October 16, 2009, 10:15 am

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’ »
October 2, 2009, 9:26 am

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)
September 26, 2009, 9:34 am

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
September 4, 2009, 1:29 pm

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
September 1, 2009, 8:43 am

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’ »
August 26, 2009, 7:17 pm

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’ »
August 17, 2009, 9:43 am

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
August 3, 2009, 9:58 am

1. sudo vim /etc/cron.hourly/pacmansy
2. and place this within
pacman -Sy
3. then :wq the file and make it executable:
chmod a+x /etc/cron.hourly/pacmansy
4. vim ~/bin/getupdates.pl
and place this within:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
print ((`pacman -Qu` =~ m/^[^\s]+\s\((\d+)\):/m) ? $1 : 0);
5. vim ~/.screenrc and do this: (relevant parts are bolded)
caption always “%{= KW}%-w%{= Gk}%n %t%{-}%+w %-=”
hardstatus alwayslastline “%{= kW} %-= %{= kC}Session:%u%{= kW} %5` | %{= kC}Host:%{= kW} %H | %1` |%{= kC} MEM:%{= kW} %2`MB /%{= kC} SW: %{= kW}%3`MB | %{= kC}Unread %{= kW}%4` | %{kC}Updates:%{kW} %7` | %m/%d %c”
#Backticks to display information in status bar
backtick 1 60 60 /home/username/bin/get_uptime
backtick 2 60 60 /home/username/bin/get_freemem
backtick 3 60 60 /home/username/bin/get_freeswap
backtick 4 60 60 /home/username/bin/get_gmail
backtick 5 60 60 /home/username/bin/get_sessionname
backtick 7 60 60 perl /home/username/bin/get_updates.pl
Now run screen and the number of updates awaiting for you in pacman should be displayed. Enjoy.