utilities

Moving to KVM virtual machines

Installing VirtualBox is getting increasingly painful on Ubuntu due to the problems with UEFI Secure Boot and the VirtualBox kernel modules. Another reason for an alternative is that running VirtualBox VM's completely in the background is not as straightforward as it could be. From the available alternatives I looked into (VMWare, Xen & KVM) it was KVM that fitted my needs (casual VM usage with mostly headless VM's for testing purposes). Main reasons: Well supported by Ubuntu Easy, straightforward install Background VM's are simple as Moving VM's from one host to another is a breeze Checking system To check if the CPU can actually support egrep -c '(svm|vmx)' /proc/cpuinfo If the number returned is > 0 your systems should be capable to run. You will also enable your BIOS for virtualisation (in Security settings of most BIOS's) if that has not already be done. You will get an error if not enabled if you are trying to run an install. The Install of KVM will work fine. Installation sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients bridge-utils virt-manager sudo addgroup libvirtd sudo adduser libvirtd sudo service libvirtd start sudo service libvirtd status sudo virt-manager Moving VM's to another host Source Host virsh shutdown VMNAME virsh dumpxml VMNAME > /tmp/VMNAME.xml scp /tmp/VMNAME.xml TARGETHOST:/tmp/VMNAME.xml scp /var/lib/libvirt/images/VMNAME.qcow2 TARGETHOST:/var/lib/libvirt/images/VMNAME.qcow2 Target Host virsh define /tmp/vm.xml virsh start vm Once you have confirmed operation you probably want to remove the source VM from the Source Host. virsh undefine VMNAME rm /var/lib/libvirt/images/VMNAME.qcow2

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SShuttle – quick and temporary VPN over SSH

Every once in a while you find a gem. One of these for me is SShuttle - until now I have not known about this one.    by  Stephan Geyer  Sometimes you need to quickly forward all your traffic via a remote server quickly. And while you can do all of this manually using OpenSSH it's not a quick one-step process (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH/OpenSSH/PortForwarding). Dynamic SOCKS5 proxies are great if all you need is browser traffic, but there is always software that won't play ball with SOCKS. Use-case: I just been trying to get Ubuntu Make to install Eclipse IDE and the local AARNET download mirror is just refusing to cooperate (https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-make/issues/90). A quick forward to a remote VPS fixed the issue without headaches Install sudo apt-get install sshuttle Run sshuttle -r username@servername.tld 0.0.0.0/0 -vv That's all - it sets up routing & iptable rules transparently and removes them after use. Kudos goes to https://github.com/apenwarr - thank you. A VERY useful utility !!! Source link: https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle

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Paperless Office using the Raspberry Pi

This is a follow-up on an older blog using Ubuntu.    by  rosmary  For this purpose I used a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i scanner as I really like the features of this series (full duplex scan as well auto document feeder as well for around $250). It's document feeder is not a good as the S1500 we have in the office, but very compact and can be powered from USB hub. Raspberry Pi Prerequisites Since this will be a purely headless install designed to sit in a corner behind the scanner I am using a Base Raspian (Debian Wheezy) install (I personally like the clean minimal install via https://github.com/debian-pi/raspbian-ua-netinst the best). apt-get install sudo vim wget wput libusb-dev build-essential git-core Add non-privileged user account(s) adduser USERNAME adduser USERNAME sudo groupadd scanner usermod -a -G scanner USERNAME Install Sane The version of sane from the Raspbian repos is not working with the Fujitsu ScanJet range and needs to be built from source. git clone git://git.debian.org/sane/sane-backends.git cd sane-backends BACKENDS=epjitsu ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var make make install Install S1300i Driver You need to get the driver file ('1300i_0D12.nal') from the CD that came with the scanner. If you still have access to a CDROM drive that is. :( mkdir -p /usr/share/sane/epjitsu/ cp 1300i_0D12.nal /usr/share/sane/epjitsu/ Check /etc/sane.d/epjitsu.conf and see if the following line is there (in my case it was already created by sane build). # Fujitsu S1300i firmware /usr/share/sane/epjitsu/1300i_0D12.nal usb 0x04c5 0x128d sane-find-scanner -q found USB scanner (vendor=0x04c5 [FUJITSU], product=0x128d [ScanSnap S1300i]) at libusb:001:004 found…

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Installing libdvdcss on Ubuntu 13.10

With the demise of the Medibuntu repository and libdvdcss not being hosted in the main Ubuntu repos due to licensing issues a new repository is needed from 13.10 upwards. Thanks to the good folks at VideoLAN (makers of the awsome VLC Video Player) there is a ready and updated source available. wget ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/videolan-apt.asc | sudo apt-key add - echo "deb ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libdvdcss.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

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Darktable – Photo Management under Ubuntu

Whilst I am by no means a photographer I do end up taking quite a few photos (these days pretty much exclusively on my phone) and the management of these photos can be a pain. So far I have never found an program worth the pain over plain old file management. But having stumbled across Darktable (http://darktable.org/) I think I might have found a worthwile package. Install on Ubuntu: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmjdebruijn/darktable-release sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install darktable

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Bulk converting Office documents to PDF

When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver. On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories. sudo apt-get install unoconv Combined with the -exec option of the Unix find command this makes conversion of whole directory structures a breeze. #find all Word Documents and convert to PDF find . -name "*.doc*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \; #find all Powerpoint Documents and convert to PDF find . -name "*.ppt*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \; To show all the possible conversion formats you can use: unoconv --show The following list of document formats are currently available: bib - BibTeX [.bib] doc - Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP [.doc] doc6 - Microsoft Word 6.0 [.doc] doc95 - Microsoft Word 95 [.doc] docbook - DocBook [.xml] html - HTML Document (OpenOffice.org Writer) [.html] odt - ODF Text Document [.odt] ott - Open Document Text [.ott] ooxml - Microsoft Office Open XML [.xml] pdf - Portable Document Format [.pdf] rtf - Rich Text Format [.rtf] latex - LaTeX 2e [.ltx] sdw - StarWriter 5.0 [.sdw] sdw4 - StarWriter 4.0 [.sdw] sdw3 - StarWriter 3.0 [.sdw] stw - Open Office.org 1.0 Text Document Template [.stw] sxw - Open Office.org 1.0 Text…

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Finding a Notepad++ alternative / replacement on Ubuntu

One of the most important utilities on any computer is a decent text editing tool. Since there are as literally hundreds of text-editors out there you would think it is an easy task to find a similar one for each platform.   by  Thomas Hawk  After years of trialing on various Windows platforms I have found Notepad++ to be the most useful of them all (closely followed by EMEditor which I used for years before Notepad++). Since I have now switched to Ubuntu completely it was necessary to find a permanent alternative on that platform since Notepad++ is only available on Windows. The requirements list in order of priority: Fast & Native (reading NOT Java or similar runtime requirements) Excellent Search & Replace (which is where most fail ....) Lightweight Simple GUI (reading NOT an IDE) Potential Candidates Scite Scite was my first try since it is based on the same engine as Notepad++. I have used it for a number of months but was never really happy with it. Issues with "Find in Files" functionality have been the final issue that make me move on. http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html Geany I came across this one very recently and after a short trial period grown to really like it. Apart   from it's silly name and very ugly icon it really has got the nicest overall balance of speed and functionality. And most importantly it also has very decent in-built search & replace functions. This includes "Find in Files" functionality which actually works. http://www.geany.org/ Vim (Cream) Since vim is my command-line text editor of choice for years I was…

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