Howto Ubuntu

Notes about installing and setup of various apps and features in Ubuntu

• Apache
  • Apache:configuration
  • Secure directories under Apache (htaccess style)

• Mediawiki
• Mysql
• Trac

• ssh with a private-public key
• SVN - Subversion
• simpleproxy - Simple TCP proxy for linux
• VirtualBox

• Emacs - some of my favoritre customizations
• SciTe / Scintilla - the lightweight programmers editor
• OpenOffice
• Grep - grep and egrep usage tips

• Octave (MatLab alternative)

• XMMS setup for Ubuntu 8.04 and up - from source
  • XMMS setup for Ubuntu Hardy - from deb.

• Ubuntu setup
  • Users and permissions in Linux / Ubuntu

Other nice external links and howto-s

Mass search and replace in files (with sed)

for i in $(find . -type f); do sed 's/oldstring/newstring/g' $i > $i-tmp; mv $i $i-backup; mv $i-tmp $i; done

Mass file rename

Replace spaces with underscores in all file names of the directory. then rename *.JPG to *.jpg

rename 's/ /_/g' *
rename 's/.JPG/.jpg/g' *

DV/Firewire for Ubuntu

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Firewire

Tunneling to socks proxy

ssh-tunnel-socks-proxy

In short:
$ssh -D 9999 username@ip-address-of-ssh-server
Then set in Firefox to use a SOCKS proxy: “localhost", port 9999

Acroread on Ubuntu

The link.

Check the ports and apps listening on them

netstat -lnptu

Listing members of a group

I.e., the opposite to the command 'groups myuser'

sudo apt-get install members     [if needed]
members groupname

Custom autocomplete in Ubuntu

It is nice to use TAB key to autocomlete path for example, for a ls command in bash. It turns out, you can also autocomplete certain command arguments, e.g. apt-get inst<TAB> expands to apt-get install. Even better, you can define your own completion rules for other commands and applications.

Read more on "howto" here: part 1 and part 2

Create your own apt-get repositories

The link.

A short example:

Get the tools

sudo aptitude install dpkg-dev

Create the repository structure. You can use any other location accessible from the web.

cd ~/public_html
mkdir my-repository
cd my-repository
mkdir binary
mkdir source

Copy your deb packages to your repository

cp src/bzr_0.11-1.1_all.deb public_html/my-repository/binary/

Create a repository index

cd my-repository
dpkg-scanpackages binary /dev/null | gzip -9c > binary/Packages.gz
dpkg-scansources source /dev/null | gzip -9c > source/Sources.gz

Using the repository. Add these two lines into the /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://example.com/~myuser/my-repository binary/
deb-src http://example.com/~myuser/my-repository source/

Optionally, add the security key. Read about it elsewhere...

Kill-ing a process for sure

The link.

In short, ways to kill in the order of fierceness:

ps aux | grep gaim
kill 1234
pkill gaim
sudo kill 1234
kill -1 1234
kill -2 1234
kill -9 1234
killall gaim
killall -9 gaim