Installing Cursor, GTK and Icon Theme

To install cursor,gtk and icon theme first download the package from the link given below :

http://rapidshare.de/files/38210507/MyTheme.tar.gz.html

To install the theme package we have downloaded fro the above link, go to (System -> Preferences -> Appearance) and click Install and point to our newly downloaded Mytheme.tar.gz archive.

This should start installing the theme package (Cursors/Icons/Theme) once installation is completed . Chose Customize in theme and click on Customize.

In this window in Icons chose LeopardX , in Controls Mac4Lin_GTK_Aqua_v0.3 , in Window Border Mac4Lin_GTK_Aqua_v0.3 and in Pointers White Cursor .

If you have followed the steps properly the theme and icons should have been installed , and you should be able to see the new theme applied to your default desktop.

Enabling Compiz Graphic Effects and installing Mac$lin Theme

First Step is to install compiconf-settings-managerusing apt-get

shahid@shahid-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Before customizing Compiz you have to change Appearance Preference to Extra ( System -> Preferences -> Appearence )

After completing above steps , you can customize compiz by going to System -> Preferences -> Advanced Desktop Effects Settings .

After this Install Emerald Theme Manager using apt-get

shahid@shahid-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install emerald

After installation is over download MacOS X Emerald theme from this link : http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Mac4Lin+Leopard+Emerald+Theme?content=68409

Now open (System -> Preferences -> Emerald Theme Manager )

After Emerald theme manager opens click on import and point to the downloaded theme package from withing the Theme Manager , you will find Mac4Lin Theme listed select the theme , click on refresh and quit the application

Mav like Dock with Avant Navigator

After the above steps Install Avant Window Navigator.

Avant Windows Navigator is cool little tool that allows you to have a cute looking dock at the bottom of the screen . Even though AWN is still very buggy, still because it is so feature rich and cool looking you could install it .

To install AWN you need to add extra repositories, now adding any additional repository carries certain amount of risk of screwing up your system so follow these step at your own risk.

To add repository:

shahid@shahid-laptop:~$ echo "deb  http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
shahid@shahid-laptop:~$ echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ubuntu hardy main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

After issuing above command type the following command to update your repositories :

shahid@shahid-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get update

and finally to install AWN issue the following command in the terminal window :

shahid@shahid-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install awn-manager-trunk awn-extras-applets-trunk

Now after completing above mentioned steps AWN should be properly installed , To Launch AWN go to (Applications -> Accessories -> Avant Window Navigator )
Now you could customize AWN by choosing to add more applets , configuring 3D effects for AWN etc by going to AWN Manager ( System -> Preferences -> Awn Manager )

Though the theme which AWN comes with preinstalled is also good , you might like to try this it’s cool and very Mac like
http://rapidshare.com/files/71511920/Transparent.tgz.html
you could install this theme through AWN Manager go to (System->Preferences->AWN manager) and go to themes there and click on “Add” and point it to the downloaded theme.

You will see a confirmation dialog box that theme has been added properly. Close AWN Manager and start it again and chose the theme just installed and press apply button to make this theme default theme of AWN.
This is how my AWN Dock looks(with the above theme installed) like : -

Here is the details of what did to get the webcam running on using Ubuntu.

$ svn checkout http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/linux-uvc/
$ cd linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk/
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ modprobe uvcvideo

Tested with ‘ekiga ‘ and ‘xawtv’

If you request a non existent page on a server .It will not show up your normal Apache custom 404 page.

A trick to show a custom page ( eg: cferror.cfm ) when a non existant cfm page is accessed. This can be done with the .htaccess file. .htaccess is a regular text file that contains “scripts” that allow you to override certain things on your server – like creating a custom 404 error document that replaces the server’s default 404 document.

Method 1

To be able to create your own 404 error document, first you need to create the actual document (use your HTML editor of choice or hand code it if you like), upload the document to the root directory on your server, and finally include the following in your document root .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.com/404.html

 Method 2

Add the following entry to the .htaccess file in your DocumentRoot

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*) /cferror.cfm?%{REQUEST_URI}

All request to the non existent pages are passed to cferror.cfm page with the requested URL as argument.

VMWare is a Virtual Machine used for installing an Operating system inside another Operating System. After installing VMWare on any operating system, we can start VMWare which will act as a system. We can install operating systems in VMWare so that we can switch to other OS very easly,  we don’t need to restart our system, we can work oon both OS at the same time.

My Experience

The VMWare Virtual Machine is one of my favorite software, which I was used on Ubuntu 7.04 Gutsy. It is very easy to install VMWare on Ubuntu 7.04.

$ apt-get install vmware-server

But after installing Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy and other essintial libraries and importan packages in my system. When I seached the package ‘vmware-server’ using apt-cache search, there is no package like this. So I added the repository to sourcess.list which is used by Ubuntu 7.04 for installing VMWare. After that the package ‘vmware-server’ was listed. When I tried to install the pakage ‘vmware-server’ using ‘apt-get install’, it show some error regarding linux-kernal-module. After that I tried to install VMWare using source code, but it also produce the same error.

Then I searche the web for any help, luckily I got an helpful stuff. Then I successfully installed vmware-server on Ubuntu 8.04.

If you are facing the same issue, then here is the full guide to install VMware Server and get it working in Hardy Heron:
Installing VMWare Server on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

Download VMware Server 1.0.5 to your home folder

Download the patch file vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz to your home folder.

Extract the Vmware-server-1.0.5-80187.tar.gz to your home folder (either via Archive manager or type tar zxf Vmware-server-1.0.5-80187.tar.gz in the terminal)

Extract the vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz to your home folder (either via Archive Manager or type tar zxf vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz in the terminal)

Install the necessary dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install xinetd gcc-3.4

If you are using 64 bits system, you have to install the additional files

$sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Run the VMware Server installer

$ cd vmware-server-distrib
$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl

You will be prompted to answer some questions. Press ‘Enter’ to select the default answer. When it reaches the point that requires you to run vmware-config.pl, type ‘No‘. The installer will exit.

Next, apply the patch

$ cd vmware-any-any-update116
$ sudo ./runme.pl

This time, press ‘Enter’ for all the questions and enter ‘Yes‘ to run the vmware-comfig.pl.

Once it has finished compiling, you should now see the VMware console in your Applications->System Tools. If not, you can start VMware Server by typing vmware in the terminal.

When you launch the application, it might generate an error message saying that it can’t find the cairo version. No worry, just copy the files over and it will work.

$ sudo cp /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/
$ sudo cp /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/

For 64 bit users

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib32 /usr/l32
$  sed -i -e ’s/usr\/lib/usr\/l32/g’ /usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/loader-files.d/libgtk2.0-0.loaders
$ sudo sed -i -e ’s/usr\/lib/usr\/l32/g’ /usr/lib32/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0.1200.9

That’s it. Your VMware Server should be working now.

$ vmware

Goto Applications ->  System Tools -> VMWare Server Console

After I got the job as Server Administrator, the company server were running on Ubuntu Servers. So for the last 6 months I am using ubuntu. And there is not much differences in the file system. Only some differences in some command for example we use ‘yum’ command to install any thing in fedora and ‘apt-get, ‘aptitude’ command to install any thing in Ubuntu.I did’nt find any big difficulties in using Ubuntu, ofcource there are lots of help if we go online. Last two weeks back I installed Ubuntu 8.04 in my laptop, it is quite good.

Last week I got an iso image of OpenSolaris and I installed OpenSolaris in the VMWare virtual machine. Solaris is one of the best OSin the world and it is stable. First I installed apache, mysql and PHP in the Solaris machine. I used the command ‘pkg-get’ to install these packages. In Fedora and Ubuntu the configuration files of installed pakages where stored in the location /etc/. But for OpenSolaris the configuration files where stored in the location /opt/csf/etc.

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

Introduction

The ASP.NET development environment on Ubuntu Linux is called XSP. This is a simple webserver written in C# that can be used for either ASP.NET 1.0 or 2.0 applications. You can install both environments side by side if need be.

Requirements

Monodevelop is probably the best IDE for developing .NET applications on Linux. In order to install and use it for development, you will also need the Mono .NET runtime environment installed. Thankfully, installing monodevelop and mono are very simple on Ubuntu.

Run this command from a Terminal window:

$ sudo apt-get install mono mono-gmcs mono-gac mono-utils monodevelop monodoc-browser monodevelop-nunit monodevelop-versioncontrol
ASP.NET 1.0

$ sudo apt-get install mono-xsp mono-xsp-base

$ sudo apt-get install asp.net-examples

This will install the development environment along with some sample applications. To run the sample applications, you will launch the XSP process and point it at the samples. You’d simply modify the path to run an application that you’ve created.

$ xsp –root /usr/share/asp.net-demos/

Listening on port: 8080 (non-secure)
Listening on address: 0.0.0.0
Root directory: /usr/share/asp.net-demos
Hit Return to stop the server.

ASP.NET 2.0

$ sudo apt-get install mono-xsp2 mono-xsp2-base

$ sudo apt-get install asp.net2-examples

This will install the development environment along with some sample applications. To run the sample applications, you will launch the XSP process and point it at the samples. You’d simply modify the path to run an application that you’ve created.

$ xsp2 –root /usr/share/asp.net2-demos/

Listening on port: 8080 (non-secure)
Listening on address: 0.0.0.0
Root directory: /usr/share/asp.net-demos
Hit Return to stop the server.

At this point, you’d want to navigate in your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and you should see a page similar to this:

Amazon S3 Indroduction

Amazon s3 is a remote file storing system. It is totally different from Normal Servers like Apache, FTP server etc. If your site burns more bandwidth due to backups or multimedia contents such a video, image, audio etc, the maintenance cost will be very high. For a limited number of page views, local file saving mechanism is ok. Because the cost of bandwidth is comparatively low. But when the data transfer rate become higher, the bandwidth cost should be considered.

In such a case instead of saving files or images in local servers, You can use Amazon s3 server (S3 stands for Simple Storage Service). For this you have do two things

1) Register on http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

2) Use api for uploading your files into s3 for web applications

3) Mount Amazon S3 bucket and use as a local file system for backups.

S3fs Indroduction

s3fs is a FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) filesystem that allows you to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a local filesystem. It stores files natively and transparently in S3 (i.e., you can use other programs to access the same files). Maximum file size=5G.Its quite useful and stable, e.g., can be used to easily copy daily backup tarballs to s3

To use it:

1. get an amazon s3 account
2. download the source, s3fs-r130-source.tar.gz (I’ve used Ubuntu 7.10 ) and slap the binary in, say, /usr/bin/s3fs
   1. you’ll need at least fuse-2.6
   2. for fedora probably need to do: yum install fuse-devel
   3. for ubuntu probably need to do something like: sudo apt get fuse-libs
   4. I got one dependency libcurl-dev, libxml2-dev libfuse-dev ( sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev libfuse-dev )
3. Installation
   1. $ sudo tar -xzvf s3fs-r130-source.tar.gz
   2. $ cd s3fs
   3. $ sudo make
   4. $ sudo make install
4. Mounting Amazon S3 Bucket

$ sudo /usr/bin/s3fs mybucket -o accessKeyId=myaccessKeyId -o secretAccessKey=mysecretAccessKey /mnt

Now you can read / write files to your bucket using Linux commands.

List the contents in the Bucket mounted to /mnt/ directory

$ sudo ls /mnt

s3fs will retry s3 transactions on certain error conditions. The default retry count is 2, i.e., s3fs will make 2 retries per s3 transaction (for a total of 3 attempts: 1st attempt + 2 retries) before giving up. You can set the retry count by using the “retries” option, e.g., “-oretries=2″

Options

• accessKeyId
• secretAccessKey
• defailt_acl ( default=”private”)
  • the default canned acl to apply to all written S3 Onjects
  • any created files will have this canned acl
  • any updated files will also have this canned acl applied
• prefix (default=”") (comming soon!)
  • a prefix to append to all S3 objects
• retries (default=”2″)
  • number of times to retry a failed S3 transaction
• use_cache (default=”" which means disabled)
  • local folder to use for local files cache

SSH is often used to login from one system to another with Username Password. There are some cases where we want to login to other systems without spesifing username and password. By generating ssh keys we can login to the system without specifying username and password.

ssh-keygen – authentication key generation

Syntax

ssh-keygen [-b bits] [-f file] [-N new_passphrase] [-C comment] ssh-keygen -p [-P old_passphrase] [-N new_passphrase]

ssh-keygen -c [-P passphrase] [-C comment]

ssh-keygen -u [-f file] [-P passphrase]

Description

Ssh-keygen generates and manages authentication keys for ssh. Normally each user wishing to use ssh with RSA authentication runs this once to create the authentication key in %HOME%/.ssh/identity. Additionally, the system administrator may use this to generate host keys. Normally this program generates the key and asks for a file in which to store the private key. The public key is stored in a file with the same name but “.pub” appended. The program also asks for a passphrase. The passphrase may be empty to indicate no passphrase (host keys must have empty passphrase), or it may be a string of arbitrary length. Good passphrases are 10-30 characters long and are not simple sentences or otherwise easily guessable (English prose has only 1-2 bits of entropy per word, and provides very bad passphrases). The passphrase can be changed later by using the -p option.

There is no way to recover a lost passphrase. If the passphrase is lost or forgotten, you will have to generate a new key and copy the corresponding public key to other machines.

USING GOOD, UNGUESSABLE PASSPHRASES IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED. EMPTY PASSPHRASES SHOULD NOT BE USED UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

There is also a comment field in the key file that is only for convenience to the user to help identify the key. The comment can tell what the key is for, or whatever is useful. The comment is initialized to user@host when the key is created, but can be changed using the -c option.

The cipher to be used when encrypting keys with passphrase is defined in ssh.h. Using the -u option, keys encrypted in any supported cipher can be updated to use this default cipher.

Example for generating ssh-key 

Two system with IP addresses 192.168.0.125 and 192.168.0.110

Login to 192.168.0.110 from 192.168.0.125

$ ssh user@192.168.0.110

Enter your password

exit

The above login is for checking the connection between two system.

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -f id_dsa

The passphrase should be empty. Press enter twice.

$ scp id_dsa.pub user@192.168.0.110:~/.ssh/temp.pub

Now login to system 192.168.0.110

$ ssh user@192.168.0.110

Enter Password

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ cat temp.pub >> authorized_keys2
$ exit

After all these steps try to login you can login with out specifying the password.

One of the more powerful tricks of the .htaccess is the ability to rewrite URLs. This enables us to do some mighty manipulations on our links; useful stuff like transforming very long URL’s into short, cute URLs,  redirecting URL to some other URL, transforming dynamic ?generated=page&URL’s into /friendly/flat/links, redirect missing pages, preventing hot-linking, performing automatic language translation, and much, much more.

When you use rewrite rule you have to enable rewrite module in the apache.conf file and you have to restart apache again.

In Ubuntu you can use a2enmod to enable rewrite mod

#sudo a2enmod rewrite

#sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

begin rewriting… 

First you have to add following lines to the Apache Virtualhost.

<Directory / Your Document Root>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
</Directory>

Simple rewriting

Simply put, Apache scans all incoming URL requests, checks for matches in our .htaccess file and rewrites those matching URLs to whatever we specify. something like this..

Example 1 :

all requests to whatever.htm will be sent to whatever.php:

# .htaccess file

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1.php [nc]

Example 2 :

all requests to example.com will be sent to xyz.com

# .htaccess file

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# require non-empty HOST header
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$

# require case-insensitive HOST to be www.example.net
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.net$ [NC]

# 301 redirect everything to correct www.example.net
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# or you can use this rewriterule
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

The Google Maps API lets you embed Google Maps in your own web pages with JavaScript. The API provides a number of utilities for manipulating maps (just like on the shahidz.com/map.php web page) and adding content to the map through a variety of services, allowing you to create robust maps applications on your website.

For enabling Google Map in your site you need a key. You can generate the key from this link : http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

Example program for a simple Google Map showing Cochin
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″/>
<title>Google Maps JavaScript API Example</title>
<script src=”http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&key=GIVE YOUR GOOGLE MAP API KEY HERE”
type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>

//<![CDATA[

function load() {
if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));
// map.setCenter(new GLatLng(37.4419, -122.1419), 13);
// map.setCenter(new GLatLng(8.81355,77.335328), 7);
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(9.91355,76.335328), 11 );
}
}

//]]>
</script>
</head>
<body onload=”load()” onunload=”GUnload()”>
<div id=”map” style=”width: 500px; height: 500px”></div>
</body>
</html>