Author: Ryan

Git is a great version control system which is used everywhere these days. The process of installing git on SUSE is as easy as other distros at moment but is not to difficult if you follow these steps. To my knowledge at this point in time there is no git rpm package for SUSE. There is a Fedora RPM but it fails to install correctly due to many missing dependencies. No problem. You will have to build and install from source. Go to http://git-scm.com/download and download the latest source. At the time of this guide the latest version is 1.7.3.4.…

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At can be very handy to automatically add a timestamp to a Tomboy note but the feature is not enabled right out of the box. Fortunately it is very easy to turn on this feature. Open Tomboy Preferences, click on the Add-ins tab, and select the Tools Add-in dropdown list. Select Insert Timestamp and click on the Enable button to the right. You can also change the default timestamp format or create your own by clicking the Preferences button. Now simply press Ctrl+d while typing a note and a timestamp will be inserted at the curser.

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One of the great features of Boxee is that it can scan your local media collection and retrieves artwork and information from IMDb.com. It does this by doing regular expression matching on each file name to determine what movie, album, or TV episode it is. If you have a collection that is not well named or organized this might not work correctly for a lot of your media files. Fortunately there is a specific way you can name your movie, music, and TV files to give the Boxee the best chance of to correctly identify your media collection. Again, Boxee…

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A new major release of VirtualBox went public today. VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. The new release includes many new features and bug fixes. Here is the changelog: This version is a major update. The following major new features were added: Reorganization of VirtualBox into a base package and Extension Packs; see chapter 1.5, Installing VirtualBox and extension packs, see the manual for more information New settings/disk file layout for VM portability; see chapter 10.1,…

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If you are looking for a great HTPC then you should look no further than Boxee on the Dell Zino HD. For those of you that don’t know, Boxee is a free software program that you install on your computer that allows users to watch internet movies and TV shows, listen to online radio and music, play your local digital music and movies. The Boxee software turns your HTPC into a social media and home theater media center. Boxee allows users to watch and listen to their local media, as well all access movies on Netflix, internet radio on LastFM…

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At some point it may be helpful to have a BASH script dynamically determine the location of itself when executed from anywhere on the system. The following code will produce the canonicalized absolute pathname of the script, as well as the directory that it resides in. The script first determines if the the first argument which is a path to the script is a relative or absolute path. If it is a relative path it will prepend the current working directory. Finally the entire path is canonicalized which resolves all symlinks and removes the extra “./”, “../” and ‘/’ characters.…

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In Ubuntu it can be difficult to customize the indicator applet which by default contains the sound, battery, Bluetooth, and empathy icons. If you don’t use empathy and want to remove the icon there is no simple option to change. Since this is a default indicator icon you must completely remove the indicator-messages package to make it disappear. $ sudo apt-get purge indicator-messages Once you have removed the package you can log out and back into your account to see the changes take effect. Alternatively you can remove the indicator-applet and then add it back to the Gnome panel.

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For whatever reason you may need to free the disk cache at some point. Since Linux 2.6.16 the interface /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches has been available to simplify this process. First we run the sync command before dropping the cache. Doing this will ensure that all memory in the cache is updated and all dirty pages are synchronized before dropping the cache. You can safely skip this step but if you have any dirty pages in your disk cache the system will refuse to release them. # sync The next step is echoing “3” to the /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches file which will signal the OS…

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Strangely enough there is no way to directly extract the contents of an .rpm package using the rpm (RPM Package Manager) tool. This feature can come in handy for example if you need to access a single file in a package but you don’t want to install it on your system. Fortunately there is a simple hack that you can use to make this work. To do this use the rpm2cpio tool to convert an .rpm file to a cpio archive then pipe it to cpio command to extract it. Here is an example: $ rpm2cpio rpm-package.rpm | cpio -idmv…

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There are a few ways to take a relative path and convert it to an absolute path which can be accessed regardless of the current working directory. The easiest method is to use the readlink utility which comes bundled with about every distribution. Here my working directory is my home directory. It is printed as an absolute path. $ pwd/home/ryan Using readlink we can convert this same directory as a relative path to an absolute path. $ readlink -f ./../ryan/Desktop/../../../home/ryan/home/ryan If you are using a Debian based distribution like Ubuntu you can use the realpath utility instead. $ realpath ./../ryan/Desktop/../../../home/ryan/home/ryan

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