From the Linux AIO website:

Our plan is to bring some of the major Linux distributions (Ubuntu and flavors, Linux Mint (“Debian”), Debian Live) with different desktop environments on one ISO file that can be burnt on one DVD or USB flash drive. Every one of them can be used as Live system, with no need of installation on hard drive or can be eventually installed on computer for full experience.

At the moment you can download different ISO from the Linux AIO website, each ISO contains a lot of different version of the same GNU/Linux distribution, here is a short list of what you can find on the website:

Linux AIO Ubuntu that includes: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS desktop i386, Kubuntu 14.04.1 LTS desktop i386, Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.1 LTS desktop i386, Xubuntu 14.04.1 LTS desktop i386, Lubuntu 14.04.1 LTS desktop i386.

Linux AIO Linux Mint that includes: Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon 32bit, Linux Mint 17 MATE 32bit, Linux Mint 17 KDE 32bit, Linux Mint 17 Xfce 32bit.

Linux AIO Linux Mint Debian Edition that includes: Linux Mint “Debian” 201403 Cinnamon 32bit, Linux Mint “Debian” 201403 MATE 32bit.

Linux AIO Debian Live that includes: Debian Live 7.6.0 GNOME i386, Debian Live 7.6.0 KDE i386, Debian Live 7.6.0 Xfce i386, Debian Live 7.6.0 LXDE i386.

Another interesting thing is that the various ISO are available in both 32 Bit and 64 Bit in addition to the EFI 64 BIT version that permits to use the iso on systems with UEFI Secure Boot active

How to make an USB stick

Once you have downloaded the iso you can put it on as USB stick, you can easily do it with the command dd.
Warning, this procedure will destroy any previous data on that USB stick !!

First determine what device your USB is. With your USB plugged in run in terminal:

sudo ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/*usb*

This should produce an output like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2014-05-24 22:54 /dev/disk/by-id/usb-_USB_DISK_2.0_077508380189-0:0 -> ../../sdb

In this example output, the USB device is sdb. Now you can use the below command to make a bootable USB drive.

sudo dd if=filename.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

Now just reboot your computer and choose from your boot menu the USB stick, you should see a screen like this one:

Now you can test the different flavors of Ubuntu (or better, Mint).

Article provided by Asapy Programming Company

A hard link is actually nothing more than a regular directory entry, which in turn can be seen as a pointer to the actual file’s data on the disk. The cool thing about hard-links is that a file can be stored once on the disk, and be linked to multiple times, from different locations/entries, without requiring to allocate extra disk space for each file instance.

But then a question arises: Given a specific file on disk, how can someone know whether it is linked to by other directory entries or not? This can be easily answered using the ls command:

giannis@zandloper:/etc$ ls -l passwd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1402 2008-03-30 17:49 passwd;

Do you ever wonder what is this small number between the file permissions and the owner in the output of ls’s long listing format (its value is usually “1″ for files, or “2″ for directories)? This number is actually the link-count of the file, when referring to a file, or the number of contained directory entries, when referring to a directory (including the . and .. entries).

So, the answer to the question “are there any other directory entries linking to this file, and if so, how many?” can be simply answered by executing ls -l for this file and checking the link-count column. If it is just 1 that means that this is the one and only instance. If it’s greater than 1 then there are other directory entries linked to that same file.

Now, imagine you find out that a file is linked to by some other directory entry. The next thing you would want to know is who is linking to that file. To figure this out you must know what all these directory entries share in common. And that is, an inode.
An inode is a data structure used internally by a (unix-like) file system to store information about a file (it can be also considered as the file’s meta-data). Every inode has a unique (in the scope of the file system) identity number. We will use this property to locate all the hard links of a file within a file system. And this is how we can do it.

By passing the -i option to the ls command we also get the inode number for a directory entry:

giannis@zandloper:/etc$ ls -i passwd
199053 passwd

In this case, the inode number for the /etc/passwd file is 199053. Now that we have the inode number we can now do the actual search for directory entries that have that same inode number. But because it would be pointless to do such a thing since we know that there are no other hard links of this file in existence (recall the link-count “1″ in the output of the previous ls -l command which states that there is only one instance of that file), I’m going to first create a hard link of the file in my home directory:

giannis@zandloper:~$ ln /etc/passwd
giannis@zandloper:~$ ls -l passwd
-rw-r--r-- 2 root root 1402 2008-03-30 17:49 passwd

Now we’re going to search the entire file system for files with inode number equal to 199053. To do so we are going to use the find command and its -inum option:

giannis@zandloper:~$ sudo find / -inum 199053
/etc/passwd
/home/giannis/passwd

It is also used for one of the two purposes, as local daemon or as network daemon. MPD don’t use many resources. It is designed to make its job in background playing music from its database.

For connecting with MPD and managing music there are many options and clients. CLI clients, GTK clients, Qt clients and even from VI.



MPD uses flat file databases for maintaining the basic music collection info.
After starting, MPD loads it’s database into RAM and has no need for searching through HDD. Usually the music is saved in ~/Music directory and MPD will check that folder as first when making the database. If you have your music collection in some other folder, add its path in the mpd.conf file, usually located in the directory /etc.

MPD`s client/server nature gives it some advantages over all-round music players. Clients can communicate with MPD not only locally on the same computer, but they can also communicate over network.

In this way you can access and listen to all your music but without the need to have it physically with you. Also it does not require an X server to run or to be installed, it runs fine from console and there are plenty of ncurses based MPD clients. Every user over the network can have it’s own client connected to the MPD server, sharing the same database but every user will listen to his favorite songs.

As said, there are many MPD clients, for any taste and they also come for various devices and operating systems. Also Android. With that in mind we could build our own music streamer. If you have some cool hardware like Raspberry Pi, then you’ll have more benefits. But for this simple project every computer connected to Internet will work.

What we need?

1.) working computer with Linux
2.) Internet connection
3.) Android device
4.) Around 45 minutes

Installation

As said, MPD is an open source software and can stream audio to any device connected to the computer and it can also be controlled from any device. For making a music streamer using MPD the first thing that you have to do it’s to install MPD. It is usually available in the main repositories of all the most common distributions.

1.) Debian and Debian derivate

apt-get install mpd mpc

2.) OpenSuse

zypper install mpd mpc

3.) Fedora

yum install mpd mpc

4.) Arch

pacman -S mpd mpc

5.) Gentoo

emerge mpd mpc

Note, mpc is a client for MPD. mpc connects to a MPD and controls it according to commands and arguments passed to it. If no command is given, the current status is printed (same as ‘mpc status’).

Configuration

When you finish the installation of MPD become root, or use sudo, to open with your favorite text editor the file /etc/mpd.conf file for editing.
You should see something similar to this:

music_directory       "/home/user/Music"         # Your music dir.
playlist_directory    "/home/user/.mpd/playlists"
db_file               "/home/user/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file              "/home/user/.mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file              "/home/user/.mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file            "/home/user/.mpd/mpdstate"
#user                  "user"
audio_output { 
         type                    "alsa"
         name                    "My ALSA Device"
         device                  "hw:0,0"     # optional
         format                  "44100:16:2" # optional
}

audio_output {
         type                    "fifo"
         name                    "my_fifo"
	 path                    "/tmp/mpd.fifo"
	 format                  "44100:16:2"
}

# Binding to address and port causing problems in mpd-0.14.2 best to leave
# commented.
# bind_to_address       "127.0.0.1"
#port

This is default mpd.conf. Change paths to your music collection and path to .mpd folder. Save it, exit and test MPD.
Start it with the command

 /etc/init.d/mpd start

. Before adding it as a default daemon to the system, you need to do some more editing in the mpd.conf file so open it again. In the section bind to address change localhost variable to any and add the http streaming section:

audio_output {    
        type            "httpd"    
        name            "My HTTP Stream"
        encoder         "vorbis"                # optional, vorbis or lame
        port            "8000"
#       quality         "5.0"                   # do not define if bitrate is defined
        bitrate         "128"                   # do not define if quality is defined
        format          "44100:16:1"
}

Save the changes, restart the daemon and add it to system default daemons, the one that starts at boot.

Selecting a client

Selecting your client depends on your specific needs. If you would like to control music from your laptop or workstation you can use Sonata or ncmpcpp. Sonata is a nice and popular GTK client for MPD while ncmpcpp is one of the most popular ncurses based MPD clients.

If you decided to build an simple, small and discrete music server you can use one of the many MPD clients for Android.
Two of the best apps are in my opinion Droid MPD and MPDroid. Both of them are very simple to configure.

MPDroid settings

When you configure these applications you usually need only to add your IP adress.
Local IP to remote control it at your home and your public IP if you want to stream music everywhere to your Android device.

Playing music

We are now at the end, the only step left is to play, listen and enjoy our music with the new build music server/streamer.
Open your client, choose your favourite song and relax..

Raspberry PI + MPD and MPDroid as client:

Configure ssh to use ipv4 only
Configure ssh to use a particular authentication method
Reuse SSH Connection
Disable the Dns lookup on server side

Also if you are interested in ssh you can take a look at my previous articles about How to keep ssh connections alive on Linux and how to keep a Permanent SSH Tunnels with autossh.



Please note I use these tweaks on my Ubuntu 13.04 and Arch Linux, older version of ssh could not have all these options.

Use ssh with IPV4 only.

Sometimes I can reach a server over IPv4, but not over IPv6. Other times the IPv6 connection it’s unstable or buggy, so being able to force an SSH connection over IPv4 can be handy, and it’s faster in some cases.

To force an IPV4 connection you can simply use this command on your computer:

ssh -4 user@hostname.com

This will connect to hostname.com only using IPV4 protocol, on the other hand if you want to force an IPV6 connection you can use the command:

ssh -6 user@hostname.com

Use ssh with a particular authentication method

In general the best way to authenticate it’s with an exchange of keys between the ssh client and the ssh server, in this way you don’t have to put your password every time you do a connection, but sometimes you don’t exchanges the keys between your client and the server and so you must use the good old password.

In this case you can use an option to skip the pubkey method and go directly to the password method, to do this use this command:

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=keyboard-interactive -o PubkeyAuthentication=no user@hostname.com

You can also do the reverse, and run ssh to use only the pubkey method with the command:

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey user@hostname.com

Reuse SSH Connection

It’s possible to reuse a connection for remote server using the controlmaster directive. The concept is very simple — rather than each new SSH connection to a particular server opening up a new TCP connection, you instead multiplex all of your SSH connections down one TCP connection. The authentication only happens once, when the TCP connection is opened, and thereafter all your extra SSH sessions are sent down that connection.
To set this option open the ssh configuration file for your user, that it’s located in : ~/.ssh/config and add these options:

Host *
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath /tmp/%r@%h:%p

This tells your ssh client to always use a ControlMaster on all hosts. You can set it to autoask instead of auto to have ssh prompt you for whether or not to reuse an existing connection. The configuration directive ControlPath tells ssh where it should keep its socket information. In this example the files are created in /tmp, however it may be best to put this into your own home directory on multi-user systems.

Disable the Dns lookup on server side

As last thing if you are the owner of the remote server you can configure it to don’t resolve the reverse name of the IP that is connecting via ssh, there is a setting in OpenSSH that controls whether SSHd should not only resolve remote host names but also check whether the resolved host names map back to remote IPs. Apparently, that setting is enabled by default in OpenSSH. The directive UseDNS controls this particular behaviour of OpenSSH, and while it is commented in sshd_config (which is the default configuration file for the OpenSSH daemon in most enviornments), as per the man page for sshd_config, the default for UseDNS is set to enabled. Uncommenting the line carrying the UseDNS directive and setting it to “no” disables the feature.

THis directive can be modified in the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config and once you change it you have to restart the ssh daemon with the command:

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

Or equivalent.

Conclusions

These are some quick tips for speed up your daily tasks with ssh, if you have any other tips or suggestions just add them as comments, I’m always in search of good tricks.

Reference

SSH ControlMaster: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

I’ve changed the GNU/Linux distribution of my home computer from Xubuntu to Mint (XFCE edition) 2 releases ago, and from that date I’ve never regret it, so while I wait for the release of the XFCE edition of Olivia (the code name of Mint 15), I’m glad to publish an interesting article of Manuel and it’s experiences with the Cinnamon edition of Mint 15.
—

The new version of Linux Mint has just been released. The developers have arrived at version 15, the nick name of this version is Olivia. A lot of the changes are specified in the release notes. Among the most striking a new managment for the proprietary drivers and the repository. The writer already used successfully Mint, but in the variant with the XFCE desktop environment. This time, it was decided to give credit to the developers of Mint and use the official version with Cinnamon instead of XFCE.

No more pleasantries. The new Mint soon proved to be a bomb, with really gew things to complain about. Installed as usual directly from an USB stick, in around twenty minutes we had everything set and ready. All the hardware of our laptop Dell Inspiron 1525 has been recognized on the fly, but we had to turn on the of the proprietary wireless driver in order to use the wireless connection. A few automatic updates remained to be done, and so, we started with our tests.



For simple matter of habit, coming from XFCE, we moved the main panel at the top. Linux Mint is installed with a lot software ready for use. We limited ourselves to add some tools which we use daily: IBus to handle input in Chinese, Double Commander, the text editor Geany, SMPlayer, Clementine for music, Dropbox, Skype and little else.

A small note for those who use Double Commander like us. The GTK version has a bug with the animation effects of the windows. If you try to delete a file, the popup of cancellation remains on the screen and it is impossible to get rid of it even after a restart of Cinnamon. To resolve this issue and get back to safely use Double Commander, simply avoid using the Fade effect in the settings of the effects of Cinnamon. We hope that soon this bug will be fixed.

For those who do not know Double Commander or prefer to use what Linux Mint provides, the file manager Nemo, derived from Nautilus that is the default in Ubuntu, offers everything you need.

A fresh installation of Linux Mint also miss the Windows fonts, but just type the following command in the terminal to resolve this:

sudo apt-get install ttf-installer-mscorefonts

Thanks to Cinnamon, the menu is a little gem of elegance, order and comfort. It is a moment to find all the applications, add them to the panel, reorder, create desktop shortcuts. For those who like hack everything, within the options menu there is the possibility to enter the path of a directory directly in the search box.

There are several settings which you can customize in Linux Mint. Of course you do not have the freedom that you had with XFCE, but we are not so far away. To change the appearance of the system there are two themes available, you can add more themes directly from the system settings without getting lost among websites. However, the first attempt to look for new themes on the web proved to be quite long in spite of our network that was working perfectly. There are also desklets useful to beautify your desktop, and various extensions are easily accessible in the clean and polish panel with the system settings.

A few clicks and tricks and voila, here is how our Olivia in all its glory will look.

Another minor inconvenience experienced was the inability to see other PCs in our local network via the Samba service. To solve the problem is enough to follow this simple procedure:

• from the terminal, run sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf
• under the heading workgroup = WORKGROUP, add: name resolve order = bcast host lmhosts wins
• save and close the file
• open a terminal and type run sudo service smbd restart
• open a terminal and type run sudo service nmbd restart

Wait a few minutes and all is done, our local network was accessible again.

Conclusions

Olivia is proving to be all that Linux Mint has tried to be since it was born. A stable operating system, elegant and easy to use. Rejecting the desktop environments of the latest Ubuntu and Fedora that have so divided the Gnu/Linux community, Linux Mint makes simplicity and comfort its true strength. If you want to find a downside, with Cinnamon the load times at startup are a bit slower than when we were using XFCE, but nothing to tear his hair. GNU/Linux has never been so beautiful.

7) Linux shell, how to use the exec option in find with examples

In a former article I’ve wrote about the command locate, an useful command to find quickly a file in your computer.
An alternative to locate is the command find : GNU find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence, until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find use the defined action and moves on to the next file name.

find can use many options to compose an expression and as standard action it print in the standard output the file name that match the expression.

6) 3 Tower defense games for Linux

This is a genre I like and usually I play this kind of games in their flash/java online version but there are some nice Tower Defense games that can be downloaded and installed on Linux systems, today I’ll present you 3 of my favorites: Creeptd, Target Defense and Revenge of the Titans

But first a small introduction to what’s a Tower defense game:

The goal of tower defense games is to try to stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass. Enemies and towers usually have varied abilities, costs, and ability costs. When an enemy is defeated, the player earns money or points, which are used to buy or upgrade towers, or upgrade the number of money or points that are earned, or even upgrade the rate at which they upgrade.

5) Top 10 Games for Linux in 2012

Techies and gamers seem to always be faced an unfortunate lack of video games available for the Linux operating system. While many techie gamers would prefer to move to a cleaner, leaner Linux environment, the Microsoft world it seems has held the monopoly when it comes to supporting great computer games. While Apple has made great strides toward supporting a wider variety of games, Linux clearly trails behind the big commercial operating systems in game support.

To help alleviate this unfortunate situation Linux aficionados find themselves in, here is a list of the top ten Linux games released or updated in 2012

4) 5 Linux Distros focused on computer security

Today I’ll present you 5 Linux distribution focused on computer security, in this list I’ve not put 2 distro I’ve already talked about: Backtrack and Damn Vulnerable Linux.

The 5 Linux distribution are: DEFT (Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit), QubesOs, Pentoo, Lightweight Portable Security and CAINE.

3) Understanding the Top command on Linux

Know what is happening in “real time” on your systems is in my opinion the basis to use and optimize your OS. On ArchLinux or better on GNU/Linux in general the top command can help us, this is a very useful system monitor that is really easy to use, and that can also allows us to understand why our OS suffers and which process use most resources. The command to be run on the terminal is:

$ top

And we’ll get a screen similar to the one on the right:

Let’s see now every single row of this output to explain all the information found within the screen.

2) How to remove Zeitgeist in Ubuntu and why

On my desktop I use Xubuntu 12.04, and today i noticed that this distribution shipped by default the Zeitgeist daemon, a thing that I’m not using at all, for what i know.

From Wikipedia:

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’s activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations. It makes this information readily available for other applications to use in form of timelines and statistics. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns by applying data association algorithms such as “Winepi” and “A Priori”

Zeitgeist is the main engine and logic behind GNOME Activity Journal which is currently seen to become one of the main means of viewing and managing activities in GNOME version 3.0

1) 7 hidden features of bash

Today I want to share with you some of my favorite features of bash, I called them hidden because I’ve discovered that a lot of people don’t know or don’t use them, but to be honest they are not so hidden after all, they are in the man page of bash, but how many of us have read it all ?

1)

Thanks to xkcd.com for this explanation.
In short this is useful when you need root access for a command and you forget to use sudo.
The parameter “!!” is substituted with the last run command.

We all know the incredible versatility of our beloved Linux. To our great pleasure we can find it in the PC of the school of our son, or on the netbook of our secretary, in the terminals of the Internet Café of Madrid but also, for the amazement of many, in the most common security devices or in the more sophisticated satellite receivers. But I am quiet sure that you have never heard of Linux distributions for the space. That’s right! What reaction would you have in discovering that many of the satellites scattered in outer space have entrusted our beloved Linux? Shocked? Then, you have not heard anything! The future of Linux and its philosophy is finally conquering the space my dear.

In fact, the famous NASA for some time now consider the Linux distributions as an alternative to operating systems specially created. In favor of this choice, there are several reasons. First, the enormous versatility of the Linux distro and its kernel that allows modification for any purpose, and also, remember that Linux is free! And surely a Linux developer would cost less than any other! Some of the projects that comprise our most famous penguin are: the ST8, the Spacebus, Beowolf and the NASA Open Portal! The ST8 is the solution for the spacecraft of the future. As you can well understand, send a bare PC or smartphone space impairs its functioning. One reason for this failure are often the radiation. These, in fact, damage the device! In this system the idea is, thanks to some special hardware, to do an auto analyse of the whole system to find any problems arising from radiation. When we speak of Beowolf, we talk about a system with 20 StrongARM CPU, and a Linux kernel 2.4.4. But I refer you to the online documentation to understand the great benefits of this project. These projects, thanks to the OpenSource portal dedicated to the integration and beyond, have collected and collect an huge success!


But what is this open source portal of the famous U.S. federal organization? The site is accessible at the link “http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/“. It’s a portal totally dedicated to NEWS and pictures, videos and sounds that have to do with the philosophy of Open Source and NASA itself. You can also have all the information you want on the projects of on past, present and future missions, who have to do with our beloved Linux.

Not only! You can even follow everything that has to do with this site thanks to the systems of social networks now ubiquitous everywhere. We can follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Youtube, Flickr, iTunes and more. Not only that, we can even download applications for our PCs and smartphones.

All this can only make us curious! Excite and at the same time, let us see with pleasure that the NASA is not looking only to aliens but also solutions for all the problems that we have had in the last decade!

In Trisquel every software is checked in every component and is discarded (or modified) if don’t use a 100% compatible license, for example the kernel used in this distribution is the one released by the Linux-libre project.



Linux-libre is a project that releases and maintains modified versions of the Linux kernel. Their kernel version removes any software that does not include its source code, has its source code obfuscated or released under proprietary licenses. The parts that have no source code are called binary blobs and are generally proprietary firmware which, while generally redistributable, generally do not give the user the freedom to modify or study them.

Trisquel 5.5 STS is the first version based on GNOME 3/GTK 3 and also Linux-libre 3.0.0 kernel. The biggest problem for the team has been the implementation of the GNOME 3 desktop environment, especially because of GNOME Shell, which requires 3D acceleration, while not introducing in the kernel many binary modules for video-cards, a good news for Nvidia user is that the 3D is now full supported thanks to the Nouveau modules.

This release features, among many others:

• Linux-libre 3.0.0
• GNOME 3.2
• Abrowser 11 (Aka Firefox)
• LibreOffice 3.4.4
• Gimp
• Exaile

This distribution has always attracted me for its radical choice, but so far I have not had the courage to install it, who knows maybe in the future I’ll move to the side of the softwar totally free, but i think that it should be tested just to realize how many modules/software non-free all other distributions use.

Mediagoblin GNU is a project that has as goal to get an open source,sort of, “clone” of deviantART, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums and generally of all the online sites that let you upload your media (photos, videos, etc.). Why do it? For the freedom of course, what’s more important than that ?

Some of the problems that the project would like to solve cover the actual ownership of the shared content, data portability and privacy.
Mediagoblin is released under the AGPLv3, which means that if third parties put up services based on Mediagoblin they’ll be obligated to share changes even if they don’t “distribute” the software in the traditional sense.

I forget to say, they are working to get a federated photo sharing site, so there will be multiple sites that share the same information.



The platform is an idea from the creators of Libre.FM (a free alternative to Last.fm), and GNU Social, the compatibility with Ostatus, a standard protocol maintained by StatusNet , provides support for identi.ca, The server is based on this software:

• Python 2.6 or 2.7
• python-lxml
• git
• MongoDB
• Python Imaging Library (PIL)
• virtualenv

The project started in March 2011, so it’s amazing all the work they have done in these months, these are some information from the 0.1.0 announcement:

As we get ready to start coding up federation, aka world domination, we added brand-new deployment documentation — take a look! Better yet, install it and let us know how it went. Last month we added cross site request forgery protection and lost password functionality. There was some significant internal restructuring this month as we gear up for caching and supporting more media types in the next release or so. The translations crew continues to amaze us with their volume and diligence. Watch out world, here we come.

Website and Documentation

I’ve took a look at the official website and i must say that it’s really well designed and nice to be browsed, the team has put a lot of efforts also in this and has got a great website where you can take a tour, to see some of the ready, or soon to be ready, functionality of Mediagoblin.
Also the Documentation is well done and there is a clear how-to on how to install a instance of mediagoblin on your server

Do you want to test mediagoblin as user ? no problem there is also a demo site where you can see the last mediagoblin up and running. Just do not expect too much and not be too hard, making comparisons with other sites, in the end we are only at version 0.1, there is a long way to do yet, but given the principles that underlie this project, i really wish them to dominate the world.

Good Luck Mediagoblin !