Recover Deleted Files From An NTFS Volume Using Ntfsundelete

Ntfsundelete is a part of ntfsprogs, a suite of NTFS utilities based around a shared library. It lets us recover the deleted files from any NTFS volumes without making any changes in the NTFS volume itself.

Generally when a file is deleted from disks, it is some kind of pointer to the physical file that gets deleted and the actual content still remains in the disk unless it is overwritten by new files so it is possible to recover those files.

ntfsundelete has three modes of operation: scan, undelete and copy. By default, it will run in the scan mode which simply reads an NTFS volume and looks for the files that have been deleted.



To use ntfsundelete, you'll have to install the ntfsprogs suite with following command in ubuntu and debian-based distros:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

You'll have to first figure out which drive you want to recover. A handy command for this is:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Once you know the NTFS volume you want to recover, you can first run the scan mode to list the filenames that can be recovered.

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda4

The optional -f switch can be specified for the forceful scanning. There is a nice percentage field which gives the information on how much of the file can be recovered. You can apply the time and percentage filters to scan specific files. For example, you can use the following command to search for the files which can be recovered 100%

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo ntfsundelete -p 100 /dev/sda4

And, you can apply the time filter to list the files altered/deleted after the specified time. For example, following command will scan and list the files deleted in the last 14 days.

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo ntfsundelete -p 100 -t 2d /dev/sda4

Other suffices you can use are d, w, m, y for days, weeks, months or years ago respectively.

Once you get the files to be recovered, you can use the -u switch to undelete or recover the files. An example of recovering files by pattern matching is as below:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo ntfsundelete -u -m *.jpg /dev/sda4

Similarly you can recover by providing inode or inodes range using the -i switch. You can get the inode values from the first column in the scan mode.

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo ntfsundelete -u -i 161922 /dev/sda4

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Graphical Frontends To Sopcast Client For Linux

As all of you know the official Sopcast client for linux is only the command line version and many people find it difficult to use the CLI version. However, many good people have made an effort to write the graphical frontends to the Sopcast client for linux. Here you will find some of such GUI frontends for sopcast.

Sopcast Player: SopCast Player is designed to be an easy to use Linux GUI front-end for the p2p streaming technology developed by SopCast. SopCast Player features an integrated video player, a channel guide, and bookmarks. Once SopCast Player is installed it simply "just works" with no required configuration.

qsopcast: qsopcast is a QT GUI front-end of the Linux command line executive of P2P TV sopcast.

gsopcast: gsopcast is a GTK based GUI front-end for p2p TV sopcast.

TV-Maxe: TV-MAXE is an application which provides the ability to watch TV stations and listen radio via different streams, such is SopCast. Currently it has a large number of channels, both romanian and international.

SCPlayer: SCPlayer is a simple and lightweight GUI frontend for sopcast supporting only linux GNOME3 platform.

Pysopcast: It is a simple GUI for sopcast made using PyGTK.

totem-sopcast: A totem plugin to let you browse and play sopcast streams.

wxsopcast: A sopcast GUI for linux written in python and wxPython. Note that the channel URL needs to be changed to http://www.sopcast.com/gchlxml at first.

jsopcast: jsopcast is a simple GUI to see P2P TV sopcast made in Java.

If you know of any other GUI frontend for sopcast, please feel free to leave a comment. :)


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Sopcast Player With GUI In Linux

SopCast is a simple, free way to broadcast video and audio or watch the video and listen to radio on the Internet. Adopting P2P(Peer-to-Peer) technology, It is very efficient and easy to use. The GUI for sopcast player for linux works pretty well and this post gives you the step by step process of installation of sopcast player in linux.



Follow the steps as below for easy installation under ubuntu. Instructions should be similar in many variants:

samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop$ su

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/# mkdir sopcast && cd sopcast/

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# wget http://www.sopcast.com/download/libstdcpp5.tgz

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# wget http://sopcast-player.googlecode.com/files/sp-auth-3.2.6.tar.gz

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# wget http://sopcast-player.googlecode.com/files/sopcast-player-0.8.5.tar.gz

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# tar -xvf sopcast-player-0.8.5.tar.gz

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# tar -xvf sp-auth-3.2.6.tar.gz

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# tar -xvf libstdcpp5.tgz

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# apt-get install gettext python-setuptools libvlc-dev

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# cd sopcast-player

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# make

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# make install

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# cd ../sp-auth

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast/sp-auth# cp sp-sc-auth /usr/bin/

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast# cd ../usr/lib/

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast/usr/lib/# cp -a libstdc++.so.5* /usr/lib/

root@Techgaun:/home/samar/Desktop/sopcast/usr/lib/# sopcast-player

Now everything should work fine. I hope this helps. :)


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Now NTC Hosts Ubuntu Repository For Nepal

As most of the ubuntu users know that the previous nepali repository hosted by Mitra Network Pvt. Ltd. had lots of problem in packages and later went down for a long time. This time, it is NTC who has taken a good initiative and has started providing local ubuntu repository for us.

As seen on foss nepal's mailing list, everybody seems to be happy with the effort of NTC to promote linux and open source software tools in Nepal.

The np.archive.ubuntu.com is now resolving to ubuntu.ntc.net.np now. You can edit your sources.list and choose the nepali repository now. :)

Also, lots of ubuntu distros are available for download. See THIS. Now I can download ubuntu ISO's in around one or two minutes(Thanks NPIX for keeping local traffic local)

In case anyone wants my copy of sources.list file, here it is: sources.list or get it from HERE in case you hate registering on 4shared.

Once you copy the sources.list to /etc/apt/sources.list, make sure to run sudo apt-get update to update the package database.


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Accelerate Download Speed In Linux Using Axel

Axel is a lightweight command line download accelerator for linux. Axel is a program that downloads a file from a FTP or HTTP server through multiple connection, each connection downloads its own part of the file.

Unlike most other programs, Axel downloads all the data directly to the destination file, using one single thread. It just saves some time at the end because the program doesn't have to concatenate all the downloaded parts.

Axel tries to accelerate downloads by using multiple connections (possibly to multiple servers) for one download. Because of its size, it might be very useful on bootdisks or other small systems as a wget replacement.

One useful implementation of axel is in the apt-fast tool, a fusion of apt-get and axel to accelerate downloads of packages.

Installation under ubuntu and other debian distros: Open the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install axel

Similarly, a graphical frontend axel-kapt is also available for download for GUI lovers. Also, flashgot plugin for firefox lets you make use of axel to download files. I should say, axel is a small yet good download accelerator for linux systems.


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Setting Up Ncell Connect In Linux

Today I got a NCELL Connect device from my junior friend and did a quick PPP setup on linux. Later thought that this would be useful for other guys who use ubuntu(thats what I'm using) and other distros and hence am posting the steps on setting up Ncell connect in linux.

1. Install wvdial. Wvdial is a dialer that lets you to make a PPP connection in order to connect to the internet. Fire up the terminal and run the following command:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install wvdial

Optionally you could also install gnome-ppp(sudo apt-get install gnome-ppp) for GUI but wvdial does all the job.

2. Edit the /etc/wvdial.conf, the configuration file for wvdial which requires appropriate setting for NCell connect and replace all the text with following data.

[Dialer Defaults]
Stupid Mode = 1
Modem Type = Analog Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Username = web
Dial Command = ATDT
Password = web
Baud = 460800
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0

In the above process, you can run the wvdialconf command to see if your Huawei card is being detected. The Modem = line may require appropriate value.




3. While your device is plugged in, type the following command and note the line containing huawei.

samar@Techgaun:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 12d1:1446 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E1552 (HSPA modem)
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0408:03f1 Quanta Computer, Inc.
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 138a:0005 DigitalPersona, Inc
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 025: ID 04f3:0210 Elan Microelectronics Corp. AM-400 Hama Optical Mouse
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0020 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

We are concerned with the vendor and product id. In the above information, 12d1 is the vendor ID and 1446 is the product id. Now perform the following in the terminal:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1446

4. Now we must be all good. All we have to do is dial the connection. Type the following in the terminal:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo wvdial

If everything is fine, your connection will be successful showing the information such as IP address and primary and secondary DNS information. I hope this helps. Enjoy the NCELL connect in linux :)


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How To Disable Password Prompts For sudo In Ubuntu

If you are one of those linux users who very frequently use the sudo command, you might have been annoyed of entering passwords each time you use this command. However with a very simple tweak, you can change this behaviour and disable the password prompts for the sudo command.

A bit of warning though, do not modify the default behavior of asking for passwords since it would drastically compromise security of your system. Following is the warning given by ubuntu help.

If you disable the sudo password for your account, you will seriously compromise the security of your computer. Anyone sitting at your unattended, logged in account will have complete Root access, and remote exploits become much easier for malicious crackers.

Now you are aware of warning, lets see how this can be done.We need to edit the /etc/sudoers file. Lets first open the file in safe editable mode using the following command:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo visudo

Using visudo for editing the /etc/sudoers lets us locate the possible errors that may occur while editing the file so always use visudo.

Following is the format of disabling password prompts for specific user.

<username> ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

So if we are to disable password prompts for the user samar, you can make a new line with following entry:

samar ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD: ALL

In case you want to let all the users with admin privilege use the sudo command without having to give the password, you can edit the line that says %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL to the following:

%admin ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD: ALL

Once you add such line for appropriate user, press Ctrl + x and save the changes. You will either have to log out and login back or restart the shell to see the modification in effect.

I hope this is useful. :)


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How To Fix NTFS Disk Partition From Linux

If you have problematic NTFS partition in your hard disk, you can fix many of the common NTFS inconsistencies from linux. Linux consists of a set of tools that allow you to manipulate and perform different types of actions on the NTFS partitions. This package is known as ntfsprogs.

If your linux distribution does not consist of the ntfsprogs package, you can install it by using the package manager tool that comes in your distribution or from command line. Debian and ubuntu users can type the following command:

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Now to fix the NTFS drive, we must first determine the partition we want to fix. We can use the simplest one, the fdisk utility to determine the partition of hard disk we want to fix. Type the following command to view the list of partitions:

sudo fdisk -l

If you have more than one HDDs and want to view partitions of specific HDD, you can always do so by issuing the commands such as sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda or sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb and so on.

Now lets suppose its /dev/sdb5 we need to fix. We can now use the ntfsfix command that comes in the ntfsprogs package.

sudo ntfsprogs /dev/sdb5

Note that it only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows. You may run ntfsfix on an NTFS volume if you think it was damaged by Windows or some other way and it cannot be mounted.


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Determine Directory Size From Terminal In Linux [How To]

Sometimes you are working on command line and you want to find the total size of any directory. An instance is while working over SSh. Here is a technique on how you can determine the size of any directory from terminal.

du command lets us estimate the file space usage and can be recursively used for directories as well. This command can also be useful if you want to find the folder sizes of each subdirectories in any specified directory, something that would have been hard to achieve from the GUI.

To find the total size of a directory, use the -sch switch as below:

samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop/samar$ du -sch directory_name

The screenshot below will help you understand more clearly:

If you would like to see some more details like the size of each subdirectory, use the -hc switch as below:

samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop/samar$ du -hc directory_name

Check the screenshot below:

The du command provides more advanced stuffs such as exclusions of files and directories and depths for determining size. I hope this helps you. :)


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Delete All X-Chat Logs From Ubuntu

If you want to clear all the channel and personal chat logs from the X-Chat, this is a small piece of information on how to do that. In this example, I am showing how to delete the X-chat log in ubuntu and similar distributions.

Well I connect to IRC channels so often using X-chat gnome client that my chat windows are usually filled up with older chats. Also, for some unknown reason, unchecking Log Conversations checkbox in the Edit - Preferences is not working for me. And I usually hate the old chat logs coming up and of course, due to privacy concerns, I regularly delete the channel logs of X-Chat. All the chat logs in x-chat2 are recorded in the ~/.xchat2/scrollback/ folder with network names as the sub folders. So to delete the logs, all you have to do is use the rm command as below:

rm -rf ~/.xchat2/scrollback/*

This will delete all the chat logs but in case you want to delete logs of specific networks or channel or user, just navigate to the scrollback directory and choose the network you wish to delete and issue the rm command for that network.

*Note: This little FYI guide was written by taking the version I've as the reference. Your version could even have the option for clearing the logs but I'm not aware of any such functionality in my version. I hope this helps :)


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5 Cool and Useful Linux Command Line Tricks

Well using linux is fun and working on linux terminal is even more fun. Learning to use linux terminal and commands can prove very useful for personal as well as enterprise purpose. Today I'm going to talk about few cool and crazy linux commands that are less likely to be known by the average computer user.

1) The !$ trick: The !$ is a type of event designator that is present in bash as the feature. I'm not sure if other shells support it but bash does, for sure(I heard event designators are bash-specific). Anyway, !$ saves the last string from the previous command you've entered. The session in bash below shows what it actually does:

samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop$ mkdir test
samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop$ cd !$
cd test
samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop/test$

So when we give the mkdir test command, the !$ holds the value test So when we do cd !$, !$ is replaced by the string test which is the last string in last entered command.

2) The Don't Save This Command trick: Prepending your command with one or more space(<space>command) will not save the command in the bash history. This trick can be quite useful while doing password related stuffs and while sneaking in your friend's laptop.

3) The Oh! I forgot sudo trick: Well this is one of my favorite tricks and I named it so because I tend to forget to put sudo while running many commands and then I use this trick to prepend sudo at the beginning of the command. Below is the session when I used this trick recently.

samar@Techgaun:~$ cat /etc/sudoers
cat: /etc/sudoers: Permission denied
samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo !!
sudo cat /etc/sudoers
[sudo] password for samar:

*** Content Snipped to preserve length ***

As shown above, the !! is just another event designator. The !! actually holds the last used command and this can be alternatively specified as !-1. The !-1 version can be actually generalized to traverse back to history i.e. you can get any command in your history by using !-n convention.

4) The Clean up Terminal trick: Sometimes you open the binary and gibberish data and your terminal looks so ugly and needs some cleanup. In such cases, the command reset can be used which actually does is initialize the terminal.

5) Run previous command by replacing one string with another: Using the syntax ^abc^xyz^, you can run the previous command by replacing the string abc by the string xyz. The example below shows how I used the cat command after using the ls command. Its just an example, you could really make use of this trick for longer commands.

samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop$ ls /etc/hosts
/etc/hosts
samar@Techgaun:~/Desktop$ ^ls^cat^
cat /etc/hosts

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Determine All Internet Connections And Corresponding Running Processes In Linux [How To]

Sometimes you might want to see all the internet connections being made by the running processes in the linux system. I am writing this small commandline trick to view all the internet connections using the lsof command.

lsof command is used to all the open files and the processes opening those files. All kind of resources such as disk, network connections, pipes, etc. are actually implemented as files in linux and the lsof command allows you to get the report regarding the opened files.

To view all the internet connections and the corresponding processes, we can simply use the -i switch as below:

samar@Techgaun:~$ lsof -i

The above command runs fine but is a little bit slow since it tries to resolve the network addresses to host names and port numbers to port names. So you might wish to use the command below for faster response from the lsof command.

samar@Techgaun:~$ lsof -i -Pn

Also, running the lsof command as the root(i.e. sudo lsof | grep -i listen or sudo lsof -i | grep -i listen) will give more extra outputs esp. the "LISTEN" ones i.e. the processes that are listening for incoming connections. This piece of information might be useful in determining the backdoors and rootkits but I've not yet explored into that.

I hope this little trick comes useful sometimes.


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Adding Regular User To Sudoers File In Linux

Hi everybody, this time I am writing about the different command line methods of adding regular user to the sudoers file in linux or in more obvious way, giving access to root privilege to certain regular users. The sudoers file(located at /etc/sudoers by default[in my distro i.e. ubuntu]) contains the information of groups and users who can execute commands with root privilege. I'll list 3 ways of adding users to the sudoers list so continue reading the post.

Method 1
The first way is to use the usermod command to append the user to the admin group. Since the admin group has the privilege of executing commands with sudo privilege, adding the user to the admin group is one easy way to add regular user to the sudoers file. The example command is as below(Replace user with the proper username which you want to add to sudoers list):

sudo usermod -a -G admin user

Method 2
This method is similar as above however the command is adduser this time and the command is even more simpler to remember. Just specify the respective user to be added to the admin group as below:

sudo adduser user admin

Method 3
The last method I'm writing about is the safe way of editing sudoers files. Linux advises to use visudo command to edit /etc/sudoers so that possible errors while writing in sudoers file can be avoided. Typing just visudo would open the /etc/sudoers file for editing, and in case, if you want to edit sudoer file in alternate location, type visudo -f sudoer_with_path. Anyway, to add new user to the default sudoers file, type sudo visudo and add the line as below(Replace user with the proper username to whom you want to give sudo privilege) at the end of file:

user ALL = (ALL) ALL

I hope these methods come useful for you.


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Useful Aliases To Make Things Easier In Linux

In this post we will see some of the useful aliases that I have made to work faster while I'm working in my system. From that, you can figure out such useful aliases for yourself. With this little customization, you will find so much ease and speed in doing different tasks you need to perform repeatedly.


Either you are a regular linux user or system administrator or tech-geek, you will want to make use of alias to makes several things shorter and easier.

Temporary aliases can be created using the alias command in the terminal. So to test the aliases I've posted below, you can type them in the terminal to see the effect temporarily. If you want to make aliases permanent, you can edit ~/.bashrc file and add those aliases inside this file. Even better, to separate aliases from the .bashrc file, you can put all your aliases by creating a new file ~/.bash_aliases and paste all your aliases in this file. Either way, you'll achieve the permanent aliases for yourself and you'll be finding things going easy and fast for you.

Quick Directory Jumps

alias www='cd /opt/lampp/htdocs/' #Navigating to my web root using www command(actually alias)
alias moviez='cd /samar/data/gallery/movies/' #Navigating to my movies folder by typing moviez

Getting out from deep directory structure

alias cd1='cd ..'
alias cd2='cd ../..'
alias cd3='cd ../../..'
alias cd4='cd ../../../..'
alias cd5='cd ../../../../..'
alias cd6='cd ../../../../../..'

The above aliases can help you while you are inside deep directory structure and want to get out to certain outer level in the same structure.

Shortcuts To Frequently Used Commands

alias runlampp='sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start' #run lampp server bundle
alias stoplampp='sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start' #stop lampp server bundle
alias checkmail='grep -in "Subject:" /var/mail/$USER' #overview of mail
alias myserverlogin='ssh netadmin@192.168.0.1 -p 222 -X' #ssh login to server
alias rootnaut='sudo nautilus /' #open root nautilus file explorer

With this post, what I would like to say is that there is no limit in making these aliases, eventually you will find the necessary aliases for yourself. If you have any other useful general purpose aliases, please feel free to share as the comment.

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Converting .CUE/.BIN Files To .ISO Format

Bchunk is a CD image format conversion tool that is capable of converting CD images from bin/cue to iso/cdr formats. Converting a .bin/.cue file to .iso can be done by using the bchunk command line tool.

The bin/cue format is used by some non-Unix cd-writing software, but is not supported on most other cd-writing programs. image.bin is the raw cd image file. image.cue is the track index file containing track types and offsets. basename is used for the beginning part of the created track files.

The produced .iso track contains an ISO file system, which can be mounted through a loop device on Linux systems, or written on a CD-R using cdrecord. The .cdr tracks are in the native CD audio format. They can be either written on a CD-R using cdrecord -audio, or converted to WAV (or any other sound format for that matter) using sox.

An example of this is:

bchunk image.bin image.cue image.iso

Following are the available switches in the command, explore them if you need them.

OPTIONS
-v Makes binchunker print some more unnecessary messages, which should not be of interest for anyone.

-w Makes binchunker write audio tracks in WAV format.

-s Makes binchunker swap byte order in the samples of audio tracks.

-p Makes binchunker go into PSX mode and truncate MODE2/2352 tracks to 2336 bytes at offset 0 instead of normal 2048 bytes at offset 24.

-r Makes binchunker output MODE2/2352 tracks in raw format, from offset 0 for 2352 bytes. Good for MPEG/VCD.

To install this tool on ubuntu, open the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install bchunk

I hope it helps. :)


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Solution For No Ethernet(LAN) In Ubuntu [That Worked For Me]

Not a tutorial but a quick note, I don't know if this works for you or not but this worked for me. Earlier, my system was not showing the ethernet interface and I tried lots of stuffs to find the solution. Just a thought came across my mind and then I turned off my laptop and removed the battery and then inserted the battery after a while. On booting to the system, I found the ethernet to be working. Maybe this might help you sometimes so putting up this small note.




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Installing SWI-Prolog In Ubuntu

SWI-Prolog is a free interpreter available for logical language Prolog. In order to practice Prolog in ubuntu(or linux), you need to install SWI Prolog in your system. SWI-Prolog is available for all major linux flavours for installation from the repository.

To install SWI-Prolog in ubuntu or debian based systems, type the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install swi-prolog

To run swi-prolog, open the terminal and type swipl to get to interactive prolog interpreter. Your prolog code must be saved with the extension .pl and to run the prolog file(which is known as consulting in case of prolog), cd to the respective directory, run the swipl and run the file by typing [filename]. and be sure to include the dot(.) and make sure you don't miss those big square braces.

To exit swi-prolog, type halt and press ENTER.

If you want to read the manual of SWI Prolog, open the browser and type in the address bar the address as file:///usr/lib/swi-prolog/doc/Manual/index.html and you can read reference manual.

I hope this makes a quick guide for installing and running swi-prolog in linux or more specifically ubuntu.


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Install LibreOffice In Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10

The older 10.x versions of ubuntu, 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat have openoffice.org and I wanted to install libreoffice for my friends in Lucid Lynx. This How To explains how to install libreoffice in ubuntu 10.04 and ubuntu 10.10 using PPA.

First, we have to remove openoffice in case it is installed. Its better to purge the openoffice.org installation with the following command.

sudo apt-get purge openoffice*.*

Now lets add the Libreoffice PPA repository with the following command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

Now we need to update our package information for which you have to issue the following update command.

sudo apt-get update

Now we are ready to go for installation of libreoffice. Type one of the following commands according to your desktop environment.

For Gnome Users:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice libreoffice-gnome

sudo apt-get install libreoffice libreoffice-kde

This completes your job for installation of the libreoffice. Now leave for package download and you can access the tools from Applications -> Office.

About PPA(Taken from Launchpad
Using a Personal Package Archive (PPA), you can distribute software and updates directly to Ubuntu users. Create your source package, upload it and Launchpad will build binaries and then host them in your own apt repository.

That means Ubuntu users can install your packages in just the same way they install standard Ubuntu packages and they'll automatically receive updates as and when you make them.


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Image Resizing Using Linux Command Line

Image resizing is one of those things in linux that should not be done using GUI. Better than GUI, there is a part of ImageMagick package for effective resizing of any image.

For resizing images, you need to have ImageMagick installed in your linux system. ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100) including GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PhotoCD, TIFF, and DPX. You can use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bezier curves.

For ubuntu and debian based distros, type the following in console for installation:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Now, to resize any image, we can either use mogrify or convert command(these commands are far more complex and useful than just resizing, check man mogrify for more details of their functionalities.) that is part of ImageMagick suite.

For example, to resize an image you can use the following command:

mogrify -resize 50% image_name.jpg

That would reduce the size to 50% of the original size.

To resize to certain pixel, you can specify the expected dimension as below:

mogrify -resize 800x600 image_name.jpg

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Useful and Basic Commands and Shortcuts For Ubuntu Beginners

One of my friends asked me to list useful commands and shortcuts for him to use in his ubuntu distro. I listed some pretty useful ones and am also sharing them over here.

Basic Commands

Alt + F1: Opens application menu.
Alt + F2: Opens run command(something similar to run command in windows)
Ctrl +Alt + FN: Switch to TTYN terminals
Ctrl +Alt + F7: Switch to X Display
mkdir <dir_name>: Create a directory
cd $HOME: Set the current path as your home directory
cd /: Set the current path as root filesystem

Privileged commands: Note that most of these commands require you to have sudoers privilege which is specified in /etc/sudoers file.

sudo su: Run the shell as root user.
sudo su user: Run the shell as the user specified
sudo command: Run the specified command with root privilege
gksudo command: Run the specified command as graphical root mode.(used for graphical programs)
passwd: Change your password

Basic Network Commands

ifconfig: Displays information about network. Also, ifconfig interface would give information about the specified interface.
iwconfig: Displays information about wireless network
ping host_or_IP: Pings to check if the specified host or IP is online or not. Also useful for knowing if you are connected to some other network eg. internet.
host ip_addr: Displays hostname for specified IP address by querying nameservers specified in /etc/resolv.conf
ifup interface: Bring the specified network up.
ifdown interface: Bring the specified network down.
ssh user@hostname -p PORTNO: Establish SSh connection to specified host and port number and login as specified user.

Commands For Package Management: These commands require root privilege so either escalate privilege to root by sudo su command or precede each commands with sudo.

apt-get install package1 package2 .. packageN: Download and install the package(s) specified.
apt-get install -d package: Just download the packages(no installation)
apt-get update: Update packages information.
apt-get dist-upgrade: Perform distro version upgrade.
do-release-upgrade: Perform distro version upgrade.
apt-get remove package: Remove the specified package(s).
apt-get -f install: Fix packages problem.
dpkg --configure -a: Fix broken packages.

Other/Misc. Commands

id: Displays user and group IDs for current user.
uname -a: Displays all kernel information
gedit: Open text editor
nautilus: Open nautilus file manager
gksudo nautilus: Open root nautilus file manager
lsb_release -a: Get information about installed ubuntu version

These are some of the commands that has come in my mind as of now. I might update this list when some other commands come into my mind. By the way, TAB is very useful in terminal as it allows auto-completion and suggestion of commands and files in ubuntu. What this means is if you type do- and then press TAB, it will auto complete the command to do-release-upgrade thus saving some important time. Also be sure to share the useful commands in the comment section below.


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