PattonCentral

I am keeping here a list of useful links for Linux newbies. I will add to this list as I come across good links (and actually remember to put the link here).

Full Circle Magazine — The Ubuntu community magazine.

Free Ubuntu Books

There is an unfortunate dearth of competent mp3 device managers available to Linux users. Fortunately, there is Amarok.

I usually only write about software if I have some specific tip or trick that I think will help other users avoid some annoyance I had to overcome. In this post, the tip is simply: use Amarok. I wasted a lot of time searching for a competent iPod manager. Hopefully, other users will save time by trying Amarok first.

My search for an iPod manager began at this very useful comparison of iPod managers, and I tried all of the mangers listed therein. I was looking for software that could manage my local collection of audio files (including tags and cover art), as well as facilitate the easy transfer of files to and from my iPod. Only Amarok had the functionality I was looking for.

Not only does amarok work (mostly) like you would think it should, I actually prefer it to iTunes. (I’m not just saying that because I’m a Linux guy. I really do prefer it.) Initially, I had some difficulty mounting my iPod so Amarok could find it. However, I’ve had no problems since then. As an added bonus, Amarok is a gread podcatcher. I use it to download my favorite podcasts, and transfer them to my iPod; I then transfer the shows I really like into my permanent collection. In the end, Amarok just works like you think it should.

To mount your iPod nano under Linux, follow the instructions here.

I have a one-hour round-trip commute to work each day, and I usually spend that time listening to NPR. As much as I do like NPR, I decided to take more control over my listening time. So, I bought a new car stereo capable of controlling my Apple iPod. That was definitely one of the best decisions I have made in a long time. Now, I spend an hour each day listening to interesting, thought-provoking, and entertaining radio. No more wasted time.

Here are some great podcasts that I listen to. Please recommend any you enjoy.

Radio Lab — Maybe the best show on radio.

What is Radio Lab?

Radio Lab® is an investigation. Each episode is a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea. On RadioLab, science bumps into culture… information sounds like music.

This American Life — Again, possibly the best show on radio.

One of our problems from the start has been that when we try to describe This American Life in a sentence or two, it just sounds awful. For instance: each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show.

The Moth — Amateur storytelling.

The success of The Moth is one example of the phenomenon of storytelling that is gaining momentum nationwide. In The Moth’s case, these narrative sessions are fast becoming an institution.

Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! — Very funny and witty.

Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! is NPR’s weekly hour-long quiz program. Each week on the radio you can test your knowledge against some of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world while figuring out what’s real news and what’s made up.

Re:sound — A great place to find new and interesting podcasts

Re:sound is a little bit of a lot of things…

Hosted by longtime producer and essayist Gwen Macsai, Re:sound brings you intriguing radio stories culled from around the world and ranging from experimental sound art to humorous essays, from personal narratives to investigative documentaries.

Philosophy Talk — Incredibly entertaining and informative.

Philosophy Talk is a weekly, one-hour radio series produced by Ben Manilla. The hosts’ down-to-earth and no-nonsense approach brings the richness of philosophic thought to everyday subjects. Topics are lofty (Truth, Beauty, Justice), arresting (Terrorism, Intelligent Design, Suicide), and engaging (Baseball, Love, Happiness).

This is not a lecture or a college course, it’s philosophy in action! Philosophy Talk is a fun opportunity to explore issues of importance to your audience in a thoughtful, friendly fashion, where thinking is encouraged.

If you don’t use VIM as your text editor, you really should think about using it — especially if you use Linux. (Although, I use it under Windows too.) VIM saves me so much time editing source code files, that I cannot use an integrated development environment (IDE) anymore — even with all the nice features IDEs provide — because editing files with VIM is so much faster. If you don’t understand how an editing files can be faster in one editor versus another, then there is a whole new world out there just waiting for you too explore.

The downside of VIM is that there is a learning curve associated with it. Like most things that come from the Unix world, VIM uses recall not recognition. That is to say, in Windows you can figure things out by recognizing icons and feeling your way around. Under Unix/Linux you must recall the command. That means you have to know it before hand. The upshot is that doing something the first time takes longer under Linux, but doing it the second time takes a lot longer under Windows.

Anyway, the reason for this post is not for me to extol the virtues of VIM, but to maintain a list of VIM tricks an tips so that I can recall them later:

• Use File Skeletons:

  You can keep a skeleton file (or template file, if you will) on your system, and VIM will automatically read this skeleton file in when you create a new file of the appropriate type. See the help for more detail.

  As an example: I have the file ~/.vim/skeletons/skeleton.m on my system, and the command autocmd BufNewFile *.m 0r ~/.vim/skeletons/skeleton.m in my ~/.vimrc file. When I open a new *.m file, the contents of skeleton.m are automatically placed in my new file. I find this very useful because I use Subversion for version control, and always put the same header, with SVN keywords, in my files.

When creating PDF documents with LaTeX, one desires a PDF viewer that will automatically reload the document when it changes. Unfortunately, the best PDF viewer under Linux, acroread from Adobe, does not do this. Neither does gpdf. Another GNOME PDF viewer called evince will reload, but you have to type CONTROL+R to do so. The only PDF viewer I could find that automatically reloaded PDF files is kpdf. Fortunately, kpdf is also a nice PDF viewer. So, I am happy that I found it.

I came across an incredibly interesting piece of software today. It is called TrendAnalyzer from Gapminder. It is statistical visualization software with so much promise that it was bought by Google. I love the goal of the Gapminder project, which is “to promote a fact-based worldview by bringing statistical story-telling to new levels. In collaboration with producers of accurate statistics that are eager to give the public free access to databases, Gapminder hopes to recruit and inspire many users of public statistics.”

Checkout the TED 2007 presentation on their homepage. Then, checkout what Google’s done with it. Very cool.

p>
I setup a machine running Ubuntu 5.04 server edition as
a print server for my heterogeneous LAN. This setup was especially tricky
because the server edition is command-line only — i.e., there is no
X-windows and Gnome interface. I ran into a number of problems during
this setup. So, I’m posting the steps as both a reminder to myself and
an informal guide to anyone else trying to do something similar. These
steps involve setting up the Ubuntu 5.04 server, an Ubuntu 6.10 client,
and a Windows XP client. The printer was an Epson Stylus Color 740. I
think the steps listed are relatively complete, but I can make no
guarantee. The packages I tell you to install may be overkill, but
maybe not. I would appreciate any feedback if someone knows better than
I.

Server Setup

1. Update your system

       sudo apt-get update
       sudo apt-get upgrade

2. If your printer uses the parallel port, make sure that it is enabled
   in the BIOS and that your kernel supports it. My BIOS had it disabled
   by default, and that took me quite a while to figure out. See this
   newbiedoc article and this article
   for some details.
3. Install the necessary packages

       sudo apt-get install samba cupsys cupsys-client cupsys-bsd cups-driver-gimpprint foomatic-db gs-esp

   I don’t know if every printer requires foomatic-db and gs-esp. However, mine did. (And it
   took me a long time to figure that out!)

4. Install your printer from either the command line a la this
   how-to, or from the cups web interface a la this
   how-to. The important part is that your cups server should be
   listening to port 631 for all hosts. Note that if you choose the
   command line option then you’ll probably need to download the
   appropriate printer driver from here . Once
   you can print locally (from the server), you can move on to client
   setup.
5. Read the Part 2: Make the printer available using SAMBA
   in
   Sharing a printer to Windows XP clients with Samba and Cups. I
   just backed up may /etc/samba/smb.conf and then replaced it
   with the author’s smb.conf Things just worked after I set my
   own workgroup and netbios name.

Ubuntu Client Setup

1. Repeat steps 1 (update) and 2 (get packages) of the server setup
   above.
2. Add the line ServerName IP_OR_HOSTNAME to
   /etc/cups/client.conf where IP_OR_HOSTNAME is either
   the IP address or hostname of the print server. Note you may have to
   create the file /etc/cups/client.conf
3. Go to the System–>Administration–>Printing applet, and
   select Global Settings on the toolbar. Check Detect LAN
   Printers.
4. In the printing dialog, double click the New Printer icon.
   This will bring up the Add Printer dialog box. Your system
   should have detected the printer connected to your print server.
   Install this printer.

Windows Client Setup

1. Read the Windows Client Configuration section in
   Sharing a printer to Windows XP clients with Samba and Cups.

References

Sharing a printer to Windows XP clients with Samba and Cups

The author shares his experience setting up Samba and CUPS under
Debian Sarge. His experience was very similar to mine. You must read
this article.

Howto:
configure cups on Ubuntu Server from command line

Discusses configuring CUPS from the command line.

HOWTO: Setup A Headless Ubunutu CUPS Print-Server

An extension of the above reference. Discusses how to setup CUPS for
remote administration via the web interface.

Ubuntu: Share your printer

Shows how to configure the CUPS client.

HOWTO: Fileserver with Samba and Printserver with CUPS

Found this after I wrote this post. Maybe it is helpful?

An interesting article about open research:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6404429.stm

I could provide a discussion, but I will instead be lazy, and let the slashdot.org discussions do the talking. (The slashdot discussions are actually pretty good for a change. Read them.)

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/03/02/0158208.shtml

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/01/1643204

My first attempt at adding and configuring printers from the command line in Linux. Posting script and references here.

#!/bin/bash
########################################################################
#
# Author: Lee Patton, 2007
# This script adds Wright State printers.  To get drivers see:
# http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi
#
########################################################################

######################################
# Common Printers in Russ
######################################
NAME="Russ1"
DESC="Lexmark Full-Duplex B/W"
LOC="1st Floor RC"
PPD="Lexmark-Optra_T616-Postscript.ppd"
HOST="valhalla.cs.wright.edu"
QUE="russ1"
OPS="-o Duplex=DuplexNoTumble"

echo Adding Printer: $NAME, $DESC, $LOC
lpadmin -p "$NAME" -v "lpd://$HOST/$QUE" -D "$DESC" -L "$LOC" -P "$PPD" -E
lpoptions -p $NAME $OPS

######################################
# Lab Printer -- Default
######################################
NAME="HP"
DESC="HP Color Laserjet 2550n"
LOC="233 RC"
PPD="HP_Color_LaserJet_2550.ppd"
HOST="hp01"
QUE="raw"
OPS="-o none"

echo Adding Printer: $NAME, $DESC, $LOC
lpadmin -p "$NAME" -v "lpd://$HOST/$QUE" -D "$DESC" -L "$LOC" -P "$PPD" -E
lpoptions -d $NAME $OPS

######################################
# EOF
######################################

Some really good references

• Lockergnome
• Univ. of Cambridge
• The Linux Foundation

For some reason wordpress theme designers like to specify everything in pixels. I imagine it has to do with the fact that most themes have an image as the header, and the designers want everything to be even with the image. Well, for whatever the reason, every theme I’ve tried out does a poor job at displaying preformatted text, which is what I use to post log files, source code, etc.. Therefore, I cobbled together a little CSS code that can be placed in the main CSS file of the theme. It appears in the box below, which also demonstrates its functionality. The key here is the “overflow: auto” property. I’m posting this code here as a reminder.

.scrolling {
	overflow: auto;
	border: 1px grey solid;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 10px;
        padding: 5px;
}

.scrolling {
	overflow: auto;
	border: 1px grey solid;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 10px;
        padding: 5px;
}

With A very long line -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

.scrolling {
	overflow: auto;
	border: 1px grey solid;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 10px;
        padding: 5px;
}

A very long line -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A very tall line
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|

Personal notes for migrating between computers.

1. Copy relevant directories

   Use tar in order to preserve file permissions

   sudo tar -pczvf somedir.tar.gz  somedir/
   sudo scp -r somedir.tar.gz username@host:/home/username/
   sudo tar -pxzvf somedir.tar.gz
   

2. Get packages:

   Enable all universes/multiverses by editing /etc/apt/sources.list or checking all of the boxes under Settings->Repositories in the package manager. Next, run the update manager, then install the following packages:

   • acroread, acroread-plugins
   • vim-full (vim-tiny is installed by default. Missing lots of features.)
   • tetex-extras, latex-beamer, kpdf, and kdvi. Remember to copy texmf directory in home.
   • imagemagick
   • j2re1.4-mozilla-plugin
   • octave and gnuplot
   • subversion
   • vlc

3. Hidden files

   The following hidden files and folders, found in the home directory, can be copied over to the new home directory.

   • ~/.aspell.en.pws
   • ~/.bash_aliases, then uncomment the appropriate lines in ~/.bashrc. Also, add /bin/rm -f $HOME/bash_history to the file ~/.bash_logout.
   • ~/.vim and ~/.vimrc
   • ~/.subversion (discussed below)
   • ~/.mozilla/firefox/something_cryptic.default/bookmarks.html (discussed below)
   • ~/.evolution (discussed below)

4. Subversion:

   Simply copy over subversion repositories and working copies. The FSFS repositories will work fine. The BDB will not. See this post for details. Also, copy ~/.subversion to new home directory in order to retain desired configuration settings.

5. Firefox:

   Copy Firefox bookmarks file ~/.mozilla/firefox/something_cryptic.default/bookmarks.html. Next, install all of the desired search bar plugins

   • Google Scholar
   • Google Books
   • crossref
   • Dictionary.com
   • IEEExplore
   • Google Linux
   • GNU Radio
   • WSU LDAP

6. Email:

   I was able to just copy my old ~/.evolution directory to my home directory. This preserved all of my contacts, calendar, and email. However, I did have to re-enter all of my accounts.

7. MATLAB:

   Copy over MATLAB license file from /usr/local/matlab/etc/

8. Add Printers:

   See http://www.pattoncentral.org/?p=50