November 2011 | Linux Blog

How To Set the Disk IO Priority For a Process on Linux - ionice

ionice program sets or gets the io scheduling class and priority for a program. If no arguments or just -p is given, ionice will query the current io scheduling class and priority for that process.

A process can be in one of three scheduling classes:
Idle

A program running with idle io priority will only get disk time when no other program has asked for disk io for a defined grace period. The impact of idle io processes on normal system activity should be zero. This scheduling class does not take a priority argument. This scheduling class is permitted for an ordinary user (since kernel 2.6.25).

Best effort

This is the effective scheduling class for any process that has not asked for a specific io priority. This class takes a priority argument from 0-7, with lower number being higher priority. Programs running at the same best effort priority are served in a round-robin fashion.

Replicate the Installed Application Across Different Computers - OneConf

OneConf enables you to save and replicate some data in between all your computers like the list of installed applications and some settings. The goal is to enable your to continue your work between your workstation and your netbook, for instance, without having to do any complicated manipulation.

OneConf is a mechanism for recording software information in Ubuntu One, and synchronizing with other computers as needed. In Maverick, the list of installed software is stored. This may eventually expand to include some application settings and application state.

Installing Oneconf:
Open the terminal and type following command to install oneconf:

sudo apt-get install oneconf

Sound Mixing Software for DJs, - Mixxx

Mixxx is free mixing software for DJs, providing everything needed to create live mixes. It allows you to beatmatch songs and crossfade them together, like you would with turntables and a mixer. Mixxx natively supports MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAVE, and AIFF playback (with plugins to support additional formats) and can be controlled by numerous DJ MIDI controllers.

The basic requirements for Mixxx are a desktop computer or laptop with a reasonable amount of storage space on the hard drive for your music, at least 1 audio card for outputting the sound and a way of controlling the software either by mouse, keyboard or hardware DJ Controller.

Mixxx will run on the Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

Mixxx Features:
* Cross-platform (Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X, Linux)
* Free and open source (GPL v2)
* Parallel waveform displays
* Waveform summaries
* MP3, OGG, WAVE, and FLAC playback
* Extra playback formats through plugins
* Fast, database-powered library
* Shoutcast and Icecast broadcasting
* Automatic crossfading with Auto DJ
* Crates and playlists
* Reads iTunes and Rhythmbox libraries
* Pitch-independent time stretch (key lock)
* Vinyl emulation
* Hot cues
* Looping
* Wave recording
* BPM detection and estimation
* Bulk BPM analysis
* Community Supported MIDI Controllers:

many many more ....

UI Application for ssh, telnet, sftp, rdesktop, vnc, cu, remote-tty, ftp, etc ... - PAC Manager

PAC Manager is a UI Application for replacement for SecureCRT/Putty/etc (linux ssh/telnet/... gui)... It provides a GUI to configure connections: users, passwords, EXPECT regular expressions, macros, etc.

PAC Manager Features
* Unique linux app to implement SecureCRT's functionality (more or less!)
* Remote and local macros
* Remotely send commands with EXPECT regexp
* Cluster connections!! Connections on same cluster share keystrokes!!
* Proxy support
* Serial/tty connection via cu/tip/remote-tty connections!!
* Pre/post connections local executions
* Wake On LAN capabilities
* Possibility to split terminals in the same TAB!
* Quick acces to configured connections via tray menu icon
* Best linux GUI for ssh, telnet, sftp, rdesktop, vnc, cu, remote-tty, ftp, etc
* DEB, RPM & .TAR.GZ packages available!!
* FREE (GNU GPLv3)

Download and Convert Videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and other online video sites - ClipGrab

ClipGrab is a free software for downloading and converting online videos from many sites like YouTube or Vimeo. ClipGrab can download from the following sites: YouTube, Clipfish, Collegehumor, Dailymotion, MyVideo, MySpass, Sevenload, Tudou, Vimeo.

Downloaded videos can be converted to the following file formats: WMV, MPEG4, OGG Theora, MP3 (audio only), OGG Vorbis (audio only).

ClipGrab isn’t limited to the sites listed above, because many more sites are supported "unofficially" through the automatic site-recognition of ClipGrab - just try it! ClipGrab can also download HD videos from sites that have support for high definition (e.g. YouTube or Vimeo).

Text Based Password Manager using the Blowfish Encryption - YAPET

YAPET is a text based password manager using the Blowfish encryption algorithm to store password and associated information encrypted on disk. Its primary aim is to provide a safe way to store passwords in a file on disk while having a small footprint, and compiling and running under today's most popular Unix Systems.

YAPET does not impose a limit of password records per file and the number of files the passwords are stored in, although YAPET is only able to display password records of one file at a time. For convenience, YAPET provides a search function for password records of the currently displayed password file.

The password records are protected by a master password. The master password is used to encrypt and decrypt the password records.

YAPET relies on OpenSSL for encrypting and decrypting password records. The cipher for encryption and decryption is Blowfish with a 448 bits key.

openSUSE 12.1 Released

openSUSE 12.1
This release represents more than eight months of work by international community.
Awesome improvements include the latest GNOME 3.2 desktop as well as the newest from KDE, XFCE and LXDE; your ownCloud made easy with mirall; Snapper-shots of your file system; and much, much more.

Desktops:
openSUSE 12.1 comes with the new GNOME Shell 3.2.
Notifications are much nicer, you can now configure your online accounts in one place and Shell handles multiple-screen setups better.

Among the features is color management, something GNOME shares with KDE where openSUSE is the first to integrate the Oyranos color management system. Also new from KDE is Apper, an easier-to-use PackageKit front end.

Cloud:
It is 2011, and most of us use ‘cloud’ technology like having our files on Dropbox, friends on Facebook and music on Spotify. But these technologies are arguably dangerous from a security and privacy point of view. While not solving all problems yet, ownCloud aims to bring these services back under your control.

Social Media Player for Linux, Windows and MAC OSX - Tomahawk

Tomahawk is a project dedicated to creating an audio player as an alternative Banshee, Amarok, and Rhytmbox. Tomahawk interface looks clean and fits perfectly on any desktop environment such as Gnome, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE. Tomahawk can be installed on MAC OSX, Linux and Windows

Tomahawk is build to solve below mentioned problems:
* Why can't I easily listen to all the music I have scattered across multiple computers, at multiple locations, from a single interface?
* Why can I stream my home iTunes library to my laptop when I am at home, but I can't when I am somewhere else?
* Conversely, how come I can stream my co-worker's iTunes library when we are both at the office, but only if we are on the same wireless network (or subnet)?
* When I am reading a website that talks about a song, and I own that song, why can't I play my copy directly from that page?
* Why can't I subscribe to, and import, playlist metadata from all over the web - and then have that resolve against any/all songs that I have access to?
* Why do I have to listen to songs I have on my hard drive, and songs from services I subscribe to, in totally different user experience silos?
* If I am a music subscription service provider, why do I need to incur the costs of streaming you content you already have locally?

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Find and Delete Duplicate files under Linux - Fdupes

fdupes is a program written by Adrian Lopez to scan directories for duplicate files, with options to list and delete them. It first compares file sizes and MD5 signatures, and then performs a byte-by-byte check for verification.
fdupes is written in C and is released under the MIT License.

fdupes installation:
Type the following command to install fdupes in Debian / Ubuntu Linux:

sudo apt-get install fdupes

Protects Networked Hosts from Brute Force Attacks - Sshguar

Sshguard is a small program that monitors services running on your machine from the log files. When it detects that someone is doing something bad to a service, sshguard blocks the IP address of the bad guy with a firewall rule.

Sshguard Log support:
Sshguard interprets log messages with several formats:
* syslog
* syslog-ng
* metalog
* multilog
* raw log
It can monitor multiple log files at once, and handles log rotation and temporary log files automatically. Its powerful grammar-based parser makes it straightforward to support several formats and services without increasing complexity.

Extracting Images from PDF files - Pdfimages

Pdfimages is an open source command-line utility for extracting images from PDF files. It is freely available as part of poppler-utils and xpdf-utils, and included by default with many Linux distributions.

Pdfimages saves images from a Portable Document Format (PDF) file as Portable Pixmap (PPM), Portable Bitmap (PBM), or JPEG files. Pdfimages reads the PDF file, scans one or more pages, PDF-file, and writes one PPM, PBM, or JPEG file for each image, image-root-nnn.xxx, where nnn is the image number and xxx is the image type (.ppm, .pbm,.jpg).

NB: pdfimages extracts the raw image data from the PDF file, without performing any additional transforms. Any rotation, clipping, color inversion, etc. done by the PDF content stream is ignored.

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