Linux Blog

iScanner - Detect and Remove Malicious code from your webpages

iScanner is free open source tool lets you detect and remove malicious codes and web pages viruses from your Linux/Unix server easily and automatically.

This tool is programmed by iSecur1ty using Ruby programming language and it's released under the terms of GNU Affero General Public License 3.0.

iScanner Features:
* Detect malicious codes in web pages. This include hidden iframe tags, javascript, vbscript, activex objects and PHP codes .
* Extensive log shows the infected files and the malicious code.
* Send email reports.
* Ability to clean the infected web pages automatically.
* Easy backup and restore system for the infected files.
* Simple and editable signature based database.
* Ability to update the database and the program easily from dedicated server.
* Very flexible options and easy to use.
* Fast scanner with good performance.

Installation:
Download iScanner - here
Extract the package to some other directory - tar -zxvf iscanner.tar.gz

You don't have to install iScanner on your machine to be able to use it. The program is portable and doesn't require any external libraries, you just need to have Ruby installed on your machine then you can copy iScanner's folder to '/etc' or any other directory and use it directly from there.

Using iScanner:
-f :Use this option to select the folder you want to be scanned.

# iscanner -f /home/user

-m :With this option you can tell iScanner to send a copy of the infected log to selected email address:

# iscanner -f /home/user -m email@example.com

-c :This option will remove the malicious code from the infected files with out deleting the infected files. Before using this option make sure to check the infected log to know what iScanner will remove from each infected file.

# iscanner -c infected.log

There are many more useful option, please check the iScanner help.
You can add iScanner to the cron jobs to make it scan you server every 24 hours and send the infected log to your email address.

Secure your stored computer files with dependable spyware protection and a firewall protected Apple operating system.

Uget - A complete Download Manager for Linux / Windows

Uget is a download manager that uses GTK+2 and libcurl. It allows you to classify downloads, and allows you to import downloads from HTML files. Every category has an independent configuration that can be inherited by each download in that category.

Uget has many features like :
* Free (as in freedom , also free of charge) and Open Source.
* Simple , easy-to-use and lightweight.
* Support resume download , so if your connection lost you don’t need to start from first.
* Classify downloads , and every category has independent configuration and queue.
* Queue download.
* Integrate with Firefox through Flash-got plug-in.
* Monitoring clipboard.
* Import downloads from HTML file.
* Batch download , you can download many files has same arrange , like file_1 file_2 …. file_20, you don’t need to add all links , just one link and changeable character.
* Can be used from command line.

Installation:
DEB package for Debian-based distributions (Debain, Ubuntu, etc) - here
RPM package for RPM-based distributions (RedHat, Fedora, etc) - here
EXE for Windows XP / Vista / Win 7 , without GTK+ , you have to download GTK+ for windows

Mencoder - Movie Encoder for Linux

Mencoder is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies (AVI/ASF/OGG/DVD/VCD/VOB/MPG/MOV/VIV/FLI/RM/NUV/NET) to other MPlayer-playable formats. It can encode with various codecs, like DivX4 (1 or 2 passes), libavcodec, PCM/MP3/VBRMP3 audio. It also has stream copying and video resizing abilities.

Since it uses the same code as MPlayer, it also features the same huge number of highly-configurable video and audio filters to transform the video and audio stream.

In order to convert the videos all you have to do is open a console and issued the proper commands. For easy tasks this is the better way, because it's faster and you can just copy/paste the bash lines through different console sessions and have Mencoder multitask all of your videos to be converted.

If you have some more complicated tasks to do (extracting subtitles, cropping video frame, deinterlace, change endpoints) i suggest that you do it with a visual tool, like Avidemux.

Among the file types mencoder can handle are MPEG/VOB, AVI, ASF/WMA/WMV, RM, QT/MOV/MP4, Ogg/OGM, MKV, VIVO, FLI, and FLV, basically, the command structure is:

[mencoder] + [input file name] + [audio options] + [video options] + [output file name]

Here's a simple command that converts an MPG file to AVI format:

mencoder file.mpg -o file.avi -ovc lavc -oac lavc

Suppose you have a folder full of small video files of different types and would like to merge them into one big movie for easy watching. First, rename them so that they're in the order you want them to appear in the final video, then use:

mencoder * -o output.avi

To convert a video file to run on a device running iPodLinux, use:

mencoder -ovc raw -ofps 15 -oac pcm -vf scale=176:-2,expand=176:132,format=bgr16 input.file -o output.avi

Convert 3gp movies to avi:

mencoder mymovie.3gp -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3 -o mymovie.avi''

Lubuntu - Ubuntu with LXDE desktop

The Lubuntu project started in March 2009, with the purpose of creating a lighter and less resource demanding alternative to the Xubuntu operating system, using the LXDE desktop environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to join the ranks of Kubuntu and Xubuntu, and become an officially supported derivative of Ubuntu.

The developers claim that, while Xubuntu is often represented as a lightweight distro, it actually fails on running on older hardware, so they are targeting Linux their distribution at older legacy computers and devices with less than 256 MB of RAM.

While this project hasn't received too much attention until now, the LXDE project received an invitation to become a self-maintained component of Ubuntu back in February 2009, straight from the Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth.

Under the management of Mario Behling, the project received a project logo and an official Ubuntu wiki page, that includes a list of desired applications, packages and components.

Arista - Multimedia Transcoder for GNOME

Arista is an easy-to-use multimedia transcoder for the GNOME desktop. It focuses on the goal of transcoding media, namely the devices you wish to play the media on. It is designed for use by people who are not familiar with audio and video encoding and want an easy way to get multimedia to their devices. It supports input from DVD and V4L devices as well as regular files.

Arista Features:
* Presets for iPod, computer, DVD player, PSP, Playstation 3, and more
* Live preview to see encoded quality
* Automatically discover available DVD media and Video 4 Linux (v4l) devices
* Rip straight from DVD media easily (requires libdvdcss)
* Rip straight from v4l devices
* Simple terminal client for scripting
* Automatic preset updating

Arista Requirement:
Arista is written in Python and requires the bindings for GTK+ 2.16 or newer, GStreamer, GConf, GObject, Cairo, and DBus. If you are an Ubuntu user this means you need to be using at least Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). The GStreamer plugins required depend on the presets available, but at this time you should have gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, gst-plugins-ugly, and gst-ffmpeg. If you are on Ubuntu don't forget to install the multi-verse packages.

Installing Arista:
OpenSuSe user can install Arista using "1-click" installer - here
Ubuntu user can install Arista using command: sudo apt-get install arista