Archive for February, 2013

How to extract database from a whole MySQL database dump with sed

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

If you have a configured mysql dumps to be prepared regularly via cronjob
and you happen to experience crash or lost of data and need to restore only a certain
database from a whole bunch of MySQL data SCRIPT file letes say mysql-fulldump.sql, you might be wondering how.
Here is how:

# sed -n '/^-- Current Database: `DATABASE_NAME`/,/^-- Current Database: `/p' mysql-fulldump.sql > DATABASE_NAME.sql

Change DATABASE_NAME with whatever your required database name is.
mysql-fulldump.sql – is the name of whole database file dump file
DATABASE_NAME.sql – will contain the extracted database from complete SQL dump.
TThat's all, now import new dump to MySQL and Enjoy 🙂

Set ISP provider default DNS to overwrite DHCP settings on Debian / Ubuntu Linux

Monday, February 11th, 2013

dhcp linux ovewrite dns settings from console and terminal Debian Ubuntu Fedora CentOS Linux
 

These days, almost every home wireless ISP network router, ADSL modem etc. has its own local running DNS service. Generally this is very good as it puts off the burden of  Internet Service Provider DNS servers and "saves" multitude of users from so common overloads with ISP DNS Servers – caused by ISP DNS Service unable to handle the incoming user DNS (Domain resolve) traffic. Common scenario, where ISP DNS servers is unable to handle DNS traffic is when few thousands of users belonging to ISP gets infected with a Worm, Trojan horse or Virus doing plenty of DNS Spoofs and distributed DDoS attacks.

Though local DNS service (daemons) on local Cable and Wireless Network Routers is something designed to be good it becomes another bottleneck for DNS resolve problems, Calling the ISP tech support for help is often loose of time, as  in ISPs it is so rare to find someone understanding Linux Networking.

The periodic issues with DNS resolving from home routers in my observations has 3 main reasons;

  • Local Cheap network Wireless routers with slow hardware (CPU) and little memory are unable to handle DNS requests, because of torrent Downloads
     
  • DNS Wireless Router can't handle DNS requests to its DNS local service, because a small local network of computers with a landline and wireless (lets say 5 to 10) is trying to access the Internet (browsing) – again due to its low hardware paremeters router CPU heats up cause of multitude of DNS requests

     

  • Something is wrong with general network topology of PCs behind the router. Often people buy a router and use it shared with their neighbors – tampering with Router settings messing it up.

DNS resolving problems are even harder to track whether Internet provider has policy to deliver Internet via automated IP assignment protocol (DHCP),

A very common scenario, I've seen is Internet coming via ISP ADSL / Network router installed at home and mis-configured due to a custom user installation,   or because of ISP technician who installed router in hurry or lacked good competency and messed up with Router Network configuration.

During the years I had to install various Linux distributions for Desktop use in networks located behind such mis-configured Network Hubs. Because of this mis-configured DNS, even though Linux hosts succesfully graps the IP addresses for host IP, Gateway and DNS, they occasionally create problems with Internet Connection leaving the user with impression that Linux is not ready for Desktop use or somehow it is the the Linux distro fault.

After giving an introduction I will continue further to exact problem I've faced with one such mis-configured just today. The same issue has happened in my sysadmin practice over and over again so many times. So finally I decided to write this small story explaining the whole scenario, its causes and fix.

I'm writing this little post from another Linux installation like this which is living on a small local network served by a Vivacom ISP through ADSL Commtrend SmartAX MT882 Router.

The Commtrend does NAT (Network Address Translation)-ting for whole local network, auto-assigning some DNS server to Natted IP PCs local Network addresses in IP raneg; (172.16.0.0-255). The DNS the router assigns for internet is with IP (172.16.0.1), where in reality the DNS on the router is run on Network interface with IP 1921.68.1.1, in other words belonging to the router from another network. Thus PCs connected via a UTP land-line cable connection does not see 192.168.1.1 – meaning Domain name resolving works not at all.
The solution is to assign a static IP address for DNS of Google Public DNS or Open DNS, while leaving the Linux host to automatically assign LAN IP and Gateway using DHCP – (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol).

By default most Linux distributions use DNS configured in /etc/resolv.conf as a host DNS servers, however as CommTrend Network Router does provide settings for DNS Servers to be used for resolving along with other settings on each Linux host boot settings from /etc/resolv.conf gets ovewritted with the unreachable (from 172.16.0.255), nameserver 192.168.1.1.

Thus to work-around this on most all Linux distributions you can set /etc/resolv.conf to be overwritten adding a line to /etc/rc.local script (before its last line – exit 0);

echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' > /etc/resolv.conf
echo 'nameserver 8.8.4.4' >> /etc/resolv.conf

This method is universal, but the problem with it arises, if on the Linux host is planned to run 24 hours a day. DHCP Servers on router has configured DHCP Expiry lease time, which is different on different routers but usually few hours i.e. (4 hrs). Thus in 4 hours, due to DHCP Lease expiry the Linux host will question the DHCP Server for IP, getting together with DHCP IP and Gateway Settings also a DNS IP (overwritting again /etc/resolv.conf – with local running ISP Router IP – 192.168.1.1). One stupid solution of course is to use good old Windows philosophy (reboot it and it will work).

Other little more intelligent but not very efficient solution to problem is to set a cronjob, to run every 1 minute and overwrite /etc/resolv.conf DNS setting.

# crontab -u root -e

*/1 * * * * echo -e 'nameserver 8.8.8.8\nnameserver 8.8.4.4' > /etc/resolv.conf >/dev/null 2>&1

Since the cronjob to overwrite DNS IPs runs every one minute it is possible the host ends up without internet from few secs to 1 minute, this might happen quite rare so for a desktop this is ok. Other inconvenience is it puts a tiny load on system every 1 minute.

Final and best solution is to configure DNS server from /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf  for Ethernet Interface eth0. Inside /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf for eth0 make sure you have:

# vi /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf

interface "eth0" {
prepend domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8;
prepend domain-name-servers 8.8.4.4;
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222;
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.220.220;
}

Fraps and Taksi – capture GAME video screencasts from Desktop on Windows XP/ Vista / 2003 and Win 7

Sunday, February 10th, 2013

fraps game 3D accelerated screen capturer program ms windows

A friend of mine who is a dedicated gamer, asked me to install some piece of software capable of capturing video while in Game play. He mostly plays in Steam (online gaming platform), stuff like Men of War.
After a quick research online, I found FrapsReal time capturing and Benchmarking app.

As long as people write in steam forums, as of time of writting Fraps is the best software to capture in-Game videos. There is one other software called WeGame – which allows you Watch, Record and Upload videos in InGame.com website Storage, however WeGame is still inferior choice to FRAPS.

FRAPS is especially designed for in game video capturing of PC Games using DirectX and OpenGL Graphics technology. Another good use of it is to benchmark CPU hardware and measurement between PCs, as well as the possibility to create easy Screenshots while in Game with no need to everytime paste in MS Paint, GIMP, Photoshop or whatever Image Manipulation soft.

I didn't tested it but on FRAPs website it is said it has support for ultra-high screen resolutions (7680×4800). To give FRAPS fetch it from fraps.com

List of fraps capture game video program all options (specifications) screenshot

The only problem with FRAPS is it is paid proprietary software. Thanksfully, there is also Free Software (Open Source) alternative program – Taksi.
Taksi is in early development – still haven't reached at ver 1.0 as of time of writing this post Taksi is at version 0.7.7.9.

Taksi program screenshot 3d games and graphics accelerated video games on Windows XP 7

Just like FRAPS Taksi supports well (DirectX, OpenGL, or GDI).
Taksi
is simplistic and with very easy interface.

taksi-capture-screen-windows-xp-configuration-shot-3

Videos captured by Taksi are stored in standard AVI files (using VFW) codec.
Though performance might be a bit degraded, Taksi is nice free soft Video capturer.
 

Steam how to make screenshots while in game

Saturday, February 9th, 2013

If you're a steam addict looking for a way to make screenshots while in game and use pictures later. You will be happy to know since Nov 2011 Steam gaming platform (Interface) has support for making any game screenshot. Default key binded in steam to make screenshots is F12 (though you can easily change that from Steam Options). Pressing F12 will make screenshot of current game screen and import it to Steam's Screenshot Manager.  By default Steam Manager stores captured screenshots in a Cloud Server Storage which is 1GB.

Once you have the picture stored to access Steam Screenshot Manager follow to:

My Profile > My Screenshots > Upload Screen shots

Other way to access Steam Screenshot Manager is;

By Right click your Steam icon in your taskbar and choose Screenshots or
if you right click on Steam on particular game, you get menu "view screenshots"

Steam Screenshot Manager had a nice feature – upload pictures to Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

How to solve “djvu decoder cannot decode djvu files with version >=25” DJVU files opening error

Saturday, February 9th, 2013

If you happen to be running DJVU Solo version 3.1 and you have some documents saved with DJVU Mozilla Firefox browser plugin you might end up with an error:

"djvu decoder cannot decode djvu files with version >=25"
 

The error is well known and described on djvu solo's website. Though the reason is explained and a work around in future files downloaded via the DJVU browser plugin is suggested. The page doesn't suggest a way on how to open already downloaded .djvu files failing to via DJVU Solo.

Thanksfully there is a fix, get away from DJVU Solo and start using STDUViewer – 🙂

Here is description of STDUViewer taken from their website:

STDU Viewer is a free viewer for multiple file formats. The goal of this software is to replace the multiple document viewers with a single one simple application. STDU Viewer supports TIFF, PDF, DjVu, XPS, JBIG2, WWF document formats. These are the most popular formats for scientific and technical documentation.

Additionally STDU Viewer supports FB2, TXT, Comic Book Archive (CBR or CBZ), TCR, PalmDoc(PDB), MOBI, AZW, EPub, DCX and image (BMP, PCX, JPEG, GIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, PSD) files.

Well enjoy opening all your DJVU files formats with superior  STDUViewer.

Motivating yourself and changing important for your personal well-being and professional success

Friday, February 8th, 2013

I've watched a multitude of videos claiming to reveal the secret on how to become millionaire. I'm quite sure thousands of people all around have done so too. Today it is ultra modern for people to persevere after the idea "get-rich-quick". The big problem with this however is it is not possible. Except if you don't steal or don't do something illegal it is practically impossible to become rich quicker. Still as I'm often having troubles with motivation I loose the point in life. Seeing how pointless human progress is and how humanity is going literally nowhere. Anyways as I happen to be born part of this society I have only two ways to deal with situation. One is to quit society and go live in a cave and second is to adapt and start earning money to be able to sustain some existence in this society. I really thought over the idea of living in a Cave as a hermit or a monk live for a while but after time decided to make a family and continue choosing the family live. However I need to periodically motivate myself. As part of this I just found a nice video in youtube. Along with plenty of the junk inside below there is good and wise sayings.  Even though I don't like Steve Jobs methodology and anti-christian philosophy. In terms of motivation and success I should admit he has interesting things to teach people.


 

Nice Motivating Video to get you back on track – Motivating video for succcess

Enjoy 🙂

How to download books from Books Google with Google Book Download stand alone program and Greasemonkey with Google Books Downloader script

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

If you are student or just a researcher, you already know most of the good books you can find are on books.google.com. Google Books's is nice, but not all browsers support it well. Older mobile phones has big troubles with it, plus it is always nice to have a stored copy of book on your PC for later review or just to refresh your memory on books previously read.

Thus if you get to task to download Books from Google a quick research reveals few programs claiming to support downloading Books from Google in PDF;

1. Google Books Download standalone application for Windows and Mac OS X

Google Books Download is said to support Save of Google books in PDF, JPEG or PNG format.
This program works good whether you need to extract only certain book pages, however with complete books it often hangs. Other problem is it is  proprietary software, (freeware), so pages book pages it downloads in PDF had a big red color stamp complaining the program is trial.
There is a cracked version available on Piratebay.se's website. But as Piratebay is filtered from here. To test it I had to google it via piratebay proxy: –  with "piratebay  google books download"
.


Google Books Download
, standalone app from Piratebay is at current version 3.1.308.
As you can see from screenshot Google Book Download has two modes of work, one is;
Download Manually
– This is used for manual download a pages from a complete book and converting them to PDF.
Download Automatically – Is purposed to download a complete book from books.google.com and converting it to PDF. Downloading a complete copy of book using this mode is sometimes, hanging, plus it is really, really slow. The reason is each of the pages from the Book is first scanned using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology page by page and later after all pages are downloaded in pictures, they're converted to 1 PDF file.

Because Download Automatically loops at certain pages, this makes Google Books Download almost useless for people looking to store a full copy of books on Books.Google.com ….

2. Downloading PDFs from books.google.com with Firefox Greasemonkey and Google Book Downloaderjavascript

a. Install GreaseMonkey Firefox add-on

If you never before heard of Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox Extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser (also known as augmented browsing).

b. Install Google book downloader GreaseMonkey javascript

After a FF restart, you're ready to download any book from Books.Google.com.
To use it open the book you want to download and on the left upper corner you will see a Download this book button, press it and the book will be scanned in OCR and saved in PNG picture format. Below is a screenshot showing a sample book to download from books.google.com;

how to download book from google in firefox web browser screenshot


After each book page is succesfully download in page on the left pane you get a download status;

google book download firefox screenshot pictures - Scythian Monks download - how to download books to pictures from Google books on Windows XP, Windows 8

You should keep in mind that the download links of Google Book pages, will have a time expiry, so if you don't hurry up to save the pictures for later use soon links will become inaccessible and showing as broken from Google – I'm not sure how much exactly is google's max expiry time set of links but I guess it should be something 5-10 mins.

The pages of PDF, gets fetched as pictures one by one so it takes 20 secs or so to get all links to pages. Since Google Books Downloader only provides links to PDF pages it is necessery to either save each of the pictures manually (quite a lot of effort) or Install and use lets say DownThemAll! FF download extension. Using DownThemAll does not completely automates picture downloads, as you need to manually select all pictures for downloading, but at least selecting pages saves some time. To download all book pages with DownThemAll click with right mouse button on the left pane where links to pictures appears and choose download with DownThemAll!. After that tick on all links pointing to books.google.com……. to make them have the green tick as shown in below screenshot;

Once you have all PNGs saved on the PC you need to then convert them to unified PDF file. One way to do this is using ImageMagick's convert command line tool.
To do so install imagemagick for Windows downloading Win binaries from here
There are a bunch of binaries you will need to install named like ImageMagick-*-x86-static.exe

Run cmd.exe, change dir (cd) to folder where the just download book is saved in PNG and issue:


C:\Downloads> convert *.png pdf/my-book-from-pictures.pdf

How to keep track of All User accounts executed commands, highest CPU consumers and user times on Linux

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

Linux accounting keeping an eye on all user run commands time accounting find cpu eaters

For people interested into statistics of how Linux existing users are spending, there log in times and what kind of commands each of users is executing, take a look at acct
acct is existing on all mainstream Linux distributions is a great sysadmin tool. acct is a great tool whether you have a system where a multitude of users you don't trust has to be monitored. It is an absolutely must have for anyone willing to run, lets say  experimental honeypot or  free shell host. acct is useful for paranoid sysadmins who like to always knows what there users are running as well as in situation where some of users is suspected to be a potential cracker trying to root the host.

Below is description of acct package on Debian:

# apt-cache show acct| grep -i description -A 8
Description: The GNU Accounting utilities for process and login accounting
 GNU Accounting Utilities is a set of utilities which reports and summarizes
 data about user connect times and process execution statistics.
 .
 "Login accounting" provides summaries of system resource usage based on connect
 time, and "process accounting" provides summaries based on the commands
 executed on the system.
 .
 The 'last' command is provided by the sysvinit package and not included here.

To start using acct, just install it with usual:

# apt-get install --yes acct

(Whether on Debian / Ubuntu Linux);

On Fedora, CentOS and RHEL and other RPM based Linuxes issue;

yum --y install psacct

On deb based Linux distributions, whether acct collects statistics is controlled via:

/etc/default/acct

# cat /etc/default/acct
# Defaults for acct

# If you want to keep acct installed, but not started automatically, set this
# variable to 0. Because /etc/cron.daily/acct calls the initscript daily, it is
# not sufficient to stop acct once after booting if your machine remains up.
ACCT_ENABLE="1"

# Amount of days that the logs are kept.
ACCT_LOGGING="30"

After installed to start collecting user "process accounting" data run acct via init script;

# /etc/init.d/acct start
Turning on process accounting, file set to '/var/log/account/pacct'.
Done..

The file gathering info on system usage, CPU load, user ran commands /var/log/account/psacct is a binary and unreadable tailing it with tail -f .

On CentOS / Fedora Linux to Enable acct account statistics gathering in future boot and from present moment on do;

# chkconfig psacct on
# /etc/init.d/psacct start

1. Find out all commands executed by Linux user account (lastcomm)

Once user accounting is running to get information of every command ever executed on user shell use lastcomm cmd. For example:

# lastcomm hipo

bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.03 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
sed                    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
uname                  hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
dircolors              hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
uname                  hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.03 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
sed                    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
uname                  hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
bash              F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
id                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
mesg                   hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
verse                  hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
cowrand                hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
cowsay                 hipo     pts/1      0.03 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
cowrand           F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
head                   hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
tail                   hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
head                   hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
cowrand           F    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
awk                    hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
wc                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20

A lot of the initial commands shown to run on pts/1 is not actual commands, by the user but are just stuff run on user login time via /etc/bash.bashrc, /etc/profile, ~/.bashrc. ~/.bash_profile.

lastcomm displayed output from 2nd column is a special flag giving more information on how and for what purpose command was executed. In above output
F
– indicates the command run after a fork.
X – is returned if a command exit with SIGTERM (kill signal)
D – in case of generated command core dump (D is good one to look for whether checking a suspicious user profile, as it is so common exploits use core dumping to get root superuser access)
S – means the command is run with superuser privileges (this one you will see usually whether inspecting user profile of a cracker who run exploit using core dump – a lot of Ds followed by some shell code to run as superuser)

2. Get statistics on CPU use time of services (daemons) and user accounts

psacct is very handy, whether you have CPU server overloads and you have difficulty finding out what are the "CPU hungry processes". To get those use summarized accounting information tool;

# sa -m
                                     2619      31.06re       0.54cp         0avio      2907k
root                                 2448      30.19re       0.52cp         0avio      2817k
www-data                               33       0.06re       0.02cp         0avio      3687k
hipo                                   72       0.15re       0.01cp         0avio      6217k
qscand                                 11       0.36re       0.00cp         0avio      5326k
vpopmail                               48       0.25re       0.00cp         0avio      1486k
qmails                                  6       0.00re       0.00cp         0avio       968k
sshd                                    1       0.04re       0.00cp         0avio     12632k

-m (prints user summary).

3. Find all system users running certain commands

Another good use of lastcomm command is to grep over all users executed command for precise commands of interest. One very good use case is if you catch a system abuser running certain exploit or DoS tool on the host and you want to make sure no-one else on the system doesn't try running it.

# lastcomm ls
ls                     www-data __         0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:40
ls                     www-data __         0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:30
ls                     hipo     pts/7      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     hipo     pts/1      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     www-data __         0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:20
ls                     root     pts/0      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:10
ls                     root     pts/0      0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:10
ls                     www-data __         0.00 secs Tue Feb  5 00:10
 

4. Get statistics of most active system users in hours

There is one tool called ac, which is similar in what it does to last command, just like last it uses /var/log/wtmp binary log file to get its user login times stats . The difference is ac provides more and better structured user login time length info.

Its very useful if you want to have idea, which user spends most time connected to host.

$ ac -p
    sic                                  4.86
    hipo                                 4.80
    root                                25.80
    play                                 0.02

To get general info on how much overall hours all existing users spend doing stuff on node;

$ ac total 35.61

To know which days from the month users were most active:

$ ac -d
Feb 1 total 14.54
Feb 2 total 0.97
Feb 3 total 12.47
Feb 4 total 5.96
Today total 1.73

Linphone a good working Skype voice over IP alternative

Monday, February 4th, 2013

If you never tried linphone I warmly recommend it.
2 days ago, with a friend of mine we tested a bunch of Linux softwares to find out what is the situation with possible alternatives to Skype to transmit Voice and Video. I've been interested into Skype Alternative programs since about 2 years, but so far I never found good and easy to set up working Linux alternative.

We first tried Ekiga. Though it is said to be a good Linux SKype alternative, my ekiga client running on Debian Linux stable Squeeze ver. 3.2.7.2 failed to connect to SIP account I've created on ekiga.net. I've tried hard to make ekiga connect to account SIP created from ekiga.net but all time I was getting an error on connect:

Ekiga did not manage to configure your network settings automatically. You can still use it, but you need to configure your network settings manually.

Please see http://wiki.ekiga.org/index.php/Enable_port_forwarding_manually for instructions

ekiga cant login to SIP protocol error enable port forwarding manually - ekiga is not ready to use on Linux

After continously trying to follow instructions from above pointed URL and making proper settings on my DL-524 Wireless Router and all time ending up with the annoying error, we decided to finally completely abondoned it and try some other voice over IP clients.
We  tried Jitsi and few others which prooved to be unworking. Finally we give a try to Linphone which seemed to be promising. We tested it On Linux platform, where both of Linux installed OS-es where tested were running Debian Linux (one stable Debian Squeeze and one unstable Debian Blackstar). Linphone even with different versions on different Debian Linux OS-es worked fine Video conferences were crashing but voice over IP via SIP protocol works okay.

Setting up linphone to do speak (voice over IP) conference calls with friends is easy task, you need to have linphone package installed, i.e. run:

apt-get install –yes linphone

Then once installed launch it from terminal or GNOME menus with:

$ linphone-3

You will have to create account on linphone.org's website via Register a Linphone account. Once registered and confirmed the account, linphone sends you an email with credential info, through e-mail like:
 

Dear Linphone user, your account has been activated.

You can now use your linphone account with these parameters :

sip:hipo@sip.linphone.org
hipo
sip.linphone.org
 

Regards,
The Linphone team.

Then in linphone you should configure new created Linphone account via:

Linphone -> Preferences -> Manager SIP Account

LinPhone Working Linux Skype Alternative Settings Screenshot
 

Once account is added, calls via SIP protocol are ready to go. Probabl,y due to incompitability between versions of Debian stable Linux and unstable the user you will add and about to call is showing as offline, however calling between each other works perfect and voice quality is quite good.

good working skype inux alternative to proprietary skype voice video chat program - linphone rulez

Linphone has a version for Windows as well as for AppleIphone mobile phone.

LinPhone for Iphone version dialpad picture

For console geeks, there is also a command line tool interface to linphone linbphonec;

$ linphonec
Warning: Could not start UDP transport on port 5060, maybe this port is already used.
Ready
Warning: video is disabled in linphonec, use -V or -C or -D to enable.
linphonec>
linphonec> help
Commands are:
---------------------------
help Print commands help
call Call a SIP uri
chat Chat with a SIP uri
terminate Terminate the current call
answer Answer a call
autoanswer Show/set auto-answer mode
proxy Manage proxies
soundcard Manage soundcards
webcam Manage webcams
staticpic Manage static pictures when nowebcam
ipv6 Use IPV6
refer Refer the current call to the specified destination.
nat Set nat address
stun Set stun server address
firewall Set firewall policy
call-logs Calls history
friend Manage friends
play play from a wav file
record record to a wav file
quit Exit linphonec
register Register in one line to a proxy
unregister Unregister from default proxy
duration Print duration in seconds of the last call.
status Print various status information
ports Network ports configuration
speak Speak a sentence using espeak TTS engine
codec Audio codec configuration
vcodec Video codec configuration
ec Echo cancellation
mute Mute microphone and suspend voice transmission.
unmute Unmute microphone and resume voice
transmission.
nortp-on-a Set the rtp_no_xmit_on_audio_mute
configuration parameter
---------------------------
Type 'help ' for more details.
linphonec> quit

Another great thing about Linphone is it is licensed under free software license GPL2 – meaning source is publicly accessible – thus anyone with skills and desire to port it to any computer architecture can do it. I did not have time to test it throughfully with newer version of linphone to know if Video calls works fine – whether same program versions are used between both peer sides, nevertheless for anyone willing non M$ sniffed channel to do voice calls between Computers linphone is nice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alexander Nevsky Russian classic historical drama movie from 1938 – St. Alexander Nevsky an Orthodox King who defeated Roman Catholics

Friday, February 1st, 2013

Alexander Nevsky (Russian): Алекса́ндр Не́вский) is a 1938 historical drama movie directed by Sergei Eisenstein . It depicts the attempted invasion of Novgorod in the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and their defeat by Prince Alexander, known popularly as Alexander Nevsky (1220–1263).

Eisenstein made the film in association with Dmitri Vasilyev and with a script co-written with Pyotr Pavlenko ; they were assigned to ensure that Eisenstein did not stray into "formalism" and to facilitate shooting on a reasonable timetable. It was produced by Goskino via the Mosfilm production unit, with Nikolai Cherkasov in the title role and a musical score by Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky was the first and most popular of Eisenstein's three sound films. In 1941 Eisenstein, Pavlenko, Cherkasov and Abrikosov were awarded the Stalin Prize for the film.

In 1978 the film was included in the world’s 100 best motion pictures according to the opinion poll conducted by Milan’s publishing house “A. Mondadori”


 

Alexander Nevsky Russian Classic movie 1938 – Teutonic Knights defeat by St. Alexander Nevsky