Jun
29
Installing Compass on Ubuntu
June 29, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 6 Comments
Posted in How To
One thing I particularly enjoy are tools that make my work simpler. I was reading a post on Smashing Magazine about "35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design" that mentioned Compass. It's a a real stylesheet framework. As such it's of great benefit to web developers and designers who have some coding skills.
What particularly attracted me to Compass were four issues:
- Simplifies maintainable, semantic CSS that I can import into any project.
- Compiles my CSS files as beautiful code!
- Community support.
- Excellent support from the developer, Chris Eppstein, who was VERY generous with his time, patience and assistance while trying to troubleshoot a few things in our multi email session over the greater part of a Sunday afternoon (I'm sure he had better things to do, but I really appreciated his help in getting me going - Thats a great example of outstanding developer and community support - WOW!.
If you've not heard about Compass yet, Read more
Jun
25
Using Built-In Revision Control in Firewall Builder
June 25, 2009 | By: Vadim Kurland | Leave a Comment
Posted in How To
This article continues the series of articles on Firewall Builder, a graphical firewall configuration and management tool that supports many Open Source firewall platforms as well as Cisco IOS access lists and Cisco ASA (PIX). Firewall Builder was introduced earlier with the article Getting Started With Firewall Builder. The series continued with articles on built-in policy importer and other topics.
More information on Firewall Builder, pre-built binary packages and source code, documentation and Firewall Builder Cookbook can be found on the project web site at www.fwbuilder.org. Watch Project Blog for announcements and articles on all aspects of using Firewall Builder.
This article demonstrates one of the more advanced features of Firewall Builder - built-in Revision Control System (RCS).
Firewall Builder GUI has built-in revision control system that can be used to keep track of changes in the objects and policy rules. If data file has been added to the revision control system, every time it is saved, the system asks the user to enter a comment that describes changes done in the file in this session and stores it along with the data. The program also assigns new revision number to the data file using standard software versioning system with major and minor version numbers separated by a dot. When you open this data file next time, the program presents a list of revisions alongside with dates and comments, letting you choose which revision you want to use. You can open the latest revision and continue working with the file from the point where you left off last time, or open one of the older revisions to inspect how the configuration looked like in the past and possibly create a branch in the revision control system. Here we take a closer look at the built-in revision control system.
We start with a regular data file which we open in the Firewall Builder GUI as usual. Note that the name of the file appears in the titlebar of the main window, here it is [test2.fwb]:
You can always see additional information about the file using main menu File/Properties. There is not much the program can report about this file that we do not know already. It shows full path where it is located on the file system and Read more
Jun
20
20 Useful, Common Linux (Ubuntu) Commands for New Users
June 20, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 8 Comments
Posted in How To
I recently was asked by a new Ubuntu user (also involved in web, graphic design, etc.), what some of the more common day to day commands I use are.
Many of these commands can increase productivity, etc. by making things (for me at least), easier to do. My system desktop has a transparent terminal integrated into it. This makes it easy for me to run commands as I never have to open a terminal - my desktop in effect, is the terminal.
These are useful commands! Ones that will actually help you do something! Other more common commands (chmod, chown, ls, cd, etc.) can be found elsewhere on the Internet. I tried to stay away from such basic commands, unless they were really useful (like rebooting).
Hopefully, the following will help out some of my readers. If you've some good commands, feel free to comment!
1) To find out the processes running that use the most memory. When things are running slower than I want, and am looking for which processes I can kill:
ps aux | sort -nrk 4 | head
2) To see the version of the installed package, when I'm considering an application upgrade:
apt-cache policy xxxxxx (where xxxxxx is the name of the package).
3) To mount an ISO image, so that I don't have to burn it if I don't want the ISO after review:
mount /xxx/image-file.iso /mnt/cdrom -o loop (where xxx is the path).
4) Find out where that newly installed package went. This happens to me a lot... I just installed it, where did it go?
whereis xxxxxx (where xxxxxx is the package name).
5) Ever reinstalled an app to find the old configuration still working? This will Read more
Jun
20
Converting VMware Images to VirtualBox – A Simple Method
June 20, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 6 Comments
Posted in Editorials
When I need to run a Windows based application on my trusty Ubuntu Hardy box, I don't use Wine. Don't get me wrong, it's just that I don't want to have to manage the Wine environment and prefer to have Windows and it's associated applications tucked away in it's own virtual system. This way if I need to run a Windows application... I simply boot up the Windows system and run whatever application I want.
More importantly, I run several distributions of Linux in virtual environments. This way I don't have to worry about multiboot configurations, bootloaders, etc. and I can simply delete or backup up a copy of images I don't immediately need. To do this I use VirtualBox.
To get it: sudo aptitude install virtualbox or apt:virtualbox
From time to time I come accross an image I'd like to be able to boot in my virtual environment (VirtualBox), only to find that the site only hosts the VMware version for download. Fortunately, there's an easy way for me to convert the files from the original .vmdk to VirtualBox's .vdi. Actually, it's a two-set method.
- Convert the .vmdk to a .bin file
- Convert the .bin file to .vdi
In order to convert the image to .bin, were going to need Read more
Jun
18
Making Your Ubuntu System Read Out Loud
June 18, 2009 | By: UbuntuLinuxHelp | 3 Comments
Posted in Editorials
I had an interesting morning playing with my Ubuntu (Hardy - 8.04) system. I just created a nice new desktop, with super effects and graphics and wondered if there's not a way to create a more customized "ear candy" environment (since I've already covered the eye candy aspect). I discovered that Ubuntu (and most likely other Linux distributions) has a speech synthesis package included, it's called espeak.
In my system, it was installed by default. If you don't have it available, the command to install is:
sudo aptitude install espeak or simply click: apt:espeak
To realize what I'm talking about, run this command in terminal:
espeak "eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows. eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but I find the articulation clearer and easier to listen to for long periods. It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file or from stdin. A shared library version is also available. It works well as a Talker with the KDE text to speech system (KTTS), as an alternative to Festival for example. As such, it can speak text which has been selected into the clipboard, or directly from the Konqueror browser or the Kate editor. A Gnome Speech driver is now available."
or another language: Read more
