Welcome to Linux Screw! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe our RSS feed.
Flickr is an extremely popular image/video hosting website, web services suite and an online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. It hosts more than two billion images.
Now it is possible to mount your Flickr account on Linux PC as a virtual filesystem, allowing you to browse through your photos as if they were on a locally connected drive. It can be now easily done with Flickrfs:
Once mounted, it retrieves information about your photos hosted on your flickr account, and shows them as files. You can now easily copy photos from your local machine to this mount, and it will automatically upload them to your flickr account. Similary, you can copy the files from your mount to your local machine, and it will download your images from flickr.
All the files in the mount have a meta file attached to them, which provides access to title, description, tags, and license information. Modifying any of these fields and saving the meta file, will update them on the server as well.
You are lucky if you chose Ubuntu as detailed step-by-step installation guide is available at author’s site for Ubuntu users. Of course you are welcome to use it under other Linux distributions e.g. Slackware 
Share This
Yes, it can be useful sometimes. For example, you have access to Wi-Fi network but you're not allowed to access Internet via TCP/UDP as these protocols are blocked. At the same time ICMP is opened and you can ping everything alive in Internet. So, to check your email just have ptunnel installed and work around the restrictions set by the Wi-Fi network sysadmin easily.
Ptunnel is an application that allows you to reliably tunnel TCP connections to a remote host using ICMP echo request and reply packets, commonly known as ping requests and replies. It is not a feature-rich tool by any means, but it does what it advertises. So here is what it can do:
- Tunnel TCP using ICMP echo request and reply packets
- Connections are reliable (lost packets are resent as necessary)
- Handles multiple connections
- Acceptable bandwidth (150 kb/s downstream and about 50 kb/s upstream are the currently measured maximas for one tunnel)
- Authentication, to prevent just anyone from using your proxy
1. Install ptunnel in Ubuntu or Debian
apt-get install ptunnel
2. Start ptunnel proxy:
ptunnel -p proxy_address -lp listen_port -da destination_address -dp dest_port [-c network_device] [-v verbosity] [-u] [-x password] [-f file]
The following example assumes that ptunnel is run as root, both on the proxy and client. To tunnel ssh connections from the client machine via a proxy running on proxy.pingtunnel.com to the computer login.domain.com, the following command line would be used:
ptunnel -p proxy.pingtunnel.com -lp 8000 -da login.domain.com -dp 22
An ssh connection to login.domain.com can now be established as follows:
ssh -p 8000 localhost
P.S. A brief manual on how to use ptunnel can be got here.
P.P.S. If you are sysadmin and have to forbid Internet access to some user in LAN, don't forget to block ICMP! 
Share This
One of the best instant messengers named Pidgin (previously Gaim) released it’s latest version 2.3.0. According to developers' description Pidgin is a multiprotocol IM client and it’s goal is to hide protocols from the user as much as possible (users have to know about individual protocols when they create or modify accounts, but in day-to-day communication and usage, the intent is that users don't have to think about protocols at all).
Pidgin supports the following protocols:
Read full developer’s changelog here and download Pidgin from pidgin.im/download. It’s available as source tarball, as binary packages for Fedora, CentOS/RHEL and other major Linux distributions, plus 2.3.0 version is ready also for Windows users.
Share This
Liferea is the best aggregator for online news feeds especially 1.4.6 version. Some of it’s features really makes feeding life easier. It supports duplicate rss entries detection (see picture), and it’s surely one of the fastest feed readers I ever tried. Google Reader is very powerful and useful solution for RSS reading as well but sometimes it’s very important to have RSS entries offline. To move Google Reader subscription list to Liferea including folder hierarchy it’s necessary to accomplish several steps:
1. Export Google Reader subscriptions: go to "Settings" -> "Import/Export" -> "Export your subscriptions as an OPML file" and save XML file on your computer.
2. Import saved subscriptions into Liferea: go "Subscriptions" -> "Import Feed List" (or press CTRL+O) and select previously saved XML file. In few minutes you'll get Google Reader subscription saved locally.
By the way, to install Liferea in Ubuntu run: sudo apt-get install -y liferea.
Share This
This weekend my colleague brought to our office simple 20$ webcam. I have to say that my previous attitude to such toys was quite ambiguous. But idea to build home/office video security system based on such webcam(s) and Ubuntu changed my mind especially taking into consideration extremely low cost of end system and it’s capabilities. First of all I was interested in events replay, multiple camera zones and web interface. As it was discovered later, such system provides tons of useful features.
In this post I'll provide you with a free-style guide on how to set up home video security system that supports above mentioned features and is based on rather cheap webcams, free as beer software ZoneMinder and Ubuntu.
Continue reading...
Share This
CHM is the file extension for Microsoft Compiled HTML Help that is a proprietary format for online help files, developed by Microsoft and first released in 1997 as a successor to the Microsoft WinHelp format. It was first introduced with the release of Windows 98 crap.
There are three most popular tools to read CHM files in Linux: gnochm, xchm and kchmviewer. Continue reading...
Share This
Luci Langa’s Evolution RSS Reader Plugin enables support for feeds in the Gnome Evolution mail reader.The newest version (0.0.6) of this plugin has the following changes against previous ones…
Continue reading...
Share This
Recent Ideas