ushare – slackware 13.37 64 multilib

Had trouble compiling ushare for Slackware 64 1337 multilibs

./configure --with-libupnp-dir=/usr/local/lib

Also start ushare

ushare -x

for xbox compliant mode

Slackware 13.37 Xfce 4.8 screenshots

Slackware 13.37 Xfce 4.8

Slackware 13.37 Xfce 4.8

Slackware 13.37 Xfce 4.8

Slackware 13.37 Xfce 4.8

Xfce 4.8 upgrade, ntfs read-write broken

After installing Slackware 64 13.37, I upgraded to Xfce 4.8 following the instructions at:

http://connie.slackware.com/~rworkman/xfce-4.8.0/

Everything is fine except for my ntfs usb drives are read-only.

After Googling around I found this solution:

ln -s mount.ntfs-3g mount.ntfs

linking mount.ntfs to mount.ntfs-3g which allows writing to ntfs, where as standard ntfs only allows read.

filesystem type now shows up as fuseblk in /etc/mtab, whereas was showing ntfs previously.

Thinkpad fan daemon Slackware x86_64 fix

Having moved to Xfce desktop from Gnome, as well as migrating to 64bit Slackware, The thinkpad fan daemon packages tpfand and tpfand-admin had broken. After searching Google, it was apparent this was due to the Python libraries being at version 2.6 and the Makefile was hardcoded to point at /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/tpfanadmin. The solution was a simple case of altering the Makefile to reflect the new path to the newer version of python and /lib64 instead of /lib

Tpfand executed fine. Tpfan-admin however failed to launch with a

ImportError: No module named rsvg error.

After a Google search it seemed that rsvg was part of gnome. I attempted to install librsvgmm, but still I got the ImportError: No module named rsvg.

After looking through the code, I surmised that the svg library was only used for animating a fan icon on the GUI to indicate when the fan was on, so I decided to the remove references to this in the file fan.py. This did the trick and now tpfan-admin works again. I created a patch file for the changes to fan.py

fan.py.diff

Slackware 64 bit + broken bits + suspend to disk

Installed Slackware 64 bit, so I could run 64 bit guests in virtualbox. Worked well, Slackware 13.1 64bit installed easy off SD Card via unetbootin. Virtualbox 64 bit download from Oracle installed easily enough

Things that broke

Since going over to Slackware 64bit, tpfan and tpfan-admin broke, due python libs being hardcoded in the makefile Fixed tpfan and tpfan-damin by altering Makefile, both installed ok, although tpfan-admin would not run due to a missing rsvg module. The solution is outlined [here]

Compiz, my favourite waste of time is partially broken (not sure why yet), need to fix this

Suspending to disk

Since I now turn my personal laptop off for longer amounts of time, suspending it is a waste of battery power, so I decided to try hibernate. This never worked out of the box with Slackware, so after some investigation, the following solution worked for me:

Linux swap partition of 6GB (overkill but twice my memory size)

/dev/sda5           18663       19457     6385806   82  Linux swap

fstab entry for swap space. In my case:

/dev/sda5       none              swap        swap             0   0

Once this is done, I could either use the Xfce hibernate button which calls pm-hibernate, which calls echo disk > /sys/power/state eventually, but uses the 00xscreensaver script in /usr/lib64/pm-utils/sleep.d/ [see Ubuntu to Slackware post for script] to make sure the screen is locked when laptop is thawed.

SSH keys – yet another demonstration

There are hundreds of how-to’s on the internet demonstrating how to setup SSH keys so that you don’t have to use a password to access remote servers over ssh. Here is mine.
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Ubuntu 10.04 to Slackware 13.1

Introduction

As a long time user of Ubuntu, I felt that although it is an excellent distribution to use and in my opinion has helped bring Linux to a wider audience. It is currently moving in a different direction to what I am comfortable with (Ubuntu One, CouchDB, Unity desktop etc). I was also becoming lazy and spoilt by all the desktop compositing and flashy GTK themes. I always wanted to learn under the hood of Linux, but the flashy themes and novel applications kept me too occupied, (my own fault really.) Not to say compiz isn’t awesome, because it is, (the zoom effect just cannot be beaten in my opinion), but I wanted to get more experience with the underlying system and wanted a distribution that would allow me to do that.
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lrssi desktop notifications using notify-send

Irrsi notificatoins using notify-send

Irssi is a great lightweight app for IRC, however when somebody shouts you in channel or sends you a private message, if you are not focused on the terminal window, you will be unaware. A way around this is to use a perl script called notify.pl, so that a notification appears on the desktop when the conditions above occur.

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Serverwide 404 URL profiling

Scenario

Your webserver is being hit day and night by people who like to scan for web vulnerabilities. (Calling them hackers would be wrong!). They try to gain access by trying URLs out on your server, that might give more information about your system. They might be trying to exploit a known vulnerability in a web application, for example WordPress, Joomla or PHPMyAdmin etc.

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Add redundancy to your online storage

Overview:

To create n instances of online storage areas that contain the same copy of the data at any one time.

With all the free online storage available nowadays, it is possible to add a level of redundancy to protect your data should your local copy fail or one of the online providers be unavailable.

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