Linux – Page 11 – Everything is Broken

ClamAV reporting Outdated version

May 4, 2010 by admin

Just to remind myself as much as anything, as I've been through this a few times. ClamAV was complaining loudly in the logfiles about not having the most up to date ClamAV. I searched around and was pointed to the Debian Unstable repository to /etc/apt/sources.list (Read the whole article before you add this one …there … Read more

Adventures in unbricking a router

April 7, 2010 by admin

Another fantastic illustration of how Linux 'gets the job' done. Although sometimes the operator (ahem) is sometimes a bit slow on the uptake. Anyway, I had a Linksys WRT54G router in which the wireless unit had blown up after a power outage and surge. Gotta love the Philippines. I had dd-wrt on it, but decided … Read more

One Line Guitar Tuner

March 16, 2010 by admin

Every now and then I come across something which makes me marvel at the flexibility of Linux. This is one of these things. I play guitar, and I'd previously written a small script to act as a guitar tuner. I generated some .ogg files of the correct pitch and then wrote a script to loop … Read more

Ubuntu Firefox's Tattletale Search Query

April 23, 2009 by admin

Have you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for 'banana' and you get something like this:

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

Well what you're effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana

and if they really want to know more about me, then they're welcome to go digging through their logs.

OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there's no reason why we can't take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.

Counting files in subdirectories.

February 23, 2009 by admin

OK, it sounds simple, and it probably is if you're sitting at your desktop with Gnome or KDE fired up. However if you're looking on a server half way across the world, using the command line its not so easy.

There are a number of tools which are useful in finding out things about your filesystem. ls, du, df are three of them, but sometimes they just don't give you the information you need. In my case I'm backing up a server to a remote location. The script was timing out becase I was trying to back up too many files at once, so I needed to find the number of files in each subdirectory.