missing from the installation kernel or due to certain functionality included in this kernel, such as ACPI, that still cause problems on some hardware.

There are various other ACPI-related kernel parameters that can be entered at the boot prompt prior to booting for installation:

acpi=off
This parameter disables the complete ACPI subsystem on your computer. This may be useful if your computer cannot handle ACPI at all or if you think ACPI in your computer causes trouble.

acpi=force
Always enable ACPI even if your computer has an old BIOS dated before the year 2000. This parameter also enables ACPI if it is set in addition to acpi=off.

acpi=noirq
Do not use ACPI for IRQ routing.

acpi=ht
Run only enough ACPI to enable hyper-threading.

acpi=strict
Be less tolerant of platforms that are not strictly ACPI specification compliant.

pci=noacpi
Disable PCI IRQ routing of the new ACPI system.

pnpacpi=off
This option is for serial or parallel problems when your BIOS setup contains wrong interrupts or ports.

notsc
Disable the time stamp counter. This option can be used to work around timing problems on your systems. It is a new feature, if you see regressions on your machine, especially time related or even total hangs, this option is worth a try.

nohz=off
Disable the nohz feature. If your machine hangs, this option might help. Generally, you do not need it.

Once you have determined the right parameter combination, you also need to writes them to the boot loader configuration (grub) to make sure that the system boots properly next time.

source:http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2010/06/13578167757601.html