Tools

Today I, for the first time in my life, bought extra speakers for my machine.

While I’m not a music fanatic I thought of buying extra speakers to bring some change to my boring life. I finally settled down on [Altec Lansing ATP3](http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-speakers/altec-lansing- atp3/4505-3179_7-1587363.html) PC Multimedia Speakers.

I must admit; The bitch is awesome. She rocks. And she blows me off good.

Does anyone know when really did coreutils get patched for this behavior ?

rrs@learner:~$ rm -foo
rm: invalid option – o
Try rm ./-foo' to remove the file -foo’.
Try `rm –help’ for more information.

This feature really wasn’t earlier and if you ever ended up with files starting with characters like “-”, it was not a straight task to remove it.

Earlier (when I wasn’t aware of this patch), the workaround was to write a small 1 liner and not use getopt at all. Something like:

Currently, there’s no simple framework in NetworkManager for Firewalling support.

Here’s one way you can provide a simple and minimal firewall setup for your box controlled by NM.

Create the following files:

rrs@learner:~$ cat /etc/network/if-up.d/firewall
#!/bin/bash

if [ $IFACE == “lo” ]; then
echo;
else
/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i $IFACE -m state –state NEW,INVALID -j DROP;
fi
rrs@learner:~$ cat /etc/network/if-down.d/firewall
#!/bin/bash

if [ $IFACE == “lo” ]; then
echo;
else
/sbin/iptables -D INPUT -i $IFACE -m state –state NEW,INVALID -j DROP;
fi

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So many of you might be aware of NetworkManager. The big new tool from RedHat does simplify Network Configuration on your Linux box.

But there lies a small problem with NetworkManager. It is very picky about what it is going to touch and what not.

Here’s a paragraph from the README.Debian file:

Configuration of wireless and ethernet interfaces

Only devices that are *not* listed in /etc/network/interfaces or which have  
been configured "auto" and "dhcp" (with no other options) are managed by

NM.

For those who are stuck up with using Kontact with an Exchange server should have experiences of how difficult it is to get everything properly working.

For instance, address book is an issue. Assuming that your exchange server holds more that 10,000 user records, it is going to be a challenging task to get your addressbook configurd to fetch those addresses.

A friend of mine figured out that this was rather a bug with either ldap or exchange (in that case a feature) which restricted the query response to 1000 replies. This bug is inherited in the ldap code of K Address Book also because it silently fetches 1000 records only.

So recently I tried to look at what all projects I monitored using a RCS.

The list I ended up with was:

• Open iSCSI

• Beryl

• Linux

• LVM

• Device Mapper

• KDE

Wow!! That itself is huge. I then looked at the space consumption for these projects and that led to 4.1 GB. That’s too much of space taken away.

Now, since most of the contentt is text in these projects, I thought why not find out a way to use them with compression beneath. And that is where FuseCompress came to the rescue. Like many other excellent implementations (ntfs-3g, sshfs), fusecompress does exactly what I was looking for. It keeps the data compressed (gz, bz2, lzo) and provides a transparent interface for the applications (through FUSE). With this in place, I get full comprerssion, with saving disk space, while not breaking any of the applications. Now that is what I call full utilization of your CPU cycles (Most n00bs claim that full CPU cycle utilization is by using Gentoo which keeps compiling on n on n on….You often might have heard someone saying -mcpu=.., -fblah-makes-it-fast)

FuseCompress is another lovely work I found.

Hence this package. I’ve verfied and it is lintian clean.

fusecompress_1.99.10-1_i386.deb

Updated luvcview debian package. Version is 20070107.

Download

Most GNU/Linux desktop users today are aware of the new 3D enhancements brought to the desktop. Namely Compiz and Beryl.

Compiz is already present in Debian but Beryl isn’t and will not be included until Etch is released, which probably is expected to be released in another 3 months. Beryl looks to be primarily focused on Ubuntu which IMO is not good but I can’t comment much because I haven’t contributed to it. In fact, as per the recent announcement on the Beryl blog, their release too seems to be focused on Ubuntu.

luvcview is a camera viewer for UVC driver based webcams

I’ve packaged a .deb for it which can be fetched from:

http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/sponsor- pkglist?action=details;package=luvcview