PostgreSQL

mysql: SHOW TABLES
postgresql: \d
postgresql: SELECT table_name FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema = 'public';

mysql: SHOW DATABASES
postgresql: \l
postgresql: SELECT datname FROM pg_database;

mysql: SHOW COLUMNS
postgresql: \d table
postgresql: SELECT column_name FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_name ='table‘;

First let your Ubuntu know where it should find chromium-browser deb package:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

add the following lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Replace jaunty with hardy, intrepid or karmic depending which version you run at your computer. If you feel this information is not sufficient for you, follow this link to get Ubuntu official information on this matter or follow Launchpad help.

The next step is to install Chromium browser:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
or
sudo aptitude install chromium-browser

Once you press enter Ubuntu will download around 18 MB of data from launchpad’s server and will install Chromium with gnome menu entries and shortcuts. Now you can go to System menu –> Internet –> Chromium Web Browser in order to launch Google browser.

Ubuntu Chromium Google browser (Google Chrome Ubuntu)

As you might know there is still no official release of chromium/chrome available for Linux, so these daily builds from launchpad are for testing/observations purposes only. For example, there is no flash plugin available so you will be able to see html pages like this one and no swf/flash content. Anyway thanks to Google for great browser which has all chances to become “browser number one” for Linux or even for the rest of operating system such as Windows or Mac. Who knows?

You might also find this page using Google and the following keywords: Ubuntu Chrome, Google Chrome Ubuntu, Chrome for Ubuntu and others.

artemn@artemn-laptop:~$ cat /etc/passwd | awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -n | awk '{$1=""; print $0 }'

bin:x:2:2:bin:/bin:/bin/sh
sys:x:3:3:sys:/dev:/bin/sh
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
proxy:x:13:13:proxy:/bin:/bin/sh
mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/mail:/bin/sh
lp:x:7:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:/bin/sh
sync:x:4:65534:sync:/bin:/bin/sync
ntp:x:110:120::/home/ntp:/bin/false
daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin:/bin/sh
ftp:x:111:65534::/home/ftp:/bin/false
games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games:/bin/sh
klog:x:102:103::/home/klog:/bin/false
man:x:6:12:man:/var/cache/man:/bin/sh
irc:x:39:39:ircd:/var/run/ircd:/bin/sh
dhcp:x:100:101::/nonexistent:/bin/false
news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/bin/sh
saned:x:120:131::/home/saned:/bin/false
syslog:x:101:102::/home/syslog:/bin/false
uucp:x:10:10:uucp:/var/spool/uucp:/bin/sh
backup:x:34:34:backup:/var/backups:/bin/sh
www-data:x:33:33:www-data:/var/www:/bin/sh
libuuid:x:112:121::/var/lib/libuuid:/bin/sh
messagebus:x:103:109::/var/run/dbus:/bin/false
nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/sh
sshd:x:109:65534::/var/run/sshd:/usr/sbin/nologin
Debian-exim:x:117:128::/var/spool/exim4:/bin/false
artemn:x:1000:1000:artemn,,,:/home/artemn:/bin/bash
list:x:38:38:Mailing List Manager:/var/list:/bin/sh
mysql:x:119:130:MySQL Server,,,:/var/lib/mysql:/bin/false
gdm:x:108:118:Gnome Display Manager:/var/lib/gdm:/bin/false
hplip:x:104:7:HPLIP system user,,,:/var/run/hplip:/bin/false
pulse:x:113:123:PulseAudio daemon,,,:/var/run/pulse:/bin/false
polkituser:x:114:127:PolicyKit,,,:/var/run/PolicyKit:/bin/false
avahi:x:106:114:Avahi mDNS daemon,,,:/var/run/avahi-daemon:/bin/false
asterisk:x:118:129:Asterisk PBX daemon,,,:/var/lib/asterisk:/bin/false
gnats:x:41:41:Gnats Bug-Reporting System (admin):/var/lib/gnats:/bin/sh
haldaemon:x:107:116:Hardware abstraction layer,,,:/home/haldaemon:/bin/false
landscape:x:115:65534:Landscape Client Daemon,,,:/var/lib/landscape:/bin/false
avahi-autoipd:x:105:113:Avahi autoip daemon,,,:/var/lib/avahi-autoipd:/bin/false
chipcard:x:116:119:Chipcard-Tools Daemon Account,,,:/var/run/chipcard:/bin/false

For reverse sort, use the following command:

cat /etc/passwd | awk '{print length, $0}' | sort -rn | awk '{$1=""; print $0 }'

Source: www.opennet.ru

Ian Murdock (left) founded Debian while a student in 1993. He named Debian after himself and his then-girlfriend Debra, now his ex-wife, thus Deb(ra) and Ian.

From Ian’s blog:

Debian was one of the first Linux distributions and arguably the first open source project that explicity set out to be developed in a decentralized fashion by a group of volunteers. Today, over 1,000 volunteers are involved in Debian’s development, and there are millions of Debian users worldwide.

Mark Shuttleworth (right) who founded Ubuntu Linux was the second space tourist and one of Debian’s key developers. His biography is too interesting to be published here so just use google to get more facts. Mark:

I can pay, however, because ten years ago when I was still studying at the University of Cape Town in South Africa… Linux allowed me to compete with the best companies in the world, without any obstacles between me and success. That made me a billionaire; so I could fly into space and do many other wonderful things.

Gaël Duval (left) was born 1973. He is a graduate of the Caen University in France where studied networks and documentary applications. In July 1998, he created Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), a Linux distribution originally based on Red Hat Linux and KDE. He was also a co-founder of MandrakeSoft (now merged in Mandriva) with Jacques Le Marois and Frédéric Bastok. Gaël Duval was responsible for communication in the Mandriva management team until he was laid off by the company in March 2006, in a round of cost-cutting. Duval suspected part of the reason for his dismissal was disagreement with management over the company’s future strategy, resulting in a lawsuit against the company. Gael:

It was clear for me that Linux had the potential to be an excellent alternative to Windows, or maybe even a full replacement, and at the time I thought that it would be good to provide a Linux distribution that would be as easy to use as Windows.

Patrick Volkerding (right) was born 20th October 1966. He is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. He is the “Slackware Benevolent Dictator for Life”. Volkerding earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993. Patrick in 1994:

Linux is my big fun project right now - gets pretty crazy sometimes trying to keep up with all of the development going on; for instance, last week the new C libraries, GCC, and kernel were all released within a couple days of each other. Luckily, I like keeping my machine current. Judging from the mail I get when things fall a bit behind, so does everyone else.

Daniel Robbins (left) is best known as a founder of Gentoo Linux project. During his time as a system administrator at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque Robbins first came into contact with Linux. He became a developer on Stampede Linux, and later formed his own distribution Enoch Linux, which was later renamed Gentoo in 2002.
Daniel in 2007:

The logic is as follows: it is impossible to write a kernel module without it being a derivative work of the kernel, which is GPL, so in turn the module itself must be distributed under the terms of the GPL and thus cannot be binary-only/proprietary in nature.

To be continued…

#!/bin/bash

WGET="/usr/bin/wget"

$WGET -q --tries=10 --timeout=5 http://www.google.com -O /tmp/index.google &> /dev/null
if [ ! -s /tmp/index.google ];then
	echo "no"
else
	echo "yes"
fi

As you see it tries to download google’s index page, if it’s not empty script returns “yes”, if there is not Internet connection available script will return “no”. If it is impossible to fetch the page in more than 5 seconds script will return “no” as well.

Anything to add? You are welcome!

This article is presented to you by LaptopLogic.com. Go there to read the latest info on the top rated laptops and the best laptop accessories.

The High Definition (HD) content is everywhere these days, from HD and Blue Ray Discs to streaming HD media. Although HD content gives best picture quality, it also uses a lot of computational power to decode and play.

This was made easy for Windows by the introduction of new drivers from graphics card manufacturers, Nvidia and ATI, which allowed the whole media to be decoded on the dedicated graphics card, saving cost in computational power, and the need to have a stronger processor.

Nvidia recently released a new set of drivers for Linux supporting PureVideo technology for its line of graphics hardware, enabling full hardware HD-decoding, and giving smooth HD content playback, even on less powerful computers. The 180 series supports PureVideo decode acceleration. These drivers adds a new VDPAU API, which provides PureVideo like features on Linux, adds CUDA support, X Render optimizations, new workstation performance optimizations and some other improvements. The new versions offer optimizations and support for a wide range of Nvidia hardware, and is expected to improve with future releases.

Linux uses X-Video (Xv) as output extensions, where as X-Video MotionCompensation (XvMC) is an X-Video extension which offers some video decoding on GPU. With the new drivers, Nvidia implements VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX).

VDAPU is capable of hardware acceleration and the decoding of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 bit streams. It also provides an API for post-processing of decoded video in order to apply operations such as noise reduction and temporal and spatial de-interlacing, timestamp-based presentation of final video frames, and compositing of sub-picture elements.

AMD also supports hardware acceleration through X-Video Bit stream Acceleration or XvBA API. The recent drivers can take advantage of Unified Video Decoder (UVD2).

These new technologies are also supported by new video playback softwares, which can fully utilize the Graphics Hardware for video playback, providing smooth frames in HD and Blue-Ray movies. The VDPAU supported players include libavcodec, mplayer and ffmpeg.

CUDA support is also provided with 180 series drivers for Linux, and it can also be used to accelerate videos, and also to do any processing involved, like CoreAVC 1.9.0 is the first media player to offer this decoding.

The video acceleration on Linux came late, but certainly, with these new advancements by Graphics chips manufacturers, Linux users will be able to experience HD media playback, even on less powerful systems.

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

Add the the line “blacklist pcspkr” to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to turn off the speaker forever

Imagine the following situation: you have to compile some Linux/Unix application or kernel module that requires kernel source present at your hard drive, say, in /usr/src/kernels/kernel-2.6.21-i386/ or elsewhere. But there is not enough disk space to copy these sources or install kernel-devel or linux-source packages (in Fedora/RedHat or Ubuntu/Debian distros respectively)… Sounds familiar? Believe me, sometimes it happens

As a solution you can mount the directory of some remote PC that contains needed kernel source. It can be done via several protocols like smb, ftp etc. In this article we will mount remote directory using ssh protocol that is one the most popular for remote and secure access to Linux boxes over the network.

Below are the steps which should be taken to get the ball rolling. We need two packages: sshfs and fuse-utils.

1. Install necessary packages:

a. Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo aptitude install fuse-utils sshfs

b. Fedora/Centos/RedHat:

yum install fuse-sshfs fuse fuse-libs

c. Other Linux: download and compile sshfs/fuse from sources

2. Check that kernel module fuse is loaded:

lsmod | grep fuse

There should be the line containing “fuse” in the output (of not try modprobe fuse).

3. Mount remote filesystem using something like this (two commands):

mkdir -p /mnt/sshfs/
sshfs remote-user@remote-machine:/some/directory /mnt/sshfs

where remote-user is the username allowed to login remote-machine via ssh protocol. It will ask you to type the password so just type it and press return

4. That’s it. Good luck!

BackTrack is Live distribution for penetration and security tests. This is how its developers describe it. But there are plenty of tools, utilities, programs behind this brief description. Let’s dig into.

This distribution started from the merge of two ones: WHAX (or Whoppix) and Auditor Security Collection (the swiss army knife for security assessments). The latest stable version (BackTrack 3) contains more than 300 tools (including such monsters as wireshark, nmap, hping and others) which will be appreciated by every security professional. All tools are categorized into:

1. Information gathering
2. Network Mapping
3. Vulnerability Identification
4. Penetration
5. Privilage Escalation
6. Maintaining Access
7. Covering Tracks
8. Radio Network Analysis (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth)
9. VoIP and Telephony Analysis
10. Digital Forensics
11. Reverse Engineering

The full list of tools with descriptions you can find at official BackTrack wiki, screenshots and documentation are here.

Download Now: CD Image, USB Image. More?

Midnight Commander (mc) is one of the most popular console applications with text user interface that displays file system; it also has the ability to view the contents of RPM files, edit files (with powerful highlighting), connect to samba shares, ftp server etc. and etc. Try "sudo apt-get install mc" in Ubuntu or "sudo yum install mc" in Fedora/Redhat/Centos to install this app.

After almost four years of stagnation developers of GNU Midnight Commander released fresh version of this mega popular file manager. Well, good news for text file managers fans. The latest version 4.6.2 contains numerous updates since previous version which were released in 2005, here are some of them:

- Added a micro helper library in order to go slowly
avay from glib (Closes: #157)
- Use static strings as section entries in ~/.mc/history
WARNING!: This will break old files (Closes: #50)
- Fixed a repaint issue when clicking on the "View" Button instead
of using F3 (Closes: #35)
- Removed obsolete autoconf macros (Closes: #133)
- Fix escaping for command line completion (Closes: #147)
- prevent mc from segfaulting when getting invalid timestamps on files (Closes: #96)
- Fixed a keybord issue when running mc via a putty console (Closes: #203)
- setted pty fd to closeonexec (on subshell) (Closes: #174)
- Fixed file renames, when copying/moving is performed
into deleted directories. (Closes: #181)
- Add an option to show executables first in the panels (Closes: #173)
- Fixed concat_dir_and_file if there is a parameter = NULL (Closes: #180)
- Allow out-of-tree builds (Closes: #224, #208)

Officially mc doesn’t support utf-8 locale while there is corresponding patch available.