Linux | A cat & dog story

We’ve all enjoyed the awesomeness of the ‘cat’ command. We’ve surely had good time catting files. Well… Now, you can start dogging files. Yep! You do have a ‘dog’ command. It’s not available on the repos; just download it from > https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/i386/dog/1.7-8 and then:

dpkg -i dog_1.7-8_i386.deb

Now you can dog files just the same way you used to cat them… Wait… You get additional options, like displaying all in upper/lowercase, converting file endings (dos/unix/mac) etc. See the list of options here > http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man1/dog.1.html.

You could also compile it from source.

Happy dogging buddies!

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

This is an awesome piece of work or you may also call it a nice companion for the aspiring Linux administrator. It starts from the basics of Debian and gradually deepens one’s knowledge in field of Linux administration.

Project homepage : http://debian-handbook.info/
Download : http://debian-handbook.info/get/now/

Very often people search for ways to get a bootable Linux pendrive. While there exists several methods and tools to make one; a less geeky way is using imagewriter. The latest LMDE already comes bundled with this nice piece of application and I guess the next edition of Linux Mint will include it too. If you’re running Ubuntu/Mint, you may install it from the repos.

$ apt-get install usb-imagewriter

For openSUSE/SLED it easier to install using YaST. Get it with one click from openSUSE Build Service.

And here’s how it looks.

Indian Languages Support

Getting Indian languages support in Linux isn’t a tough task.

Under Debian/Ubuntu/Mint, just do:

$ apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts

and for openSUSE, here’s how it goes:

$ zypper install indic-fonts

Open ‘Regional and Language’ from ‘System Settings’.

Go to ‘Layouts’ and click on the ‘+’ button to add your language. The language selector should now be available from the desktop panel.

VirtualBox is a great tool when it comes to experiment things with your OS. I’ve been using it for a long time to try & test distros showing up on distrowatch.com.

Recently, I wanted to set up a virtual lab to contain a development LAMP server. I got all applications & tools running inside my Mint box. Now, what remained was to view the pages from the host. I did some googling and it didn’t take much time getting it down.

VirtualBox comes bundled with a nice utility called ‘vboxmanage’. Vboxmanage supports everything (or a little more) than what the graphical user interface allows you to do with the click of a button. Vboxmanage is used with specific subcommands like createvm, startvm, registervm etc. For a full list of these subcommands type ‘vboxmanage –help’.

If you have already set up your Guest VM, you can register it through vboxmanage as follows:

$ vboxmanage registervm GuestName /path/to/guestfile

The guestfile is actually the VirtualBox configuration file of that specific VM. It is usually stored within ‘/home/username/Virtual Box VMs/GuestName’. The file name should be like filename.vbox-prev. The config is stored in XML format.

Once the VM has been registered, you can set up port forwarding as follows:

$ vboxmanage setextradata GuestName "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/HostPort" 8888

$ vboxmanage setextradata GuestName "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/GuestPort" 80

$ vboxmanage setextradata GuestName "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache/Protocol" TCP

Restart the VM as follows:

$ vboxmanage startvm GuestName

You can do the same to forward SSH port.