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Basics of iptables
Alot of people are freaked out by IPTables and find it hard to understand. However, once you get the grasp of it the basics are easy. This document will serve as a basic how-to on using iptables.
Control Your Volume in the Commandline with alsamixer
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:
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
View MS Word files in the Commandline with AntiWord
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
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.
How to use wget
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc. GNU Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire web or FTP sites easy. If it’s not already installed, chances are it’s in your repositories. If not you can download it here:
Enhance your terminal with fish
Install Software With YAST From the Command Line
YAST can install a package from the command line or from a script. This functionality is useful if wanting to install software on a group of machines, such as a cluster.
YAST can install a package given the full path or by pulling from the software available in the listed installation sources (i.e. Those listed in YAST -> Software -> Change Source of Installation)
Video to come Soon.
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Convert OggTheora to Flash
I wanted to upload some of the screen casts to Youtube. They don’t accept video files in Ogg Theora format at Youtube. I had to convert Ogg Theora file into Flash Video format to upload it to Youtube. I did some research on audio and video converters. FFmpeg was the solution to my problem. FFmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another.I used the below command to convert Ogg Theora file to .flv format.
ffmpeg -i in.ogg -b 384000 -s 640×480 -pass 1 -passlogfile log-file out.flv
in.ogg was the Ogg Theora file. The above command converted in.ogg to out.flv. I uploaded the out.flv file to Youtube and I was all set.
Surf with a Terminal WebBrowser
elinks is a command line web browser for unix-based systems. It’s relatively simple to use. To install:
- on Fedora: yum -install elinks
- on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install elinks
- on Suse I was unable to find a suitable package. So i grabbed the source from here
- extract the package: tar -xjvf elinks-0.11.4rc0.tar.gz
- change to the directory: cd elinks
- configure: ./configure
- gain root access: su (and type admin password)
- make
- make install
- run the application: elinks
Usage
You’ll find the application immediately prompts you for a web address to go to. Use the arrow keys to jump from link to link. Use the Enter key once text boxes are selected to enter text within them. The Page Up and Page Down buttons will make scrolling through the pages easier.
If you’re using a terminal emulator and not just a straight terminal you’ll the links are clickable with the mouse. If you click the mouse at the top of the screen you’ll bring down the menu for the browser. You can access these menu’s with keyboard commands as well. Ctrl+F for the File menu, Ctrl+V for the View, Ctrl+L for Link, Ctrl+T for Tools, and Ctrl+S for Setup.
IRC through the command line
irssi is a command line IRC client for unix-based systems. It’s relatively simple to use. To install:
- on Fedora: yum -install irssi
- on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install irssi
- on openSuse: zypper in irssi
- run the application: irssi
Usage
When the application opens type: /connect “irc_channel” and press enter. As an example:
/connect irc.freenode.net
- /join “#channel” “optional_password”
- exampe /join kde
And that’s it.