Feb

21

450 Free GIMP Brushes for Download

February 21, 2008 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 2 Comments
Posted in Applications

Are you a GIMP or GIMPshop user? Last November (2007) we had a post for 150 GIMP Brushes here: /gimp-user-150-extra-gimp-brushes-for-ubuntu/

New we've found another, larger resource...

Gimp & Photoshop website offers over 450 brush sets for GIMP. All are at no cost and ready to download. However, you'll need to create a membership. I saw quite a few tutorials while I was looking around (as well as other resources), so it might be interesting to you to take a quick look.

Some of the useful brush sets include:

  • Cross Brushes
  • Stardust & Twinkles
  • Heavy Metal Brushes
  • Deep Space
  • Fractal Flames
  • Diamonds
  • Fireworks
  • Valentine Brush Set (just in time!)
  • Wildlife Brushes
  • Floral Brushes
  • 3D Spheres & Bubbles

Feb

21

How to Scale the CPU Frequency of Your Ubuntu Laptop – The Easy Way.

February 21, 2008 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | Leave a Comment
Posted in How To

Does a loud, constant CPU fan on your laptop drive you nuts? Try this simple tweak before more drastic measures...

Try scaling down your CPU frequency: Clock scaling allows you to change the clock speed of CPUs on the fly. This is a nice method to save battery power on notebooks, because the lower the clock speed, the less power the CPU consumes.

To do this you'll need to insert the p4_clockmod module:

sudo modprobe p4_clockmod

This shouldn’t return any output.

Now, add the line

p4_clockmod

to "/etc/modules" to ensure the CPU clock scaling module starts with the system.

Now, to add the CPU frequency scaling monitor applet to the panel, right click over an empty area in the panel, select 'add to panel', and select the CPU frequency applet. Hopefully it'll pop up showing the CPU frequency now. Reboot your laptop if it doesn’t seem to be working immediately.

Finally, if you (like I did) get miffed off with the laptop ‘lagging’ when needing a quick boost of power, you can manually set the frequency you want it to run at. Sometimes 250Mhz just isn’t enough!

sudo cpufreq-selector -f 1000000

Would set the CPU frequency to 1GHz - Easy eh?
There you have it, CPU frequency scaling in 5 minutes
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Feb

21

How to install Ubuntu Studio in Windows using VirtualBox – A Complete Walkthrough

February 21, 2008 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | Leave a Comment
Posted in Hands On, How To

This tutorial will take you every single step of the way through installing Ubuntu Studio using VirtualBox for Windows. In other words, even new users should be able to follow along.

Who this tutorial is for

This tutorial is for anyone with a PC running Windows (Windows 2000 SP3, XP or Server 2003) who is curious about Linux - specifically Ubuntu Studio, and has about an hour to kill (not including the time it takes to download Ubuntu). The great thing about installing Ubuntu Studio using VirtualBox is that if you decide you don’t like it, you can uninstall VirtualBox, delete its files and folders, and its like it never happened. You don’t have to worry about partitioning your hard drive (which when done incorrectly can delete your valuable files). That, and all of the software involved is entirely free.

The steps and screenshots used for this tutorial are specific to VirtualBox 1.3.8 and Windows XP SP2. With that said, they will be nearly identical if you have Read more

Feb

21

How to Regularly Backup Ubuntu Using rsync

February 21, 2008 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | Leave a Comment
Posted in How To

Right after I wrote How to regularly backup Windows XP to Ubuntu, using rsync for my T42 ThinkPad, I ended up installing Ubuntu on it. In the end I was mostly interested in backing it up for the purpose of safely wiping Windows. So much for regularly.

Then something unexpected happened: I started to use my 5 year old X23 exclusively. Partly because I’d already gotten comfortable with Ubuntu on it, and partly because I was using it at the time to edit photos on the bus ride home from work. When I got home, it didn’t make sense to switch to another laptop to finish whatever I was working on.

It also may have something to do with a feeling that I think Mark Pilgrim put well:

There’s something magical about breathing new life into old hardware, hardware that you had given up on. I don’t know quite how to describe it. It’s very… tender.

So I’ve been meaning to get back to rsync to start regularly backing up Ubuntu to Ubuntu. Well my little Mini-ITX server with external hard drive is already up and running. So that half of the equation was in place. What I was a little rusty on was how to set the whole thing up to run without needing a password.

That turns out to be really easy. If you’ve got ssh, then you’ve probably got ssh-keygen, which exists for the sole purpose of generating public and private keys, which when created without a passphrase can be used for password-free logins. So I ran ssh-keygen to generate a 2048 bit RSA key without a passphrase (aka a passphraseless key). I could also have generated a 1024 bit DSA key. I’m not sure I understand the difference. I’m not sure it matters.

ssh-keygen -b 2048

Inside ~/.ssh, ssh-keygen created two standard files, id_rsa and id_rsa.pub, the private and public keys respectively. The next and final step is to copy and “install” the public key on my backup server (192.168.0.100).

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub [email protected]

ssh-copy-id uses ssh to copy the public key to the remote server and appends it to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. Of course I didn’t know about ssh-copy-id when I started, so I just scp-ed the file over and pasted the public key into the authorized_keys file.

At which point I could use ssh to login without a password! ssh knows to automatically check for the existence of the id_rsa private key and try logging in with that.

ssh 192.168.0.100

Hot damn! That alone makes me want to start distributing my public key around to every server I access regularly. Of course the other benefit (and the whole point of this post!) is that now I’ll also be able to cron an rsync backup without requiring a password.

My ideal backup is a relatively current mirror of my home directory. I’m not looking for modified file snapshots or entire bootable filesystem images, I just want to know that if my hard drive crashes, most of my data (especially the photos) is recoverable. To that end, my rsync needs are relatively simple, though it took some tweaking to get to this point:

rsync -aze ssh --delete --exclude=".*/" /home/jwatt/ [email protected]:/home/jwatt/backup/x23/

The -a option means archive files—it’s really an alias for a lot of other options having to do with maintaining permissions and timestamps, etc. The -z option uses compression when transferring files. The -e ssh option tunnels the file transfer over an encrypted ssh connection. The --delete option deletes any destination files that have been deleted from the source. The --exclude=".*/" option skips hidden files and directories. Finally the last two parts are the source (in this case everything under my home directory) and the destination I’ve already set up on my backup server.

And that’s it. I added it to my cron to run daily at 10pm. Set and forget it.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Feb

21

How to regularly backup Windows XP to Ubuntu, using rsync

February 21, 2008 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 3 Comments
Posted in How To

Back in September I revived my Mini-ITX box to serve as a backup server. I set up BackupPC, ran it once, it seemed to work, and then ignored it for weeks. When I checked back, it hadn’t run successfully since. Ugh, I want backups to just work!

A few nights ago I decided to try again, this time dropping the constraint of not installing software on my laptop. Turns out I already had the building block I needed: rsync, installed in the form of Cygwin.

I began with these Rsync for Windows instructions, and everything went smoothly until the very end—rsync on Windows wasn’t connecting to rsync on Ubuntu. My gut told me rsync’s port 873 isn’t open on Ubuntu, but I had no idea how to open ports anymore. Luckily I found How to start rsync daemon at boot in the Ubuntu forums which told me exactly what I needed to know.

Partly as an aide to my memory, and partly to help anyone out there who might be struggling with the same project (unless everyone except me is already backing up their computers) I decided to summarize the process without all the false starts and dead ends it took me to figure it all out. For more information, the rsync man page is useful, as well as the results in Google for windows rsync.

Set up rsync server on Ubuntu

  1. Run sudo apt-get install rsync (it’s probably already installed)
  2. Create a file named rsyncd.conf in /etc 
    1. sudo nano /etc/rsyncd.conf
    2. Add the following to rsyncd.conf, replacing all instances of username with your Ubuntu username: 
      [usernamebackup]

    path = /home/username/backup
    comment = Backup
    uid = username
    gid = username
    read only = false
    auth users = username
    secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
    3. sudo chmod 644 /etc/rsyncd.conf
  3. Create a file named rsyncd.secrets in /etc 
    1. sudo nano /etc/rsyncd.secrets
    2. Add the following to rsyncd.secrets, replacing username with your username and password with a password of your choosing: 
      username:password
    3. sudo chmod 600 /etc/rsyncd.secrets
  4. Open rsync port by editing /etc/default/rsync and setting 
    RSYNC_ENABLE=true
  5. Restart rsync 
    sudo /etc/init.d/rsync restart

Set up rsync client on Windows

  1. Install Cygwin, making sure Editors > nano and Net > rsync are selected
  2. Add C:\cygwin\bin; to the Windows PATH statement
    1. Right-click on My Computer and select Properties
    2. Switch to the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button at the bottom
    3. Find the “Path” or “PATH” variable in the System variables list at the bottom and click Edit
    4. Add C:\cygwin\bin; to the beginning of the list
  3. Create secret file to store password in Cygwin
    1. Start Cygwin Bash Shell
    2. Create secret file in the filesystem root and enter only the password in rsyncd.secrets above, with no spaces or line breaks 
      nano /secret
    3. chmod 600 /secret
    4. chown Administrator:SYSTEM /secret
  4. Create bat file to run rsync
    1. Open Notepad and enter the following command, replacing User Name with your Windows User Name directory, username with your Ubuntu username, and ipaddress with the IP address of your Ubuntu server (e.g. 192.168.0.100): 
      C:\cygwin\bin\rsync.exe -qrtz --password-file=c:\cygwin\secret --delete "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/User Name" username@ipaddress::usernamebackup

      As you may have guessed, the "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/User Name" command line option designates where to start backing up from. As currently configured, this will backup your Windows home directory (Desktop, My Documents, etc). If you want to backup your whole hard drive, change that option to "/cygdrive/c".

    2. Save the file as C:\rsync.bat

Create scheduled task to run C:\rsync.bat once a day

  1. Create scheduled task
    1. Goto Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks
    2. From the File menu, select New > Scheduled Task
    3. Name this task “rsync backup”
    4. Right-click on the task and select properties
    5. Enter C:\rsync.bat in the Run field
    6. Switch to the Schedule tab and select the time you want the backup to run every day and click Ok
  2. Test the scheduled task
    1. Create a folder called C:\data and put a few photo files in it
    2. Edit C:\rsync.bat and change "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/User Name" to "/cygdrive/c/data"
    3. Add the command pause on a new line at the bottom of C:\rsync.bat and save the file
    4. Right-click on the “rsync backup” scheduled task and select “Run”—A command window should popup and with either errors or the list of files being transfered. If there are errors, troubleshoot them.
    5. Once the scheduled task and C:\rsync.bat appear to be working correctly, change "/cygdrive/c/data" back to "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/User Name" and remove the pause command
    6. Finally, edit the scheduled task properties and change “Run as:” to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM—this will ensure that the process runs in the background, without popping up a command prompt window

Run your first backup

Run C:\rsync.bat from the command line before going to bed. Backing up 35GB over a wireless-g connection took me over 8 hours. Subsequent backups take less than a minute. Behold the beauty of rsync.

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.


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