Ubuntu Linux, ubuntu desktop, Linux operating system, ubuntu guide » ubuntu 9.04

How to change the Language & Keyboard Layout in Ubuntu

sahab — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:15:14 +0000

The following command is used to reconfigure the default language and the keyboard layout in Ubuntu.

sudo set-language-env -E – Default Language

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup – used to reconfigure the default language

For example if you need to chanage the default language to German, run the above command and choose your default language.

HOW to Dual boot Windows Linux laptop

sahab — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:39:32 +0000

Your goal is to have a laptop into which you can boot Windows or Linux.

Your primary understanding is that Windows XP is an old operating system and makes some important ignorant assumptions.

The first assumption is that Windows was a proprietary computer operating system produced by a Corporation that wanted a monopoly control of the computer operating system market. This meant that it would

Assume that it was going to be the only operating system of the computer

And assume that it need no capacities to recognize the presence of any other operating system or file system.

This first assumption that Windows would be the only operating system of the computer means that you have to install a boot record and a bios that establishes that this computer is “compatible” rather than name the more efficient modern setting.

The second assumption means that you have to make sure that Windows is installed in the first true partition right at the front of the cylinder. You can install Linux in a logical partition behind that on the hard drive.

Linux is a modern computer operating system and is adaptable to its environment and is produced in a way that it recognizes other computer operating systems on the hard drive and it can install itself anywhere.

Your secondary understanding is that you will have to first install Linux to prepare the hard drive if such a way as that there is a NTFS formatted partition in your very first primary, (first) partition, i.e. /dev/sda1. This is for windows to reside in. Part of the secondary understanding is that you don’t install all the bells and whistles with this Linux installation because you are going to nuke the boot record when you install Windows into the partition. This is no problem because then you will install Linux a second time and then it will create the boot record in grub and make everything happy.

Part of the secondary understanding is that you will install Linux for the primary purpose of downloading gparted, a partition manager, and move your partitions around if you want to save your data or whatever. I have a better idea.

By far better idea is that you do what I ended up doing which is to

— Boot from a live Linux disk.

— backup your data to a thumb drive or USB drive.

— Boot from a live Linux disk

— just nuke and repartition your hard drive so

— there is an empty NTFS Partition at /dev/sda1.

— Make sure that the setting for your bios is set to “’compatible” this is the reason (for probably about 24 failed Windows installs where Windows simply couldn’t see the partitions I was making for it. I am not exaggerating the number of failed attempts)
— Install Linux lightly into the first part of a logical extension making room for a swap drive that is twice the size your RAM memory

— Make sure the boot flag on the partition that Windows will reside is set to “boot”

— Reboot with the Windows disk that you have. It will now see where it is supposed to go, being completely blind to everything that’s in the logical extension. As long as you don’t choose to format your hard drive all the damage that Windows will do will be to put Windows on your computer. That is enough.

— During the install leave the room and do something fun because looking back at the computer while Windows is installing can make you crazy.

— Reboot into Windows and there is something that you will do here but I will NOT mention here for clarity but I will make an endnote containing that information.

— Setup Windows to please yourself.

— reboot from the live Linux distribution.

— Install Linux. It will ask you about whether you want to just install it along with an operating system or not. I hope it is not necessary for me to answer that question for you.

— At this time Linux will rewrite the boot data so from then on when you start a computer you can hit escape and get that menu that let you choose whether you want to run Windows or a modern operating system.

— Now what you’ll want to do if you don’t have the CD that came with the computer with the drivers for your laptop is to Ethernet cable connect your laptop to a computer with an Internet connection. Go to your laptop manufacturer’s website and download the drivers for the Windows operating system wireless app. Then when you reboot into Windows with that installed you can connect to the Internet and get all the rest of the drivers and whenever you want in the way of apps.

How to run a command without using sudo password in ubuntu

sahab — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 11:08:46 +0000

Today I have tried my client PC run shutdown and reboot command without being enter sudo password. The details given below

Use the command “sudo visudo” to edit the file. Now look for the line “# User alias specification” and add a list of users as follows:#

 User alias specification
User_Alias USERS = user1, user2, user3

Now look for the line “# Cmnd alias specification” and add a command list as follows:

# Cmnd alias specification
Cmnd_Alias SHUTDOWN_CMDS = /sbin/shutdown, /sbin/reboot, /sbin/halt

Now look for the line “%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL” and add the command which will let USERS give SHUTDOWN_CMDS without a password

Code:

:%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
USERS ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: SHUTDOWN_CMDS

Now those specified users can use the commands “sudo shutdown”, “sudo halt”, and “sudo reboot” without being asked for your password.

EDIT: By the way, the reason that these commands can’t be used by normal users is that Linux was designed as a multi-user system. You don’t want one user shutting down the system while others are using it!

Some usefull Linux scripts

sahab — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 09:41:46 +0000

A nice script to find out the no of connection from a particular IP address to the apache

root@sahab-desktop# netstat -n|grep :80|awk {‘print $5′}|awk -F: {‘print $1′}>netlist;for i in `sort -u netlist` ;do echo -n$i”->”;grep -c $i netlist; done;

How to remove frozen messages from mail queue?(exim)

This command will help you to remove the frozen messages from the mail queue.

exim -bp|grep ‘*** frozen ***’ |awk {‘print $3′} |xargs exim -Mrm

Command to find all of the files which have been accessed within the last 10 days

The following command will find all of the files which have been accessed within the last 10 days

find / -type f -atime -10 > Monthname.files

This command will find all the files under root, which is ‘/’, with file type is file. ‘-atime -30′ will give all the files accessed less than 10 days ago. And the output will put into a file call Monthname.files.

Find and Remove the editor backup files

find . -name ‘*~’ -type f -print

find . -name ‘*~’ -type f -print |xargs rm -f

Mount USB Drive in Ubuntu

sahab — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:41:21 +0000

Automount

In ubuntu storage devices that are plugged into the system mount automatically and place an icon on your desktop, often called “disk” and as more drives are added, you can get “disk-1″ and so on. The folder disk create under /media folder. If we give the command

#fdisk -l

It mounted on new device sdb, sdc etc

To have a program automatically start when you plug in a device, go to System->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media.

Another one method is Open file browser select the menu Edit/preferences/media tab There you can select what happens when media is inserted. For example we need to turnoff audio CD auto play

CD audio “can do nothing” or “ask what to do” or “open folder”

Then Right Click the Device select Unmount for safely remove.

Command Line Mount

Sometimes devices don’t automount, in which case you should try to manually mount it. Most flash drives are FAT16 or FAT32 and most external hard disks are NTFS.

Create Mount Point

sudo mkdir /media/Disk

Then mount the USB using the below command, Lets assume sdb1 is device, For FAT 32

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/Disk -o uid=1000,gid=100,utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137

The options following the “-o” allow your user to have ownership of the drive, and the masks allow for extra security for file system permissions. If you don’t use those extra options you may not be able to read and write the drive with your regular username.

For NTFS

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/Disk

Command for Unmount the Device

sudo umount /dev/sdb1 or sudo umount /media/Disk

Pmount

which allows unprivileged users to mount drives as if they were using sudo, even without an entry in /etc/fstab

For installing

#sudo apt-get install pmount

Example

pmount /dev/sdb1 test

This will mount the device /dev/sdb1 at /media/test

Prevent User access on USB Drive

For preventing the particular user access

System->Administration->User and Groups, choose the user, click on “Properties”, then go to the “User Privileges” tab.

Uncheck the options “Access external storage devices automatically”.

Use full commands

lsusb – list the usb devices

dmesg – When you encounter problems with USB devices, the first thing to do is to check the latest debug information generated from the kernel just after you plug in your device and/or just after you encounter the problem.

Stop ubuntu from creating shortcuts of Harddisk, USB in Desktop

Open the terminal or press alt+f2

Type

gconf-editor

Navigate to apps — nautilus — Desktop. Uncheck Volumes_visible check-box in right pane.

Why ubuntu on Dell notebook

sahab — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:13:34 +0000

First and foremost, Ubuntu is an Operating System. Just like Microsoft^® Windows^® or Apple MacOS, you can use Ubuntu to surf the web, check email, or just about anything you might want to do. Here’s a “Top Ten” list of things you should know about Ubuntu.

10) Ubuntu is simple and elegant

If you’re the kind of person who likes your computer to simply work, Ubuntu is right for you. It’s based on stable, secure, easy-to-use software that’s been around for a long time.

9) Ubuntu is designed for the Internet

Do you spend most of your time on the Internet? Ubuntu connects you to the Internet in seconds. Firefox is a very popular browser and works well with practically every website you’ll run across, e.g. news sites, social media sites, etc. It also works great with web-based e-mail sites like Yahoo or Gmail.

Ubuntu is “social from the start”

The people who make Ubuntu designed it to be very social-media centric. Do you use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or any of the other dozens of popular social networking sites? Ubuntu 9.10 works very well with these websites. And beginning with Ubuntu 10.04, these websites will be integrated into the Ubuntu OS itself for your convenience.

7) Ubuntu plays videos, songs, and movies easily

Do you like to watch videos on YouTube, buy songs from Amazon, pop in DVD’s from the local video store? No problem! Dell bundles a multimedia player with Ubuntu to deliver a great entertainment experience.(DRM protected music not supported.)

6) Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft^® Windows^®

The vast majority of viruses and spyware written by hackers are not designed to target and attack Linux.

For more info Dell opensource

Download Ubuntu Server Edition

sahab — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:37:48 +0000

You can download Ubuntu Server Edition now – it’s completely free

F0r more info click here

How to Reset the mysql root password in LInux

sahab — Mon, 31 May 2010 10:37:05 +0000

Mysql installation time, If you have never set a root password for MySQL, the server does not require a password at all for connecting as root. To setup root password for first time, use mysqladmin command at shell prompt as follows:

$ mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

However, if you want to change (or update) a root password, then you need to use following command

$ mysqladmin -u root -p'oldpassword' password newpass

For example, If old password is dbase, and set new password to dbase123, enter:

$ mysqladmin -u root -p'dbase' password 'dbase123'

Other then the ways specified here to reset and change the root password for mySQL in the case that the password is forgotten or lost,

1)Stop the mysql demon process using this command

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

2)Start the mysqld demon process using the –skip-grant-tables option with this command

sudo /usr/sbin/mysqld –skip-grant-tables –skip-networking &

3)start the mysql client process using this command

mysql -u root

from the mysql prompt execute this command to reset/update your password

SET PASSWORD FOR root@’localhost’ = PASSWORD(‘password’);

If you have a mysql root account that can connect from everywhere, you should also do:

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD(‘newpwd’) WHERE User=’root’;

Alternate Method:

USE mysql
UPDATE user SET Password = PASSWORD(‘newpwd’)
WHERE Host = ‘localhost’ AND User = ‘root’;
And if you have a root account that can access from everywhere:

USE mysql
UPDATE user SET Password = PASSWORD(‘newpwd’)
WHERE Host = ‘%’ AND User = ‘root’;

For either method, once have received a message indicating a successful query (one or more rows affected), flush privileges:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit

Then stop the mysqld process

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

How to set time zone in CLI mode in ubuntu server

sahab — Mon, 31 May 2010 10:14:00 +0000

Enter the below command for change the time zone in ubuntu server

#sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Then follow the screen instructions

Mysql DB Backup and Restore How to

sahab — Mon, 31 May 2010 09:57:23 +0000

Database Backup

If you’re storing anything in MySQL databases that you do not want to lose, it is very important to make regular backups of your data to protect it from loss. It is also a good idea to create a backup before making any major changes, incase something goes wrong and you need to revert to the unmodified version. Database backups can also be used to transfer your database from one server to another if you change web hosts.

Command Line (using mysqldump)

# mysqldump -u user_name -p your_password database_name > File_name.sql

Eg:
Let’s assume that:
Username: ubuntu
Password: jaunty
Database Name: ubuntulinux

# mysqldump -u ubuntu -p jaunty ubuntulinx> ubuntulinux.sql

This will backup the database to a file called ubuntulinux.sql

Back up more than one database

In this case you can use the –database option followed by the list of databases you would like to backup. Each database name has to be separated by space.

#mysqldump -u root -p –databases ubuntu ubuntulinux > data_backup.sql

Backup all Database

Back up all the databases in the server at one time you should use the –all-databases option. It tells MySQL to dump all the databases it has in storage.

#mysqldump -u root -p –all-databases > all_backup.sql

Database Backup From the phpMyAdmin

1. Login to phpMyAdmin
2. Click on your database name
3. Click on the tab labeled EXPORT
4. Select all tables you want to backup (usually all)
5. Default settings usually work, just make sure SQL is checked
6. Check the SAVE FILE AS box
7. Hit GO

Database Restore

Restore Database From the Command Prompt

If you are moving your data to a new server, or you have removed the old database completely you can restore it using the code below. This will only work if the database does not already exist:

#mysql – u user_name -p your_password database_name < file_name.sql

Or using our previous example

#mysql – u ubuntu -p jaunty ubuntulinux < ubuntuBackup.sql

If your database already exists and you are just restoring it, try this line instead:

#mysqlimport -u user_name -p your_password database_name file_name.sql

Or using our example again:

#mysqlimport -u ubuntu -p jaunty ubuntulinux ubuntuBackup.sql

Restore Database From the phpMyAdmin

Login to phpMyAdmin
Click on the tab labeled SQL
Unclick the ‘show query here again’ box
Choose your backup file
Hit GO