Recently I discovered a set of command line tools that allow you to interact with the trash can: trash-cli. Normally only GUI file managers like Nautilus will use the trash can, if you delete files on the command line using rm or rmdir the trash can is bypassed and files are deleted immediately.
Linux
Control Your Trash
Password Generators
Here is a list of command line password generators, from:
http://debaday.debian.net/2007/11/14/gpw-generate-pronounceable-passwords/
Google Desktop for Linux
Google recently released a Linux version of Google Desktop. This is really good news, hopefully other companies will follow. What is even better is the fact that there is a Ubuntu repository for all this. Unfortunately no amd64 binaries here.
Quite a few people seem to have privacy concerns. Providing the source code for the application would definitely alleviate most of the concerns, but I am afraid this will not happen to soon. Or maybe it will?
Opening a File in Linux
For a while now I was using a simple command line utility in Gnome called gnome-open. As an argument you can pass a url, a file or a folder. Urls will be opened in your browser, files with the associated applications and folders in Nautilus.
This is great for applications or menu entries as well. If you want to open a PDF document you can use gnome-open in order to make sure that it is opened using the user's preferred viewer.
Installing CheckGmail on Ubuntu
CheckGmail is a nice Gmail system tray notifier. You can find an older version, 1.10.1, in the universe repository, but probably you want to run the latest one (1.12 as of now). Downloading and running the basic notifier is quite simple, just unpack the tar file and run the script.
If you want all the functionality, encryption of locally stored password and hyper links in message bodies, then you need to manually install a few libraries. Here are the steps for Ubuntu Feisty:
Ubuntu Edgy and the APC ES 550 UPS
After going through several power outages recently I ordered UPSs for all our computers at home. The Linux boxes, running Ubuntu Edgy, ended with one APC ES 550 each.
APC UPSs are supported under Linux by the apcupsd daemon. Here are my notes on how I configured this daemon to work under Edgy. Make sure the UPS is all hooked up and that the USB cable is connected to your computer.
First install the package, its name is apcupsd. There is also a documentation package, apcupsd-doc, but the docs are incomplete and full of broken links. Just use the documentation from the official site if you need to.
Partition UUIDs in Linux
In the latest version of Ubuntu I noticed that partitions in fstab are referred using UUIDs instead of device names. If you want to find out the UUID for an existing partition then you can use a couple of rather obscure commands: blkid and vol_id.
Java on Ubuntu Edgy
I had Java running on my Ubuntu system for quite a while now and I switched to the Sun package provided by Ubuntu as soon as it became available. Upgrading to Edgy seemed smooth with regards to Java, until last Friday. The problems I started noticing were related to keystore generation, first issues with the format of distinguished names (no spaces accepted after commas anymore) and today problems with the format of the keystores. Keystores created with keytool could were no longer recognized by Java code.
It turns out that the version of keytool I was using after upgrading to Edgy was the one provided by Gnu. Actually the whole set of Java binaries was a mix of Sun and Gnu binaries. Running a debian alternatives command fixed this:
IEs4Linux
IEs4Linux is a nice package and script to install Internet Explorer (yes, IE) on a Linux box. It is dead simple, but obviously it will work on i386 architectures only.
Gnome Screen Ruler
Just found this little Gnome utility that puts a ruler on your screen so you can measure things: Gnome Screen Ruler. Unfortunately it is not in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories, so you have to compile it yourself, especially if you are running amd64.
I found good compilation instructions (there are quite a few problems) on GnomeFiles. I attached the amd64 deb file, it may work for you: gruler-0.
