mark.bockenstedt.net » Linux

Partition a Hard Drive Using a gParted Live CD

Mark — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:20:14 +0000

Linux folks may know about a great piece of software called gParted, the Gnome Partition Editor. While booted into Linux, gParted works great for managing partitions on a hard drive. Windows users don’t have any good (read free) utilities like this, and the built-in Windows partition manager leaves much to be desired.

gParted Live is a CD image you can download that contains a minimal installation of what appears to be the Debian distribution. Once inside the Live CD, you are free to operate on any partition for any hard drive, since none of them are mounted. I haven’t found anything that this little CD can’t do in terms of partitioning. It would make a great utility to have in a Sys Admin’s toolkit.

You can get the gParted Live CD here. There’s also a package for booting from a USB drive.

Banning IPs in Ubuntu

Mark — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:30:59 +0000

Last Friday I was subject to a barrage of spam on this site – somewhere between 100 and 150 comments came in that were spam (prior to that I’d had 300 spams since May). Akismet caught every single one of those comments, but it was still a pain because I still had to trudge through and verify they were all spam. I’m not really that hesitant to drop the ban hammer on the IPs that most of the comments were coming from.

I crowdsourced some solutions to Twitter, not knowing exactly what software to use to ban an IP. @jcollie replied saying I should use iptables to block traffic. So, I took his advice and ran the following command on the server to block the IP:

iptables -A INPUT -s [IP] -j DROP

This worked well, and I saw the torrent of spam slow immediately (there were multiple culprits). However, iptables doesn’t like to reload its rules when the server gets rebooted, so I was searching for another solution. I don’t reboot the server very often, but you know how it goes – when I would, I’d forget to run the rules again.

I also remembered that Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a built-in firewall utility called UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall). I wanted to give this a shot also so I ran this command:

ufw deny from [IP]

Much simpler than the iptables command was, but ufw status told me that the firewall was not loaded. Naturally, the next step was to run ufw enable to load the firewall, right? Wrong. I was immediately locked out of my own website because, by default, UFW seems to want to block all traffic. To remedy that problem, run ufw default allow to set the default behavior to allow traffic. Now, if you run ufw status, you’ll see that your firewall is loaded and it will show any rules you’ve set up. To recap, banning IPs with UFW is as easy as:

ufw default allow
ufw enable
ufw deny from [IP]

If you find yourself unable to hit your web server, try running ufw default allow after you’ve enabled the firewall. I actually did the previous in reverse order, but it makes more sense to do it in the order that’s shown.

Have a better solution? Share it in the comments.

Launchy Comes to Linux

Mark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:30:05 +0000

Launchy is a quick way to launch applications in Windows, and now it has made its way over to the Linux world. Launchy can be installed from source or as a .deb. Launchy depends on the libqt4 libraries, so be sure to install them first. If you try installing from the .deb, it’ll tell you what else you need to install.

To access Launchy in Linux, press Ctrl-Space and the Launchy window will pop up (press escape to make it go away). Start typing a few characters and it will show you a list of options matching what you’ve typed. Double-click any icon in that list to launch an app – no more searching through menus!

Ubuntu-based Mac Theme

Mark — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:45:39 +0000

I’m pretty intrigued by the new Macs simply because of the looks of the OS. I’m not willing, however, to fork over all the money that comes with owning a bona-fide Macintosh. So instead, I skinned Ubuntu to look like Mac OSX. I found the tutorial over at Make Tech Easier, and it’s pretty simple to follow. From start to finish only took me a few hours, and that’s including installing Ubuntu 8.04, plus tweaks and tricks to get everything going properly. The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is screenlets, but I couldn’t care less about desktop widgets. The tutorial won’t produce an exact replica of OSX, but it does a pretty good job. If Apple does one thing correctly, it’s definitely the user interface.

Featured Linux App: PCMan FM

Mark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:49:51 +0000

PCMan File Manager is a fast, lightweight file manager for Linux. It’s based on Nautilus, Konqueror, Firefox, and many other programs. Its main use is on machines that have limited resources and cannot dedicate much to a file manager.

PCMan supports a wide array of features, such as tabbed browsing, volume management through HAL, file association support, and drag & drop. The best thing about PCMan is that it’s so lightweight, which translates to low load times. PCMan claims that the app can be started on normal machines in under a second. I tried this, and will admit that it comes up very quickly.

Screenshot of the main interface. You can see that there are four tabs open. PCMan supports both list view and icon view. On the left you can have either the location pane (shown) or a directory tree.

This is the context menu accessible by right click. It has most of the same options that Nautilus supports.

PCMan also has the ability to open a terminal by use of the F4 key. The terminal opens to whatever directory you’re at, and which terminal opens is customizable. There’s also the option to browse as superuser, which comes in handy from time to time.

This is the warning pane that comes up when you browse as superuser. It’s nice that the program differentiates user browsing modes so you’re not confused if you’re in superuser mode or not. When you enter superuser mode, PCMan pops up a separate window and allows you to continue browsing as a normal user in the previous window.

Featured Linux App: YaKuake

Mark — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:17:34 +0000

YaKuake stands for Yet Another Kuake KDE terminal emulator. The website is pretty lame (doesn’t look like it’s been updated in 3 years), but the application itself is pretty handy. YaKuake can be hidden and recalled by a user-defined hotkey. Users can specify how large they want the window to be, where they want it, and on what screen it should show up. YaKuake can also be pinned to the desktop so it can’t be hidden. YaKuake is layered over all windows and displays as “always on top”.

I set up my access key to be F12, so when I tap that key, a terminal drops down from the top of my screen. It’s just a standard terminal at this point, and also supports tabs. When I’m finished, I tap F12 again and YaKuake hides itself. The access key can be set to whatever the user wants, within reason (ie you can’t use “2″ as your access key).

YaKuake can be downloaded from the apt-get repo (apt-get install yakuake) or downloaded as source from Softpedia.

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Featured Linux App: Terminator

Mark — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:04:53 +0000

Terminator is a terminal emulator aimed at providing a useful way to arrange multiple terminals into a single window. Terminator’s approach is to allow the user to create multiple terminals in a grid, rather than on tabs. You can split the window vertically or horizontally any number of times, and resize each terminal as you wish.

To create a new grid, simply right click on the grid you want to operate on, then choose either Close, Split Vertically, or Split Horizontally. These functions are what makes Terminator so useful.

Terminator is an emulator of gnome-terminal, so to set any of your preferences, you have to set them through gnome-terminal. Be sure save the profile if you make changes there. If you have multiple profiles, you can specify which one to use by adding -p PROFILE or –profile=PROFILE to your Terminator arguments.

If you want to download Terminator, head over to the download section on Launchpad. Download the tarball and follow the installation instructions to get started.

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Handy Nautilus Tips/Tricks

Mark — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:30:45 +0000

There’s a boatload of things you can do with GNOME’s file browser, Nautilus. Some of my favorite tricks are listed below.

Remote File Management

When I’m using Windows, I always turn to WinSCP for my GUI SCP needs. When I use Linux, there is no WinSCP. Lo and behold, you can just type ssh://user@host:/path/to/dir in your Nautilus address bar and it will prompt you for a password (you can also FTP and SFTP using Nautilus). You’ll then have access to the filesystem and can cut, copy, and paste files as you wish. You can also graphically edit files through using whatever tools you have installed on the local machine. Alternately, there’s the fish:// protocol which works in Konqueror (KDE). As far as I know, it only works on Konqueror and doesn’t work in Nautilus.

Trash Management

If you want to delete a file for good instead of putting it in the trash, fire up Nautilus and go to Edit -> Preferences -> Behavior. Check the box labeled “Include a Delete command that bypasses Trash”. On that same window, you can uncheck the box “Ask before emptying the Trash or deleting files” to skip the confirmation step when emptying your trash bin.

Show/Hide Hidden Files

There are two ways to accomplish this. The easy way is to toggle display by pressing Ctrl-H. The other way is in Edit -> Preferences with the “Show hidden and backup files” checkbox.

Browse filesystem as Root
Start a new desktop configuration file in the /usr/share/applications directory.

sudo vim /usr/share/applications/Nautilus-root.desktop

Add the following lines to the new file:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=File Browser (Root)
Comment=Browse the filesystem with the file manager
Exec=gksudo "nautilus --browser %U"
Icon=file-manager
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;System;

Save the file and close Vim. To start Nautilus as the root user, choose Applications -> System Tools -> File Browser (Root), and you’ll be prompted for the root password.

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Installing Adobe AIR for Linux

Mark — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:19:40 +0000

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building web-based applications that can be deployed as desktop apps. AIR for Linux is currently in the alpha stages, so it’s got a ways to go before it’s officially released. I’ve been using it a little, and posted about it in my Twitter post a couple days ago. Here are the steps for getting AIR set up in Linux.

Open a terminal and do the following commands:

cd ~/Desktop
 
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
 
chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
 
sudo ./adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

That should kick off the installer. Follow the steps through that (just a few) and AIR will be installed to “/opt/Adobe Air”. Not sure why they put spaces in the path, but OK. I’m also not sure how to change the installation path, as I’d like to have it installed to /air/ so it’s all in one spot separate from apps I compiled from source code, but I’m just nitpicky.

The next thing you’ll need to do is download some AIR apps. Here’s a list of AIR apps: http://airapps.pbwiki.com/. After you click through and find an app you like, download it and save it to the disk.

To install your new AIR app, simply execute the following:

/opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller /path/to/air/app

Follow the instructions on the installation, which by default goes to /opt, but you can actually change the location there. In Ubuntu, the start menu icon goes to Other, but I moved mine into a new folder called AIR. That should do it, you’ve just installed your first AIR app on Linux.

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mark.bockenstedt.net » Linux

Partition a Hard Drive Using a gParted Live CD

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Banning IPs in Ubuntu

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Featured Linux App: YaKuake

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Featured Linux App: Terminator

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Handy Nautilus Tips/Tricks

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Installing Adobe AIR for Linux

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