Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

You might have a collection digital audio files -- such as MP3 files -- or a source of analog audio -- like the headphone output from your phone, tablet or computer, or a vinyl record, a cassette tape, VHS tape, or any other old school audio format -- and you want to share it with someone who has a CD player in their boom box or their car's audio system. Or maybe you just like making mix tapes and you want to update your game for the 21st century. In this post, I'll  cover: how to convert your analog audio to a digital audio format,  how to convert your digital audio into the specific format you need to make an Audio CD, the type of CD that will pay in a stand-alone CD player or the CD player in a car's sound system.  To burn an Audio CD, your track files must be in a specific WAV file formats (details below). Note that you could easily use these steps to convert existing digital audio, like AIFF files, to another format, like MP3s, or to covert analog audio to...

Puppy Linux Logo I've been using Puppy Linux quite a bit these days and I like it! My favorite features are the ability to boot from (and store personal data to) a USB stick. You don't need very much space, in fact. Puppy Linux operating system is a lightweight Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and minimal Memory footprint. The entire system can be run from RAM with current versions generally taking up about 130 MB. -- Wikipedia, Puppy Linux Thinks I Use Puppy Linux For Booting Intel computers from a USB stick with portable settings, including browser preferences, desktop settings, and data. Running an old Dell with 512 MB of RAM and turning it into a performance champ.  From the Puppy Linux web site,  Puppy's goals Easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media. Booting from CD (or DVD), the CD drive is then free for other purposes. Booting from CD (or DVD), save everything back to the CD. Booting from USB Flash drive, minimise writes t...

As the cost of Windows becomes a larger and larger portion of the cost of computer hardware, more vendors are going to look at Linux as a viable alternative. Acer is already selling Linux on its low cost ultra-portables, but will expand Linux options to notebooks this year.  Another interesting advantage of Linux for hardware manufacturers: because it's open, they can customize it for their specific hardware models and the differing requirements of laptops or Media PCs. According to the article, using Linux helps them "extend battery life from five to seven hours."  This means that hardware manufacturers could build special hardware features into their boxes and then not only write the drivers to support the hardware, but also modify any aspect of the operating system to better support the new features. That's an appealing option to companies that are currently competing primarily on price.

At Cadent , we use Parallels Plesk Control Panel Software for Hosting on our servers (we’ve also used the open source Webmin and the commercial CPanel). Plesk has a great user interface, which our clients appreciate. It also imposes its own way of doing things, which can be a bit of a pain when tracking down subtle issues with server configuration. Because Plesk rewrites many configuration files automatically, it’s really critical to ensure that I make any manual changes to the server configuration in the right place, or Plesk will overwrite my efforts without remorse. The issue we needed to address was this: we installed Joomla! 1.0 on our development server, and Joomla reported the following configuration problems:         •        Safe mode was on, needs to be off.         •        The session directory was unwriteable. PHP: Safe Mode is a global setting allows only a file's owner or group to execute the script or read a file. Clearly, this is a good thing for security...

If you use a Mac at all, you know the value of a handy search interface like Spotlight or Quicksilver . The Gnome Deskbar delivers similar features to the Ubuntu desktop, or any other Gnome desktop, for that matter. See also: Dick Wall's Blog: Deskbar - Ubuntu's answer to spotlight Katapult - KDE's answer to Deskbar

[There's been quite a bit of interest in this post and I've expanded on it quite a bit. Please post any comments or questions to help me improve this guide. - Neil] Keith and I have both run into situations where we want to recover a Windows computer by cleaning it up with a Linux Live (bootable) CD distro. This offers several advantages to cleaning up an infected or compromised computer by booting into Windows: It prevents the malware, if it exists, from jumping from the infected computer or partition we are trying to fix to the repair partition or boot medium. If we boot from a CD, there's actually no way to alter the boot medium, since it's read-only. Naturally, we started with Knoppix -- download it here . Installing and scanning with F-Prot is covered in this Knoppix.net discussion thread, Virus Scan from LiveCD , which describes how to install F-Prot from the command line using apt-get. Also, In Knoppix 5.1, you can boot from the Knoppix CD and install F-P...

Great tips on how to install and customize Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), although a little slow to load with all the screen shots. It's a great way to get a sense of how to set up one of the best Linux desktops around these days. Some of my favorite tips include: powertop adding a new software repository adding the medibuntu repository

I want to put a current time stamp on my prompt, so I can see when I run a job. From Custom Bash Prompt How-To This How-To is to change the display of your bash prompt permanently. It will give you a list of different strings you can include into your bash prompt such as, the time of day, the date, and many other options. My prompt is already customized in ~/.bash_prompt

Since the keyboard commands for bash are the same no matter what platform you run your bsh shell on (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.) it pays to learn a few choice command. Here's a great reference: The default shell on most Linux operating systems is called Bash. There are a couple of important hotkeys that you should get familiar with if you plan to spend a lot of time at the command line. These shortcuts will save you a ton of time if you learn them. Here is the List of Bash Shell Keyboard Shortcuts For Linux Users Ctrl + A - Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on Ctrl + E - Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on Ctrl + L - Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command Ctrl + U - Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line. Ctrl + H - Same as backspace Ctrl + R - Let’s you search through previously used commands more , including Alt keys ... Read the rest of the listing at Bash Shell Keyboa...

FreeMind is mind-mapping software written in Java. I use it to plan web sites, promotions, business plans. It’s great for brainstorming, capturing your ideas and organizing them. Since it’s a cross platform Java application, it will run on Windows, Macs and Linux computers, among others. All you need is the current Java Runtime Environment, which is probably already installed if your computer is up-to-date. I use it on the Mac, and I’ve created a SmartFolder to find my FreeMind (*.mm) files quickly. I’ve tested sharing files with Linux, and it works like a champ, although some of the keyboard shortcuts are a little different across platforms. You can (and will) use your mouse, though -- drag-and-drop, collapse and expand (with a double click) let you zip around your mind maps and focus on the details you want, or zoom out to see the big picture. Import/Export & Sharing FreeMind uses an XML file format, meaning that you can read it with a text editor (Text Edit, Notepad, etc....

Installing a private certificate server, Linux version: Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and change "<VirtualHost _default_:443>" to "<VirtualHost 192.168.10.200:443>" [root@dts conf]# cd /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key [root@dts ssl.key]# openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024 [root@dts ssl.key]# cd ../ssl.crt [root@dts ssl.crt]# openssl req -new -key ../ssl.key/server.key -x509 -out server.crt Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:New York Locality Name (eg, city) []:New York Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Grb-internal Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:. Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:192.168.10.200 Email Address []: larnd@grb.xxxxx.org [root@dts ssl.crt]# service httpd restart From What Keeps You Off of Windows?

From the gnu.org site: For example, here is how you might copy a directory's contents from one disk to another, while preserving the dates, modes, owners and link-structure of all the files therein. In this case, the transfer medium is a pipe , which is one a Unix redirection mechanism: $ cd sourcedir; tar -cf - . | (cd targetdir; tar -xf -) Here's a sample: sudo tar cvzf /media/MyBook500-ext3/Volume/home-2007-10-20.tgz /home/