Tux Training

Tor is a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing – a system which claims to enable its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet.  Its primary goal is to protect its users against traffic analysis attacks.  The Tor Project’s home page has a great simplified write up about how Tor actually works here: http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en

Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004, and the EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005. Tor software is now developed by the Tor Project, which since December 2006 is a research/education non-profit organization based in the United States of America that receives a diverse base of financial support.

Getting Tor working both as a client and as a server is no sweat on Arch Linux and below are the steps.

Continue reading ‘Installing Tor Server and Client on Arch Linux’ »

Enjoy

http://tuxtraining.com/files/arch_linux_handbook.pdf

This will list all orphans.   I find it best to review what packages it lists here first and foremost.

pacman -Qdt

This will remove them all.

pacman -Rsn $(pacman -Qdtq)

Say you need a backup list of every package installed on  your Arch system.  This should be simple enough:

pacman -Qe > intalled_apps.txt

Lets say you’re setting up a new box, or blew away your installation and want to go back just to the way things were.  Well save this file, and once you’ve gone through the initial Arch install simply run

for x in $(cat install_apps.txt); do pacman -S $x; done

The pacman cache is a folder containing compressed packages that you’ve downloaded – including older versions, e.g. you’ll have somepackage.0.1.1, somepackage.0.1.2 and somepackage.0.1.3, etc   It can be very useful if something breaks and you need to revert to an earlier package.  But it also takes up a lot of space!   I was able for free up about 4GB of space on my box by doing this:

pacman -Sc   This clears outdated/uninstalled packages.

I got another 1GB freed by running

pacman -Scc   This clears the whole folder, not just the packages that are outdated/uninstalled.

Optimise the pacman database (good to do from time-to-time!)

pacman-optimize && sync

This will attempt to put all the small files together in one (physical) location on the hard disk so that the hard disk head does not have to move so much when accessing all the packages.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Improve_Pacman_Performance

Copy this into /etc/rc.d/rtorrent and add the daemon to /etc/rc.conf. Make sure you change USER in the script below to your user name

#!/bin/bash

. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions

case "$1" in
  start)
    stat_busy "Starting rtorrent"
    su rtorrent -c 'screen -d -m rtorrent' &> /dev/null
    if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
      stat_fail
    else
      add_daemon rtorrent
      stat_done
    fi
    ;;
  stop)
    stat_busy "Stopping rtorrent"
    killall -w -s 2 /usr/bin/rtorrent &> /dev/null
    if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
      stat_fail
    else
      rm_daemon rtorrent
      stat_done
    fi
    ;;
  restart)
    $0 stop
    sleep 1
    $0 start
    ;;
  *)
    echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac
exit 0

Source:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-600362.html
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RTorrent#rtorrent_Daemon_with_screen

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=53395

SLiM (Simple Login Manager) is a desktop-independent graphical login manager for the X Window System. SLiM aims to be light, completely configurable, and suitable for machines on which remote login functionalities are not needed.

SLiM supports the following features:

• PNG and XFT support for alpha transparency and anti-aliased fonts
• External themes support
• Configurable runtime options: X server, login / shutdown / reboot commands
• Single (GDM-like) or double (XDM-like) input control
• Can load predefined user at startup
• Configurable welcome / shutdown messages
• Random theme selection

Continue reading ‘Install and configure SLiM on Arch Linux’ »

ROX-Filer is a fast and powerful graphical file manager for the X Window System.

By default ROX-Filer has thumbnailing disabled, and when enabled only supports some basic image formats. The thumbnail suport can be expanded by using VideoThumbs which will allow ROX-Filer to generate and display thumbnails for most common video formats.

Continue reading ‘How to have video thumbnails in Rox file manager in Arch and Gentoo’ »

Since Arch’s official kernel26 package 2.6.16.2-1, IPv6 is no longer compiled directly into the kernel, but as a module. Many don’t require the features, and may benefit from added performance (many programs will query IPv6 addresses first, unaware that you don’t have an IPv6 connection) and free memory (250k, that’s a mighty big module).

The ipv6 module is loaded at boot. There are many programs which will load the ipv6 module if they detect that it’s available. In fact, they’re loading net-pf-10, which is an alias to ipv6. Adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf will disable the automatic loading of ipv6, while also allowing you to load it manually, if needed.

# disable autoload of ipv6
alias net-pf-10 off