I was doing my initial “is it working?” tests after reinstalling mpc, and mpc ls was not giving me any output. ncmpc was also showing no files. What I didn’t appreciate was that the music database is no populated by default- you have to issue an “update” command manually (or semi-manually by running a client [...]
Archive for the ‘linux’ Category
Show Progress Bar During dd Copy
There are a number of ways of showing the progress of a dd copy. The easiest is sending the USER1 signal to the dd process, like: dd if=FILE1 of=FILE2 pkill -USER1 dd But that only gives a current status – eg 12345678 bytes transferred (11.77MB) … [8.56MB/s]. Not that helpful if you want an ongoing [...]
Limit the Rate of SCP
I was using scp to upload some files (as you should!) and maxing out my connection while doing it. It made using ssh problematic! Fortunately there’s an easy switch to use to limit the rate: scp -l 1024 /file1 user@host:/file2 The -l switch limits scp to the specified upload rate in kilobits per second. Handy!
Fix for “Current Password No Longer Matches Keyring”
A I may have mentioned, I recently reinstalled Ubuntu (had been using Windows 7 for a few months). Since the reinstall I had changed my common login password for the other computers on the network so of course I updated my user password for the new install. The slight problem came when I used any [...]
[Solved] sshd Does Not Run At System Startup (Ubuntu)
Problem: sshd does not appear to start on system boot, but runs fine when started from a terminal with /etc/init.d/ssh start Update Dec 2010: Thanks to Jeremie here. Change the following in /etc/init.d./ssh to stop sshd starting before the network is ready: Change: # Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog to: # Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog $network Merci Jeremie! [...]
Extract A Single Image From A Video Using FFMPEG
Dead handy, this: ffmpeg -ss 0.5 -i inputfile.mp4 -t 1 -s 480×300 -f image2 imagefile.jpg The various options: -t 1: limit to 1 frame extracted -ss 0.5: point of movie to extract from (ie seek to 0.5 seconds) -s 480×300: frame size of image to output (image resized to fit dimensions) -f image2: forces format [...]
Connect to a WPA/WPA2 Secured Network In Linux
This turned out to be dead easy, although it took a bit of futzing around due to my own slowness. The situation arose during an a failed upgrade of my dad’s machine to Ubuntu 10.04 (aka Lucid Lynx). I’m sensing a pattern here; I don’t think there has been an upgrade that has gone smoothly [...]
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Upgrade Problem Fixed (mountall/init)
(Jump to the bonus section on sorting a removed Gnome panel) I finally got round to doing the Jaunty->Karmic upgrade on a troublesome machine. Well, re-doing. I made an abortive attempt to install it on this particular exhibit of electronic arthritis back before I left for Barcelona, which ended in me reinstalling 9.04. Anyway, for [...]
Count Arguments In A Bash Script
Another useful tip I’m sure most people will be familiar with, but in bash scripts $# stores the number of arguments passed to the script. Eg, combine with $@ (all arguments) for batch processing (what I used it for): foreach $arg in $@; do [stuff] [compare with $# to tell remaining items] done Very basic [...]
Batch Rename or Move An Extension In Linux (Eg .JPG to .jpg)
A short and easy trick, but one that is either not referred to or more complex examples given. I wanted to change a bunch of upper case .JPG images to lower case. Rather than writing a bash script or some such, I just used the ‘rename’ command: rename ‘s/\.JPG$/\.jpg/’ *.JPG It may depend on perl [...]
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