By default, standard users are not allowed to access the serial ports on a Debian machine. A workaround is to run that program as root, but this is inherently unsafe. A better solution is to add your unprivileged user account to the dialout group.
usermod -a -G dialout username This allows an unprivileged account to access the system’s serial ports. This is handy with programs such as the Arduino IDE, which require serial port access to program the microprocessors.
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Wine is a compatibility layer to allow you to run Windows programs on Linux with near native efficiency. I use Wine to run foobar2000 on Linux. On Windows, foobar2000 supports upmixing stereo tracks into 5.1 surround sound. This was the first thing I missed when I moved my Desktop to Linux full time.
After a good bit of googling, it turns out that it is actually possible to pass 5.1 surround sound from a Wine application to the native Linux sound driver.
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I discovered the other day that Thunderbird supports Unix Movemail accounts. It seems to have supported them for a long while, but it wasn’t very obvious from the Account options. This is dead handy as it allows me to retrieve the various system generated emails from /var/spool/mail automatically.
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Every time I move to a new Debian/Ubuntu installation I can never remember how to remove the Nautilus breadcrumbs bar in favour of the address bar. I’ve decided to write it down so I’ll remember it.
Use
gconf-editor to edit the value of
/apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry
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I got a Debian based VPS recently, and every so often I find myself needing to reboot the server. I keep forgetting to start my GNU Screen and Irssi windows again though.
Adding the following line to /etc/rc.local allows GNU Screen to automatically run at boot time. This line runs Screen from my unpriviledged account, loads Irssi within that Screen, and then backgrounds itself, ready for the next time I login.
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Having used PDFcreator on Windows for many years, a PDF printer is something that you miss very quickly on a fresh install operating system.
Linux is no exception, and cups-pdf provides a PDF printer for the most excellent CUPS. (I normally despise Apple software, but I have to give them credit for CUPS. :))
To install on a Debian/Ubuntu machine:
apt-get install cups-pdf Once installed, you should now have a new PDF printer showing up in CUPS.
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I recently decided to take mirror an old website that I had running. The hosting plan only offered ftp, and so, I couldn’t get shell access to tar and scp it.
Next best thing was to mirror it using lftp. The following command logs into the root FTP directory and mirrors every file recursively.
lftp -e mirror -u username,password ftp.example.com
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While the Axis 207 IP camera provides MPEG4 video output, the MPEG4 format is a bit obscure, and not handled by many media players. This makes recording the output difficult. Fortunately, VLC is capable of both playing and recording this format.
The following cron line uses VLC to record hourly chunks of video from a Axis 207 camera with IP address 10.0.0.1, and store them in /tmp/Axis207.
0 * * * * /usr/bin/vlc rtsp://10.
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If you are using Ext2/3/4 as a filesystem, you might not be aware that the system reserves a certain percentage of disk for root processes by default.
While this is normally useful on boot drives, it is a major hindrance on storage drives. Debian reserves 5% by default. On a 1 TB drive, this equates to approximately 47 GB!
This can percentage can be altered using tune2fs and the -m argument, followed by the percentage of blocks you wish to reserve.
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ngrep is a powerful tool which enables network administrators to view packets travelling across the wire in real time. This is a useful item for both security audits and reverse engineering.
By running ngrep on router level devices, it is possible to see where closed source devices such as Playstations and Wiis are phoning home for updates.
Below is a sample command run on my router to view all traffic on interface br0, travelling to or from host 192.
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