For my money, I would much rather read manpages in a browser.

Ubuntu Manpages Repository

*What I am waiting for now though is a way to search the manpages by function.  I have to know the command ‘wc’ to search the man pages for how to make it output the number of lines now (’wc -l’). What I would like to see is this ability integrated into manpages.*

The first article “Learn 10 Good Unix Usage Habits“:

• Make directory trees in a single swipe.
• Change the path; do not move the archive.
• Combine your commands with control operators.
• Quote variables with caution.
• Use escape sequences to manage long input.
• Group your commands together in a list.
• Use xargs outside of find .
• Know when grep should do the counting — and when it should step aside.
• Match certain fields in output, not just lines.
• Stop piping cats.

The other article expands on it “Learn 10 More Good Unix Usage Habits” :

• Use file name completion.
• Use history expansion.
• Reuse previous arguments.
• Manage directory navigation with pushd and popd.
• Find large files.
• Create temporary files without an editor.
• Use the curl command-line utility.
• Make the most of regular expressions.
• Determine the current user.
• Process data with awk.

So I will be out for this week and probably next.  I will still be twittering and should be doing that pretty frequently these couple weeks in my personal life. You can get updates on that here

Till then, take care all!

If your using Gnome, Baobab is listed as Disk Usage Analyzer under Applications->Accessories.  My KDE 4.1 installation did not have it on the menu, but it can be added via Kmenuedit or run from the command line with the command:

sean@redstar:~$ /usr/bin/baobab &

Baobab is a Gnome application, so if you run it under a different window manager you will need to to have the gnome libraries installed.

Once Baobab is up, we need to scan the filesystem.  This will take a minute, but will provide the detailed information we want.

After the scan is done we have a good graphical view.

The neat part is you can drill down into the directories to get details on what is actually taking up all your filesystem space.

One thing to note, if you do not have permission to a directory, Baobab will not display a graphical view of it.

Link to the Baobab Homepage

The global KDE settins for KDE4 are in

/etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc

Open this in the text editor of your choice with sudo and change

#NumLock=Off

to

NumLock=On (remove the ‘#’ sign and change Off to On)

You will need to restart the computer for setting to take effect, but from now on the numlock key should be on by default.

If any KDE gurus know a better way to do this in 4.1, let us know since this should be doable via the System Settings.

Kdar Splash Screen

We all are terrible about backups.  Admit it.  You haven’t done a backup in a while.  I hadn’t either.  That is until I discovered Kdar and fell in love.

Kdar is a local backup utility that meets all my criteria.  Most backup programs were way to complex for backing up my local machine and files.  I didn’t want to FTP the backups to a remote machine.  I wanted it to be able to easily do incremental backups.  And damn it, I wanted a GUI.

My backup setup is simple.  I once a month I run a full backup, then every other week that month I run a differential backup.  I save the backups to an attached external and to a removable drive that I store in the fire safe.  Yes, I am aware that this is not a completely bullet proof backup scheme, but it works well enough for me.  Little overhead, little work, and no recurring expenses.

Kdar is the best package I have found for this.  The only problem is that it is not part of the repositories for the most current version of Ubuntu (8.04 as of this writing).  But installing it is only slightly more painful then a normal application.

First off, you need to have the KDE libraries installed, but installing Amarok or any other KDE app from the repositories will get you those so chances are you already have them.

Next we need to install a library that Kdar needs - libdar3c2a.  You can get that here:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/libdar3c2a

Finally we install kdar itself.  Get that here:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/kde/kdar

That’s it.  In the next couple days, we’ll look at doing a full backup, then a differential backup, then how to restore files from an archive.  Stay tuned!

when the machine restarts, it will run fsck.

I got this printer free when I bought my computer a while ago and it turns out that the Dell 720 is a rebranded Lexmark. Lexmark does not offer drivers for Ubuntu, so we will need to get the linux drivers built for RedHat.
Download the drivers from Lexmark here(link opens in a new window).

Now that we have the drivers, we need to extract them and convert them.

1. Open a command shell. (actual commands are in bold)
2. Extract the drivers with tar
   1. tar xzvf CJLZ600LE-CUPS-1.0-1.TAR.gz
3. Now we need to extract the drivers from the install script since it is built for Redhat
   1. tail -n +143 z600cups-1.0-1.gz.sh > install.tar.gz
   2. tar xvzf install.tar.gz
4. We will now change the RPMs to DEB packages so Ubuntu can install them using alien
   1. sudo alien -k z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.rpm
   2. sudo alien -k z600cups-1.0-1.i386.rpm
5. Now we have the files as .deb, which we can install on Ubuntu
   1. sudo dpkg -i z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.deb
   2. sudo dpkg -i z600cups-1.0-1.i386.deb
6. Now we are ready to install the actual printer
   1. Open the Printer Control Panel System->Administration->Printing
   2. Add New Printer
   3. Choose the Lexmark z600 driver
   4. Print a test page

That should be it.