*The* significant point about LindowsOS is that you can buy preconfigured systems at Wal-Mart. Further, the systems are *cheap*. $199 for a PC with an OS installed. For GNU/Linux to be widely embraced as a desktop that is accessible by everyone, this is what needs to happen. We wondered just how easily Lindows was to […]
LindowsOS 3.0 Review
Getting Rid of Plain Bash Prompts
Are you tired of looking at an ugly bash prompt like this?: -bash-2.05b$ Well, if you add this line to your .bash_profile: export PS1=’\[\033[01;31m\]\h \[\033[01;34m\]\W \$ \[\033[00m\]’ You will get a red hostname (up to the first .) and a blue current working directory: servername directory $ For more info, see the prompting section of […]
Free Program That Prints Clipboard Text
We ran into an interesting problem with PuTTY. PuTTY doesn’t have a print-screen function. We looked around for an application that would simply print the clipboard. True, you could do something like ctrl-v, ctrl-p in notepad, but then you have to change focus, which is distruptive. With PuTTY, you simply highlight text with the left […]
Using Dynamic Backgrounds With KDE
In this article I showed how to update the background of an X desktop with various text status dumps. I have been using IceWM because it has always been the most stable window manager. It was also useful when bringing up an OS from source, as IceWM can be compiled quickly. KDE has a lot […]
Firefox Passes 25 Million Mark
Firefox has enjoyed 25 million downloads in 99 days. We have been using Firefox here at NetAdminTools for the last couple of months, and are very impressed. For more info, see this article. We have to celebrate with a nice image from factorycity.net: The popup blocker works well, and the rendering is beautiful, at least […]
Setting the Gnome Desktop Background With a Script
You can use these two commands to set the Gnome desktop background: gconftool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /path/pic.png gconftool-2 -t str –set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_options “centered” This will put the picture in the center. If you want to fill the background with the picture use stretched.
Using Ldconfig To Set Library Locations
Gozer needs libgiblib to work right. I like to install strange libraries like this into /usr/local/lib. I put all of the source into /usr/local/src that isn’t part of the main RPM system. Even when I compiled and installed giblib, though, it wouldn’t work right: [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ gozer gozer: error while loading shared libraries: libgiblib.so.1: cannot […]
Reading RSS Feeds with Outlook 2007
Outlook 2007 has the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds. Just scroll down to the RSS Feeds folder under Personal Folders, click on the RSS Feeds. Right click on RSS Feeds. Choose Add a New RSS Feed. Enter the location of the RSS feed into the box: Here is what the NetAdminTools.com RSS feed looks […]
Rotating a Video with Mencoder
If you import a rotated video off of your phone or other device, here is a quick command to rotate it 90 degrees: mencoder -vf rotate=1 -o hx.avi -oac pcm -ovc lavc hx.mo Some more details are in How to rotate an AVI or MPEG file taken in Portrait.
Xfce Tips
If you lose your borders around your windows in Xfce4 and your mouse pointer over the desktop is wonky try: xfwm4 –replace rm -rf ~/.cache/sessions
Funky MP3 Car Players, and the Scripts That Load Them
Oh my. I had no idea about what was running my music. Now I know quite a bit more, and I thought I would share. My collection is very convoluted, but I didn’t know it. No, I had no idea. How did I get to the messy state I’m at today? I started converting my […]
Running Native Sim City on Ubuntu
Yes, yes… no time for games, usually, but sometimes a little Sunday gaming can be fun. For grins, we did a bit of googling, and found that Micropolis is available on Ubuntu. We happen to be running 12.10: apt-get install micropolis Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done The following extra […]
Fixing WMI Corruption on Windows 7
We had a workstation that wasn’t getting updates properly. Here are some items in the logs we noticed: Event ID 43: Windows Management Instrumentation ADAP failed to connect to namespace \\.\root\cimv2 with the following error 0x80041002 And: Event ID 1090: Windows failed to record Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) information, which describes the scope of […]
Running Apache on Win32
Do you ever wish you could inch away from IIS and migrate towards Apache on Linux or some other UNIX operating system? Well, in this article we will install Apache on our NT server. Another advantage to using Apache is it is a cool way to get a full fledged web server on your workstation. […]
Apache Installation and Configuration
First, get the current Apache distribution from Apache.org, and extract it: [root@srv-3 src]# ls apache_1.3.19.tar.gz bind-9.1.2 bind-9.1.2.tar.gz webmin-0.85.tar.gz [root@srv-3 src]# tar -xzf ap*.gz [root@srv-3 src]# [root@srv-3 src]# ls apache_1.3.19 bind-9.1.2 webmin-0.85.tar.gz apache_1.3.19.tar.gz bind-9.1.2.tar.gz [root@srv-3 src]# cd ap* [root@srv-3 apache_1.3.19]# ls ABOUT_APACHE config.layout INSTALL Makefile.tmpl src Announcement configure KEYS README WARNING-WIN.TXT cgi-bin htdocs LICENSE README.configure conf […]
Protecting your site from particular IP addresses w/ Apache
If a particular user is abusing your Apache web server, it is quite easy to deny access to your site. We found (with our ISP) that the easiest is to put an entry in the .htaccess file in the root of the directory you want to protect: deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the offending […]
Inserting program listings in PHP-Nuke
NetAdminTools used to use PHP-Nuke. For those of you who don’t know, PHP-Nuke is a fabulous Open Source project that gives you everything you need to bring up your own website with a database backend and other features. Now, one annoying thing with PHP-Nuke, and most web based interfaces is that it is quite difficult […]
Programming With PHP – Part 1
In this series of articles, we will explore the fundamentals of PHP programming with MySQL. For a good reference, try this book. It helped us. In this installment of Programming With PHP, we will set up the Red Hat RPMs, configure our directories, and code a simple “Hello World” app. We are running Red Hat […]
Programming With PHP – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, we set up a basic PHP server with Apache on a Red Hat system, and wrote a simple “Hello World” script. In this article, we will vary content based on browser type. We will use the HTTP_SERVER_VARS server variable. The specific variable we want is HTTP_SERVER_VARS[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’]. To use this, […]
Tidy Up Your HTML
One cool tool for tidying up your HTML, as well as notifying you of coding errors is TIDY. For an overview of what TIDY can do for you see this overview. Installation is quite easy: root@srv-1 src # tar -xzf tidy*.tgz root@srv-1 src # cd tidy root@srv-1 tidy # ls Makefile Makefile.bcc32 Makefile.nmake Makefile.vc6 console […]
