Enhance your terminal with fish

Posted on March 12th, 2008 in Basics, Commandline Tools by admin

fish is a user friendly command line shell for UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux. fish supports syntax highlighting and generally makes reading a terminal, as well as text documents, much easier. I’ve included a screenshot example, but you can see the rest here.

fish4.png

Commandline BitTorrent

Posted on March 3rd, 2008 in Commandline Tools by admin

rtorrent is a command line bit torrent client for unix-based systems. It’s relatively simple to use. To install:

  • on Suse I was unable to find anything in the repo’s. So i grabbed the source from here 
    • rpm -Uvh rtorrent-0.7.6-1.1.i586.rpm
      • 

    • rpm -Uvh libtorrent-0.11.6-1.1.i586.rpm
      •

    (both packages are available at the link above)

      

    

    • 

  • run the application: rtorrent
    • 



Usage


To simply download a torrent do the following:


rtorrent http://extratorrent.com/download/666052/openSUSE-10+2-GM-DVD-i386-iso.torrent


For further options see  the man page and the user guide.




					




				

		
 
	
 



	


	
		

					


				
Play mp3’s with the commandline
	


				

					Posted on  March 3rd, 2008 in Commandline Tools, Multimedia by admin 				


				
	


	


mpg123  is a command line mp3 player for unix-based systems.  It’s relatively simple to use.  To install:


    

  • on Fedora: yum install mpg123
    • 

  • on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install mpg123
    • 

  • on openSuse: zypper in mpg123
    • 

  • run the application:
    • 



mpg123 /home/username/song.mp3


or


mpg123 -C /home/username/music_folder/


Ta da.


By using the -C switch, keyboard controls are enabled and by default you can use ’s’ to stop, ‘p’ to pause, ‘f’ to jump forward to the next song, ‘b’ to jump back to the beginning of the song, ‘,’ to rewind, ‘.’ to fast forward, and ‘q’ to quit. Type ‘h’ for a full list of available controls.




					




				

		
 
	
 



	


	
		

					


				
Manage Images with ImageMagick
	


				

					Posted on  March 3rd, 2008 in Commandline Tools by admin 				


				
	


	
ImageMagick is a software suite used for image manipulation and display, supporting many image formats. ImageMagick software mainly uses command line interface for image manipulation. You can use this software to do tasks such as rotate, scale, resize, flip, shear, display and many more. You can do the image manipulation job much faster using command line interface and it is easier to use.


Now, I will walk you through the steps to install ImageMagick software suite.




					




				

		
 
	
 



	


	
		

					


				
Burn ISO’s to CD with cdrecord
	


				

					Posted on  March 3rd, 2008 in Commandline Tools by admin 				


				
	


	
You can’t simply cp a CD image onto a new disk. For this task, you need the cdrecord program.


In the old command-line days, about the only way to write a CD-ROM on a Linux system was to know the set of commands that build an ISO filesystem and then copy it to a CD. Today, with the availability of GUI-based CD creation programs such as K3B, the old command-line method is pretty much forgotten.


Those GUIs are fine for building a CD from ordinary files stored on your hard disk–text, data, music and such–but sometimes you need to do the equivalent of copying a CD image onto a new CD. A common occurrence of this is with a Linux distribution. For example, Knoppix is distributed in this manner, as is the SuSE Live Evaluation.


You might think that using cp or  dd would do the trick in this situation. After all, to us UNIX people, a file is a file. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with creating CDs, because you can’t simply write bits to the CD and be home free.


Fortunately, there is a program that understands how to deal with writing CDs like this and isolates you from most of the pain. The program is cdrecord, and most GUI-based CD creation programs  actually use cdrecord to do the actual writing.