How to install an RPM Package on Ubuntu Linux

Installing software on Ubuntu usually entails using Synaptic or by using an apt-get command from the terminal. Unfortunately, there are still a number of packages out there that are only distributed in RPM format.

There's a utility called Alien that converts packages from one format to the other. This doesn't always mean that an rpm will work on your system, though. You will need to install some prerequisite software packages in order to install alien, however. These packages include gcc and make.

Run this command to install alien and other necessary packages:

sudo apt-get install alien dpkg-dev debhelper build-essential

To convert a package from rpm to debian format, use this command syntax. The sudo may not be necessary, but we'll include it just in case.

sudo alien packagename.rpm

To install the package, you'll use the dpkg utility, which is the internal package management tool behind debian and Ubuntu.

sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb

The package should now be installed, providing it's compatible with your system.

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How to change GRUB Menu Timeout on Ubuntu

When Ubuntu boots, grub gets loaded and will display the OS for only 3 sec, now suppose you want to increase this amount… or you may even want to decrease it.

Open up the /boot/grub/menu.lst file in your favorite text editor. you can use gedit:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now find the section that looks like this:

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 3

The timeout value is in seconds, specify the time you required. Save the file, and when you reboot you will have that many seconds to choose the menu item you want.

There are many other options avaliable in Grub -- check here

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How to create command aliases

Aliases in the Unix/Linux operating system provide shortcuts that can save you typing, let you build your own powerful commands, and make your command line life easier.

Background
I've found it very helpful to create aliases to make my command line Unix/Linux life easier. For instance, instead of always typing

ls -al

to get a directory listing, I've created an alias so I only have to type this: "l" (That's the lower case letter "L".)

Using aliases like this you can create anything from simple shortcuts like this to powerful custom commands.
How to create aliases

Creating aliases is very easy. You can either enter them at the command line as you're working, or more likely, you'll put them in one of your startup files, like your .bashrc file, so they will be available every time you log in.

I created the l alias above by entering the following command into my .bashrc file:

alias l="ls -al"

As you can see, the syntax is very easy:

   1. Start with the alias command
   2. Then type the name of the alias you want to create
   3. Then an = sign, with no spaces on either side of the =
   4. Then type the command (or commands) you want your alias to execute when it is run. This can be a simple command, or can be a powerful combination of commands.

Sample aliases
To get you going, here is a list of sample aliases I use all the time. I've pretty much just copied them here from my .bashrc file:

alias l="ls -al"
alias lm="ls -al|more"
alias html="cd /web/apache/htdocs/devdaily/html"
alias logs="cd /web/apache/htdocs/devdaily/logs"
alias qp="ps auxwww|more"
alias nu="who|wc -l"
alias aug="ls -al|grep Aug|grep -v 2002"

As you can see, you can get as creative as you want, and pipe commands together to do just about anything. In the last alias shown I've actually combined three Unix commands in a row into one alias to get the output I want.

Because the Unix shell is very programmable and because the output of commands is very consistent and reliable, you can create your own aliases (or macros if you prefer) to do just about anything.

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Top OpenSorce Groupware

eGroupWare (www.egroupware.org)

 eGroupWare is many things. It is a very flexible pluggable framework capable of hosting applications like a group calendar, AddressBook, Email, accounting ledger, inventory, and whatever else your can think of. These applications can share a common user store, and a flexible Access Control List (ACL) system to control access and information sharing. At it's core there is the phpgwapi, an API written for php, that provides some very useful functions and tools for developers, including the user store, which has several back ends, database abstraction, and a flexible templating system. Applications are then written using the phpgwapi and phpgw framework to provide web based tools to users.

phpGroupWare (http://www.phpgroupware.org/)

phpGroupWare - formerly known as webdistro - is a multi-user groupware suite written in PHP.

It provides about 50 web-based applications, as there are the Calendar, Addressbook, an advanced Projects manager, Todo List, Notes, Email, Newsgroup- and Headlines Reader, a Filemanager and many more Applications. The calendar supports repeating events and includes alarm functions. The email system supports inline graphics and file attachments.

The system as a whole supports user preferences, themes, user permissions, multi-language support and unser groups. It includes modules to setup and administrate the working environment. The groupware suite is based on an advanced Application Programming Interface (API).

PHProjekt (http://www.phprojekt.com/)

PHProjekt is a modular application for the coordination of group activities and to share informations and document via the web. Components of PHProjekt: Group calendar, project management, time card system, file management, contact manager, mail client and many other modules.

Group-Office (www.sourceforge.net/projects/group-office)

It offers a very wide variety of features that matter. Features you don't need won't be installed. Group-Office stands out when it comes to user friendliness combined with powerfully features. It was developed with the following goals in mind:

Speed
The World Wide Wait bugs us all every day and the critical business applications that Group-Office provides can't be hindered by being slow. Group-Office is specifically designed to perform tasks as quickly as possible.

Simplicity
The Graphical User Interface is designed in a way that everybody intuitively finds the functions they are looking for. Group-Office strives to be as simple as possible without losing functionality.

Modularity
As an ever-changing software product, upgrades should be as painless as possible. This means that good code design is critical. Group-Office is designed in a modular way that makes upgrades easy and painless.

Scalability
Group-Office is designed to be usable for 1 to thousands of users.

WebCollab (http://webcollab.sourceforge.net/)

A collaborative web-based system for projects and project management; WebCollab is easy to use, and encourages users to work together. The software is functionally elegant and secure without being cumbersome for users, or graphically intensive.

The software is ideally suited to tracking multiple projects and innumerable small tasks across an organisation of any size. If you have reminder notes stuck all over your desk, then you need WebCollab!   


    *  Easy to read and intuitive screen layouts. Most users can use WebCollab without training.
    * Individual users are assigned rights and permissions. Users can also be put into groups with controlled rights and permissions.
    * Projects and tasks progress and approaching deadlines are graphically highlighted.
    * Changes are personally highlighted for other users to see.
    * Changes and new items can be emailed to affected users.

And the software is based on mature code base:

    * WebCollab is fast and stable
    * Secure - particular attention has been paid to security. No security scares to date.
    * Robust and scalable. Several years of daily production use.

OBM (http://www.obm.org/)

 
OBM is a groupware, email, LDAP, Windows PDC, CRM, and project management application. It is mainly used as an Exchange or Notes/Domino groupware and mail server replacement, as an LDAP directory, as a Windows PDC, as a contact and customer database, as a project management tool, or as any combination of these functions. It provides groupware (calendars, contacts, and tasks) connectors for Outlook, Thunderbird/Lightning, and PDAs. It supports internationalization and themes. It is highly scalable, and is used by sites from five to many thousands of users.

Teamwork (http://www.twproject.com)

Teamwork is a Web-based groupware for project management. It supplies groupware, issue tracking, cost control, and document and project management features with fine-grained security in a friendly interface. Agile methodologies such SCRUM are supported. Teamwork is easy to integrate with your IT infrastructure. Supports multiple databases (via hibernate), browsers, and languages.

TWiki (http://TWiki.org/)

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, and simple Web based collaboration platform. It is suitable for dynamic intranets and knowledge bases, and for sharing and managing documents and collaborative projects. It resembles a normal Web site, but every page can be changed from a browser. It features automatic link generation, full text search, group authorization, Web forms, reporting, change notification, file attachments, revision control of pages and attachments, a modular templating system with skins, hierarchical navigation based on the topic parenting feature, and more. Plugins can be used to enhance the program and build groupware applications.

Horde Groupware (http://www.horde.org/groupware/)

Horde Groupware is an enterprise ready browser-based collaboration suite. Users can manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project. Horde Groupware bundles the separately available applications Kronolith, Turba, Nag, and Mnemo. It can be extended with any of the released Horde applications or the Horde modules that are still in development, like a file manager, a bookmark manager, a forum, or a wiki.

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Top Download Manager

d4x (Here)

Downloader for X is a powerful graphical download manager. It supports both HTTP(S) and FTP protocols and has nice graphical user interface, though some actions can also be performed using the command line.

Among others, its key features include proxy and SOCKS5 support, recursive downloading, wildcard matching, download scheduler, multiple download queues and more...

Using the D4X is very simple, copy the url to the file to be downloaded, Click the + icon in the software and paste the URL and click OK. Quite interesting features in D4X are sound effets on completion, ftp access, simple usage, logs, setting limits on download size etc… Use D4X for your downloads and Enjoy…

KGet (http://kget.sourceforge.net/)

KGet is a download manager similar to GetRight or Go!zilla.

It keeps all your downloads in one dialog and you can add and remove transfers. Transfers can be paused, resumed, queued or scheduled. Dialogs display information about the status of transfers - progress, size, speed and remaining time.

The program supports drag & drop from KDE applications and Mozilla Firefox.
KGet is an advanced download manager with support for Metalink and Bittorrent. Downloads are added to the list, where they can be paused, queued, or scheduled for later.


Features include:
    * Downloading files from FTP and HTTP(S) sources
    * Pausing and resuming of downloading files, as well as the ability to restart a download
    * Provides lots of information about current and pending downloads.
    * Embedding into system tray
    * Integration with the Konqueror web browser
    * Metalink support which contain multiple URLs for downloads, along with checksums and other information

doKa (http://doka.sourceforge.net/)

doKa is a download accelerator/manager for KDE, with the beauty of KDE. It supports various connections that divides the file. It'll have the feature of add new connections on the "fly".

It's made with Kdevelop, C++ and Qt, it uses multiples connections to download a file. This way you can speed up your download. The goal of this project is to make a downloader with the beauty of Kde and with more features than the main downloaders for Linux has.

KMAGO (http://kmago.sourceforge.net/)

KMAGO (MAnager of Get Operations) is a KDE-based download manager. It features drag and drop operations, group management of transfers, control of multiple downloads with priority and selectable priority policy, resume capability check, full configurability, and the ability to choose different programs for use as a downloading backend.


Features:
 * drag and drop operations with applications (konqueror, Netscape, ...) and between KMago widgets
 * drop target and system tray icon with d'n'd capabilities
 * transfers grouping
 * multiple downloads control with priority and selectable priority policy
 * resume capability check
 * full configurable
 * enabled to manage many retriever commands
 * cookie and http related management offered by KDE I/O library

Gwget (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gwget/)

 

Gwget it's a download manager for the Gnome Desktop. The main features are:

    * Resume: By default, gwget tries to continue any download.
    * Notification: Gwget tries to use the Gnome notification area suppo dxrt, if available. You can close the main window and gwget runs in the background.
    * Recursivity: Gwget detects when you put a html, php, asp or a web page dir in the url to download, and ask you to only download certain files (multimedia, only the index, and so on).
    * Drag & Drop: You can d&d a url to the main gwget window or the notification area icon to add a new download.
    * Firefox Extension: Fireget 

QuickDownloader  (http://qdown.sourceforge.net/)

QuickDownloader is a download manager that accelerates downloads by between 200 and 300%. It provides a resume capability for resuming broken downloads. It supports both HTTP and FTP downloads.

features:

features of QuickDownloader
 * Support for multiple Downloads
 * Capability to carry out both downloads and Resume simultaneously
 * Better Handling of errors
 * Handling of 100 % of all possible errors that can be thrown
 * A Desktop button which can set the location to the users desktop
 * Resuming of All Downloads
 * Information on each Download that can be resumed
 * Buffer Resizing for optimum use
 * Proxy Configuration for systems behind firewalls
 * The viewing of System Resources and the resources in use by QD
 * Log and error handling support
 * Accelerates Downloads by upto 300%
 * Support for all types of Network connections such as Dial Up, Broadband T1 etc.
 * Ability to download from both http and ftp sites
 * 100 % Resume support on all downloads even if the server doesn't support it.
 * Downloads can be zipped up upon download to minimise the amount of space it takes
 * OS Independent
 * Uses Java JRE which runs on any machine such as Windows 2000, 98, Linux etc.
 * Integrity checker for all gui based components

octod (http://diozaka.org/octod/)

Octod is a "download manager daemon" -- a daemon that listens at the network interface for incoming download jobs and performs them (simultaneously) in the background. It is intended to run on desktop systems as a reliable and fast download manager without the overhead of a graphical user interface, but it can also be used as a centralized download station running in network environments with multiple users.

To control the daemon, an easy and self-explanatory network protocol has been defined, so cross-platform, cross-language graphical clients (based on ncurses, Qt, Gtk, or even HTML/PHP) can be implemented.

The libraries used for the daemon (libcURL and libboost) are highly portable, so there should not be any problem in compiling it within any POSIX-compliant operating system and even Microsoft Windows (with some adaption of the network functions), but this has not been tested yet. At the moment, it is running fine on Linux systems.

Claros Downloader (http://www.claros.org/old/products/downloader/download.html)

Claros Downloader is a highly customizable, multi-threaded, Web-based downloader manager. Users can download files to their desktop or corporate server, from wherever they are.

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