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

Gmail Tricks

sahab — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:12:03 +0000

Whether you use Google’s Gmail service at work or for personal purposes, you probably have a good handle on the basics: organizing your contacts, sending emails, setting up folders and more.

But if you’ve mastered the basics and are looking to increase your Gmail prowess and productivity, here’s a look at five tips and tricks that will take you to the next level.

1. How to Set Up Desktop Notifications

If you’re expecting an important email, there’s no need to constantly refresh or monitor your inbox. Instead, download an add-on for the Google Chrome browser that enables a popup that lets you know when you have a new email or chat message.

Chat notifications are enabled by default, but you can disable them in your Gmail settings. To enable email or chat notifications, here’s what to do:

First, click the gear icon in the upper right of your Gmail and select “Settings.” On the “General” tab, select the option you’d like in the “Desktop Notifications” section. Here, you can turn Chat notifications on or off, or receive notifications for all incoming email or only those Gmail marks “Important.” When you’ve made your selections, click “Save.” Right now, this feature works only for Chrome browsers.

2. How to Quickly Add Multiple Attachments to an Email

If an email you’re sending requires you to add multiple attachments, there’s an easier way than selecting and uploading files one-by-one.

If you want to send multiple files from the same folder, hold down the Ctrl key (or Command key on Macs) and click on each file you want to attach to your message. Or, you can also hold down the Shift key to select a continuous group of files.

Another option is to click and drag file icons from a folder or your desktop directly to the “Attach a file” section. When you do, the area will change to white and display this message: “Drop files here to add them as attachments.”

3. How to Send an Automatic Vacation Response

The vacation response feature will automatically send a reply with a message to anyone who emails you, except for messages classified as spam and messages addressed to a mailing list you subscribe to. These groups will not receive a notification. If a person contacts you again after four days, Gmail will send another vacation response to remind the person youre away.

To set up a vacation response, click the gear icon in the upper right of your Gmail and select “Settings.” From the “General” tab, select “Vacation Responder on” in the “Vacation responder” section. Next, enter the subject and body of your message in the appropriate fields, then check the box next to “Only send a response to people in my Contacts” if you don’t want everyone who emails you to know you’re away.

If you use Google Apps, you’ll also see an option to send a response only to people from your domain. If you check both of these boxes, only people who are in your contacts and your domain will receive the automatic response. When you’re done, click “Save Changes.”

When you’re back from vacation, click “end now” in the banner that runs across the top of your Gmail page.

4. How to Learn More About Your Contacts

Gmail’s people widget, located on the right-hand side of your messages, shows you contextual information about the people you’re interacting with in Gmail.

Click on the contact’s name on the right side to see information such as their name, email address or occupation; recent Google+ posts your contact has made visible to you, which you can +1 directly in Gmail; recent emails your contact has sent you; Google Calendar events if your contact’s Calendar is shared with you; and Google docs, shared with both you and the contact.

If you have several contacts on an email thread, the contact with the first unread message in the conversation will have the above information shown in the people widget. You can find more information about others in the conversation by clicking the more link at the top of the people widget.

To disable the people widget, click the gear icon in the upper right and select “Settings.” On the “General” tab, select “Hide the people widget” button. Then click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page.

5. How to Sign Out of Gmail Remotely

If you use multiple computers or devices to sign into Gmail and think you forgot to log out, you can do so remotely. Scroll to the bottom of your inbox: You’ll see information about the time and location of the last activity on your account. Click “Details” to see whether your account is still open in another location.

The page that pops up shows you if your account is open in another location, recent activity,(which includes whether it was accessed by browser, mobile, POP3 and so on) the IP address; and the date and time. You can also log out of all other sessions from here.

Windows 8 Tablets Due in November

sahab — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:08:48 +0000

Windows 8 tablets and tablet/laptop hybrids built on Intel architecture will be in retail stores in November, according to a CNET storythat cites a source close to Windows 8 device makers.

These devices will be using Intel’s newest Atom chips, named Clover Trail, which are the chip-maker’s first dual-core Atom design based on 32-nanometer processing. Windows 8 devices will be powered by chips from both Intel and AMD and will be able to run older “legacy” applications.

It’s been a foregone conclusion that Windows 8 will arrive in the fall. October has been the assumed month. So CNET’s source calling for November Windows 8 tablets is consistent, though some analysts are saying that November may be too late.

The CNET source said that half of the Intel chip-based Windows 8 tablet devices will be hybrids. As someone sitting on the fence between laptop and tablet use, I’m intrigued by the idea of a Windows 8 hybrid model where an ultrabook with a traditional physical keyboard folds seamlessly into a touch-screen tablet.

Desura game platform launched on Linux

sahab — Sun, 13 May 2012 08:41:02 +0000

Linux client for the independent Desura game platform has now been released. The new release is an application that makes it easy to install, patch and play games on all Linux and Windows distribution according to developers.

You are required to first signup with a valid email address in order to use the service and get games. At present 65 games in various genres have been available for Linux.

There are also a few free games. The list includes the turned-based strategy game Triple A free now.

OpenStack – Installing OpenStack Essex (2012.1) on Ubuntu 12.04

sahab — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:38:05 +0000

What is OpenStack

OpenStack OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.

Installing OpenStack Essex (2012.1) on Ubuntu 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”):

Install NTP by issuing this command on the command line:

apt-get install ntp

Then, open /etc/ntp.conf in your favourite editor and add these lines:

server ntp.ubuntu.com iburst server 127.127.1.0 fudge 127.127.1.0 stratum 10

Restart NTP by issuing the command

service ntp restart

to finish this part of the installation. Next, install the tgt target, which features an iscsi target (we’ll need it for nova-volume):

apt-get install tgt

Then start it with

service tgt start

Given that we’ll be running nova-compute on this machine as well, we’ll also need the openiscsi-client. Install it with:

apt-get install open-iscsi open-iscsi-utils

Next, we need to make sure that our network is working as expected. As pointed out earlier, the machine we’re doing this on has two network interfaces, eth0 and eth1. eth0 is the machine’s link to the outside world, eth1 is the interface we’ll be using for our virtual machines. We’ll also make nova bridge clients via eth0 into the internet. To achieve this kind of setup, first create the according network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces (assuming that you are not using NetworkManager). An example could look like this:

auto lo iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 10.42.0.6 network 10.42.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.42.0.255 gateway 10.42.0.1

auto eth1 iface eth1 inet static address 192.168.22.1 network 192.168.22.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.22.255

As you can see, the “public” network here is 10.42.0.0/24 while the “private” network (within which our VMs will be residing) is 192.168.22.0/24. This machine’s IP address in the public network is 10.42.0.6 and we’ll be using this IP in configuration files later on (except for when connecting to MySQL, which we’ll by connecting to 127.0.0.1). After changing your network interfaces definition accordingly, make sure that the bridge-utils package is installed. Should it be missing on your system, install it with

apt-get install bridge-utils

Then, restart your network with

/etc/init.d/networking restart

We’ll also need RabbitMQ, an AMQP-implementation, as that is what all OpenStack components use to communicate with eath other, and memcached.

apt-get install rabbitmq-server memcached python-memcache

As we’ll also want to run KVM virtual machines on this very same host, we’ll need KVM and libvirt, which OpenStack uses to control virtual machines. Install these packages with:

apt-get install kvm libvirt-bin

Last but not least, make sure you have an LVM volume group called nova-volumes; the nova-volume service will need such a VG later on.

Install MySQL and create the necessary databases and users

Nova and glance will use MySQL to store their runtime data. To make sure they can do that, we’ll install and set up MySQL. Do this:

apt-get install -y mysql-server python-mysqldb

When the package installation is done and you want other machines (read: OpenStack computing nodes) to be able to talk to that MySQL database, too, open up /etc/mysql/my.cnf in your favourite editor and change this line:

bind-address = 127.0.0.1

to look like this:

bind-address = 0.0.0.0

Then, restart MySQL:

service mysql restart

Now create the user accounts in mysql and grant them access on the according databases, which you need to create, too:

mysql -u root <
mysql -u root <
Install and configure Keystone
We can finally get to OpenStack now and we’ll start by installing the Identity component, codenamed Keystone. Install the according packages:
apt-get install keystone python-keystone python-keystoneclient
Then, open /etc/keystone/keystone.conf in an editor and make sure to set a value for admin_token. We’ll use “hastexo” in this example.
Scroll down to the section starting with [catalog]. This section defines where Keystone finds its endpoint defintions. In earlier versions of Keystone, endpoints had to be manually defined with keystone-manage, but in newer Keystone versions, we can just use a template for that. Ubuntu’s default configuration uses such an endpoint catalog stored in MySQL. However, according to the OpenStack developers, this isn’t the recommended method for Essex. Change the [catalog] section to look like this:
[catalog]

driver = keystone.catalog.backends.templated.TemplatedCatalog

template_file = /etc/keystone/default_catalog.templates
After you have conduced these changes, restart Keystone by issuing this command:
service keystone restart
The next step is to fill Keystone with actual data. You can use the script attached to this blog entry entitled keystone_data.sh_.txt. It’s courtesy of the Devstack project with some adaptions. Rename the file to keystone_data.sh. Be sure to replace the admin password (ADMIN_PASSWORD variable) and the value for SERVICE_TOKEN with the entry you specified in keystone.conf for admin_token earlier. Then just make the script executable and call it; if everything goes well, it should deliver a return code of 0 and your keystone is ready to go.

Download the file

Install and configure Glance

The next step on our way to OpenStack is its Image Service, codenamed Glance. First, install the packages necessary for it:

apt-get install glance glance-api glance-client glance-common glance-registry python-glance

When that is done, open /etc/glance/glance-api-paste.ini in an editor and scroll down to the end of the document. You’ll see these three lines at its very end:

admin_tenant_name = %SERVICE_TENANT_NAME%
admin_user = %SERVICE_USER%
admin_password = %SERVICE_PASSWORD%

Fill in values here appropriate for your setup. If you used the keystone_data.sh script from this site, then your admin_tenant_name will be admin and your admin_user will be admin, too. admin_password is the password you defined for ADMIN_PASSWORD in keystone_data.sh, so use the same value here, too. In this example, we’ll use hastexo.

After this, open /etc/glance/glance-registry-paste.ini and scroll to that file’s end, too. Adapt it in the same way you adapted /etc/glance/glance-api-paste.ini earlier.

Please open /etc/glance/glance-registry.conf now and scroll down to the line starting with sql_connection. This is where we tell Glance to use MySQL; according to the MySQL configuration we created earlier, the sql_connection-line for this example would look like this:

sql_connection = mysql://glancedbadmin:ohC3teiv@10.42.0.6/glance

It’s important to use the machine’s actual IP in this example and not 127.0.0.1! After this, scroll down until the end of the document and add these two lines:

[paste_deploy]
flavor = keystone

These two lines instruct the Glance Registry to use Keystone for authentication, which is what we want. Now we need to do the same for the Glance API. Open /etc/glance/glance-api.conf and add these two lines at the end of the document:

[paste_deploy]
flavor = keystone

Afterwards, you need to initially synchronize the Glance database by running these commands:

glance-manage version_control 0
glance-manage db_sync

It’s time to restart Glance now:

service glance-api restart && service glance-registry restart

Now what’s the best method to verify that Glance is working as expected? The glance command line utilty can do that for us, but to work properly, it needs to know how we want to authenticate ourselves to Glance (and keystone, subsequently). This is a very good moment to define four environmental variables that we’ll need continously when working with OpenStack: OS_TENANT_NAME, OS_USERNAME, OS_PASSWORD and OS_AUTH_URL. Here’s what they should look like in our example scenario:

export OS_TENANT_NAME=admin
export OS_USERNAME=admin
export OS_PASSWORD=hastexo
export OS_AUTH_URL="http://localhost:5000/v2.0/"

The first three entries are identical with what you inserted into Glance’s API configuration files earlier and the entry for OS_AUTH_URL is mostly generic and should just work. After exporting these variables, you should be able to do

glance index

and get no output at all in return (but the return code will be 0; check with echo $?). If that’s the case, Glance is setup correctly and properly connects with Keystone. Now let’s add our first image!

We’ll be using a Ubuntu UEC image for this. Download one:

wget http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/11.10/release/ubuntu-11.10-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img

Then add this image to Glance:

glance add name="Ubuntu 11.10 cloudimg amd64" is_public=true container_format=ovf disk_format=qcow2 < ubuntu-11.10-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img

After this, if you do

glance index

once more, you should be seeing the freshly added image.

Install and configure Nova

OpenStack Compute, codenamed Nova, is by far the most important and the most substantial openstack component. Whatever you do when it comes to managing VMs will be done by Nova in the background. The good news is: Nova is basically controlled by one configuration file, /etc/nova/nova.conf. Get started by installing all nova-related components:

apt-get install nova-api nova-cert nova-common nova-compute nova-compute-kvm nova-doc nova-network nova-objectstore nova-scheduler nova-vncproxy nova-volume python-nova python-novaclient

Then, open /etc/nova/nova.conf and replace everything in there with these lines:

--dhcpbridge_flagfile=/etc/nova/nova.conf
--dhcpbridge=/usr/bin/nova-dhcpbridge
--logdir=/var/log/nova
--state_path=/var/lib/nova
--lock_path=/var/lock/nova
--allow_admin_api=true
--use_deprecated_auth=false
--auth_strategy=keystone
--scheduler_driver=nova.scheduler.simple.SimpleScheduler
--s3_host=10.42.0.6
--ec2_host=10.42.0.6
--rabbit_host=10.42.0.6
--cc_host=10.42.0.6
--nova_url=http://10.42.0.6:8774/v1.1/
--routing_source_ip=10.42.0.6
--glance_api_servers=10.42.0.6:9292
--image_service=nova.image.glance.GlanceImageService
--iscsi_ip_prefix=192.168.22
--sql_connection=mysql://novadbadmin:dieD9Mie@10.42.0.6/nova
--ec2_url=http://10.42.0.6:8773/services/Cloud
--keystone_ec2_url=http://10.42.0.6:5000/v2.0/ec2tokens
--api_paste_config=/etc/nova/api-paste.ini
--libvirt_type=kvm
--libvirt_use_virtio_for_bridges=true
--start_guests_on_host_boot=true
--resume_guests_state_on_host_boot=true
--vnc_enabled=true
--vncproxy_url=http://10.42.0.6:6080
--vnc_console_proxy_url=http://10.42.0.6:6080
# network specific settings
--network_manager=nova.network.manager.FlatDHCPManager
--public_interface=eth0
--flat_interface=eth1
--flat_network_bridge=br100
--fixed_range=192.168.22.32/27
--floating_range=10.42.0.32/27 
--network_size=32
--flat_network_dhcp_start=192.168.22.33
--flat_injected=False
--force_dhcp_release
--iscsi_helper=tgtadm
--connection_type=libvirt
--root_helper=sudo nova-rootwrap
--verbose

As you can see, many of the entries in this file are self-explanatory; the trickiest bit to get done right is the network configuration part, which you can see at the end of the file. We’re using Nova’s FlatDHCP network mode; 192.168.22.32/27 is the fixed range from which our future VMs will get their IP adresses, starting with 192.168.22.33. Our flat interface is eth1 (nova-network will bridge this into a bridge named br100), our public interface is eth0. An additional floating range is defined at 10.42.0.32/27 (for those VMs that we want to have a ‘public IP’).

Attention: Every occurance of 10.42.0.6 in this file refers to the IP of the machine I used for writing this guide. You need to replace it with the actual machine IP of the box you are running this on. For example, if your machine has the local IP address 192.168.0.1, then use this IP instead of 10.42.0.6.

After saving nova.conf, open /etc/nova/api-paste.ini in an editor and scroll down to the end of the file. Adapt it according to the changes you conducted in Glance’s paste-files in step 3.

Then, restart all nova services to make the configuration file changes take effect:

for a in libvirt-bin nova-network nova-compute nova-api nova-objectstore nova-scheduler nova-volume nova-vncproxy; do service "$a" stop; done

for a in libvirt-bin nova-network nova-compute nova-api nova-objectstore nova-scheduler nova-volume nova-vncproxy; do service "$a" start; done

The next step will create all databases Nova needs in MySQL. While we are at it, we can also create the network we want to use for our VMs in the Nova databases. Do this:

nova-manage db sync

nova-manage network create private --fixed_range_v4=192.168.22.32/27 --num_networks=1 --bridge=br100 --bridge_interface=eth1 --network_size=32

Also, make sure that all files in /etc/nova belong to the nova user and the nova group:

chown -R nova:nova /etc/nova

Then, restart all nova-related services again:

for a in libvirt-bin nova-network nova-compute nova-api nova-objectstore nova-scheduler nova-volume nova-vncproxy; do service "$a" stop; done

for a in libvirt-bin nova-network nova-compute nova-api nova-objectstore nova-scheduler nova-volume nova-vncproxy; do service "$a" start; done

You should now see all these nova-* processes when doing ps auxw. And you should be able to use the numerous nova commands. For example,

nova list

should give you a list of all currently running VMs (none, the list should be empty). And

nova image-list

should show a list of the image you uploaded to Glance in the step before. If that’s the case, Nova is working as expected and you can carry on with starting your first VM.

Your first VM

Once Nova works as desired, starting your first own cloud VM is easy. As we’re using a Ubuntu image for this example which allows for SSH-key based login only, we first need to store a public SSH key for our admin user in the OpenStack database. Upload the file containing your SSH public key onto the server (i’ll assume the file is called id_dsa.pub) and do this:

nova keypair-add --pub_key id_rsa.pub key1

This will add the key to OpenStack Nova and store it with the name “key1″. The only thing left to do after this is firing up your VM. Find out what ID your Ubuntu image has, you can do this with:

nova image-list

When starting a VM, you also need to define the flavor it is supposed to use. Flavors are pre-defined hardware schemes in OpenStack with which you can define what resources your newly created VM has. OpenStack comes with five pre-defined flavors; you can get an overview over the existing flavors with

nova flavor-list

Flavors are referenced by their ID, not by their name. That’s important for the actual command to execute to start your VM. That command’s syntax basically is this:

nova boot --flavor ID --image Image-UUID --key_name key-name vm_name

So let’s assume you want to start a VM with the m1.tiny flavor, which has the ID 1. Let’s further assume that your image’s UUID in Glance is 9bab7ce7-7523-4d37-831f-c18fbc5cb543 and that you want to use the SSH key key1. Last but nut least, you want your new VM to have the name superfrobnicator. Here’s the command you would need to start that particular VM:

nova boot --flavor 1 --image 9bab7ce7-7523-4d37-831f-c18fbc5cb543 --key_name key1 superfrobnicator

After hitting the Enter key, Nova will show you a summary with all important details concerning the new VM. After some seconds, issue the command

nova show superfrobnicator

In the line with the private_network keyword, you’ll see the IP address that Nova has assigned this particular VM. As soon as the VMs status is ACTIVE, you should be able to log into that VM by issuing

ssh -i Private-Key ubuntu@IP

Of course Private-Key needs to be replaced with the path to your SSH private key and IP needs to be replaced with the VMs actual IP. If you’re using SSH agent forwarding, you can leave out the “-i”-parameter altogether.

The OpenStack Dashboard

We can use Nova to start and stop virtual machines now, but up to this point, we can only do it on the command line. That’s not good, because typically, we’ll want users without high-level administrator skills to be able to start new VMs. There’s a solution for this on the OpenStack ecosystem called Dashboard, codename Horizon. Horizon is OpenStack’s main configuration interface. It’s django-based.

Let’s get going with it:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi openstack-dashboard

Make sure that you install at least the version 2012.1~rc2-0ubuntu1 of the openstack-dashboard package as this version contains some important fixes that are necessary for Horizon to work properly.

Then, open /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings.py in an editor. Go to the line starting with CACHE_BACKEND and make sure it looks like this:

CACHE_BACKEND = 'memcached://127.0.0.1:11211/'

Now restart Apache with

service apache2 restart

After this, point your webbrowser to the Nova machine’s IP address and you should see the OpenStack Dashboard login prompt. Login with admin and the password you specified. That’s it – you’re in!

Making the euca2ools work

OpenStack offers a full-blown native API for administrator interaction. However, it also has an API compatible with Amazons AWS service. This means that on Linux you can not only use the native OpenStack clients for interaction but also the euca2ools toolsuite. Using euca2ools with keystone is possible. Large portions on how to do it are written down in this document. Here’s the short summary for those who are in a hurry:

export EC2_URL=$(keystone catalog --service ec2 | awk '/ publicURL / { print $4 }')
export CREDS=$(keystone ec2-credentials-create)
export EC2_ACCESS_KEY=$(echo "$CREDS" | awk '/ access / { print $4 }')
export EC2_SECRET_KEY=$(echo "$CREDS" | awk '/ secret / { print $4 }')

After that, the euca2ools should just work (if the euca2ools package is installed, of course). You can try running

euca-describe-images

euca-describe-instances

to find out whether it’s working or not.

Making nova-volume work

nova-volume is the OpenStack Compute component that will allow you to assign persistent storage devices to your virtual machines. Internally, it’s using iSCSI, which is why you installed the tgt package earlier.

Assuming that you have a local LVM volume group entitled nova-volumes, you can try assigning a 1G large volume to our superfrobnicator VM by using these commands to create a 1G large volume and assign it accordingly:

nova volume-create --display_name "volume1" 1
nova volume-attach superfrobnicator 1 /dev/vdb

Please take particular note of the parameter between superfrobnicator and /dev/vdb in this example. It refers to the actual ID of the volume. To find out a volume’s ID, you can do

nova volume-list

and then use the value from the “ID” field for a specific volume. If everything went well, you’ll see a new disk device in the superfrobnicator VM now, /dev/vdb.

Using floating IPs

Floating IPs are an unbelievably handy tool in OpenStack to supply your virtual machines with “official” IP addresses. In this example, we’ve mainly been dealing with the 192.168.22.0/24 network, which is the “internal” network for our VMs. Our VMs can communicate with each other and they can communicate with the outside world, but they don’t have an official IP address that others could connect to (the “public” net in this test-setup is 10.42.0.0/24 after all). Floating IPs allow you to assign your VMs an additional IP from that “public” network, making them accessible directly. And using floating IPs is anything but hard!

First, you’ll have to define a range of addresses which OpenStack nova will use. Our old friend nova-manage does this:

nova-manage floating create --ip_range=10.42.0.32/27

Then, within Nova itself, you’ll have to create a floating IP (creating here is Nova-speak for “reserving”):

nova floating-ip-create

This command will print out an IP address (in this example it’s 10.42.0.35) that you will need in the next step. To assign this IP to our superfrobnicator VM, use this command:

nova add-floating-ip superfrobnicator 10.42.0.35

Please note: Assigning a floating IP to an existing VM does automatically enable that IP for the VM. You’ll not have to manually assign the IP to the VMs main network interface, as all the networking magic is done by iptables on the actual compute node.

That’s it! Your new VM can now use its floating IP. There is only one problem left: By default, nova uses very secure iptables rules to protect IPs reachable via floating IPs from abuse. De facto, nova will not allow any traffic from the outside to get through to your VM. We’ll have to fiddle with Security Groups to solve this problem. Here’s how you can enable SSH access and ICMP to your floating IPs:

nova secgroup-add-rule default tcp 22 22 0.0.0.0/0
nova secgroup-add-rule default icmp -1 -1 0.0.0.0/0

After this, your VM will be reachable directly from the outside via its floating IP address (by SSH and ICMP).

http://ubuntulinux.co.in/blog/wp-admin/media.php?attachment_id=511&action=edit

Command for Listing all installed packages or software in Linux,Unix,MAC

sahab — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:45:12 +0000

Linux, Unix, MAC

Fedora,CentOS, Redhat

Type the following command to get list of all installed software

# rpm -qa | less

# yum list installed

Debian,Ubuntu

# dpkg --get-selections

Gentoo Linux

# qlist -I

SUSE Linux

# zypper -l

FreeBSD,OpenBSD, Solaris

# pkg_info | less

AIX

# lspp

MAC

# pkgutil --pkgs

CamScanner – Android phone can be document scanner too!!!

sahab — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:22:37 +0000

You can use you android device as a document scanner, with the help of an app called CamScanner. It is free Android app that converts your smartphone into a scanner and digitizes paper document using your samrtphone camera. The app also has features like cropping, image enhancement and the ability to create a PDF from your scanned files.

Camscanner also allows the user to upload documents to the cloud and manage them by tagging or searching. With this app, Android phone users can manage their written notes, business cards, memos and magazines at one place, and carry them anywhere.

With this app, user can can also backup their files to an SD card, so that they can be restored at any time. The app can reduce file size of PDFs and other files.

Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) New Features

sahab — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:01:30 +0000

Ubuntu 12.04 is a particularly important iteration of Canonical’s Linux distribution. Just one more beta version of the free and open source software is scheduled–with an arrival date of March 29–before the launch of the final release on April 26.

“The team has been hard at work throughout this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs,” wrote Kate Stewart, Canonical’s Ubuntu Release Manager, in an announcement on Thursday.

Among the new changes included in this first beta version are a feature enabling considerable power savings and a new CD image size of 703MB “to squeeze in every bit of package goodness we can on the installation CD images,” Stewart added.

Designed for testing purposes, Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 can now be downloaded from the project’s site. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the release’s key highlights.

1. A Taste of HUD

As hinted by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth in late January, Ubuntu’s new “Head-Up Display,” or “HUD,” interface makes its debut in this beta version. Dubbed as “a new way to quickly search and access any desktop application’s and indicator’s menu,” HUD can be accessed by pressing the Alt key and typing in a description of what you want to do. The software will then return a set of corresponding entries, including some fuzzy matching, the project team says. Over time, it also learns from your previous choices to make the search more and more accurate, they note.

2. Unity Tweaks

Ubuntu’s Unity interface has been nothing if not controversial, but in this new release, the “Appearance” panel in the software’s system settings lets you more easily configure some properties of Unity. For bookmark users, the Unity launcher now also includes Nautilus quicklist support.

3. ClickPad Support

Ubuntu 12.04 now includes support for ClickPads, or trackpads on which the physical button is integrated into the trackpad surface. Most Synaptics ClickPads are recognized out of the box in this new release, as are Apple MacBook trackpads. Coming in Ubuntu’s next release will be support for Apple Magic Trackpads and more Synaptics brand devices, the Ubuntu team says.

4. Power Savings

For the aforementioned power savings, RC6–the technology that allows GPUs to go into a very low power consumption state when the GPU is idle–is now enabled by default for Sandy Bridge systems. The result can be improvements of between 40 and 60 percent in power usage under idle loads, the developers say.

5. LibreOffice 3.5 and Rhythmbox

Among the default applications in Ubuntu 12.04 are the newly updated LibreOffice 3.5 as well as Rhythmbox as the default music player.

6. Better Language Support

When users install new software through the Ubuntu Software Center, the corresponding language support packages–including translations and spell check modules–are now installed automatically as well, thus eliminating the need to open “Language Support” after installing new software.

7. A Fresh Kernel

Finally, upgrading from the second alpha release of Precise Pangolin, this new beta version includes the 3.2.0-17.27 Ubuntu kernel, which is based on version 3.2.6 of the upstream stable Linux kernel.

Amanda backup setup and configuration using Virtual Tape in Fedora

sahab — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:21:58 +0000

This document describes the steps to be followed to amanda backup setup configuration using virtual tape. As of date, the current stable version of Amanda is 3.3.0.

AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers or disks or optical media. Amanda uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix.

This will guide you through setting up virtual tapes (utilize hard disk space for backups)

Here we are using Fedora 14 as Amanda server – backup.server.com (hostname)

and amanda client is an ubuntu desktop machine – backup.client.com (hostname)

Fedora we have installed using minimal packages and not installed the default amanda software with send mail server. Download the amanda latest version 3.3.0 stable version

Step 1

Open the terminal

#wget -c http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/amanda/amanda-3.3.0.tar.gz?download

#tar -xvzf amanda-3.3.0.tar.gz

#cd amanda-3.3.0

#./configure

#make

#make check

We get error when we missed any packages and libraries.

#make install

Step 2

The Amanda services are started by the extended internet daemon, xinetd, which is why you must have xinetd installed on every Amanda server and client. In any text editor, create one xinetd startup file, /etc/xinetd.d/amandaserver

If you have not already installed xinetd, install it

# yum install xinetd

Create an amanda xinetd entry

# vim etc/xinetd.d/amandaserver

Give it the following contents

Code:

# default: on
#
# description: Amanda services for Amanda server and client.
#
service amanda
{
        disable          = no
        socket_type  = stream
        protocol        = tcp
        wait             = no
        user               = amandabackup
        group          = disk
        groups         = yes
        server          = /usr/lib/amanda/amandad
        server_args   = -auth=bsdtcp amdump amindexd amidxtaped
}

Restart xinetd

# /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Become amandabackup user

# su amandabackup
Create copies of the configuration files, just in case

$cp -r /etc/amanda/DailySet1 /etc/amanda/DailySet1.bak

Step 3

Edit amanda.conf

$ vim /etc/amanda/DailySet1/amanda.conf

Make the following changes in the file

Code:

Make the following changes in the file
Code:
      org “DailySet1″                                                 # your organization name for reports
      mailto “backupadmin@yourdomain.com”   # space separated list of operators at your site
      dumpuser “amandabackup”
      tpchanger “chg-disk”                                       # the tape-changer glue script
      tapedev “file:/amandabackup/DailySet1/slots”   # the no-rewind tape device to be used
      tapetype HARDDISK

define dumptype global {
      comment “Global definitions”
       auth “bsdtcp”
}
define dumptype gui-base {
       global
       program “GNUTAR”
       comment “gui base dumptype dumped with tar”
       compress none
       index yes
}
define tapetype HARDDISK {
length 100000 mbytes
}

#Add the following lines to support the encrypted backup

define dumptype client-encrypt-ossl {
        global
        program “GNUTAR”
        comment “no compression and client symmetric encryption with OpenSSL”
        compress none
        encrypt client
        client_encrypt “/usr/sbin/amcrypt-ossl”
        client_decrypt_option “-d”
    }

Step 4

Choose a location for your virtual tapes to reside. Here we using /amandabackups/ Create the tapelist file that is necessary for indexing tapes available
Code:

#touch /etc/amanda/DailySet1/tapelist

create the location and set permissions for the virtual tapes
Code:

#mkdir -p -m 770 /amandabackup/DailySet1/slots

#chown -R backup:backup /amdndahosts

CD to the new directory from amandabackup user

$cd /amandabackup/DailySet1/slots

Create the necessary directories for the tapes
Code:

$for ((i=1; $i<=25; i++)); do mkdir slot$i; done

Create symlink for the data directory to point to the first tape
Code:

$ln -s slot1 data

Label the tapes

for ((i=1; $i<=9; i++)); do amlabel DailySet1 DailySet?1$i slot $i; done

for ((i=10; $i<=25; i++)); do amlabel DailySet1 DailySet1$i slot $i; done

Output should look like (for each slot)

labeling tape in slot 1 (file:/amandabackup/DailySet1/slots)
rewinding, reading label, not an amanda tape
rewinding, writing label DailySet?1-01, checking label, done.

Reset the changer back to slot 1

amtape DailySet1 reset

Output should look like

amtape: changer is reset, slot 1 is loaded.

Create below directory for Amanda log files

#mkdir -p /usr/adm/amanda
#chown amandabackup:disk /usr/adm/amanda

Step 6

Edit .amandahosts “ backup.server.com” /var/lib/amanda/.amandahosts file to allow the backup clients to connect back to the server when doing restores. Specify fully qualified domain names

On the .amandahosts file is located as /var/lib/amanda/.amandahosts

Open the file

vim /var/lib/amanda/.amandahosts

The file looks like

backup.server.com root amindexd amidxtaped

backup.server.com amandabackup amindexd amidxtaped

backup.client.com root amindexd amidxtaped
backup.server.com amandabackup admump

Step 6

Create an /etc/amanda/DailySet1/disklist file in the Amanda configuration directory

The format for the disklist file is :

Dumptypes are deinfed in /etc/amanda/amanda.conf, but we using the GNUTAR dumptype comp-user-tar for this example

vim /etc/amanda/DailySet1/disklist

Add a line like so

Code:

backup.client.com /var/www/html comp-user-tar

backup.client.com /home / encrypt-simple

backup.server.com /etc comp-user-tar

Amanda Client Setup

Here We are using two clients one is backup.client.com and another one is the same amdanda server backup.server.com

Install AMANDA client

Install the AMANDA client app

Step 1

$sudo apt-get install amanda-client

Create necessary amanda directory ( It is not needed for the server ubuntulinux.co.in)

$sudo mkdir -p -m 770 /etc/amanda

Change owner

$sudo chown -R amandabackup:amandabackup /etc/amanda

Step 2

Become the amandabackup user

$su amandabackup

Create an excludes file

touch /etc/amanda/exclude.gtar

Edit /etc/amandahosts to allow server to connect to client machine for backups

localhost amandabackup

backup.client.com amandabackup

backup.server.com amandabackup

Step 3

Create xinetd amanda entry

sudo vim /etc/xinetd.d/amanda

Edit the file, mine looks like

# default: on

# description: Amanda services for Amanda client.

service amanda

{

bind = backup.client.com

socket_type = dgram

protocol = udp

wait = yes

user = amandabackup

group = amandabackup

groups = yes

server = /usr/lib/amanda/amandad

server_args = -auth=bsd amdump

disable = no

}

Restart xinetd

$sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Edit /etc/services to look like

# Amanda Services

amanda 10080/udp

amanda 10080/tcp

kamanda 10081/udp

kamanda 10081/tcp

amandaidx 10082/tcp

amidxtape 10083/tcp

Make sure your /etc/inetd.conf looks like

amanda dgram udp wait backup /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/lib/amanda/amandad

Step 4

Verify the Configuration, Run amcheck on Server to verify configuration files, connections, etc lgoin as amandabackup user

Code:

$amcheck DailySet1

Output looks like

$amcheck DailySet1
Amanda Tape Server Host Check
—————————–
found in slot 1: volume ‘DailySet1-01′
slot 1: volume ‘DailySet1-01′
Will write to volume ‘DailySet1-01′ in slot 1.
NOTE: skipping tape-writable test
NOTE: conf info dir /usr/adm/amanda/curinfo does not exist
NOTE: it will be created on the next run.
NOTE: index dir /usr/adm/amanda/index does not exist
NOTE: it will be created on the next run.
Server check took 0.972 seconds

Amanda Backup Client Hosts Check
——————————–
Client check: 1 host checked in 7.147 seconds. 0 problems found.

(brought to you by Amanda 3.3.0)

Amanda backup

$ amdump DailySet1 à Dump the give server files and alert mail will send to backupadmin@yourdomain.com

$ amtape DailySet1 show
amtape: scanning all 15 slots in changer:
slot   1: date 20111002092634 label DailySet1-01 à last backup date
slot   2: date X              label DailySet1-02
slot   3: date X              label DailySet1-03
slot   4: date X              label DailySet1-04
slot   5: date X              label DailySet1-05
slot   6: date X              label DailySet1-06
slot   7: date X              label DailySet1-07
slot   8: date X              label DailySet1-08
slot   9: date X              label DailySet1-09
slot 10: date X              label DailySet1-010
slot 11: date X              label DailySet1-011
slot 12: date X              label DailySet1-012
slot 13: date X              label DailySet1-013
slot 14: date X              label DailySet1-014
slot 15: date X              label DailySet1-015Amrecover

amrecover – Recover the files from backup

Amrecover browses the database of Amanda index files to determine which tapes contain files to recover. Furthermore, it is able to recover files.

In order to restore files in place, you must invoke amrecover from the root of the backed up filesystem, or use lcd to move into that directory, otherwise a directory tree that resembles the backed up filesystem will be created in the current directory. See the examples below for details.

Amrecover should be run as root user.

Amrecover will the read the amanda-client.conf file and the config/amanda-client.conf file. If no configuration name is supplied on the command line, Amrecover will try the compiled-in default configuration, usually DailySet 1.

Edit the following lines in amanda-client.conf

conf DailySet1 # your config name

index_server backup.server.com # your amindexd server

tape_server backup.server.com # your amidxtaped server

tapedev file:/amandabackup/DailySet1/slots # your tape device

Example

amrecover> listhost

200- List hosts for config DailySet1

201- 10.132.100.56

200 List hosts for config DailySet1

amrecover> sethost 10.132.100.56

200 Dump host set to 10.132.100.56.

amrecover> list disk

Extract list written to file disk

amrecover> setdisk /home/user/Desktop/var /tmp

200 Disk set to /home/user/Desktop/var.

amrecover> ls

2011-09-21-19-18-44 test3

2011-09-21-19-18-44 test2

2011-09-21-19-18-44 test1

2011-09-21-19-18-44 .

amrecover> listdisk

200- List of disk for host 10.132.100.56

201- /home/user/Desktop/var

200 List of disk for host 10.132.100.56

amrecover> lpwd

/root/old

amrecover> add test2

Added file /test2

amrecover> extract

Extracting files using tape drive changer on host localhost.

The following tapes are needed: DailySet1-01

Extracting files using tape drive changer on host localhost.

Load tape DailySet1-01 now

Continue [?/Y/n/s/d]? y

Restoring files into directory /root/old

All existing files in /root/old can be deleted

Continue [?/Y/n]? y

./test2

amrecover> ls

2011-09-21-19-18-44 test3

2011-09-21-19-18-44 test2

2011-09-21-19-18-44 test1

2011-09-21-19-18-44 .

amrecover> exit

200 Good bye.

The world’s first Android 4.0 smart TV

sahab — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:05:10 +0000

Lenovo has unveiled the words’s first Android 4.0 smart TV at CES 2012. What is interesting is that Lenovo’s k9 runs on Android 4.0, not Google TV. The company claims that it has wrapped a new ‘smart UI’ around Andrpid 4.0 in the k9.

With this offering, the company aims to bring features like video-on-demand, Web apps and of course, TV programms. The Lenovo k91 smart TV runs on a 1.5 GHZ Qualcomm 8060 SnapDragon processor, which is likely to be fast enough to play1080P movies and to run casual games.

Lenovo has given the k9 is a pretty decent design, but it still does not seem to be competing with the televisions offered by Samsung or LG. The company has used a 139.7 CM (55 inch) IPS LCD display, which is likely to reproduce great colours at wide viewing angles.

Ubuntu 12.04 alpha release

sahab — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:09:07 +0000

Canonical has released the first alpha build of Ubuntu 12.04, dubbed “Precise Pangolin,” and the organization said that the latest version would be a long term support (LTS) release.

Version 12.04, available for x86 and 64-bit platforms, is based around the Linux kernel 3.2 release, and a lot of work has gone into bugfixing around this for Ubuntu’s code, including problems with how it interacts with Intel’s Sandy Bridge and Centrino hardware. The code also includes version 9 of both Firefox and Thunderbird from Mozilla.

Download ubuntu 12.04