Elysium film showing real UNIX commands in a blockbuster movie.

The movie Elysium showcased some awesome UNIX shell commands. The rhost command was one, there is a more detailed show here: http://i.imgur.com/niqfmy5.png. The nmap port scanning utility is used to port scan Matt Damon`s brain before the data is copied from his neural storage to the Elysium computer system. I cannot see the full command; … Read more

How to change the shell for a user on a Linux system easily with the usermod command.

I recently created a new user with the adduser command. homer@deusexmachina:~/Documents$ sudo adduser jimkirk Adding user `jimkirk’ … Adding new group `jimkirk’ (1002) … Adding new user `jimkirk’ (1002) with group `jimkirk’ … Creating home directory `/home/jimkirk’ … Copying files from `/etc/skel’ … Enter new UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: passwd: password updated successfully … Read more

How I fixed the Java out of memory issue on an Amazon AWS instance.

I was trying to get openmeetings working on an Amazon AWS instance today and I kept getting Java out of memory errors. I fixed this with this simple solution I found: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18078859/java-run-out-of-memory-issue. This fixed my problem and allowed the java application to start with a limited amount of memory. Try this out if you have … Read more

15 Year old who “SWATTED” gamer convicted of domestic terrorism; 25 to life In Federal Prison.

An online gamer who “Swatted” another Counterstrike gamer by calling in a fake report to police has been sentenced to 25 to life in Federal Prison. This sends a strong message that calling in a fake police report is a very serious matter and is not something that can be used for a stupid online … Read more

How to see free memory on a Linux machine with the free command.

The free command in Linux is used to show the amount of free memory in Linux. The example below shows the default usage of this command. ubuntu@ip-172-31-0-140:~$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 602736 294680 308056 16928 17632 146320 -/+ buffers/cache: 130728 472008 Swap: 0 0 0ubuntu@ip-172-31-0-140:~$ free total used free shared buffers … Read more

More awesome wallpapers for your Linux or BSD desktop.

More awesome wallpapers for a Linux or BSD desktop. The wallpapers. Pandora and orbiting spaceship: http://wallpaperswide.com/download/avatar_6-wallpaper-1920×1080.jpg. Astronaut with surfboard on alien planet: http://4walled.cc/src/98/98fad31467a2205977988e458b554821.jpg. Awesome planet wallpaper with a giant superstructure on it: http://4walled.cc/show-1281760. Astronaut having a beer on the Moon: http://4walled.cc/show-1171862. Awesome view of planet Earth and the Milky way galaxy: http://4walled.cc/show-1124548. The sun rising … Read more

How to use scp to download files from a remote machine over a secure encrypted connection.

This is the sample command I am using to download my OpenVPN keys from a remote VPN server to allow me to setup a local connection. And to backup the keys safely. [1]homer@deusexmachina ~ $ scp -i Goku.pem -P 443 [email protected]:/home/ubuntu/easy-rsa/keys/*.* /home/homer/vpn/ 01.pem 100% 5589 5.5KB/s 00:00 ca.crt 100% 1736 1.7KB/s 00:00 ca.key 100% 1704 … Read more

Basic text filtering with sed. Very useful when you are manipulating text files.

This example uses sed to replace the beginning word of a sentence. Administrator@WIN-EM8GK0ROU41 ~ $ echo "this is a line of text." | sed "s/this/This/gi;" This is a line of text.Administrator@WIN-EM8GK0ROU41 ~ $ echo "this is a line of text." | sed "s/this/This/gi;" This is a line of text. This is a better way to … Read more

CDE desktop running on Ubuntu 14.04.

I have got the CDE desktop to compile on Ubuntu 14.04. I found this website: https://www.ics.com/blog/retrocomputing-motif-and-cde#.U-840NaKhqg, which in turn lead me here: http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/, a WIKI which contains the build instructions for Ubuntu 14.04. I followed this guide and the build worked perfectly. This is very cool indeed. The performance of the CDE desktop is very … Read more

The best tutorial I found to install FreePBX on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server.

This is the best tutorial I have found that allowed me to install FreePBX on an Ubuntu 14.04 instance on an Amazon AWS instance. I tried a few and this one really did work for me after following all of the steps and exercising patience. http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/HTGS/Installing+FreePBX+12+on+Ubuntu+Server+14.04+LTS. FreePBX is a very useful tool for setting up … Read more

Some miscellaneous Linux tips for Ubuntu and Linux Mint users.

If you are starting Firefox from a terminal window where you have specified the proxy settings, and you have the use system proxy settings option ticked, you will not need to set the proxy within Firefox. That is a very cool tip indeed. If you need to set the proxy before using apt, you will … Read more

How to connect to a Windows machine using RDP from a Linux machine using bash.

The rdesktop utility for Linux allows easy remote desktop access from a Linux machine. Type: sudo apt-get install rdesktop to install this useful utility and then type: rdesktop 192.168.100.5 to connect to a remote machine. Specify the username with the -u parameter: rdesktop -u homer 192.168.100.5. If you wish to use RDP in full-screen; enabling … Read more

Some very useful networking tricks for Linux/UNIX users.

Get your gateway IP address with curl on the command line. [homer@localhost ~]$ echo $(curl -# http://ipecho.net/plain) ######################################################################## 100.0% 153.107.97.164[homer@localhost ~]$ echo $(curl -# http://ipecho.net/plain) ######################################################################## 100.0% 153.107.97.164 Another way to list the IP addresses of your network interfaces. Using the ip command. [homer@localhost ~]$ ip a | grep inet* inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo … Read more

Useful networking commands for listing open ports and listening services.

To print a list of all open ports and established TCP connections, type this command. homer@deusexmachina /etc/asterisk $ netstat -vatn Active Internet connections (servers and established) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:4101 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:139 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:111 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 … Read more