Digitivity » Linux/Unix

Mint Overtakes Ubuntu in DistroWatch

Digitivity — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:06:53 +0000

Posted in Images

This just in: More people are checking out Mint on DistroWatch than Ubuntu. This is the first time this has happened. Normally Ubuntu reigns supreme here as the top Linux distribution that people are interested in. Note: this doesn’t mean more people are running Mint than Ubuntu. But it can presage future trends. Especially since [...] Related posts:

Tint2: A Lightweight Alternative Panel for Linux

Digitivity — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:57:00 +0000

If you think the default panel in Ubuntu or Gnome takes up too many resources, or you just need a lightweight panel for the new iterations of the GUIs in Ubuntu or Gnome which lack a bottom panel, you might be interested in Tint2, a free and open source panel for various Linuxes.

It’s in the Ubuntu repositories. To install:

apt-get install tint2

Turning on Command Not Found Suggestions in Ubuntu

Digitivity — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 17:35:00 +0000

A nice thing about the default setup of Ubuntu desktop is that if you type a command which isn’t installed (or if you slightly misspell it), you’ll get suggestions to install packages that provide that command.

But that’s not enabled for Ubuntu Server. To get that same functionality, do this:

sudo apt-get install command-not-found

Now if you mistype a command, you get something like this:

$ asdf
No command 'asdf' found, did you mean:
 Command 'asdfg' from package 'aoeui' (universe)
 Command 'sadf' from package 'sysstat' (main)
 Command 'sdf' from package 'sdf' (universe)
asdf: command not found

Debian vs. Ubuntu Server

Digitivity — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:58:58 +0000

I was looking around for people’s opinions of running Debian vs. Ubuntu Server. A lot of people think there’s no reason to run Ubuntu because it’s just a derivative of Debian.

One person has an actual difference between the two: Debian doesn’t have Upstart. Upstart is the init daemon which starts services, and restarts them if they die. I find it incredibly useful.

Note that Debian 6 does have the service command, which is a lot easier to type than something out of /etc/init.d.

Also, the default Debian install seems to leave a little lacking as far as usability. For example, man doesn’t stop when you page to the end. Rather it falls off the bottom like Solaris, which is annoying.

And then there’s little stuff like no killall command. There’s kill, and there’s killall5, which kills all processes, not exactly what you want when you want to kill a process by name.

So after some experimenting with Debian, I’m back to Ubuntu.

How to Increase Bash History File Size

Digitivity — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:11:20 +0000

In Linux, the Bash shell keeps track of all the commands you execute, upto (usually) a default of 500 lines. This can be handy for looking up particularly tricky past commands.

But 500 lines fill up pretty quick.

You can increase the size by adding this line to the end of your ~./bashrc file

HISTSIZE=2000

Make the number whatever you want. HISTFILESIZE is a synonym for HISTSIZE.

Postfix+Dovecot Email Setup Tutorial

Digitivity — Mon, 23 May 2011 13:45:00 +0000

Posted in Links

http://madspace2.rajeshprakash.com/lowendvpsconfig.htm

Low End Box has a link to a nice Postfix+Dovecot email setup walkthrough. No related posts. No related posts.

Distrowatch: Real Linux Stats by OS

Digitivity — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:18:37 +0000

You’ve heard of Distrowatch, right?

It’s the #1 site for keeping track of the latest Linux distributions.

If you go to the homepage, as most people do, you’ll see the Page Hit Ranking, which is a ranking of which distro’s information page people click on when they arrive at Distrowatch.

OK, that’s what people are interested in.

But what OS are they actually running when they come to Distrowatch?

The answer is here:

http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.osdetail.html

Interestingly, about 45% of visitors are running Windows. Another 45% are running Linux.

Of the latter, 7% run Ubuntu, and the runner-up is Mint, with 2.3%. Fedora has only 0.6%, which you wouldn’t guess by the Page Hit Ranking, where it’s #3.

How to Restrict Users to SFTP Only Instead of SSH

Digitivity — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:45:00 +0000

Posted in Links

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/94

To give users upload ability without the ability to run commands. Related posts:RedHat Relents on Fedora Software Installation Policy RedHat’s Fedora 12 Lets Users Install Software Without Root with PolicyKit How to Log in to a Webserver Without a Password Using SSH Public Keys on Ubuntu Related posts:

GNOME 3: No Minimize, Maximize Buttons

Digitivity — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 18:01:48 +0000

So the next version of GNOME (GNOME 3) won’t have minimize or maximize buttons.

It’s just the latest in GNOME doing stuff that nobody wants or needs as opposed to fixing real usability bugs.

Rememer spatial file browsing? That’s where the file manager in GNOME would open up a new window for each folder instead of letting you drill down into a file tree. It only took them, what, a decade to finally drop that after they got the message that users don’t want that.

So how long do you think it’ll take them to figure out that the current GUI paradigm was working just fine, thank you?

How to Install Google Skipfish on Ubuntu Linux

Digitivity — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:55:19 +0000

Skipfish is a new security scanning tool from Google that tries to find vulnerabilities in your webserver.

It can be installed either locally or on your webserver.

The easiest place to install Skipfish is on Linux, so I’ll go over installing it on Ubuntu.

Requirements for Skipfish

You need the following software installed in order to install Skipfish:

GNU C Compiler
GNU Make
GNU C Library (including development headers)
zlib (including development headers)
OpenSSL (including development headers)
libidn (including development headers)

The first three are installed by default on Ubuntu. In case they’re not install them with this command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install gcc make libc6 libc6-dev

To install the last three requirements, enter this command:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libidn11

Building Skipfish

Download Skipfish

Download the latest version of Skipfish from here:
http://code.google.com/p/skipfish/downloads/list

The current version (as of this writing) was 1.27b [LINK].

Save the file someplace, and then either right-click on it in the file manager and choose “Extract here“.

Or go to the directory where you saved it and enter this:

tar xzf skipfish-1.27b.tgz

Setting Paths

You may or may not need this step, but this will set the paths for header files and library files:

export CFLAGS="-I/usr/include/"
export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib/ssl/engines -L/usr/lib/ -L/usr/lib/ssl/"

Compiling Skipfish

Next, compile Skipfish. Enter the directory that was extracted earlier, and use “make” to start the build process:

cd skipfish
nice make

Note: nice prevents make from monopolizing your system’s CPU.

Here’s the result:

cc -L/usr/lib/ssl/engines -L/usr/lib/ -L/usr/lib/ssl/ -L/usr/local/lib/ -L/opt/local/lib skipfish.c -o skipfish -O3 -Wno-format -Wall -funsigned-char -g -ggdb -I/usr/local/include/ -I/opt/local/include/ -I/usr/include/ -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0 \
	      http_client.c database.c crawler.c analysis.c report.c -lcrypto -lssl -lidn -lz
 
See dictionaries/README-FIRST to pick a dictionary for the tool.
 
Having problems with your scans? Be sure to visit:
http://code.google.com/p/skipfish/wiki/KnownIssues

After you do this, there should be an executable file named “skipfish” in the current directory. If not, or if there was an error, you probably are missing a requirement or a path is incorrectly specified.

Using Skipfish

This is just a basic introduction.

In the “skipfish” directory, enter these commands:

touch dictionaries/empty.wl
ln -s dictionaries/empty.wl skipfish.wl
mkdir ../out
./skipfish -o ../out/ http://example.com

This creates a blank wordlist file, and an output directory, and then launches Skipfish to scan the specified webserver. (Replace example.com with your webserver address. Make sure you have permission to scan that address.)

Hit Ctrl+c to stop the scan.

Then view the result with Firefox (not Safari or Chrome):

firefox ../out/index.html

I’ll have a separate post on using Skipfish, along with screenshots.

Resources

Google Skipfish
Skipfish FAQ