How to use emerge in Gentoo

Posted on March 26th, 2008 in Gentoo by admin

Chances are if you have the know how to use Gentoo and made it thus far to get it installed you probably don’t need this tutorial, but it’s good to have as much documentation as possible. Emerge makes installing easy, just as apt-get would be Ubuntu, but in emerge we can install source built applications rather than binary applications, thus is the Gentoo way. And along with that is many more options for these packages. This tutorial will just cover the basics.

Emerge searches through the Portage Tree for applications. The Portage tree is a collection of ebuilds files that contain all information Portage needs to maintain software (install, search, query, …). These ebuilds reside in /usr/portage by default.

Whenever you ask Portage to perform some action regarding software titles, it will use the ebuilds on your system as a base. It is therefore important that you regularly update the ebuilds on your system so Portage knows about new software, security updates, etc.

What are and how to change Runlevels

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Basics, Linux+ by admin

Many people get confused when trying to boot in to a runlevel other than runlevel 5, for example runlevel 3, disabiling the GUI front end with which most users are familiar. Hopefully this howto will help answer the questions “How do I disable X” or “How do I boot without X” or even “How do I get to single user mode.”

One requirement of this is to have an understanding of what runlevels are, how changing runlevels will impact your system, and what services may or may not be started. In general this is beyond the scope of this document but I will give a quick run down of things as listed in /etc/inittab.

Just a warning, this does not apply to Ubuntu as Ubuntu focuses on Upstart.

Running Multiple Sessions in Linux

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Basics, Linux+ by admin

You might have noticed there is an entry in your KDE and Gnome menu called “Start New Session” ( In some distros “Switch User” ). I will try to explain a few things about this feature.

You can, at any time, do Ctrl+Alt+F1 ( to F6 ) to get a text console you could log in as another user ( also as root ) to perform needed tasks and at the same time have your X running under Ctrl+Alt+F7. So switching up and down between the X session and the text session was easy as pressing a few keys on your keyboard.

Control Your Volume in the Commandline with alsamixer

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Commandline Tools by admin

You more than likely already have alsamixer installed on your computer, even if you just don’t know it’s there. Simply type “alsamixer” on the command line and you will be presented with:

alsa.png

It does everything most graphical volume controls do and does it just as good. It handles setting the volume, controlling 3D switches, CD audio volume and line-in ports just like the graphical versions you are normally accustomed to. Key controls are a simple combination of left and right arrow keys, up and down keys and the M button to mute a channel. Simple, right?

The great part of alsamixer is that you don’t have to mess with the amixer terminal commands to set the volume on your rig. And it runs on a fraction of the space, with no need for a particular desktop environment to work. It’s a natural born utility

Make the Windows Key Open the Gnome Panel Menu

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Gnome by admin

We’ve already covered how to make that Windows Key useful in KDE and Xfce, but what about Gnome? Well these instructions should help you out getting the Windows Key to open up the Gnome Panel Menu.

File System Checking with fsck

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Basics, Hardware, Linux+ by admin

The system utility fsck (for “file system check” or “file system consistency check”) is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in the Unix system and clones thereof.

Generally, fsck is run automatically at boot time when the system detects that a file system is in an inconsistent state, indicating a non-graceful shutdown, such as a crash or power loss. Typically, fsck utilities provide options for either interactively repairing damaged file systems (the user must decide how to fix specific problems), automatically deciding how to fix specific problems (so the user doesn’t have to answer any questions), or reviewing the problems that need to be resolved on a file system without actually fixing them.

Fsck can also be run manually by the root account if there is believed to be a problem with the file system. However, running fsck on a mounted file system can potentially cause severe data corruption/loss.

View MS Word files in the Commandline with AntiWord

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in Commandline Tools by admin

Antiword is a neat little application that can convert Word documents to plain text, PostScript, and PDF. According to the developer, conversion to DocBook XML is still experimental and doesn’t always work well.

Antiword is can read and convert files created with Word versions 2.0 to 2003, and you can run it on multitude of OSes, including Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and OpenVMS. On top of that, you can set the paper size for documents converted to PostScript or PDF, include any text that was removed from the file (but which Word notoriously keeps a record of), and display any hidden text.

Oleo: a commandline spreadsheet

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 in Commandline Tools by admin

Oleo features a curses based interface (character mode), but also a LessTif (Motif) based graphical user interface. If you feel a small jump of joy and say, “Hey, that’s VisiCalc!” … then Oleo is for you. Or at least you won’t be intimidated by it, which is the important part.  One thing Oleo has going for it is extremely detailed documentation, which is a huge boost, considering it is a fairly complex application with a bit of a learning curve.

I found Oleo in the Ubuntu repositories, but I had to build it from source for openSuse.  I was unable to check it’s availability in Fedora.

Make Conky Transparent in KDE

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 in Applications, KDE, Tweaks by admin

Conky doesn’t display properly with a transparent background in KDE, this is a rather quick fix. Type the following in the command line:

feh –bg-scale `dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper 1`

If you use a centered wallpaper, use –bg-center instead.

Also see: Make Conky Transparent and movable

Make the Windows Key Open the Xfce menu

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 in Xfce by admin

This allows you to bind your ‘windows’ key to the desktop right-click menu or middle-click menu, for example.

By default, the windows key is considered Super_L, a modifier key. Therefore you’d have to bind a command to windows+[some_key], which is not what we want. So what you want to do is re-map your windows key so that it’s not a modifier. The easiest way to do this is to use xmodmap like so:

xmodmap -e “keycode 227 = Menu” &

(on older versions of xfce it will be xmodmap -e “keycode 115 = Menu” & )

“Menu” above specifies that when you press the windows key, it will pop-up the app’s menu. We will later overwrite this to pop-up an Xfce menu. The 115 above is the keycode for the windows key. It should work for most people, but you can verify what it is for you with xev.

Now that you’ve changed your windows key to Menu, you can use it with one of the following shortcuts:

xfdesktop -menu <– pops up the right-click menu

xfdesktop -windowlist <– pops up the middle-click window list

If this all works out for you, you may wish to put the xmodmap command in your .xinitrc or .xsession file so that it will execute on startup.

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