Some time ago, I was lamenting that Bash did not have something comparable to PARSE found in Rexx / Open Object Rexx. Shortly I received a reply from Dallas Legan that he had built a tool capable of exposing the power of PARSE and allow it to be used within Bash scripts. That concept totally rocks! That tool may be found here:

"A Simple, General Command Line Filter In REXX"
http://www.scoug.com/os24u/2001/scoug010.parsetool.html

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).

I recently got a bit bored with my usual Clearlooks GNOME theme. I wanted something with non-rounded controls and dark blue active title bars. Here is what I came up with.

1) First I added a couple of Ubuntu GNOME theme related packages. Both are required as Mist comes from one and Gion is in the other.

2) Next customize the Mist theme as follows:

System \ Preferences \ Appearance \ Mist \ Customize...

Some time ago I found documentation lacking for how to successfully configure name-based Apache Virtual Host (Multi-Site) and allow one of the domain names to have mod_ssl (SSL) enabled while having only a SINGLE static IP address. The answer turned out to be... "You must set up your Apache configuration files correctly!" Here is what I discovered.

I recently switched my email client from Mozilla Thunderbird 2.x to Mozilla SeaMonkey (latest) as Mozilla Thunderbird 3.x is so undesirable. Things were working quite well. I found the place to set which component of SeaMonkey it opens to on start up and selected the Mail component.

However there was one annoyance! In Firefox when a web page has a mailto: link, clicking that link would not open a new SeaMonkey email window... I would only see the SeaMonkey program flash in the lower panel within Ubuntu Gnome desktop.

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.