GreySquare Blog

Rename Multiple Files In Debian or *nix

// November 10th, 2011 // No Comments » // Linux, SysAdmin, Tech

Obviously the n00b trick of trying to do

mv oldName* newName*

does not work.

Interestingly I just found that Debian has a “rename” command that supports perl regular expressions. So this would work in case you were wondering how:

rename 's/^oldName/newName/' oldName*

Check your man pages before you attempt this on a different *nix system. Different rename binaries might have different functionality.

Mac OS X: How to connect to Windows File Sharing (SMB)

// March 17th, 2011 // No Comments » // Linux, SysAdmin

I wanted to connect to my home server using my mac today. I said to myself RTFM and went through the Apple KB article mentioned here. Well that did NOT help at all. I kept getting “Invalid User” error. So then I said to myself “I will google it before asking dumb questions” and this is what  found. You can use the same method to connect to any shared folders on a windows computer.

Open a “Finder” windows and press “Command-K”(or use Go > Connect to Server from the menu bar). Enter the url of your samba share as shown below. Depending on the settings of your samba server, if you don’t know the exact share name, you can omit the “/sharename” part from the url. The would open up a window with a list of all shares that you have access to.

DO NOT enter your credentials as shown below. This was why I was getting access errors. Make sure you delete any credentials stored in “Keychain Access” for this particular server if you saved some credentials that do not work.

Enter your credentials with the server name or ip followed by a forward slash and then username. This has been tested on 10.6 and should work for all other versions that support samba.

Remember to delete credentials saved to “Keychain Access” for this particular server if you need to connect to the same server but as a different user. This might come in hand when different folders are accessible only through user credentials.

AutoBox – More Than Plain Vanilla Torrent Downloading

// October 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Linux, Movies & TV, Tech

Hardware You Need: Any box that runs Ubuntu server edition with respectable performance.

Software:

• SSH
• rtorrent
• Samba
• Apache

More as I find time…

The Linux Phase

// February 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // General, Linux

Hope I’m NOT going through the same phase. I tend to pacify myself by saying that I’m learning something new everyday. Even my router has custom compiled Linux now! And I have to say I’ve gone through my fair share of kernel hacking.

From: xkcd

Switch to Linux: Part 1

// February 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Linux, Tech

I’ve recently decided to try and switch completely to a Linux operating system. Partly because I like the idea of using open source software that is available for public scrutiny. Also because I wanted to start improving my Python.

As a part of this process I installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala in addition to my Windows 7 and started using it as my primary os. I’m known to be partial to Fedora but this time around I wanted to just go with Ubuntu owing to the humongous user base, which means better support information thats available out there.

Some of the issue I faced, in hope of receiving some excellent suggestions from the community of-course -

Issue 1: I have a Logitech MX Revolution multiple button mouse. Apart from the fact that the mouse is jittery all the time, the buttons are not detected by default. Installed btnx and enabled revoco for my mouse. Everything seems to be fine for now.

Issue 2: I’m partial to Photoshop and I use Illustrator on and off to design weird logo’s sometimes.

Issue 3: No Windows Live Writer replacement for Linux. None of the blog clients simple cut it. Even if MS wants me to pay for Live Writer, I probably would. It’s that good. Installed VirtualBox > Installed Windows XP > Installed Windows Live Writer.

Issue 4: Non existent Netflix support. I’m not a big fan/addict of Netflix but I do like watching movies instantly once in a while. But when I try to do that under Linux I get this rather unpleasant message – “Our apologies – streaming is not supported for your operating system.” Excuse me, but is that even correct English? shouldn’t it be “on your operating system”?

Issue 5: Old Firefox. It seems the Firefox build that is available in the Ubuntu repositories is almost always older than the current available Firefox. My version is 3.5.8 whereas the latest available version of Firefox is 3.6. If you need the latest Firefox you need to remove the one you have and get the latest from Mozilla. It’s imperative that I work with the latest version as 3.6 has the latest CSS, DOM and HTML5 support and I need those things since I’ve started working on those.