BSOD Icon for your Windows Shares
June 29, 2007 at 7:07 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment 
originally found in Leopard beta:
Batch Resize Images in Linux Using Imagemagick
June 29, 2007 at 3:51 pm | Posted in Imagemagick, Linux | 1 CommentPlease See:Manage Images with ImageMagick
Xming + Putty = Run your home linux apps on a remote windows machine
June 29, 2007 at 3:05 pm | Posted in Linux, putty, Windows, xming | 5 CommentsSearch on the internet, and you see tonnes of pages and complaints and rants on “I can’t run my windows programs on linux!” Well, what if you’ve never been comfortable in windows, or you’ve finally transitioned to linux and you need to use your linux apps? In actual fact, there is a solution to this, a quick, easy and portable one.
(note: this tutorial is not how to install linux apps on your windows installation; rather it deals with running your linux apps remotely from your linux box using ssh – so it does not work if you dual boot. Although this method does have its disadvantages, such as the need to have your linux machine on, it is useful for remote administrating, and it allows almost any linux app to run with your local settings stored in your home directory)
Equipment needed:
- Xming – a X11 server for windows (tis is portable so you can carry it around on your flash drive)
- Xming Portable PuTTY – SSH client for windows (in case you hadn’t noticed, also portable)
- openSSH Server for linux
- A linux machine
- First off, make sure openSSH server is installed on your linux machine, and if not install it (this differs for each distro; on ubuntu use sudo apt-get install openssh-server or use synaptic)
- Thats it, its set up on the linux end! test it by opening up a terminal and typing “ssh -X user@localhost” where user is your username. It should prompt you for a password and start a new session.
- If you want to ssh into your linux machine remotely (over the internet) be sure to set up port forwarding to forward port 22 from your router to your linux server.
- Now, in windows download and install Xming and Xming Portable PuTTY. Once done navigate to your Xming directory as shown below
5. Click on Xlaunch and the following wizard should appear – follow the screenshots to setup your X-server
6. Here type in the name of your terminal emulator (gnome-terminal if you’re using gnome or konsole if you’re using KDE). Then select PuTTY and in connect to computer type in either: the ip address of the local computer if you are in your local area network OR type in the IP address of your LAN if you are accessing it over the internet (this can be found by going to http://www.whatsmyip.org from your LAN). Then enter your usename and password OF YOUR LINUX MACHINE and click next.
7. A dialog will pop up looking for PuTTY. Navigate to the directory you installed it to and double click on plink.exe
8. Finish the wizard, and accept the security certificate, click ok to the error that always seems to come up and your terminal should appear! (click pic to enlarge)
9. From this terminal you can launch any of the apps you’ve got installed on your linux machine. ITS THAT EASY!
http://blog.pagevoid.com/2007/06/24/run-linux-apps-in-windows-2/
HOWTO: Secure Firefox and IM with PuTTY
June 29, 2007 at 1:48 pm | Posted in Firefox, gaim, putty, SSH | 2 Commentshere are times when you want to connect to the Internet through unknown and/or insecure networks such as the local Panera or other WiFi hotspot. If you aren’t careful, you might make it all too easy for someone to sniff your connection using Ettercap.One of the best ways to secure your connection is to use a VPN, but that isn’t always practical. So here’s a way to securely connect to the net using only an SSH client and a remote box that you control/trust.
Requirements:
- PuTTY* loaded on your local machine
- Remote host running OpenSSH (e.g. Linux box at home)
- Firefox (obviously)
- Gaim for all your IM needs
1. Create a new PuTTY session
Run PuTTY and create a new session in PuTTY to connect to the remote host that is running OpenSSH. Fill in the hostname, the port (usually 22), make sure SSH is checked, give it a session name and hit Save
2. Configure a secure tunnel
Click on “Tunnels” on the left and set up dynamic fowarding for a local port (e.g. 7070). Under “Add new forwarded port” type in 7070 for the source port, leave the destination blank, and check Auto and Dynamic. Then it the Add button. If you did it correctly, you’ll see D7070 listed in the Forwarded Ports box
That’s it for tunnels, as there is no need to create more than one. Remember to save your session profile in PuTTY so you don’t have to set up the tunnel next time. (Portable versions of putty may not save your tunnel info)
3. Connect to the remote SSH box
Double click on the connection profile and type in your username and password when prompted.
4. Configure Firefox
Go to Tools, Options, General, and then click on Connection Settings…
Check Manual Proxy Configuration, leave most of the fields blank, but fill in 127.0.0.1 for the SOCKS v5 host with a port of 7070 (or whatever you used in Step 2):
5. Configure Gaim
Fire up Gaim and hit the Preferences button:
Then select Network on the left and set up the Proxy Server. The Proxy Type should be SOCKS 5. The host is 127.0.0.1 and the port is 7070 (or whatever you chose in Step 2).
There’s no need for a user or password. Then hit close.
6. Enjoy
Import KDE4 Oxygen Icons into your KDE 3.x setup
June 29, 2007 at 1:20 pm | Posted in KDE, oxygen | Leave a comment1. mkdir oxygen
2. cd oxygen
3. svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/pics/oxygen
(you may have to apt-get install (or yum or yast or however) subversion )
4. Now: mv ~/oxygen/oxygen ~/.kde/share/icons
5. Just relog in to see it and validate with kcontrol
AppArmor now in Feisty
April 6, 2007 at 3:19 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a commentFor anyone wanting to try out AppArmor, you will need to compile the modules, and install the base packages:
sudo apt-get install apparmor-modules-source dpatch
sudo m-a -v -t prepare
sudo m-a -v -t build apparmor-modules
sudo m-a -v -t install apparmor-modules
sudo apt-get install apparmor apparmor-utils apparmor-profiles libterm-readline-gnu-perl
With the default profiles, you can see one quick example of a confined process. Try doing this:
ping localhost >/dev/null &
sudo ps aZ | grep ping
In the first column, you should see what profile is being used to confine the process:
/bin/ping 14351 pts/14 S 0:00 ping localhost
unconstrained 15381 pts/14 S+ 0:00 grep ping
The list of active profiles can be seen as root in /sys/kernel/security/apparmor/profiles, which are loaded from /etc/apparmor.d/.
To confine a process, use aa-autodep and aa-logprof. For example, I wanted to confine my PDF document browser to only use /tmp (since I tend to only use it when browsing PDFs online):
- First, I create an empty profile in “complain” mode:
sudo aa-autodep evince - Next, I run evince like I normally would, including as many actions as I can think of (printing, preferences, help, etc). Watching the output of
dmesgyou can follow the trail of all the actions evince is taking. When I’m finished, I quit evince. - Next, I run
aa-logprof, which runs through all the kernel audit output and offers suggestions on what to allow from evince. Where appropriate, I select “abstrations” for things like Gnome, DNS, fonts, tmp dir usage, etc. When a whole directory tree should be allowed, I double-glob the path (/usr/share/evince/**). Once all the items from the log have been processed, the profile is saved. - Finally, I enable the profile with
aa-enforce evince. Any disallowed actions will show up in the kernel logs.
Check out the resulting profile for evince.
Now if I end up reading a malicious PDF that takes advantage of some currently-unknown vulnerability in evince, it will be confined to the above AppArmor profile, unable to exec new processes, and only able to write to the Gnome preferences for evince. (It’s also unable to read files out of /home, so that the above profile may be way too strict for common usage. And to even get caught by AppArmor, the imaginary exploit would have to avoid the randomized stack, randomized heap, stack protector, and, since I’m running 64bit, the NX processor bit.)
Be aware, this is still a new bit of packaging for Ubuntu, so you may run into sneaky gotchas. If that happens, please open a bug.
http://outflux.net/blog/archives/2007/04/02/apparmor-now-in-feisty/
Linux File System Review
March 22, 2007 at 3:55 pm | Posted in Filesystems, Linux | Leave a commentPlease See:Linux File System Review
How to install Hula Groupware on Arch Linux
January 12, 2007 at 1:46 pm | Posted in Arch Linux, Hula | 1 Comment
This is a guide for how to build hula a calendar and mail server. This guide does not explain how to configure it, just build it and access the administration gui. Too see more, see my blog post on how to install Hula on Ubuntu Breezy.
Installing necessary packages.
Hula itself doesn’t have many dependencies, just openssl, but there are things that are needed to build hula.
pacman -S subversion
pacman -S pkgconfig
Getting the source.
The sources needed to be download using subversion from the hula repository.
svn checkout svn+ssh://anonymous@forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/hula/trunk
The password is ‘anonymous’ it may need to be typed twice.
Note: per this page: http://www.hula-project.org/Source_Code:
If you don’t have developer access to the Subversion repository, you can still get read-only anonymous access to the code. To check out the hula module anonymously, run:
svn checkout https://forgesvn1.novell.com/svn/hula/trunk
This was previously on an anonymous SSH account: that has now changed.
Building Hula.
Since the sources have been downloaded using subversion, we simply need to run ./autogen.sh, make, and make install.
$ ./autogen.sh –prefix=/opt/hula/
make
make install
The –prefix=/opt/hula makes sure hula gets installed to /opt/hula.
Completing the installation.
There are a few steps left to completing the installation.
cd /opt/hula/sbin
./hulasetup –domain=your.domain.com
If you do not specifiy –domain it will default to localhost.localdomain. Also, if you have apache running on port 80 I recommend doing something like:
./hulasetup –http=8080
But the port the web service runs on can always be changed later from the administration page. The port the administration gui runs on can also be changed later.
Starting hula.
To start hula make sure you are in /opt/hula/sbin and then run:
./hulamanager
Finally, just open http://localhost:89 in your favorite web browser to access the administration gui. The default username is admin and the password is hula. I recommend adding /opt/hula/sbin/hulamanager to the /etc/rc.local to get hula to start on boot. These can be changed later on.
Rpm Program Installation – Tips for openSuse10.2
January 10, 2007 at 7:47 pm | Posted in openSuse, RPM, Uncategorized | 4 CommentsPlease see:
A switch from Kubuntu to OpenSuse 10.2
January 10, 2007 at 4:04 pm | Posted in Kubuntu, openSuse, Review, Ubuntu | 56 Comments
I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe I’m not as big of a blinded fanboy as i think of myself at times. I love free software and Ubuntu’s philosophy. They have THE BEST community on the web in terms of getting aid. There are more blogs, forums, irc rooms, mailling lists, tutorials, videos, and wiki’s documenting everything possible for Ubuntu it’s pathetic. I also, am not a happy camper with Novell recently. And yes, opensuse is getting guilt by association here. They’ve royally made me pretty angry and I’ve kept up with the MS deal and slowly watching them become the next SCO. In other words, i’m not much for the “mixed source” company. I do see advantages in providing MS Office support, increased virtualization support, etc. But they should’ve found a way to do it that didn’t violate the spirit of the GPL.
I’ve tried Redhat 8 and 9, Fedora 5 (which found i far too sluggish). I’ve played with PC-BSD, Gentoo on PPC, FreeBSD, Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu 5.10 through 6.10. I needed something new. And i just couldn’t resist all the experiences i’ve heard about opensuse 10.2.
And they were right. It’s a beautiful OS.
The Install
The DVD iso downloaded in a mere few hours. The install went smooth, though a little long. I got irritated because it kept wanting to install on my second hard-drive and i was unable to find an option to not do that. So i had to start over and unplug the drive until it was installed.
The 2nd problem I ran into was immediately upon booting up. Novell, like Fedora, being somewhat of a corporate leaning distro, I expected my video card to work off that bat. It didn’t. In fact, my entire xorg.conf was blank. Yes you heard right. Blank. Good thing i had my xorg.conf saved from ubuntu, and thank god it was compatible with this install.
Taking a Look Around
I was happy to see Novell App Armor included with the install as I’ve been wanting that or Red Hat’s SE Linux again, which just isn’t all that pragmatic in an Ubuntu machine. Also happy to see the new Kickstart menu system for KDE was installed as well.
But the first that that struck me upon logging in, was speed. I chose the KDE desktop install and upon clicking on a multitude of apps (Konsole, Firefox, Konqueror, Kontact, Gaim, Koffice, amarok, ktorrent, etc) and all opened amazingly fast in comparison to kubuntu. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was definately impressed, but then again, I’ve been told that Kubuntu was rather sluggish out of the box, and still sluggish after running BUM.
I haven’t quite figured out the firewall as of yet. I’m begining to miss Firestarter already. The only way I’ve currently found to connect to my girlfriend’s shared drives on her Windows box is to simply turn the firewall off when i need to access them. I cannot see a place to open a port for a particular IP address, or even for a particular service for samba. I’m sure this is my own idiocy though, but we could chalk this up to minus 1 on the user friendly side.
Adding Software and Documentation
Yast, is a pretty nice package manager, but I don’t like it as much as Synaptic. It’s a bit too slow starting up. I haven’t gotten around to really exploring SMART as of yet. Compared to Fedora the installation of packages runs fairly fast for an rpm distro. This includes packages both from the repo and manually downloaded.
Ubuntu has a plethora of documentation throughout the interweb (enough to choke some tubes even), on how to install certain software, where to locate restricted format support (codecs, java, fonts, etc). Then again, Suse came with nvidia drivers, it came with Macromedia Flash support (and is far better integrated out of the box than i ever got it to work in Ubuntu. This goes for Konqueror, Firefox and Opera.), and java. I just needed the gstreamer files, w32codecs, microsoft and apple fonts, etc..
It took a great while for me to find documentation where to get them and stupid me, i didn’t even bookmark it. But i got it to work, I was just suprised not to see their forums littered with HowTo’s, wiki’s showing you step by step how to get things fully operational as a desktop. Community support just isn’t as widespread and when i come across something i don’t know off the top of my head with this distro, it’ll probably take me a while longer.
Previous Blog
I wrote a blog a while ago about a week with KDE applications, and i’m not going to rehash the entire thing, but upon using Suse I see most of my criticisms were Kubuntu related rather than KDE related. Just thought i’d note that.
Overall
I’m impressed. I love my opensuse10.2 install with a passion. But now it’s kinda like the passions one might have for a hooker he doesn’t want to bring home to mom. It feels a bit dirty, but i am in love nonetheless.
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