Layman Linux

Everytime you share your flash drive or portable hard disk with your Windows friends don’t you get a dozen of viruses & other malwares in return? Due to your friends folly of not keeping their antivirus softwares up-to-date you have to pay in the form of an infected windows environment. To counter this, I have developed almost a full proof solution. Now I no longer need to be paranoid when plugging shared pendrives or external hard disks.

When you receive the flash drive or portable hard disk from your friend, don’t plug it directly into Windows. If you have any Linux distro installed boot into it. If you don’t have one, then boot from a Live CD. Any distro will do as long as it boots into a live environment or at a shell. Once you boot into the distro, mount & open the pendrive or portable hard disk. Now list all files of the pendrive in a shell or in a graphical file manager like Nautilus.

You should now notice some files & folders with weird names. These are the viruses. Now simply delete them all. Also delete the ‘autorun.inf’ which when infected instructs the viruses to load as soon as the pendrive is plugged in. With such approach, I’m sure you won’t even need to scan the pendrive into your Windows environment with an antivirus(though I do not recommend doing so). Offcourse viruses embedded into compressed files(zip,rar etc) won’t go away & still can infect your windows environment. Same holds true for macro viruses hidden inside a word document. The logic behind this is very simple that Windows viruses can’t execute themselves under Linux. The above procedure will come to rescue when you don’t have an antivirus installed & should be used only as a precautionary measure. You should still install & keep an updated antivirus software if you use Microsoft Windows.

Last.fm provides a good platform to share with the world your music liking & also to befriend people who share similar music taste like yours. Most Last.fm users scrobb(post) their tracks on their profile via the media player. The media player updates the tracks played by the user onto their profile in real-time. This is done by a plugin which pings the Last.fm server. On Linux if you’re using XMMS media player, you can update your track list by using the XMMS-Scrobbler plugin. I’ll tell you how to install XMMS media player, the XMMS scrobbler plugin & then configure the plugin so it can update your profile on Last.fm.

I assume that you don’t have XMMS media player installed on your system. Before you install it, you’ll need to enable the RPMFusion repositories. Simply follow the instructions on this page to enable them as per your operating system.

To install XMMS media player on a Fedora or its derivative system, issue the following command with root privileges into the terminal.

yum install xmms xmms-scrobbler

The above command will install XMMS media player and the XMMS Scrobbler Plugin.

Once you’re done with the above, launch XMMS & then right click & go to Option > Preferences. Here click on the ‘General Plugins’ tab. You should see ‘XMMS-Scrobbler’ plugin. Highlight the plugin by clicking on it and then click on configure. It will prompt you for your Last.fm username & password. Enter them & click ok. Now in the General Plugin tab with XMMS-Scrobble plugin highlighted check the Enable plugin chechbox.

That’s it. The XMMS-Scrobbler plugin is enabled. Now play a track in XMMS media player & check whether it gets scrobbed on your Last.fm profile. If it does then all is good. If it doesn’t then you will have to recheck whether you entered the correct credentials in the plugin configuration page.

Happy Scrobbing!

Everytime one installs a new operating system there are some tasks needed to be performed before one can start using the system. There are many task which one should do after a fresh install like disabling unwanted services, customizing settings etc but here we would talk about the most important task – Installing essentials. Essentials are those software which are required to make a crude system usable. These includes flash player, add-on plugins, media players, codecs & small utility software’s.

Generally, most of the users would hit various sites to download & install the essentials. Some users tend to do the same but via graphical package managers. Though there is nothing wrong in the above methods but these methods tend to consume a lot of time. Even I used to follow the same until I got to know about Easy Life.

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Most of the modern Linux distros can easily detect & mount external drives automatically. In extremely rare case they may fail to mount. At such times, knowing how to manually mount the external drives will come handy. This simple guide will show you to mount external drives like pendrive, external hard-disks, card reader etc in Linux.

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Earlier on we had walked through managing software packages under Debian Linux. In this post we look at managing software under an RPM based Linux distro. RPM stands for Red Hat Package Manager. As the name suggest this format was developed by Redhat but now it is not confined to Redhat Linux. Now many Linux distros like OpenSUSE, Mandriva etc have incorporated the RPM format. There are many graphical utilities out there which can help you manage software on your RPM distro but as always command line will offer you total control & flexibility over the process. Let’s go ahead & learn how to manage software on an RPM linux distro. Below foobar refers to an example application. Replace it by the name of your software package.

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