When using a USB HDD (probably a stick as well), there can be large delays when using a Ubuntu machine while waiting for data to be synced to the disk. After much googling, trying different filesystems and tweaking mount options, the solution that worked was:

echo $((16*1024*1024)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_bytes
echo $((48*1024*1024)) > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes

Which i found here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/107703/why-is-my-pc-freezing-while-im-copying-a-file-to-a-pendrive/107722#107722 http://lwn.net/Articles/572911/

 

I needed to find all the email that a user sent with only the postfix mail.log. This simple script does that. There is probably an easier way :-)

#!/bin/bash USERNAME=$1 for i in `grep -A2 $USERNAME mail.log | \
grep message-id | cut -d'<' -f2 | cut -d'>' -f1`; \
do grep "$i" /var/log/mail.log | grep "to=" | awk '{ print $7 }' | \
cut -d'<' -f2 | cut -d'>' -f1; done | sort | uniq -c

 

Pandora has become my go to choice of music player some time ago, but having a browser window open just to play music strikes me as we little crazy. Pithos is one alternative and does a reasonable job, but I was looking for something lighter and I found it with Pianobar. Theres a bunch of features, it works a treat, and is very lightweight compared to Pithos. Give it a try, maybe you'll prefer a non-gui too.

Assuming you have locate installed/setup:

locate database.inc | grep "database/database.inc" | xargs grep "\$data "

Will output any copies of database.inc that are not patched.

I've been doing some work with DOMDocument and DOMXPath to parse webpages recently, and even though I could get the XPath directly from Firefox or Chrome, it would not match in the $xpath->query(); What I found is that the $dom->LoadHTML($page); will handle invalid HTML, but mostly just by stripping it out. This is fine, unless you depend on the structure for the XPath query. The problem was the the page contained tables (we've all built them, missing the TBODY tags).

Want them to be in a more familiar layout?

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Gives the menu on the left, then the rest on the right.

Have you been trying to get winbind working on Ubuntu, and not having any luck? After the usual:

 

sudo apt-get install winbind

 

You also need to install libnss-winbind as well:

 

sudo apt-get install libnss-winbind

 

That should get it working, when combined with the change of the hosts: line in /etc/nsswitch.conf from:

 

hosts: files dns

 

to

 

hosts: files dns wins

 

And presto, it should start working.

Some contrib modules have drush commands, you may need to specify a user on the command line to get the correct permissions. Older versions of node_export module had this issue, and the drush command needed is:

drush --user=1 node-export