http://www.blindedbytech.com Tech for the rest of us -- articles on the things we want to do, but never have easily explained. Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:56:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The T-Mobile G1 was the first effort at a mass market phone built on the Google operating system Android. Combining slick (if not current) hardware from HTC, Google's web applications, and this new open mobile OS, it was meant to give the iPhone some competition while changing the landscape ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/10/21/t-mobile-g1-android-first-impressions/ System administration doesn't have to be all serious. You can have sudo insult your users who mis-enter their password, by adding 'insults' to the Defaults line. Enable it and see which users discover it first. Reference: Ubuntu Unleashed: Enable Sudo insults for some laughs! http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/10/18/enable-sudo-insults/ Let's say you have a bunch of hosts on example.com, such as mercury.example.com, venus.example.com, and jupiter.outerplanets.example.com. You spend a bunch of your time on the command line, so you want to be able to access them with just the short host name, i.e., you want to be able to ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/09/05/keep-dhcp-from-overwriting-search-domains/ How do you determine what version of a Perl module you have? If you have one module you want to check, you can call the VERSION parameter of the module. Let's say you wanted to check the version of Test::Harness you had on your system. Run the ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/09/04/how-to-determine-perl-module-versions/ You used to be able to use tzconfig to set the time zone in Ubuntu. With Hardy Heron you can no longer do this, so how do you do it? Simple: sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/08/14/how-to-set-time-zone-in-ubuntu-hardy-heron/ In Debian / Ubuntu, sometimes you want to keep a package at a specific version, and not upgrade it. For instance, the Perl module DateTime::Timezone in Ubuntu Dapper lists its version as 1:0.37-1, when the version is actually 0.37. This makes it difficult if I build a new ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/06/20/keep-a-specific-debian-package-version/ Due to the recent ssh vulnerability, many releases of Ubuntu found themselves with vulnerable ssh keys. User Keys Run ssh-vulnkey to see if you're unlucky. If you are, you'll have to regenerate your keys. ssh-keygen -t rsa That's it. If you're using dsa, use dsa in the above instead of ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/06/11/regenerating-ssh-keys-on-ubuntu/ If you're like me, you may need to build your own packages in Debian, or perhaps have downloaded different versions of packages to install on your system. Sometimes you'd like to go the other way, though, and install an older version of a package you found in the repository, ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/05/21/debian-using-apt-to-install-a-specific-version/ As I don't always have an Internet connection, being able to get my laptop online through my cell phone (a Blackberry Pearl 8100 on T-Mobile) is quite useful. Here's how you do it. I presume at this point you've already installed the Blackberry Desktop software, and can sync ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/05/09/windows-xp-online-through-blackberry-pearl-8100-and-t-mobile/ While I tend to like running Ubuntu on the desktop, I sometimes find myself needing to run Windows programs for various things. For that, I actually got VMware Workstation for Linux, and set up a Windows XP Professional image, with a partition size of 8 GB. I rarely ... http://www.blindedbytech.com/2008/02/27/resizing-a-windows-vmware-workstation-image-in-linux/