For some time I had been of the opinion that sending emails from the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) simply had to be more complicated than with Windows using Blat. Not so! Over the weekend I learned of sendEmail which offers equivalent functionality.

There is a nasty / annoying bug in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) Linux which prevents attaching USB storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDD) and Flash memory stick drives. With the assistance of others in the Ubuntu bug tracker system, I just arrived at a little script which successfully corrects the Plug-n-Play (PnP) detection problem. It is as follows, fixext_backup.sh:

Note: You need to run this script as root (aka sudo the script).

There seems to be a bug in Ubuntu in that when you reboot the system all remote CUPS printer connections are forgotten. This sounded like something needing a bit of scripting magic, so I went searching for how to accomplish that. Turns out it was quite simple actually. The utility lpadmin will be your friend to command line administer printers / print queues. The first lpadmin command attaches to the CUPS shared network printer queue via the IPP protocol, and the second lpadmin command sets the printer as the system default.

Recently I ran into a situation where a Perl CPAN module I needed was not available in the Ubuntu repositories. Someone on IRC kindly showed me a slick Ubuntu package which is able to quickly produce Ubuntu .deb packages out of Perl CPAN modules! Here is what you need to know:

Using a developer computer (aka "play box") add the following packages:

Next use dh-make-perl to package the needed CPAN module:

Today's blog post explains how to get this very useful component of the TinyDNS project to work with Ubuntu Server. You may fetch down the Michael Stella's original version of his code, and then note my adjustments to get it to work on the Ubuntu Server (9.04 through 10.04).

http://www.thismetalsky.org/projects/dhcp_dns

Unpack the file, then make the following adjustments:

Patching up djb_update.pl

When I first went looking for HOW-TO docs concerning installing Daniel J. Bernstein's djbdns on Ubuntu, I could not find such. What I did find was plenty of docs on how to download and compile Mr. Bernstein's djbdns code from source, however Ubuntu has very kindly created packages of everything you need for installing djbdns.

I discovered that the usual Ubuntu boot CD menu still exists in 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). The way to make it come up is to be pressing the Left Control (Ctrl) key as the computer starts to boot from the CD.

So, Ubuntu installation CD's may still be used to test memory with the MemTest86+. Use the above method to get to the boot menu, and the memory testing program will show up on the list of boot options.