More 2 Cent Tips!
See also: The Answer Gang's
Knowledge Base
and the LG
Search Engine
[LG 105] 2c Tips #5: Open X-change
Jimmy O'Regan (
The LG Answer Gang)
Serendipity - Linux Today are carrying a story about Open-Xchange
Server, the engine of SuSE's Openexchange Server, today - Novell have
convinced the owners to GPL it. Since it's Java based, it'll be
accompanied by their Java Application Server too.
It'll be available to download at http://www.Open-Xchange.org and
http://www.openexchange.com at the end of the month.
They consider it working but the feature set isn't frozen. The version
name is "Janus" and they've numbered it 0.7.0 since they hope to cram
in a few more features before 1.0.0.
-- Heather
Converting a VCD file to MP3
Triyan W. Nugroho (
iyan_kid from yahoo.com)
Hello Gang, here is my tips..
There is an easy way to convert VCD (Video CD) file
into MP3. What you need are just MPlayer and Lame.
MPlayer is used to convert the VCD file to WAV by
using the PCM audio output, and then you can convert
the WAV file to MP3 by using Lame.
First, you have to convert it to WAV by using the
command:
$ mplayer -ao pcm /path/to/vcd/avseq01.dat
MPlayer will play the VCD file like usual, but with no
sound. Just wait until it finished. You'll get a file
'audiodump.wav' that you can convert to MP3 by using
the command:
$ lame -h audiodump.wav newfile.mp3
Switch -h is used to get high quality MP3 file, but
bigger filesize.
Netkit
flavio (
)
I just wanted to let you know about a nice project carried out at the
Third University of Rome, namely "Netkit".
In a few words, Netkit lets you build a virtual network in order to do all
the tests you would like to carry out, with special focus on learning how
to use routing protocols and stuff like that. This virtual network is
realised launching separate instances of Linux in different xterms - each
being a full-fledged Linux box! There are methods to connect those Linux
boxes via virtual Ethernets and also to communicate with them from the
main host.
Netkit owes 90% of the stuff to UML, aka User Mode Linux, which is a
project to let the user launch a Linux Box inside Linux. But I think that
they had really an hard time to set up all the environment and create
something really usable for these network experiences. Moreover, their
website includes a lot of lectures about networking experiences using
Netkit. To be honest, when I prepared my exams I found a couple of broken
examples but everyone should be able to fix it or to... jump to the next
example.
Given the fact that you're probably going to acquire tcpdump logs of the
experiences if you decide to give Netkit a try, I also suggest to download
and install Ethereal, which is a nice GUI to explore tcpdump sniffs.
You can find Netkit at http://www.netkit.org, more on UML at
http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net. Ethereal is, of course, at
http://www.ethereal.com.
Bye,
Flavio.
That's not a bug, that's a feature
Jim Dennis (
the LG Answer Guy)
Question by Gary Luker (gluker from southerndata.com)
I found an entry on google regarding a possible bug in bash. I have a script
that does the following.
#!/bin/sh
formatmonth=`date "+%m"`
month="$(($formatmonth * 1))"
formatday=`date "+%e"`
day="$(($formatday - 1))"
when this is run if the current month is 08 it gives me this error.
value too great for base (error token is "08")
have you found a fix for this? or know a workaround? thanks for any help!
Gary Luker: MCSE, MCSA, MCP, Linux+, SAIR/GNU Linux Pro
The arithmetic functions in bash (and C and some other programming
languages) treat numeric literals with a leading zero as if they are
in octal (base eight). Octal digits range from 0 to 7; therefore 08
is not a valid octal number.
Using GNU date you can use formatmonth=`date "+%-m"` to supress the
zero padding of the month. That should take care of the problem.
According the date man page the %e value is already "blank padded" so
it will never be mis-interpreted as an octal number.
--
JimD
answer gang without the spam
Andrew du Preez (
dups from neanderthal.ws)
As our readers may recall, The Answer Gang (tag@lists.linuxgazette.net) is
really a mailing list where the regular subscribers get all queries and
linuxy bits sent through, but it accepts questions and comments from
anybody in the world. Of course this means spammers throughout the
world email us too...
-- Heather
Hello gang,
Here is a lurker's 2c worth on weeding out list spam. With a default set
of rules, Spamassassin does a reasonable job of cleaning up my inbox.
Recently though an increasing amount of spam sent to the TAG list has
been getting past spamassassin. On a mailing list I am willing (more so
than for personal mail) to accept the occasional false positive. So I
wanted to try running all TAG emails through a stricter set of spam
catching rules. Here is the configuration I have tried for the last week
or so and found the spam:ham ratio greatly reduced.
A seperate spamassassin config file is used for TAG. From .procmailrc:
:0fw: spamassassin.lock
* ^Subject:.*\[TAG\]
| spamassassin -p ~/.spamassassin-tag/user_prefs
:0Efw: spamassassin.lock
| spamassassin
And the highlights from ~/.spamassassin-tag/user_prefs:
required_hits 4
(this is 5 by default)
score HTML_MESSAGE 3.0
score RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET 3.0
score RCVD_IN_SORBS 1.0
score BIZ_TLD 2.5
(arbitrarily cranking up the score for rules that seem to match
the incoming spam)
This setup is working well for me so far (no false positives yet, and
only a single junk mail getting through).
The answer gang mailing list is always a good read, and I was glad to
find you guys hanging out at linuxgazette.net after being quite
surprised at the new structure of the .com site.
'til later TAGsters
--andrew
We are looking into ways of solving it more directly.
There'll hopefully be no need for this elaborateness when (
) we do.
People are rather busy this month, howwever.
-- Thomas
The same problem exists for any decently
worldwide mailing list, maybe the -users list from your favorite
distribution or major app, so it's still a great Tip! Just beware
setting your filtering a little too high, as Jimmy discovers...
-- Heather
[Jimmy O'Regan]
Heh. I only noticed a couple of days ago that my ISP is running
SpamAssassin on my mail before it gets to me. I was wondering why
everyone was complaining about the level of spam on the list
Fortunately my spam is available for a week through their webmail setup,
otherwise I'd never have got the contract a client sent me. Now to find a
mail provider that doesn't take such liberties with my mail...
More on Linux for low end systems
John Murray (
pursang from netwit.net.au)
Just thought I'd point out a piece I wrote a some time ago on getting
good performance out of older hardware:
http://users.netwit.net.au/~pursang/lofat.html
John
ps. Nice bike Ben! Hope you have as much fun on it as I do on my old
GSXR750
And Ben's going to be getting a first person taste of playing with
low-end systems soon. Since his laptop has been been in and out of the
silicon-lifeforms hospital, I'll be sending him my eldest
still-operational laptop for his ongoing use as a proper spare.
Thanks, John!
-- Heather
Is your sync Hot or Not?
Paul Sephton (
paul from inet.co.za)
Dear LinuxGazette
I am the lucky owner of a Palm m515 handheld. One of my frustrations in
the past has been that under Linux, I need to establish a PPP connection
to synchronise my palm with AvantGo web pages, whilst my preference is
to use the normal HotSync button to synchronise the rest of the palm. A
frustration, since I wanted the PPP connecttion to establish
automatically without my having to do anything, but this conflicts with
JPilot Hotsync.
I thought to share the following little bash script with you, which
detects in which mode the Palm is attempting to communicate, and
establishes a PPP link if that is what the Palm is attempting to do.
Otherwise it waits until the Hotsync operation is over and repeats.
I hope that someone finds this useful. By the way, if Palm owners are
experiencing trouble with USB drivers in the later (2.6.7+) kernels, I
suggest they try 2.6.5. The USB support in that version is excellent.
Paul
See attached paul.palm_smartlink.bash.txt
That's all, folks
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Published in Issue 106 of Linux Gazette, September 2004
