So I recently switched my linux flavor to Gentoo on my laptop. It takes a couple days, but has proven to be well worth it. Although that’s not the topic of this post, it should be understood that the following instructions are based on a Gentroo distro. These instructions can be tweaked to get this working in other distros as well.

There are a couple apps involved: cowsay, and fortune-mod. The fortune-mod app is a simple app that outputs fortunes, there are a number of plugins (I installed them all, but you can choose to emerge particular ones, as desired.

The cowsay app is a simple ascii cow that has a comment bubble allowing you to specify the text the cow should say. It has some customizeable features such as the eyes and the tongue.

The following instructions will get your ascii cow to output a fortune from the fortune-mod library.

First, you need to emerge these packages (the fortune-mod-all package is optional, although you need a fortune list, this pulls them all in:

emerge -av cowsay fortune-mod fortune-mod-all

Now you can output a cowsay fortune:

cowsay `fortune`

I took this a level further and added the preceeding to the last line in my .bashrc file, which has a random fortune popup on every terminal/console session entry.

It’s a lot of fun and a simple install. Have fun!!

I was curious one day when performing a fresh install of Fedora on my Laptop. I saw New York Listed as the available time-zone (as it typically is) to indicate Eastern Standard Time(EST). What about Orlando, where I live.

I performed a quick google search and found this helpful article on how to add a specific city to a time-zone. Hopefully, you’ll find this useful as well.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/add-your-city-linuxs-list-time-zones

Enjoy, and try not to break your system too bad when following these steps.

I found this article on Linux and Site Security and thought it would be useful to spread around. Hopefully it helps others with the vatying security methods that are out there for websites. It briefly covers RFC 4732 which is tailored towards DOS (Denial of Service) attacks, but can be blended into other security protocols.

Today’s post is going to be about security on Linux and Unix, since we’re building up to doing some work with CAPTCHA in the near future and need to keep ourselves awake and interested To be more specific, today’s post is going to deal with site, and user, security on the Internet (although you could apply these examples to various arenas). As we all know, maintaining a decent level of personal and professional site security on the Internet is possible to a degree. Unfortunately, as long as there’s profit in breaching that security, building industries devoted to thwarting those breaches or some interdependent mish-mosh of the two, there’s no way to achieve absolute security on the Internet unless you opt not to use it (The Internet, that is

The Linux and Unix Menagerie: Linux And Unix Internet User And Site Security – How Much Is Too Much?

So I was having quite a bit of trouble trying to get amarok 2 compiled. I found that within the fc9 and livna repos, libmtp was 0.2.6 and amarok requires libmtp 0.3. I downloaded the correct libmtp version extracted it and compiled it, then I went to re-make amarok and got this error:
Linking CXX shared module ../../../lib/libamarok_collection-mtpcollection.so
CMakeFiles/amarok_collection-mtpcollection.dir/handler/MtpHandler.o: In function `Mtp::MtpHandler::iterateRawDevices(int, LIBMTP_raw_device_struct*, QString const&)’:
/home/shaun/Download/amarok/src/collection/mtpcollection/handler/MtpHandler.cpp:147: undefined reference to `LIBMTP_Open_Raw_Device’
CMakeFiles/amarok_collection-mtpcollection.dir/handler/MtpHandler.o: In function `Mtp::MtpHandler::init(QString const&)’:
/home/shaun/Download/amarok/src/collection/mtpcollection/handler/MtpHandler.cpp:85: undefined reference to `LIBMTP_Detect_Raw_Devices’
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make Error 1
make Error 2
make: *** Error 2

UPDATE: In kde4, you can right click your desktop, select desktop settings and select New Themes…

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So I found a great article on how to install my first non-default Plasma Theme. I’ve copied most of the steps, but found that some didn’t apply to me. I’m currently running kde4.1 under Fedora 9. If you have any questions, leave a comment and we’ll help where we can.

Steps to take:

Worked like a charm for me. Great article from http://pramodrt.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/changing-the-kde4-plasma-theme/