Running Bug Jams and Packaging Jams

In this month's Ubuntu developers Youtube video channel (06 January 2009), Daniel Holbach explains how to run a bug and packaging.

References

• 
  RunningBugJam - Ubuntu Wiki
  


• 
  GlobalBugJam - Ubuntu Wiki
  

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Debian Lenny Slogan Contest, Cast Your Votes

The creative chaps at Debian Art are looking for a great line for Lenny, the development codename for the next version of Debian GNU/Linux operating system. They are running a open ballot.

I cast mine for the line "The Spiral Strikes Back!". Perhaps I loved this line over more popular one due to its strong visual connotations. No one would miss the reference to spiral logo of Debian GNU/Linux project and the Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back has strong following in the community and elsewhere.

Right now the slogan "The Universal Operating System is leading the poll. Don't you think that human brain is supposed to be the true universal operating system on earth. Duh! :P

Poll Results So Far!

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Kumar Appaiah :: New Debian Developer from India

Kumar Appaiah is the new Debian Developer from Indian subcontinent. He is a graduate student at IIT-Madras and an active member of local gnu/linux user group ILUG-C. He talks to FCI's Praveen about life, linux and plans ahead.
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Contributing to Debian for Dummies Talk

If you come across Christian Perrier's speaking at any one of the Debian Linux conferences don't miss his Contributing to Debian for dummies talk. It is perhaps one of most entertaining talk about Debian project for new and experienced users alike.

I haven't found the video of this talk, however the slides in PDF format are available for download from his Debian talks page and also from FOSS.IN/2007 site.

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Removing / Stopping Unwanted Services from Linux boot

The first thing you should do when you install a shiny new gnu/Linux system is remove unwanted services from default runlevel (default is runlevel 2 incase of debian and related distros ).

Most advanced users would manually remove the syslinks from the runlevel /etc/rc{0-6}.d directories. This is not only messy and also prone to errors. I advise you to look the update-rc.d tool from the sysv-rc package. The sysv-rc package is installed as part of standard gnu Debian Linux base system, so it pays to learn this one over other GUI or Ncurses based tools.

Alright enough of talk let me go ahead remove some unwanted services, let's get rid the The Internet Superserver(inetd) here.



$ sudo update-rc.d -f inetd remove
update-rc.d: /etc/init.d/inetd exists during rc.d purge (continuing)
Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/inetd ...
/etc/rc0.d/K20inetd
/etc/rc1.d/K20inetd
/etc/rc2.d/S20inetd
/etc/rc3.d/S20inetd
/etc/rc4.d/S20inetd
/etc/rc5.d/S20inetd
/etc/rc6.d/K20inetd


The name of the service 'inetd' (referred to as basename in manual pages) are the init scripts that reside in the /etc/init.d directory. Have a look the scripts in this directory or look closely the boot time messages to find likely targets to remove.

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Debian Google Summer of Code 2008

Steve McIntyre wrote on debian-devel-announce list about this years Summer of Code program, Guess, I should pitch in and do something this year.

Hey folks,


Google are running their Summer of Code programme again this year,
and if we want to take part again we need to apply between March 3rd
and March 12th. If we're accepted as a mentoring organisation, then
students will be able to apply to work with us up until the 1st
April.


I'm volunteering to be an admin again, and I'll deal with making the
application for Debian as an organisation. Beyond that, some more
admins would be useful to help out later on. If you'd like to help,
let me know ASAP!


Then we'll need mentors and ideas for the programme itself. As in
previous years, the easiest place for us to collect those is in the
wiki. Please fill your ideas in there. Last year's suggestions for
projects are still in the wiki if you're looking for inspiration,
but *please* don't just copy things across wholesale!

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Wake up to the music

Using cron/mplayer and some shell glue you can create your own musical alarm clock to wake you up everyday. Ever since the Cron-MP3 alarm clock was published some years ago, it never ceases to dazzle me what you can do with little creativity.

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Raw Control Characters In Less pager

Less is my default terminal pager program. On GNU Debian Linux pager is just a symbolic link to your less or one of other available pager progams like more , most , lv etc..( run update-alternatives —list pager to find out alternative pager programs available on your computer). Lately some funny characters started showing up in my pager .

$ ls /tmp/Foo/ | pager

ESC[0mESC[0mFooBarESC[0m

ESC[0mMaster-fooESC[0m

ESC[m

Oops, That looks like the ANSI Escape Sequences commonly used for making a shell colourful, but our pager program less seems to have some trouble with it. Let’s try to correct this but using -R option which toggles this behaviour.

$ ls /tmp/Foo/ | pager -R

FooBar

Master-foo

Ok, that seems to fix it. Now let’s set it into our shell environment.You set the same using lesskey also.

LESS=”-R”; export LESS

Please note that using -r option may cause display problems , that’s why I use -R .

Wolfgang Friebel notes in Displaying more with less that ..

Syntax highlighting is only activated if the environment variable LESS is existing and contains the option -R or -r or less is called with one of these options. This guarantees, that instead of literal escape sequences colors are displayed. The detection of the -r/-R presence at runtime is rather dependent on the operating system and may not work in all cases. Putting the option in the LESS environment variable is guaranteed to work.By installing the perl module Proc::ProcessTable the OS dependence can be reduced as well.

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Upgrade problems for sysvinit (2.86.ds1-16 | 2.86.ds1-19)

Update: Post out-of-date …. don’t flame me

Those of you who followed the earlier the fix for sysvinit (2.86.ds1-16) upgrade problem given below should read the follow-up comments that were aired on both debian-devel and debian-user.

— Petter Reinholdtsen Sat, 9 Sep 2006 20:12:47 +0200

In version 2.86.ds1-16 of the sysv-rc package released 2006-09-06, the update-rc.d script was broken. When used to to update symlinks it would remove all symlinks for a init.d script if such symlinks existed, and add them if they were missing. This broke all packages being upgraded after the new version was installed, as their init.d scripts will no longer be executed. This problem was fixed in version 2.86.ds1-18, but the broken packages will stay broken until their postinst scripts are executed again.

Those with packages being broken from this bug can fix it by using ‘apt-get —reinstall install package’ on the affected packages. A quick way out is to reinstall all the packages with scripts in /etc/init.d/.

for p in `dpkg -S /etc/init.d/*|cut -d: -f1|sort -u`; do

apt-get —reinstall install -y $p

done

Read the Petter Reinholdtsen’s post

sysvinit (2.86.ds1-19) unstable; urgency=low

The script proposed below is dangerous, as it had a problem

with removed but not purged packages. If such packages had

files in /etc/init.d/, it could end up trying to remove quite a lot
of packages. This version check to make sure the package is installed before trying to reinstall it, as well as making sure the
admin is asked for every package.

for p in `dpkg -S /etc/init.d/*|cut -d: -f1|sort -u`; do
if dpkg —get-selections $p | grep -qw install ; then
echo reinstalling $p
apt-get —reinstall install $p
fi
done

To avoid the question, add -y as an argument for apt-get.

An alternative to reinstalling all these packages is to look in /var/log/dpkg.log for the packages that was installed and upgraded between sysv-rc version 2.86.ds1-16 and version 2.86.ds1-18, and only reinstall these. A script to do this and update the system is provided in /etc/init.d/.

/usr/share/doc/sysv-rc/update-rc.d-recover

Please use it to update your installation if you were upgrading from one of the broken versions of sysv-rc.

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Handling CHM files in GNU/Debian Linux

In a perfect world all the OCR files would come in djVu format but world isn’t perfect, so this morning I had read this 300 page CHM compiled HTML Help (insert joke here)file and for no apparent reason my CHM viewer won’t display the file beyond page 50. Bummer!.

Don't get me wrong but there some great programs to handle CHM files on gnu/Linux OS. And I’ll mention some of them here in this post. A more detailed specifications of CHM format. is available if you are interested.

Graphical CHM Viewers

Well, The brief list doesn’t attempt to be complete but it gives you an idea of range of tools available to a gnu/Linux user.

• Kchm


• xCHM


• GnoCHM



• CHMsee


• Archmage


• DisplayCHM (contributed by Rajasekaran)


• CHM Firefox addon (contributed by Rajasekaran)



• (if I missed any, do leave a comment with a note)

View a CHM file on a Web Browser

If you like to read using your favorite web browsers instead of a Graphical X based CHM viewer, then there is chm_http in libchm-dev package from the CHMLib project . Also Archmage package has http-server and or if you prefer Apache Web Server instead of standalone webservers then there is an extension mod_chm too .

Converting and De-compiling CHM files

Of late I saw chm2pdf project offering to covert CHM files directly into PDF. I should try it sometime, but for now I will just de-compile the CHM file and get done with it.

So, if you don’t have libchm-dev package installed, then do this.

sudo apt-get install libchm-dev

This package has “extract_chmLib” program which will extract and place the files in a given directory.

extract_chmLib Foo.chm Foo-dir/

That it, now you can use your web browser to read the contents at your will. It is a quick and dirty way, but its much better than using the dreaded CHM files anyway.

Compiling CHM files ?

Sometime after this entry was posted, I got people asking me how to create CHM files under gnu/Linux .

According to Bruce Byfield in two year old article on FOSS help authoring tools


Numerous projects for cross-platform or GNU/Linux-based tools for producing .chm files have been announced, but most of them are in the planning stage, and have released little or no code. The only two that seem polished enough to use are AurigaDoc and DocBook two XML-based solutions that are well-known in other contexts.

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How to Block Ads With Adzap

Cameron Simpson’s Adzap (http://adzapper.sourceforge.net) is a Perl program written to match and replaces those annoying web ads.It uses the redirector option of Squid proxy-caching server (http://www.squid-cache.org), a fast and efficient caching server.

How does Adzap work?

Squid proxy server is designed to cache web content as clients requests,it checks for presence of local copy of request, if found servers it directly.This not only saves bandwidth usage but accelerates web speed.

Squid redirects requested URL to adzapper program which tries to identify ads,unrequested pop-up widows and other unsolicited content using regular expressions.

Most of content such as graphics,flash animations,client-side scripts and executables are matched and quietly replaced.Adzap returns sanitized request back to squid which servers it.This increases the surfing speeds considerably even if you are on boardband connection.

Most commercial web advertisers track user preferences and surfing habits.Adzap protects your privacy by efficiently blocking such ads from loading.

How do you install Adzap?

You can download the latest version of Adzap from http://adzapper.sourceforge.net .

Uncompress the the Adzap files to your /usr/local/ directory.If you use any other directory,please do change the commands in this article.

tar zxvf adzap-20030726.tar.gz -C /usr/local/

Change your directory to /usr/local/adzap.All the adzap programs are found under the scripts directory.

bq. cd /usr/local/adzap/

Edit the scripts/wrapzap file and set the zapper to squid_redirect.You can customize the Adzap to suit your needs in this file.

zapper=/usr/local/adzap/scripts/squid_redirect

Configure the squid to use Adzap as its redirector program.The squid configuration file in most *nix’s is /etc/squid/squid.conf.Set the redirect_program option as mentioned.

redirect_program /usr/local/adzap/scripts/wrapzap

Restart the squid server.

/etc/init.d/squid restart

Check the /var/log/squid/cache.log for any errors.Start your favorite browser and point it towards your squid server and enjoy ad free surfing.

First Published long time ago on the web.

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Multimedia/Internet Keyboards in GNU/Linux

As the resident Gnu/Linux guru, I sometimes help new users making transition from other OS’s.Over the years I’d ask anyone who installed Gnu/Linux about what hardware devices didn’t work for them,most often it is Multimedia/Internet keyboards. In this article, we’ll configure one such keyboard using Hotkeys.

Anthony Wong’s Hotkeys program is written to handle all those special keys provided by the multimedia/Internet keyboards and launch programs associated with them.Though there are numerous ways to configure these keyboards in Gnu/Linux,Hotkeys is easier to configure and its osd (on-screen display) is very simillar to those available on other OS’s.

You can visit Hotkeys site to download the latest version of the program as tarball or as a debian package.

The installation on Debian machine can be done using the apt-get.

$ apt-get install hotkeys

Configuration

Hotkeys starts a daemon process,usually started with xinit process,it uses a global configuration file /etc/hotkeys.conf and user configuration’s can be stored in $HOME/.hotkeysrc.

The hotkeys.conf configuration is well commentted, should not present any problems to new users.Its contains can be summed up as

1) Device Settings

Keyboard Type (kbd=”“)
CD Drive (CDROM=”“)

The supported keyboards can be checked with ‘hotkeys -l’.

2) Key Behaviour

Tag = ‘command’ (Play = “xmms —play-pause”)

The complete list of tags can be found in /usr/share/doc/hotkeys/sample.xml file.The users can also create their own tags.

3) On-Screen Display Properties

Font (osd_font=”“)
Color (osd_color=”“)
Position (osd_position=”“)

#Sample /etc/hotkeys.conf file.
#########################

1. Global configuration for hotkeys #
   #########################
   
   
   
   
   1. These are the default values.
   
   
   2. A line starting with # is a comment.
   
   
   3. Specify the default keyboard (without the .def extension) so you
   
   
   
   4. don’t need to specify -t every time
      
      Kbd=hp5181
      
      CDROM=/dev/cdrom # use ‘none’ if don’t have a CDROM Drive
      PrevTrack=xmms —rew
      Play=xmms —play-pause
      Stop=xmms —stop
      Pause=xmms —pause
      NextTrack=xmms —fwd
      Rewind=
      WebBrowser=mozilla
      Email=mozilla -mail
      Calculator=xcalc
      FileManager=gmc
      MyComputer=gmc
      MyDocuments=gmc
      Favorites=gnome-moz-remote —remote=openBookmarks
      Transfer=gtp
      Record=grecord
      Shell=xterm -rv
      ScreenSaver=xscreensaver-command -activate
      NewsReader=mozilla -news
      Communities=mozilla -remote ‘openURL(http://slashdot.org)’
      
      Search=mozilla -remote ‘openURL(http://google.com)’
      Idea=mozilla -remote ‘openURL(http://sourceforge.net)’
      Shopping=mozilla -remote ‘openURL(http://thinkgeek.com)’
      Go=mozilla -remote ‘openURL(http://linux.com)’
      Print=lpr
      Rotate=
      
      
      osd_font=-arphic-ar pl kaitim big5-bold-i-normal—0-250-0-0-c-0-*-*
   
   
   5. For the color, you can either use the strings in /etc/X11/rgb.txt,
   
   
   6. or use the RGB syntax #RRGGBB, e.g. ##A086FF
      
      osd_color=LawnGreen
      
      osd_timeout=3
   
   
   7. osd_position is either ‘top’ or ‘bottom’
      
      
      osd_position=bottom
      
      osd_offset=25
   
   

Configure Unsupported Multimedia/Internet keyboard

The Hotkeys program is still under development,you may not find your keyboard in the default list.To configure your keyboard, find out the keycodes of the all special keys on your keyboard.

Use the xev program to capture the keycodes and save it to file.Move your cursor to square on the xev window and press the special keys in a sequence.

$ xev 2>&1 >mykeys

Search the file for the keycodes.

$ grep ‘keycode’ mykeys | cut -d “ “ -f7,8 >mykeycodes

Check the file to see the keycodes.

$ cat mykeycodes

keycode 223

keycode 166

keycode 151

keycode 232

keycode 159

keycode 153


keycode 144

keycode 165

keycode 158

keycode 146

keycode 178

keycode 150

keycode 148

keycode 149

keycode 173


keycode 164

keycode 163

keycode 162

keycode 161

keycode 152

keycode 160

keycode 174

keycode 176

keycode 64

Hotkeys uses XML to define keycodes and their functionality.These are stored as ‘.def’ files in /usr/share/hotkeys directory.Let’s use the sample.xml file provided by the hotkeys to build a custom keyboard definition file.

$ cp /usr/share/doc/hotkeys/sample.xml /usr/share/hotkeys/custom.def

The hotkeys support various pre-defined ‘tags’ like Sleep, Search, Shopping andvarious CD/DVD player controls

(See /usr/share/doc/hotkeys/sample.xml). Each ‘tag’ has a behaviour assigned, Sleep uses APM to turn your computer into hibrnatio.Many other special function keys can also be configured.

For example the half-moon key on my keyboard is configured using ‘Sleep’ tag.

<Sleep keycode=“223”/>

And un-defined Shortcut key is set with.

<code>
<userdef keycode="232" command="xterm">Xterm</userdef>
</code>

Here is how the custom.def appears with the above examples.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
 <definition>
 <config model="My custom keyboard">
 <!-- Support Tags functions -->  
 <!-- half-moon key -->

 <Sleep  keycode="223"/> 
 <!-- User define functions -->
<userdef keycode="232" command="xterm">Xterm</userdef>
 </config>

<contributor>
<name>your-name</name>
<email>your-email</email>
 </contributor>
<definition>

Now test the custom.def by using it as your keyboard type.

$ hotkeys -t custom

A lot more keys can be set using the same custom.def file, a little effort pays off really well.If you have configured a new Multimedia/Internet keyboard using hotkeys, do take time to send it project developers, it would help many other users with same keyboards.

Web Resources

Hotkeys Help Forum

Hotkeys Project

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Website file Uploads With lftp

Keeping your website updated is tedious job,especially when you have lot of files,which you edit quite often.And having to do the such work over ftp makes it worse.

In this article we’ll use a command line based file transfer program lftp(http://lftp.yar.ru/) written by Alexander .V. Lukyanov to do website file uploads.Though
there are many other ftp clients,lftp is simpler to use,feature rich,can upload several files in parallel and it comes bundled up with most Gnu/Linux distributions.

lftp is a powerful tool, its built-in mirror facility is suitable for keeping your website updated and secure by replicating permissions on the uploaded files.It checks for modified files by checking the file sizes and file modification times.

Using lftp on Command Line

Now you have a local directory on your computer where you keep all your website files(/home/joe/site_files).Let upload these files to your remote webserver directory using lftp on command line.First lets connect to your hosting service providers webserver with username and password.

$ lftp -u username ftp.hostingcompany.net

Password:

The lftp program will prompt for the password,type your secret password and you will be logged in.

Now issue the ‘lcd’ command to change directory to local directory where your all website files reside.

lftp username@ftp.hostingcompany.net:~> lcd /home/joe/site_files

lcd ok, local cwd=/home/joe/site_files

Now use the lftp mirror built-in’s reverse option (-R) of lftp to

upload all files local files into remote directory on the webserver.

lftp username@ftp.hostingcompany.net:~> mirror -R


Total: 12 directories, 36 files, 0 symlinks

Modified: 13 files, 0 symlinks

You can use “ mirror -R —only-newer “ command if you want only new
files to uploaded.Once the upload is finished lftp will print out a report.Now you can end the connection by typing quit.

lftp username@ftp.hostingcompany.net:~> quit

Running lftp in a Script

Now that we have seen lftp in action.Let run all the commands from script instead.Luke Vanderfluit provides this nice little script.

lftp -u username,password ftp.hostingcompany.net <<EOF

cd / # remote directory on webserver

lcd /home/joe/site_files # local directory on your computer

mirror -R # Upload the files to remote directory

quit 0 # Drop the connection

EOF

Save all the commands in a file ‘upload_mysite’ and make it executable with ‘chmod +x upload_mysite’.Run the script by typing ‘./upload_mysite’ on the command line.As your username and password are stored it file,its a better not let anyone else to view it.Changing file permissions with ‘chmod go-rwx upload_mysite’.

Maintaining Multiple Websites

Running lftp from script is not a good idea if you have to maintain multiple sites.Instead you can use lftp’s ‘-f’ option.You can store settings of different websites into separate files.Suppose you have two websites site1 and site2.

The settings of the both the sites are stored in files ‘mysite1.lftp’ and ‘mysite2.lftp.

#####mysite1.lftp#######################

open ftp.myisp.net

user username password

lcd /usr/joe/site1_files

mirror -R

exit
#########################################

#####mysite2.lftp#######################

open ftp.hostingcompany.com

user username password

lcd /usr/local_site_location

mirror -R

exit
#########################################

To update site1, we will run lftp with ‘-f’ option.

$ lftp -f mysite1.lftp

And to update the next website.

$ lftp -f mysite2.lftp

Some other usefull features provided by ‘mirror’ built-in are the —parallel = N where in it will use N simultaneous connections to upload the files,this speeds up the upload considerably.If you want to exclude some files from being uploaded use (- x , – X) . And —delete to remove those files which are not present in local directory.

lftp can also be run as a cron job . Jani Reinikainen shows an interesting use of lftp to periodically mirroring a directory to a remote computer.

References

lftp manual page [http://lftp.yar.ru/lftp-man.html ]


lftp FAQ [http://lftp.yar.ru/FAQ ]

lftp Download page [http://lftp.yar.ru/get.html ]

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BitTorrent "INFO : duplicate connection (id collision) " log messages

BitTorrent 4.20.x (and later) now logs all its messages and errors to its logs¹. Here is one log message that mystified me.

[4.20.4 2006-09-01 04:10:39] INFO : duplicate connection (id collision)

[4.20.4 2006-09-01 04:10:48] INFO : duplicate connection (id collision)

[4.20.4 2006-09-01 04:10:52] INFO : duplicate connection (id collision)


[4.20.4 2006-09-01 04:11:03] INFO : duplicate connection (id

BitTorrrent Support provides a clear answer.

This message is harmless and can be ignored. It means that a request for data was sent to a peer you are already connected to. This is most common when there are few peers in the swarm for a given torrent. It does not affect your down or upload speed in any way.

¹ Bittorrents logs file under UNIX, GNU/Linux operating systems are found under $HOME/.bittorrent/bittorrent-{cosole,curses}.log

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Its party time for Debian camp

Debian Etch is now released. Its party time for Debian camp, the nearest party spot here in India seems to be BMS College in Bangalore. Party on and do remember to avoid spelling and grammar mistakes in your package(s) descriptions fellows.

Not all of us are native English langauge speakers but as Debian Developer’s Reference recommends in its 6 Best Packaging Practices section of the manual, we can remedy this with a little effort.

Be careful to avoid spelling and grammar mistakes. Ensure that you spell-check it. Both ispell and aspell have special modes for checking debian/control files:


ispell -d american -g debian/control

aspell -d en -D -c debian/control

As usual I expect magnanimous Debian users would lend a hand by reporting these bugs.

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libTorrent / rTorrent 0.7.0 debian packages available

UPDATE: Never version of rTorrent made into Debian (Sid) since this entry was first posted.

Rakshasa’s libTorrent and rTorrent Unstable Release (0.7.0) Debian packages are now available

The Debian Sid/unstable rtorrent package is still stable release (0.6.4.x). A wishlist was posted and you can use this repo until the main debian packages are upgraded.

You can add this line to your sources.list and apt-get the packages.

deb http://repos.ghostbar.ath.cx/debian sid main

Or grab the packages directly from http://debian.ghostbar.ath.cx/

The adding of public keys for this repo however didn’t work. Perhaps am missing something here.

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv 0xCACAB118 && gpg --export 0xCACAB118 | sudo apt-key add -

[OR]

wget http://pub.ghostbar.ath.cx/pubkey-ghostbar.gpg
sudo apt-key add pubkey-ghostbar.gpg

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Smart URL 's in Elinks

If you have Elinks installed then it already has a bunch of smart URL’s enabled .The table below lists those in Debian’s elinks package configuration file. The Elinks Manual explains how it works and how to build your own.

Here a example, lets search for what acronym “ALSA” means with elinks.

Press g in elinks and type a: ALSA when prompted with Enter URL. The a: is the keyword and ALSA (replaced in place of %s ) is search string, elinks smart rewrite expands it to http://acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=ALSA and submits it , You will be directed to the search results at acronymfinder.com.

Elinks Smart URL’s Reference:

• a http://acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=%s


• arc http://web.archive.org/web/*/%s



• bb http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?urltext=%s


• bb_en_fr http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?lp=en_fr&submit=1&urltext=%s


• bb_fr_en http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr?lp=fr_en&submit=1&urltext=%s



• bug http://bugzilla.elinks.or.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=%s


• cambridge http://dictionary.cambridge.org/results.asp?searchword=%s


• cliki http://www.cliki.net/admin/search?words=%s


• cr http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/rfcsearch.pl?searchwords=%s&format=http&abstract=abson&keywords=keyon&num=25



• czen http://www.slovnik.cz/bin/ecd?ecd_il=1&ecd_vcb=%s&ecd_trn=translate&ecd_trn_dir=1&ecd_lines=15&ecd_hptxt=0


• d http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Query=%s&Form=Dict1&Strategy=*&Database=*&submit=Submit+query



• dbug http://bugs.debian.org/%s


• dict http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s


• dmoz http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=%s


• dpkg http://packages.debian.org/%s



• draft http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/idsearch.pl?searchwords=%s&format=http&abstract=abson&keywords=keyon&num=25


• e2 http://www.everything2.org/?node=%s


• emacs http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?search=%s



• encz http://www.slovnik.cz/bin/ecd?ecd_il=1&ecd_vcb=%s&ecd_trn=translate&ecd_trn_dir=0&ecd_lines=15&ecd_hptxt=0


• fm http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=%s


• foldoc http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?%s



• fsd http://directory.fsf.org/search/fsd-search.py?q=%s


• g http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnG=Google+Search


• gd http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&cat=gwd/Top



• gg http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnG=Google+Search


• gi http://images.google.com/images?q=%s


• gn http://news.google.com/news?q=%s


• go http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnG=Google+Search



• google http://www.google.com/search?q=%s


• gr http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%s


• gwhat http://www.googlism.com/?ism=%s&name=2


• gwhen http://www.googlism.com/?ism=%s&name=4



• gwhere http://www.googlism.com/?ism=%s&name=3


• gwho http://www.googlism.com/?ism=%s&name=1


• id http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/idsearch.pl?searchwords=%s&format=http&abstract=abson&keywords=keyon&num=25



• imdb http://imdb.com/Find?%s


• lxr http://lxr.linux.no/ident?i=%s


• lyrics http://music.lycos.com/lyrics/results.asp?QT=L&QW=%s


• mw http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=%s



• mwt http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/thesaurus?book=Thesaurus&va=%s


• onelook http://onelook.com/?w=%s&ls=a


• py http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/pyhelp.cgi?keyword=%s&version=current



• pydev http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/pyhelp.cgi?keyword=%s&version=devel


• pyvault http://py.vaults.ca/apyllo.py?find=%s


• rfc http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc%s.txt


• rfcid http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/idsearch.pl?searchwords=%s&format=http&abstract=abson&keywords=keyon&num=25



• rfcs http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/rfcsearch.pl?searchwords=%s&format=http&abstract=abson&keywords=keyon&num=25


• savannah http://savannah.nongnu.org/search/?words=%s&type_of_search=soft&exact=1


• sd http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=%s



• sdc http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=%s&op=comments


• sdj http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=%s&op=journals


• sdp http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=%s&op=polls



• sdu http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=%s&op=users


• sf http://sourceforge.net/search/?q=%s


• sfp http://sourceforge.net/projects/%s


• thes http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=%s



• whatis http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=%s


• wiki http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=%s


• wn http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn1.7.1?stage=1&word=%s

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Error messages on the console screen

Debian console getting flooded with error messages and verbose warnings can be quite trying for anyone.

Previous versions Debian Reference (Section 8.6.8) used to provided a solution viz… Running “dmesg -n X” (where X is the error levels [1..7) to quiet on-screen error messages until next reboot. Or set KLOGD=”-c 3” in etc/init.d/klogd script and run /etc/init.d/klogd restart for more lasting effect.

David Clarke provides the new way of handling console errors nicely.

Add a single line is your /etc/sysctl.conf and upon every reboot the given values are set to the linux kernel printk() .

kernel.printk = 3 4 1 7

The four values we are setting in /proc/sys/kernel/printk stand for:

• console_loglevel – messages with a priority higher than this will be printed to the console

• default_message_loglevel – messages without an explicit priority will be printed with this priority

• minimum_console_loglevel – minimum (highest) value to which console_loglevel can be set

• default_console_loglevel – default value for console_loglevel

These values influence printk() behavior when printing or logging error messages. See syslog(2) for more info on the different loglevels. For more information on other /proc files is read LinuxInsight /Proc Documentation

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Download High Quality Movie Trailers

XML parsing is often left to programming languages, not for command line use or in shell scripts. Here I used XMLStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit a wonderful set of tools that brings power of handling XML to commandline and Wget to download the content. The xmlstarlet tool seeks the URL’s in XML feed and passes it to wget.

/usr/bin/wget -c  `/usr/bin/xmlstarlet sel  --net  -D -T -t  -m "/records/movieinfo/preview" -v  "large" -o " " http://www.apple.com/trailers/home/xml/current.xml` 

These two programs are ported and available for other operating systems. The wget “-c” (continue) is optional. You can use any other downloader instead of wget. I suggest curl

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GNU/Debian Linux don't power off after shutdown

To avoid any problems with your filesystems always shutdown your debian box the neat way. After a recent upgrade my computer stopped powering off after shutdown.

Thanks to the Rainer Dorsch for pointing me in the right direction.

Step One

1. First append this line to your /boot/grub/menu.lst if you are using GRUB or lilo.conf if you are using LILO.

append="acpi=off apm=power_off"

Step Two

2. Add this line to your /etc/modules

apm power_off=1

After a reboot, next time you issue the shutdown command your computer should power off automatically.

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