Drapes - wallpaper switcher

Hi,

I'm back again after long time didn't update new post in this blog.

Have you ever come across your mind how you can switch your Ubuntu wallpaper with pictures from your PC? Well Drapes is the answer. Drapes, a Wallpaper managment application for the GNOME desktop, in another word is a desktop wallpaper switcher. Just imagine your desktop wallpaper will change image let say every 10 minutes with another picture. Sound very cool right?



Just give a try to install Drapes. Open Synaptic package manager and find for Drapes and install it. To make Drapes lunch on start up, add Drapes to System > Preferences > Startup Applications



Drapes icon will appear at the top right hand corner of your desktop Gnome panel. Right click on it. Take a look under the Preferences tab. You can specify images location to display as wallpaper, timing selection, and some other things.

Youtube downloader for Ubuntu

Hi,

Ever wonder how to download videos from YouTube if you are using Linux? There are many tools that you could use. For me, I'm interested most in youtube-dl. You could download YouTube videos using terminal. Open terminal and run "youtube-dl [URL to the video]" to download your favorite videos.

To install, become root and type;
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install youtube-dl

Usage: youtube-dl [options] video_url

Options:
-h, --help print this help text and exit
-v, --version print program version and exit
-u USERNAME, --username=USERNAME
account username
-p PASSWORD, --password=PASSWORD
account password
-o FILE, --output=FILE
output video file name
-q, --quiet activates quiet mode
-s, --simulate do not download video
-t, --title use title in file name
-l, --literal use literal title in file name
-n, --netrc use .netrc authentication data
-g, --get-url print final video URL only
-2, --title-too used with -g, print title too

Credit to Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez for written and actively maintained youtube-dl

Unrar

Launch Synaptic Package Manager, search for unrar. You will get two available unarchiver unrar and unrar-free. Unrar-free come out with limited function compare with unrar (non-free version). It's up to you which unrar you want to install.

For me, I choose unrar (non-free version). Mark it for installation. Once completed, you will be able to view/unrar .rar file extension.

Install unrar using terminal;
root@support-t60:~# apt-get install unrar

mtr

mtr (Matt's Traceroute) combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool. This tool is very useful to traceroute IP or host because you can get better result (if using normal traceroute, the result sometimes has been filtered out by ISP router).

There are two version of mtr, mtr-tiny and mtr. The different is mtr-tiny run and display its output in terminal while mtr display output in its own window.

To install mtr you can use apt-get;

1. apt-get install mtr
2. apt-get install mtr-tiny

Below is terminal output when I installed mtr on my laptop;

root@support-t60:~# apt-get install mtr
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
mtr-tiny
The following NEW packages will be installed:
mtr
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 49.0kB of archives.
After this operation, 61.4kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Get:1 http://my.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe mtr 0.72-2ubuntu1 [49.0kB]
Fetched 49.0kB in 2s (19.7kB/s)
(Reading database ... 99002 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing mtr-tiny ...
Selecting previously deselected package mtr.
(Reading database ... 98997 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking mtr (from .../mtr_0.72-2ubuntu1_i386.deb) ...
Setting up mtr (0.72-2ubuntu1) ...

root@support-t60:~#

Dig command not found

I want to dig google.com from Ubuntu server, suddenly bash return error mentioned that dig command not found.

root@vps2006:~# dig google.com ns +short
-bash: dig: command not found

I have installed dnsutils in order to use dig.

root@vps2006:~# apt-get install dnsutils

As a result, now I'm able to dig to any domain that I want :D

root@vps2006:~# dig google.com ns +short
ns3.google.com.
ns4.google.com.
ns1.google.com.
ns2.google.com.

Useradd

Basically what I need is to create a new user in my Ubuntu server. I'm using useradd command with few options as below;

root@vps2006:~# useradd -d /home/support -s /bin/bash -m support
root@vps2006:~# ls /home/
support

-d set home directory for the user
-s shell login access
-m to force useradd to create home directory for the user

Gnome version

There are two ways to check GNOME version. First way is the easiest way. Go to
System > About GNOME

Second way, open terminal and type gnome-about --version

yazid@support-t60:~$ gnome-about --version
GNOME gnome-about 2.22.3