Hackszine.com: Linux Archives

Archive: Linux

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July 1, 2007

Google Desktop for Linux (sorta)

Google Desktop is now available for Linux. Unfortunately, it's not open source, and it's about equivalent to version 1 for Windows, so it won't provide all the extras like desktop gadgets.

That said, it's still a desktop alternative to find and grep, and you can search your Gmail while offline - Link

June 25, 2007

Moonlight: Silverlight for Linux

Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight web application platform. It's built on top of Mono, the open source .Net project. What's unbelievably cool is that a group of Mono hackers spent the better part of last month heads-down, creating a substantial portion of the Silverlight implementation from scratch:

The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day --including weekends-- to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time. We call this effort Moonlight.
Needless to say, we believe that Silverlight is a fantastic development platform, and its .NET-based version is incredibly interesting and as Linux/Unix users we wanted to both get access to content produced with it and to use Linux as our developer platform for Silverlight-powered web sites.

There isn't a browser plugin yet, but you can download the source tree from the Moonlight project page and contribute to the effort.

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days - Link
Moonlight Project Page - Link

June 22, 2007

HOWTO: disk encryption in Linux

It's pretty easy to make encrypted disk images and partitions in Linux using the loop-aes-utils (cryptoloop kernel module). This can really come in handy for backing up or storing sensitive content such as your email archive or tax records.

Read full story

June 21, 2007

Whistle to control your computer

R2D2 was on to something. Think easier speech recognition with reduced error rates:

Use Linux® or Microsoft® Windows®, the open source sndpeek program, and a simple Perl script to read specific sequences of tonal events -- literally whistling, humming, or singing at your computer -- and run commands based on those tones. Give your computer a short low whistle to check your e-mail or unlock your your screensaver with the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Whistle while you work for higher efficiency.

This ought to be nostalgic for all of you who remember trying to whistle a successful modem handshake sequence. (Someone please tell me I'm not the only nerd in the room who did this for kicks.)

Whistle while you work to run commands on your computer - Link

June 9, 2007

Quick-fix for obfuscated Javascript and bad indentation

To save bandwidth and make code harder for third parties to understand, a lot of web developers will use a Javascript compression or obfuscation tool. There are a number of methods used, but almost all of them save space by removing all unnecessary whitespace.

There's a useful GNU command line utility called "indent" that can help you deconstruct this mess. It won't fix variables that have been renamed unintelligibly, but, as it's name implies, it will correct the formatting and indentation of your .js file.

Indent is designed to work with C syntax, but it's pretty forgiving and does a fairly nice job on C-like syntaxes such as Javascript, Java and (I assume) C#.Net. It can mangle a regexp here or there, but it's a quick, essential tool if you want to quickly beautify a compressed javascript file and save it to a state that can be read.

De-obfuscate Javascript with indent

indent -bl infile.js outfile.js

You can see some sample output from this command in the image above. That's a snippet of code from the Google taskbar for Firefox. Note that if you don't use the second file parameter, indent will just overwrite the original file.

Tweak your block formatting preference
If there's one thing that programmers all have a strong opinion about, it's the proper placement of brackets. Specifically, should left brackets be placed on the same line as the function or clause that begins a block, or should they be placed on their own line at the same indentation as the close bracket?

Well, I think they should go on their own line, but if you're not satisfied with my opinion, you can use indent to get your way:

-br, -bl Specifying -bl lines up compound statements like this: if (...) { code }
Specifying -br (the default) makes them look like this: if (...) { code }

This reminds me to mention another caveat, which is that indent uses the wrong block formatting by default. :)

GNU Indent (man page) - Link

June 7, 2007

VMware Fusion beta 4 for OS X

A new beta release of the VMware client for OS X was released today. With it, you can run other operation systems like Linux or Windows in the VMware virtual machine without having to leave OS X.

It provides pretty much the same functionality as Parallels, except you can download the beta for free. Also, this release contains a cool feature they call "Unity", which allows Windows apps to leave the container window and get friendly with your OS X desktop (video above).

VMware Fusion Beta - Link

May 27, 2007

Beautify Firefox widgets in Ubuntu

The thing about Firefox under Linux is that its form widgets look a little nasty. Thankfully, Osmo Salomaa created some nice replacement widgets that really clean up the interface, and fatsheep over at ubuntu forums put together a quick script for installing/uninstalling the patch. It's a big improvement, unless you're into the whole super-aliased, shadow-casting button thing.

New Firefox Widgets and Install Instructions - [via] Link

May 14, 2007

Detecting and reducing power consumption in Linux

For laptop users and data center administrators, power consumption is an important issue. Intel recently released a cool, top-like utility called PowerTOP, which can help you track down processes which are consuming the most power on your machine.

When your CPU isn't executing intructions, it enters an idle mode and consumes far less energy. Any program that keeps the CPU from entering this idle state will cause your machine to consume more power, regardless of how processor intensive the process is. PowerTOP monitors your CPU to determine how many of these "wake up" events occur, and will display the top offenders for you.

Also of note is the new tickless-idle feature in the 2.6.21-rc1 kernel:

The Linux 2.6.21 kernel introduces the so called tickless-idle feature. This feature allows the processor to be really idle for long periods of time, rather than having to wake up every millisecond for the timer tick.

So, if you want to tune your Linux box for ultimate power efficiency, enable the tickless-idle feature in your kernel, grab PowerTOP, and start locating applications or drivers that aren't working as effieciently as they should be.

References:

Linux: Detecting Power Consumption
PowerTOP
Intel's known powersaving issues, tips, and tricks for Linux - this is quite comprehensive

May 9, 2007

Turn your Linux box into a PDF-making machine

With a Linux box and the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), you can set up a virtual print server that will output all of its jobs to PDF format. Why might this be useful? From the linux.com article:

When you buy stuff online, virtually every site provides a receipt, which you may want later if the order email is lost or if you need to send in a receipt for expense reports. However, you may not want to print all of them out just to keep them around, and Firefox only supports writing to PostScript, rather than PDF.

What's nice is that you can print to your PDF making device from any Windows, Linux or Mac desktop. This provides a mechanism for consolidating all of your receipts and digital paper assets into one place, which ought to come in handy as you pursue the goal of having a paperless office.

Links:

May 7, 2007

Openchange: open source Exchange MAPI library

The Openchange project's libmapi looks really promising. It's an open source MAPI implementation that allows you to talk to an Exchange server from your own code.

The OpenChange MAPI library aims to provide interoperability with an Open Source implementation of Microsoft Exchange protocols under UNIX/Linux. The current implementation offers a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients and offer native compatibility with Exchange Servers up to 2003.

As of last weekend it now supports the creation and extraction of not only messages, but also contacts, calender events, and tasks. This should be really useful for developers who want to interoperate with Exchange from other platforms and external mail systems.

Openchange: open source Exchange server alternative - Link.
Feature demonstration screencast - Link.

May 6, 2007

WikipediaFS - a Linux MediaWiki file-system

WikipediaFS is a Linux virtual file system that allows you to interact with Wikipedia as if it were a typical directory on your machine. This means you can view and edit Wikipedia entries with a normal text editor like vi.

WikipediaFS can be configured to work with any MediaWiki-based site, so this makes it a pretty powerful tool for maintaining your personal Wiki project as well.

WikipediaFS - Link.

April 22, 2007

Run an iTunes (DAAP) server in Linux with Firefly

Firefly, formerly mt-daapd, is an open source digital audio server that can stream your music library to iTunes. Linux appears to be the most supported platform, but there is also beta support for Mac OS X, Windows, and even the AppleTV!

One of its cooler features is that it's capable of transcoding your music files on-the-fly to a format that's playable by your iTunes client. So if you've been building up a huge OGG or FLAC library, Firefly will let iTunes know that these songs are available and it will automatically convert them into a format that can be played on the client.

Links:

Firefly Media Server
Firefly/mt-daapd Wiki - quick-start guides for serveral OSs here
Running Firefly on AppleTV

April 19, 2007

Run Beryl on Intel Integrated Graphics (GMA 950)

I'm running Ubuntu on a Dell with Intel integrated graphics, the Intel GMA 950. Traditionally, integrated graphics have been left out of the eye candy fun, but this recent chipset is actually pretty good. I've run Vista on this Dell, and the Aero effects work great, so I was pleased to find instructions on the Beryl forums where Fyda spelled out what you need to put in your xorg.conf to get X11 ready to run Beryl - Link

Related:

Ubuntu Hacks - Link
Ubuntu 7.04 - Link

April 17, 2007

Windows Gaming in Linux

For a lot of of Linux devotees, gaming has always been the reason for keeping an extra Windows machine, so it's pretty interesting to see this barrier crumbling. Hackszine reader Michael Becker writes:

I'd love for you guys to talk some about using Linux as an alternative to Vista. Personally I'll be using Linux with Beryl to get all those nice graphical goodies OS X and Vista user have and I'll have DirectX 9c support using
Cedega.

I know several people running this setup. I can't find any game I'd be
interested in playing that won't run under Cedega and it will run
faster to boot.

I haven't used Cedega, but it appears to be a closed-source fork of the WINE project with a more developed DirectX layer. So, like WINE, your games aren't being emulated, but are running natively on the Cedega libraries. This means that DirectX 9 games will play as fast under Linux as they do in Windows. It's peculiar, but according to some benchmarks, they actually appear to run faster than under Vista!

It's a subscription based service ($5/mo), but they are supporting a huge list of games that have been tested to play on the platform. Seems interesting, and worth checking out if you can't get your favorite game running under WINE.

And do try WINE first--it's no slouch. There are a lot of great games like Half Life and Counter Strike that will play nicely. I've included a link below for installation instructions, so give it a shot if you haven't already.

Are you a Linux gamer? Are we finally reaching the point where gaming is as good or better under Linux as it is in Windows? Tell us your experiences in the comments.

More reading:

April 11, 2007

Import and Edit PDFs

The Ubuntu Blog shows off one of the neat tricks that KWord has up its sleeve. You can use it to import PDFs, and they retain a lot of their formatting. Once you've got it into KWord, you can work with it there, or export it into your favorite word processor's format. I imported the nearly 300 page Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs book, and it didn't complain. - Link

Related: