Adam Michael Roach

Delete All Empty Folders from a Directory

Adam Michael Roach — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:15:45 +0000

Have you ever had a bunch of empty folders in one place that you wanted to get rid of without needing to go through each one first and verify that is empty? The following command will do just that:

WARNING: DO NOT RUN THE FOLLOWING COMMAND AS ROOT UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING. THIS COMMAND RESULTs IN A LOSS OF DATA AND MAY NOT BE RECOVERABLE.

find /path/to/scan c -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty --parents

Recursively Delete all Files in a Directory with a Specific File Extension

Adam Michael Roach — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:24:44 +0000

This is pretty straight forward. You have a directory with a large amount of files with a particular extension that you want to recursively get rid of. For example, you back up a directory from a Windows machine onto an external hard drive. When you mount that drive on a *nix box you are going to see a bunch of files throughout the directory structure such as thumbs.db, desktop.ini, etc. I don't need that and want to see them anymore. The following commands will solve the problem:

Installing Adobe Flash 64 bit in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Adam Michael Roach — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:57:01 +0000

If you are like me, you probably installed Flash player from the repository, expecting it to work properly. Well, that just isn't the case. For instance, on YouTube or Hulu videos, I wasn't able to push the buttons without first right clicking, then left clicking twice. Weird, huh?

Here's how to get the Adobe Flash 64 bit Alpha for Linux working in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

First, close Firefox. Next, uninstall the following packages if you have them installed:

sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree nspluginwrapper

Merging Multiple Video Files in Ubuntu Linux

Adam Michael Roach — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:12:19 +0000

Here's an easy way to combine two video files into one. I did this on Ubuntu, but this should work on most any distribution. First, you need mencoder if you don't already have it. In a terminal:

sudo apt-get install mencoder

After it installs, change to the directory that has the files you want to merge and execute the following command:

mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy video01.avi video02.avi video03.avi -o merged_final.avi

T-Mobile St. Louis gets 3G

Adam Michael Roach — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:56:52 +0000

I have been a T-Mobile customer for about 5 years. My first phone with them was the Motorola RAZR. I had always been happy with my plan, so I never upgraded phones through them. Instead, I have used phones I purchased second-hand and swapped SIM cards. About a year ago, I bought a used iPhone 2G (Edge) and unlocked/jailbroke it. I had been happily using that along with the T-Zones ($5.99) Internet package that I was grandfathered in with. For the most part, everything worked great.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on Ubuntu Linux Jaunty Jackalope 9.04

Adam Michael Roach — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:25:32 +0000

I'm not much of a gamer, but one game that I do enjoy playing is Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. The following are the steps I took to get Enemy Territory installed and fully updated to version 2.60b (including all Punkbuster updates) on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04. These instructions will work on more distros than just Ubuntu, but you may have different results depending on hardware/software setup. Please be sure to research all of your options before following this or any other tutorial.

Installing Enemy Territory

Get Dropbox Working on Ubuntu Jaunty Beta

Adam Michael Roach — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:24:48 +0000

I recently updated my main machine to Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 beta. The version of Dropbox I had with Intrepid stopped working after the update. To get it to work I performed the following steps in the terminal. (The following steps work on x86. For x86_64, the steps will be the same, but using different files):

1. Download and install Dropbox deb (32 or 64 bit) for Intrepid if you don't already have it running. (Note: Don't restart Nautilus)
https://www.getdropbox.com/downloading?os=lnx

Forwarding X over SSH

Adam Michael Roach — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:43:48 +0000

Often I want to do some quick administration on a box of mine but don't really feel like running a VNC session (aka slow) just to do it. That's where forwarding X comes in real handy. Our prerequisites are 1) an understanding of what SSH and X Windows is/does 2) having those tools at your disposal, and 3) the remote machine must be able to forward X.

Say for instance on our remote machine there is an X application that we want to run on our local machine without needing VNC. Well, first, fire up the terminal. We want to SSH (secure shell) into our machine.

Installing nVidia 180.29 Drivers in Intrepid

Adam Michael Roach — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:21:58 +0000

Installing the latest nVidia drivers (180.29) on Ubuntu Intrepid is quite easy. First, pull up a terminal (for gnome, Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and enter the following command.

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

You will be prompted for your password. At the bottom of the newly opened file insert the following lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/anders-kaseorg/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Free Ubuntu Case Stickers

Adam Michael Roach — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:19:22 +0000

System76 is offering free strip of four 'powered by Ubuntu' case stickers.

The only thing you have to do is send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the address corresponding to your country. I've gotten several sets to put on my machines. Follow the link below to read more.

http://system76.com/article_info.php?articles_id=9

Converting bin/cue to iso in Linux

Adam Michael Roach — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:28:24 +0000

So, you've got a bin/cue in front of you and you're not quite sure what to do with it. Here's how I handle them. As usual, I'm using Ubuntu Linux, but these instructions should be the same no matter the distro.

First, you are going to need bchunk. Pull up a terminal or your gui package handler of choice and enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install bchunk

User Not Able to Edit Content Created by Admin

Adam Michael Roach — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:03:33 +0000

One of my clients today was having a problem editing content on their site that was initially created by me when I was logged in as admin (user 1). The solution wasn't immediately obvious to me as the role I created for the employees of the company had access to create and edit content for that particular content type. I then realised I had changed the input format for some of the nodes to Full HTML. So the fix was to add the tags the employees needed to the Filtered HTML input (admin/settings/filter).

Happy New Year

Adam Michael Roach — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:57:26 +0000

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your 2008 was awesome and your 2009 is even awesomer!

New Year 2009 Countdown

Formatting my New Hard Drive

Adam Michael Roach — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:14:06 +0000

Santa brought me a new Western Digital 1TB external hard drive for Christmas this year. So of course, the first thing I had to do was plug it in and reformat it from the default FAT32 filesystem to ext3. There are many obvious reasons for doing this, most importantly large file management and fragmentation issues.

So here's the steps I took. First, unwrapped it and plugged it in. Easy. Ubuntu recognized and mounted it. I then fired up gParted, which is available in most major distributions' package managers.

Xchat-Gnome Not Starting

Adam Michael Roach — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:15:18 +0000

This evening xchat-gnome decided it didn't want to open for me. Running in bash produced:

The program 'xchat-gnome' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadImplementation (server does not implement operation)'. (Details: serial 548 error_code 17 request_code 145 minor_code 5) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line

Weird Audio Problems Tonight

Adam Michael Roach — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:32:04 +0000

I was having some problems with my sound tonight on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I wasn't able to get Rhythmbox or VLC to play any audio. When I tried to to play a test sound in the sound administration I got this error:

audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Failed to connect: Connection refused

So I decided the culprit was PulseAudio. I'm trying to trace the root of the problem. I've more or less determined it is an issue with the deadly combo of Firefox/Flash Player/Pulseaudio. To correct the problem I simply opened up a terminal and ran

Do you like the new look of the site?

Adam Michael Roach — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:05:13 +0000

About the Theme

Adam Michael Roach — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:48:11 +0000

The new site is built on the latest version (6.8) of Drupal. The theme was created by yours truly. It is the early stages of development although when I feel confident enough about it, I will open source it and make it available free for download and use in your own ventures. If you are interested in testing it in your own environment, please contact me and I will be happy to send you an early release.

If you find bugs or just want to make a general suggestion, please feel free to leave me a comment.

New Site

Adam Michael Roach — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:45:40 +0000

I finally got around to putting my new site up. So far...so good...so they say. Stay tuned, lots more to come!