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 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.

Though not widely talked about, I desired to access files on the Home$ share of a Samba server from my Linux workstation. I had never come up with the syntax to do so.

Using mount.cifs to do the mount, it turned out to be simply //server/userid and no trailing $ or anything special.

Obviously I made sure that userid was the same user that was authenticating to the PDC in the first place. I did not try accessing bar's Home$ share using the ID foo, for example.

When my previous display started getting fuzzy, I plugged in another display and got a much clearer view until I rebooted. After the reboot, the display came up as 1280 x 1024 resolution instead of my usual 1600 x 1200. I went searching and found references to capturing the EDID from the display and correcting the EDID information. Using the Nvidia X Server Settings applet I captured the EDID, but the Phoenix editor was unable to open the file.

Copying my bug against ubuntu-docs here, Bug #440150:

I was researching how to connect a HP 6100C scanner to Ubuntu 9.04, and encountered these docs:

ScanningHowTo
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ScanningHowTo

Scanning
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/printing/C/scanning.html