Category: GNU/Linux

Stuff about GNU/Linux distro, tips and tricks or information

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PPSPPA (Sisa Pepejal) goverment agency uses Ubuntu in its office branches

PPSPPA or Perbandanan Pengurusan Sisa Pepejal dan Pembersihan Awam is a government agency in Malaysia that uses Ubuntu in its offices. PPSPPA has branches in every state in the Peninsular, including the HQ and training center in Putrajaya, all of it runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating system.

PPSPPA Logo Sisa Pepejal

As such, PPSPPA only uses hardware which runs in Ubuntu, including printers, scanners and drawing tablets. Which is a good sign for vendors to start releasing their hardware drivers for open source operating systems.

Hopefully other government agency would follow suit and use free and open source operating system instead the one that requires millions RM of site license. It is not the license that concerns us, but it is the grip of monopoly of a single corporation has over governments and economy that is most concerning.

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Limiting the number of connections to SSH Server using Iptables

This is the quickest way to limit the number of connection to your SSH server with iptables.

[bash]
sudo /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -p tcp –syn –dport 22 -m connlimit –connlimit-above 5 -j REJECT
[/bash]

This will only allow up to 5 concurrent connections to the SSH server, subsequent connections will be rejected by iptables, thus this can thwarts Brute-force attempts to your server.

More Articles About Securing SSH Server

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Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet Notebook Running Ubuntu (with Ubermix)

The video shows how cool Dell Inspiron Duo is when running Ubuntu.

This particular demo uses Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) with Ubermix customization, which contains a collection of application suitable for netbook users.

Ubermix can be downloaded from its official website, please check the Netbook/table model specific instructions for proper installations.

Supported Netbooks

  • Dell Inspiron DUO iD-4495FNT Laptop
  • ASUS EEEPC 900 BK090XNetbooks)
  • ASUS Eee PC 1015PX
  • Dell Inspiron Mini 1018

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    How to extract Audio from Youtube Flash Video (FLV) in Ubuntu Linux

    First you need youtube-dl tool or ‘cclive’ to download the Youtube .FLV file.

    Then, download the Youtube stream.
    python youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lee7a55401e

    Alternatively, you can use ‘cclive’ to download the youtube stream.
    cclive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lee7a55401e

    After that, use ffmpeg to extract the audio and encode it to MP3
    ffmpeg -i lee7a55401e.flv vn -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128000 -ar 44100 lee7a55401e.mp3

    Note: You need to install the restricted codecs in order to extract MP3 audio files.

    Thanks Mohammad Bahathir Hashim for the tip!

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    Scientist: How to attribute free software contributions in journal article, proceeding and monograph

    Scientists, academicians and researchers are a group of users that benefits greatly from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS / FLOSS). Most them would use free software not only to help in preparing graph and documentation, but also as the main tool in their investigation.

    Although it is not explicitly required by the software license or by software authors, the role of free software should be appropriately attributed by academicians and scientists who used them in their investigations as it would not only acknowledge the contribution of free software authors (some of them are hardworking academicians or scientists themselves), but this will also done to fulfill the academic accountability on the researchers part.

    Examples on how to attribute Free Software use in Academic Paper
    1. Researchers/Academician may cite the software URL and the software author in the “Literature Review/Background”, “Methods”or “Acknowledgement section” in the articles.

    2. The citation should include the software release number and the URL to download the software in order to help other researchers to replicate the work (publishing paper is all about guiding others to replicate the investigation)

    3. If free software being used as the main tool in the investigation, it would be helpful if the academician/researcher could explain why this particular Free Software is chosen for the research, etc in their journal article or academic papers.

    For more examples: Visit the Debian Free Software Guideline, there’s a section about attributing free software in scientific and academic papers.

    Give credit to Free Software! Please share this post
    If you are an academician or researcher, then please share this post because it will increase awareness about the need to properly attribute free software tools, software author and their role in scientific community.

    Thanks!