Stow

A nice overview of stow can be found here

Whenever you compile your own packages and want to install them in the /usr/local tree, you need stow

sudo apt-get install stow

This will create the directory /usr/local/stow under which you will install your self-compiled programs, each in its own directory. Running stow on such a directory, will install some links in the ordinary /usr/local directories.

As an example, suppose we have compiled foo-0.98.4.1 and want to install it. Running

make -n install

reveals that it want to put the produced files in /usr/local/bin etc. However by issuing the command

sudo make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/foo-0.98.4.1

will result in all the installed files under the given directory.
Now issuing

cd /usr/local/stow
sudo stow foo-0.98.4.1

will create the appropriate links e.g.
/usr/local/bin/foo -> /usr/local/stow/foo-0.98.4.1/bin/foo
and the program can be used as if it was installed natively in /usr/local but can now be easily de-installed by running

cd /usr/local/stow
sudo stow -D foo-0.98.4.1

which removes the create links. Another version of the same program can be installed next to it and by using stow you can decide which version you use.

When a lot of packages are installed in stow you might want to know which packages are stowed, for this we created the following command

find . -wholename './stow' -prune -o \
-type l -exec readlink -f {} \; | \
sed -e 's/^.*stow\/\([^/]*\)\/.*$/\1/' | \
sort | uniq

Newz leeching

First find the stuff you want with FTD4Linux . You have to register (free) to get access to it's database of new posts in the various newsgroups.

Clicking on an interesting post will show a tiny NZB mark in the upper right corner. This will let you search the various usenet search engines: binsearch, yabse, newzleech, eweka. Of course you can start there in the first place, but then you won't know of the most recent posts as announced on FTD...

After finding what you want get an NZB file and save it in the download queue of your preferred NZB-leecher.

You can find a list of NZB applications on binaries4all. I tried Ninan, which has a nice built-in web-interface. It's Java based. Recently I changed to hellanzb, which is python. No web-interface, just running in the background, waiting for an NZB to be dropped in it's queue directory. You can by the way make a symbolic link to your default download directory. It's supposed to just pick the NZB files from there and copy them to the working directory.

All the programs listed at binaries4all do the hard work for you: downloading, unrarring, par2 checking (some of them only downloading the par2 file they need..) and then moving completed jobs to a directory of your liking.

Have fun

Digital pictures

All my digital pictures are renamed using the following command

jhead -autorot -n%Y_%m_%d_%H_%M_%S *.JPG

After this renaming, a web album for local use can be created using JAlbum.

For global use Flickr can be used

If you are looking for a new digital camera, be sure to have a look at dpreview

Start

This is the first posting in a blog about Linux. I want gather all kinds of tips and trics, especially about ubuntu linux