History is a wonderful way to keep track of what we did or where we went. Sometimes, we aren’t interested in having the history logged so that we can maintain some sort of secret activity. But trust me, at times it is very very useful.

But what use is history without the time when the activity took place! Time and Place play very important role. In bash history, the Time can be of great use to know, when a particular command was run.

This get extremely handy, when on a server and you need to find out when a particular command was run.

I guess you have figured out what I am getting to! Yes, time stamps in Bash History.

In shell set this environment variable

$ HISTTIMEFORMAT=”$d-%m-%y %T “

and then run history!

$ history

You will get the time stamp of when the command in your history was run!

Cool huh?

Technorati Tags: history, Linux, time stamp

First, let me tell you what let me to find this out. About what this is, you’ll soon know.

My friend borrowed my laptop, to try out OS codes for her OS lab examination. When she returned the laptop after a couple of days, I noticed that, my Desktop had moved! Yes, instead of the normal /home/jithinkr/Desktop/ it was now pointing to /home/jithinkr/Codes/Desktop/!

I tried moving the Desktop back to where it was supposed to be, but in my attempts, I ended up deleting all the files I had on my Desktop! Well, that indeed was a big loss, because I had forgotten what all files were there on my desktop. (Though the shell and the locate command came in handy to remind me what those files where. Wish I knew some way to recover them.  ).

Now my Desktop was pointing to /home/jithinkr and hence all the Documents, Pictures and Videos folders were being displayed on the Desktop.

This was something I never expected to happen .

After some surfing, I came to know of the file, where all these paths are configured. It’s here :

/home/<username>/.config/user-dirs.dirs

The content of this files was :

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update

# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you’re

# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run

# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR=”$HOME/yyy”, where yyy is a shell-escaped

# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR=”/yyy”, where /yyy is an

# absolute path. No other format is supported.

#

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR=”$HOME”

XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR=”$HOME/Downloads”

XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR=”$HOME/Templates”

XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR=”$HOME/Public”

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR=”$HOME/Documents”

XDG_MUSIC_DIR=”$HOME/Music”

XDG_PICTURES_DIR=”$HOME/Pictures”

XDG_VIDEOS_DIR=”$HOME/Videos”

Technorati Tags: config, desktop, home, Linux

Lately so much of exciting and eye candy stuffs have come up on Ubuntu. Ubuntu Karmic Koala had improvements and a whole lot of software that let you customise your desktop OS. And from whatever I have heard as of now, the next Ubuntu edition, Lucid Lynx will have lots to look forward to.

This post on the other hand will be all about recent Google releases that have made web surfing and image browsing easier.

You must have definitely heard about and used Google Chrome and Picasa, if you have used Windows ever.

Google officially released Chrome beta for Linux, and it works without crashing for me. I have loaded it up with extensions, and I am pretty happy with the results. [I had installed Chromium from the developers channel before, I still have it. More about it later.]

http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux&hl=en

Visit the link above, and download the beta (Yes, beta. It’s safe to download. Google has kept Linux users in dark for long)

Run the deb/rpm file and yo! you are ready to Chrome!

Google Picasa and Image Viewer(deb file only [for Ubuntu like distros])

Google Picasa Image Viewer is something really handy and something way ahead of other image viewers. For this we need Picasa 3 pre installed. Head over to the link below and download to install Picasa 3.

http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html

Remember, Picasa 3 (Beta) and not Picasa 2.7.

http://www.caiacoa.de/Transfer/PicasaPhotoViewer-1.0.3.deb

Download the deb from the above link and install it. Now you can view a photo/image by right click, open with > custom command > PicasaPhotoViewer.

To set it as default, right click an image, Properties > Open With > PicasaPhotoViewer.

I am happy to have found these, especially Picasa Photo Viewer on Linux. Thanks to OMGUbuntu, for this. Many a thanks to Irakli Gozalishvili and Caiacoa to have made it possible!

P.S. Did you notice that, Google did a short cut with Picasa? It ain’t actually made for Linux, it’s just the Windows version running on Wine. Thank God we have Wine.

Technorati Tags: chrome, google, Linux, picasa, ubuntu

Things just got better with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04). Annoying problems with Network manager has been sorted out. Now everything can be easily configured using the GUI itself, thus helping new linux users, get to the internet easily without sweating it out on the terminal!

In the default 10.04 theme, the network manager looks like a Wi-Fi symbol.

First we need to create the DSL connection. Right click on it, and select “Edit connections”.

From the window that opens, select the DSL tab, and then click on Add. Another window opens now.

Enter a name you desire in Connection name, something like “DataOne”. This name will be displayed when you left click on the network manager icon the next time. Next, enter the username and password for your internet connection in the respective boxes.

In the IPv4 Settings tab, make sure “Automatic (PPPoE)” has been selected for method. Save these settings and click on Apply.

You should be ready to connect to the internet. Connect the internet cable and Network Manager automatically connects to the modem, the icon will now be two arrows pointing in opposite directions. Left click the icon and select “DataOne” or whatever name you had provided.

If the username and password provided are correct, then you should be connected to the internet (the icon again becomes the two counter pointing arrows).

Happy Browsing!

Technorati Tags: internet, lucid, network, nm-applet, ubuntu

The “New Folder .exe” virus is pretty annoying. Of course all viruses are annoying, but this one is frequently encountered by me (in my friends pen drives). The computers in our Computer Center are fully infected by these, and no pen drive is spared.

My friends come to me, to help them remove this New Folder Virus from their Pen Drives. They come to me, because I have Linux on my laptop, and it becomes easier to remove the virus. Just find and delete.

For those who do not know about this virus, let me give some background. This virus, creates a copy of itself within every folder present in the pen drive. And the name of those files is the name of the folder followed by .exe.

And this it does repetitively in every folder found inside the pendrive.

When my friends come to remove, I used to manually visit each and every folder and remove the file, until I found a way to do it easily.

Thanks to the find and rm command, I just have to run a single line of code. (Believe me, I thought I will have to write a script to do it!)

The Find Command in Linux

Find command finds any file with a particular pattern.

find -name “*\ .exe”

This line helps you find any file with the extension ” .exe”. Note the space before the period. That distinguishes the virus from an actual windows executable file. Now you have to remove these files. And this is how you do it.

find -name “*\ .exe” -exec rm -rf {} \;

That’s our required piece code, I mean line of code. So go to /media/pendrive and run this line. It will find out the New Folder virus files and remove it!

P.S. If you doubt this code, then please create a backup copy of whatever is in your pendrive, then run this code. If it doesn’t delete other files, then great! You can believe the code, you can believe me!

Technorati Tags: Linux, shell, virus