One of the QMAIL mail servers, setup-uped on a Debian host has been creating some auto configuration issues. Every-time a new mail user tries to use the embedded Thunderbird client auto configuration, the auto config fails leaving the client unable to use his Mailbox through POP3 or IMAP protocols.
Since about 2 years Thunderbird and many other modern pop3 and imap mail desktop and mobile clients are by default using the auto configuration and hence it was unthinkable to manually change settings for new clients with the QMAIl install; Besides that most of the Office users are always confused, whether they have to manually change SMTP or POP3 host for a server.
Below is a screenshot displaying the warning during email auto-configuration:
The orange color in the button for the newly auto-detected smtp.mail-domain.com indicates, something is not right with the SMTP host.
Obviously, something was wrong with smtp.mail-domain.com, hence I checked where smtp.mail.domain.com resolves with host command. What I found was actually smtp.mail-domain.comActive ( A ) DNS records was pointing to an IP address, our company previously used for the mail server. At present time the correct mail server host name is mx.mail-domain.com and the QMAIL installation on mx.soccerfame.com is configured to be the actual SMTP server.
By default Thunderbird and many other POP3, IMAP mail clients, however automatically assume the default SMTP host for a mail server is to be configured under a host name smtp.mail-domain.com. This is really strange, especially when the primary MX record for mail-domain.com domain is pointing to mx.mail-domain.com, e.g.:
qmail:~# host -t MX mail-domain.com
soccerfame.com mail is handled by 10 mx.mail-domain.com.
soccerfame.com mail is handled by 20 mail.mail-domain.com.
soccerfame.com mail is handled by 30 mail-domain.com.
The whole warning was caused due to the fact mx.mail-domain.com was resolving to an IP like xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, whether smtp.mail-domain.com was resolving to yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy
Both xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy hosts were configured to have a different qmail SMTP host i.e.:
The server under IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx – (mx.mail-domain.com) was configured in /var/qmail/control/me to be mx.mail-domain.com and the other old one yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy – (mail.mail-domain.com) had (mail.mail-domain.com) in /var/qmail/control/me
As smtp.mail-domain.com was actually being still resolved to mail.mail-domain.com, the EMAILs were improperly trying to be sent with a configured DNS hostname of smtp.mail-domain.com, where the actual one on the server was mail.mail-domain
It took, me about an hour of pondering what is causing the oddities until I got the here explained issue. As the DNS recors for the domain the sample mail-domain.com were handled by Godaddy, to fix the mess, I logged in to Godaddy and;
a)deleted – DNS record for smtp.mail-domain.com. b) Created new CNAME record for smtp.mail-domain.com to be a domain alias for mx.soccerfame.com
A few minutes, afterwards I tried configuring once again the same email account in Thunderbird and this time both imap.mail-domain.com and smtp.mail-domain.comturned green; indicating everything is configured fine.
To be 100% sure all is working fine I first fetched, all email via the IMAP protocol without hassles and onwards sent a test email to my Gmail account; thanksfully the sent email was delivered to Gmail indicating both Get Mail and Send Mail functions worked now fine.
2 of the wordpress installations, I take care for had been reported an annoying bug today by some colleagues. The bug consisted in double trailing slash at the end of the domain url e.g.;
http://our-company-domainname.com//
As a result in the urls everywhere there was the double trailing slash appearing i.e.::
Therefore, I initially looked for the cause of the problem, within the wordpress admin settings for qTranslate plugin. After not finding any clue pointing the bug to be related to qTranslate, I've then checked the settings for each individual wordpress Page and Post (There in posts usually one can manually set the exact url pointing to each post and page). The double slash appeared also in each Post and Page and it wasn't possible to edit the complete URL address to remove the double trailin slashes. My next assumption was the cause for the double slash appearing on each site link is because of something wrong with the sites .htaccess, therefore I checked in the wp main sites directory .htaccess Strangely .htacces seemed OKAY and there was any rule that somehow might lead to double slashes in URL. WP-sites .htaccess looked like so:
server:/home/wp-site1/www# cat .htaccess RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /
# Rewrite rules for new content and scripts folder RewriteRule ^jscripts/(.*)$ wp-includes/js/$1 RewriteRule ^gallery/(.*)$ wp-content/uploads/$1 RewriteRule ^modules/(.*)$ wp-content/plugins/$1 RewriteRule ^gui/(.*)/(.*)$ wp-content/themes/$1/$2 [L]
# Disable direct acceees to wp files if referer is not valid #RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .wp-* #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-* #RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*media-upload.php.* #RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*cadia.* #RewriteRule . /error404 [L]
Onwards, I thought a possible way to fix bug by adding mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess which would do a redirect all requests to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ etc. like so:
I've been thinking for a lot of time analyzing my already years ongoing passion for Free Software, trying to answer the question "What really made me be a keen user and follower of the ideology of the free software movement"? I came to the conclusion it is the sharing part of free software that really made me a free software enthusiast. Let me explain ….
In our modern world sharing of personal goods (physical goods, love for fellows, money, resources etc.) has become critically low.The reason is probably the severely individualistic Western World modern culture model which seems to give good economic results. Though western society might be successful in economic sense in man plan it is a big failure. The high standard in social culture, the heavy social programming, high level of individualism and the collapsing spirituality in majority of people is probably the major key factors which influenced the modern society to turn into such a non-sharing culture that is almost ruling the whole world nations today.
If we go back a bit in time, one can easily see the idea and general philosophy of sharing is very ancient in nature. It was sharing that for years helped whole societies and culture grow and mature. Sharing is a fundamental part of Christian faith and many other religions as well and has been a people gathering point for centuries. However as modern man is more and more turning to the false fables of the materialistic origin of man (Darwininsm), sharing is started seeing as unnecessary . Perhaps the decreased desire in people to share is also the reason why in large number people started being self-interest oriented as most of us are nowadays.
As we share less and less of our physical and spiritual goods, our souls start being more and more empty day after day. Many people, especially in the western best developed societies; the masses attitude towards sharing is most evidently hostile. Another factor which probably decreased our natural human desire to share is technocracy and changing of communication from physical as it used to be until few dacades to digital today.
The huge shift of communication from physical to digital, changes the whole essence of basic life, hence I believe at least the distorted sharing should be encouraged on the Internet (file movies and programs sharing) should be considered normal and not illegal.. I believe Using Free Software instead of non-free (proprietary) one is another thing through which we can stimulate sharing. If we as society appreciate our freedom at all and care for our children future, it is my firm conviction, we should do best to keep sharing as much as we can in both physical and digital sense.
I've been given a HUAWEI Mobile Broadband E173 USB 3g model. The USB modem contains a flash USB Storage segment storing a little install program dedicated to make the modem work fine on Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / 7 and probably other M$ OSes. I'm a long time DebianGNU / Linux user and as a free software enthusiast I ofcourse wanted to be able to use Vivacom's 3G USB Modem on my Linux powered notebook.
Thanksfully as I've red on Vivacom's website the modem supports Linux OS 🙂
For those unaware in Bulgaria there are currently 3 major GSM network providers providing 3G internet this are;;;
VIVACOM – The ex Government ran national company BTC (Bulgarian Telecommunication Company)
M-Tel – The first GSM network provider that entered Bulgaria around year 1995
GLOBUL – The 3rd and last GSM mobile and net provider entered last and not so much used by Bulgarians today
Until today I had no experience in running any 3G modems on Linux, neither I had used the 3 networks 3G internet to determine which one is best, however I've been given for temporal use a VIVACOM 3G internet modem today so I proceeded to try installing it on my Debian host.
My Linux system is a bit strangely configured as I use wicd network connection manager -( wicd-gtk ) to manage wireless and LAN connections instead of the standard installed GNOME network manager – available through package ( network-manager-gnome ).
The reason I use wicd is not that it is so much better than GNOME network manger but rather for historical reasons because few years past I had impression it works better in connecting me to wireless networks. Another reason why I choosed wicd back then was the nice looking stats …
I tried plugging in the Vivacom USB 3G modem stick and checked in wicd to see if I can see a possibility to connect to the mobile opeartor 3G network but unfortunately nothing appeared.
Though the 3G adsl modem was unavailable straing in wicd, checking about it in the list of attached USB devices I could see it detected, e.g.:
noah:~# lsusb |grep -i huawei
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 12d1:1c05 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
This was at least a good sign pointing me to the thoughts that the modem is probably gonna work.
I did a quick Google search to see if other people succeded running the device on a Linux host and came across a few blog posts in Bulgarian explaining a "success story" on Ubuntu Linux through using a tweakened shell script – sakis3g. For more on how the script works and script download check out Sakis3g
Here is a quote from sakis3g's website describing the script:
It automagically setups your USB or Bluetooth™ modem, and may even detect operator settings. You should try it when anything else fails!
Sakis3g has different versions designed for for plenty of spacific hware architectures i.e. for (i386, amd64, armv4t, armv5t). There is also a version of the script which by the way contains a combination of bash shell scripting instruction and some binary exec data.
To run sakis3g on my laptop I did:
1. Download sakis3g
My notebook architecture is 64 bit so I download and used the amd64 version of the script;;;
hipo@noah:~$ mkdir sakis3g
hipo@noah:~$ cd sakis3g
hipo@noah:~/sakis3g$ wget http://www.sakis3g.org/versions/latest/amd64/sakis3g.gz
I've made also a mirror of sakis3g i386, 64 bit and all architecture the mirrors just in case it disappears in future. The mirror versions of sakis3g are here:
The script is then ready to run by either clicking twice on it or (as I prefer for debugging reasons to run it in terminal):
hipo@noah:~$ ./sakis3g
Something that I have wondered a bit was the dialog where I had to fill in some data of some variable APN abbreviation for – (Access Point Name)
The APN host for VIVACOM mobile internet is;;; APN: internet.vivacom.bg
I've used the Windows configuration progrma to gather also the following data that I thought might be important for configuring the 3G adsl modem on the Linux host;;;
Auth: *99#
User: VIVACOM
pass: VIVACOM
Here are all the configuration screenshots I've taken from sakis3g and all the data that I filled in. Next the following tiny window appeared on screen:
Well that's all folks, now sakis3g succesfully connected to the I_net via an (PPP) VPN connection tunnel here is data from ifconfig command showing the succesful 3G connection to VIVACOM;;;
The internet via the 3G connection is not blazing fast but good enough to check your mail or read some webpages. VIVACOM currently has different (traffic limited packages) for their 3G internet, I'm not sure which package exactly is the 3G USB stick modem but probably the "quick" internet connection that is now would slow down once the traffic limit is reached … Hope this post helps someone to configure 3G internet on VIVACOM in Debian and Ubuntu Linux. Though I've tested sakis3g on Debian it should work with no hassles on any other GNU Linux distribution that has bash installed.
As a person interested in history and antrophology. Just recently on my last trip to Romania as I travelled a very interesting question poped up in my mind – How it happened that RoadSigns we use on every street highway and practically everywhere on the road came to be. Interestingly now with the standartization of road signs often the most popular road signs are used as a basis for development on other popular prohibit or allowance signs, we read on airports public institutions, pubs and mostly everywhere.
So in short I did a short research on Road Sign History, just to find out once again that the ancients, were wiser than we think. The first road signs probably came to existence with the existence of humanity, however officially, there was no standartization of using signs to point on road locations travellers before it was introudced in the Roman Empire. In Rome a pillars on the roads were placed to point to major road arteries leading to Rome and various important empire city centers.
During the middle ages, milestones pillars were no longer used, but for practical reasons wooden markers placed across european cities instructed tradesman and travellers to major city important centers and were used to show a general road direction leading to nearby city. The wooden signs practice had been in use until the first modern roadsigns erected on a wide scale designed for riders of 'high' and ordinary bicycles in the late 1870 and 1880s. The modern road signs as we know it today however emerged as a result of the first International Road Congress meeting that occured in Rome in 1908. On the meeting a four standard pictures were selected to note the basic for road signs further development. The need for the meeting was the large increase of roads across european artery cities. The road signs developed on the meeting were bump, curve, intersection and railroad crossings. The invention and adoption of cars and the boom of the car producing industry quickened the need for international road sign standard. The intensive work on international road signs that took place between 1926 and 1949 eventually led to the development of the European road sign system as we know it. The signs were quicky spread to America and in 1960, the road signs become universal in America and almost everywhere all around the developed and developing world.
As of today 2012 it can be said road signs exist all around the civilized world.Though most of road signs are identical across all countries around the world today still some road symbols varies from country to country. I remember seeing some very unique road signs during my travelling through Serbia, 2 years ago.
We're living at a times, where information has become more valuable than money and gold. Though we're living in a such a wild changing times, still it is not easy to answer in onefold clear way what is information. The more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word accepted. While checking some interesting videos on the net, I've come across a video representing in a very brief form the history of information.
The Story of Information and how we come to be at where we are now
We're living at a times, where information has become more valuable than money and gold. Lest that living in a such a wild changing times, still it is not easy to answer in onefold clear way what is information. As you can see from the video, the more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word took up.
At the end end of the short presentational video there are few questions asked:
Who coined the term MEME
How many zeros are in yottabyte?
What is a one thing that can escape a black hole?
I did a quick research on the newly heard words and came to know meme concept. A meme is an "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.". The theory lists some interesting information like replication of personality (propagation) from one person to another etc. etc. However the general content of meme's theory puts Christian faith, religions and all kind of people beliefs in the graph of being just a continuous meme's patterns which are transferred from a person to person (generation to generation). Therefore according to memetics (as the meme's science is called), Christian faith and even my Orthodox Christian faith is just an informtion transmitted similarly to genetics information and the laws against:; sexual morality, bestiality, adultery, castration etc. are just a taboo and makes not sense and is just they claim is a information transferred from family generation to next generation until today.
Obviously the whole "theory" of memetics as a science is not true and is just a world view of Mr. Richard Dawkins in a book called The Selfish Gene (1976). It is well to be said Dawkins a follower of the fairy tales of Charle's Darwin's Darwinism. Modern science however is seriously questioning Darwin's materialist world view. There are plenty of scientific researches which has prooved the existence of spiritual realm and hence some of the claims memetics are standing on a shaky grounds.
Concerning the second question in the video how many zeros are in an yottabyte the answer according to FreeFactFinder.com is:
So having in mind the yottabyte equals 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes if in bytes it would have 2 zeros 🙂
But if by zero is meant the number of values which could become zeroes then the answer would be 24 zeroes. This of course is in bytes in zettabytes the zeroes are only 0 or 3i.e.(1024 zettabytes) 🙂
Moving back to the 3rd video question What is a one thing that can escape a black hole?. The answer is "WHO KNOWS ??". The BlackHoles are a matter of science based on a huge theory base, there are plenty of discussions by some scientists still doubting if black holes really exist ,,, even if we assume blackholes exist noone can tell if the blackhole would suck up all matter (including light) or some specific kind of still un-researched matter or energy can get out… In short the question imposed is completely ridiculously funny 😉
After about 3 years of no new version for GNU / Linux finally Skype has released a new version of Skype. I thought already there will be never a new skype version out for GNU / Linux, since the moment Microsoft purchased skype.
As of time of writting this post there are Skype 4 versions for following Linux-es;;;
Ubuntu 10.04 32 / 64-bit (probably would work fine on latest Ubuntus too)
Debian 6.0 Squeeze 32 / 64-bit
Fedora 16 / 32 bit
OpenSUSE 12.1 32bit (only)
Most likely the Ubuntu release of skype 4 will work flawlessly on Linux Mint and other debian derivatives.The The release mentions, Skype 4 is supposed to have 4 major advancements and the gap in interface and usability with latest Mac OS and M$ Windows Skype versions is now filled.The four major changes said in the announcement are;;;
1. a new Conversations View where users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window. Those users who prefer the old view can disable this in the Chat options;
2. a brand new Call View;
3.Call quality has never been better thanks to several investments we made in improving audio quality;
4. Improved video call quality and extended support for more cameras.
Some of the minor improvements in those
new Linux skype
are:- improved chat synchronization- new presence and emoticon icons- the ability to store and view phone numbers in a Skype contact's profile- much lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze- chat history loading is now much faster- support for two new languages: Czech (flag:cz) and Norwegian (flag:no)Just like with prior Skype releases 2.0 and 2.2beta this release comes with almost same list of non-english language support ,,,Seeing those announcement, I've hurried to download and test skype 4 on my 64-bit desktop running Debian 6 Squeeze.Once downloaded to install the pack skype-debian_4.0.0.7-1_amd64.deb I used the usual dpkg -i i,e,;;;noah:~# dpkg -iskype-debian_4.0.0.7-1_amd64.deb…………..Just like the release announcement mentions the first initial launch of Skype 4 took about 3 or 4 minutes doing something (probably sending half of my hard disk data to Microsoft 🙂 🙂 🙂 ) along with importing the prior skype data and chat history :)The minimum software dependencies for correct operation of Skype are:Qt libraries; D-Bus; libasound and pulseaudioHere are few screenshots of Skype 4 to give you an idea what to expect:The Skype Options is almost identical to Skype 2.2. One interesting new feature I've noticed is Skype WIFIUnfortunately to use Skype WIFI you need to have purchased skype credits.Another notable difference is the organization of Skype Chats, which is more like in the good old times of mIRC and IRC chat clientsHere is also the list of Skype emoticons including bundled with Skype 4:The "look & feel" of the new interface gives the impression of seriously improved Skype client stability too.There was a minor trouble with the voice recording (microphone) with Skype 4;To make the microphone work properly I had to raise up the mic volume from PulseAudio settings in Skype options.Well that's all the only unpleasent thing for this new skype is it is using KDE's libQT and seems not to have a native interface for GNOME via GTK2. If we put away this I guess this version of Skype is much more stable and therefore I would recommend anyone to update.Of course we never know if this new updated more stable Skype release is not filled up with backdoors or does not transfer all our conversations to microsoft but we didn't know that even when Skype was not Microsoft's so and since it is not a free software I guess it doesn't matter so much.As you can guess Microsoft has imposed centralization on Skype protocol so connecting the peers is now done by Microsoft servers this news is another intriguing one.According to one recent article from May 1, 2012 Microsoft Skype replaces the Peer-to-Peer P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft – In short that probably means that by changing this nowdays microsoft probably now logs all chat sessions between Skype users, even it is likely the calls between users are recorded too. We all know Microsoft imperialism pretty well so I guess this is not a big news …..This new release of Skype if it is significantly more stable than it is prior releases would certainly have serious positive implication on the development and adoption of Linux for the Desktop. So far I'm sure one of the obstacles of many manufacturers of notebooks and comp equipment to ship with Linux was the lack of a stable and easy to implement skype release for Linux.Well that's all folks. Enjoy the New Skype Cheeres ! 🙂
My home run machine MySQL server was suddenly down as I tried to check my blog and other sites today, the error I saw while trying to open, this blog as well as other hosted sites using the MySQL was:
Error establishing a database connection
The topology, where this error occured is simple, I have two hosts:
1. Apache version 2.0.64 compiled support externally PHP scripts interpretation via libphp – the host runs on (FreeBSD)
2. A Debian GNU / Linux squeeze running MySQL server version 5.1.61
The Apache host is assigned a local IP address 192.168.0.1 and the SQL server is running on a host with IP 192.168.0.2
To diagnose the error I've logged in to 192.168.0.2 and weirdly the mysql-server was appearing to run just fine:
debian:~# ps ax |grep -i mysql 31781 pts/0 S 0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe 31940 pts/0 Sl 12:08 /usr/sbin/mysqld –basedir=/usr –datadir=/var/lib/mysql –user=mysql –pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid –socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock –port=3306 31941 pts/0 S 0:00 logger -t mysqld -p daemon.error 32292 pts/0 S+ 0:00 grep -i mysql
Moreover I could connect to the localhost SQL server with mysql -u root -p and it seemed to run fine. The error Error establishing a database connection meant that either something is messed up with the database or 192.168.0.2 Mysql port 3306 is not properly accessible.
My first guess was something is wrong due to some firewall rules, so I tried to connect from 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.2 with telnet:
freebsd# telnet 192.168.0.2 3306 Trying 192.168.0.2… Connected to jericho. Escape character is '^]'. Host 'webserver' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' Connection closed by foreign host.
Right after the telnet was initiated as I show in the above output the connection was immediately closed with the error:
Host 'webserver' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'Connection closed by foreign host.
In the error 'webserver' is my Apache machine set hostname. The error clearly states the problems with the 'webserver' apache host unable to connect to the SQL database are due to 'many connection errors' and a fix i suggested with mysqladmin flush-hosts
To temporary solve the error and restore my normal connectivity between the Apache and the SQL servers I logged I had to issue on the SQL host:
mysqladmin -u root -p flush-hostsEnter password:
Thogh this temporar fix restored accessibility to the databases and hence the websites errors were resolved, this doesn't guarantee that in the future I wouldn't end up in the same situation and therefore I looked for a permanent fix to the issues once and for all.
The permanent fix consists in changing the default value set for max_connect_error in /etc/mysql/my.cnf, which by default is not too high. Therefore to raise up the variable value, added in my.cnf in conf section [mysqld]:
debian:~# vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf
...
max_connect_errors=4294967295
and afterwards restarted MYSQL:
debian:~# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..
To make sure the assigned max_connect_errors=4294967295 is never reached due to Apache to SQL connection errors, I've also added as a cronjob.
In the cron I have omitted the mysqladmin -u root -p (user/pass) input options because for convenience I have already stored the mysql root password in /root/.my.cnf
I'm a guy fascinated by ASCII art, since the very early days I saw a piece of this awesome digital art.
As time passed and computers went to be used mostly graphics resolution, ASCII art loose its huge popularity from the early DOS and BBS (internet primordial days).
However, this kind of art is still higly valued by true computer geeks. In that manner of thoughts, lately I'm researching widely on ASCII art tools and ASCII art open source tools available for Linux. Last time I check what is available for 'ASCII job' was before 5 years time. Recently I decided to review once again and see if there are new software for doing ascii manipulations on Linux and this is how this article got born.
My attention was caught by aewan (ASCII-art Editor Without A Name), while searching for ASCII keyword description packages with:
Here is the complete description of the Debian package:
hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show aewan|grep -i description -A 5
Description: ASCII-art Editor Without A Name
aewan is an ASCII art editor with support for multiple layers that can be
edited individually, colors, rectangular copy and paste, and intelligent
horizontal and vertical flipping (converts '\' to '/', etc). It produces
both stand-alone art files and an easy-to-parse format for integration
into your terminal applications.
I installed it to give it a try:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install aewan
Selecting previously deselected package aewan.
(Reading database ... 388522 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking aewan (from .../aewan_1.0.01-3_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up aewan (1.0.01-3) ...
2. aecat is utility to display an aewan documents (aewan format saved files)3. aemakeflic – tool to produce an animation from an aewan document
Next I ran it in plain console tty to check how it is like:
hipo@noah:~$ aewan
Below are screenshots to give you an idea how powerful aewan ASCII art editor is:
Aewan immediate entry screen after start up
Aewan ASCII art editor – all of the supported tool functions
As you can see from the shot the editor is very feature rich. I was stunned to find out it even supports layers (in ASCII!!) (w0w!). It even has a Layers Manager (like GIMP) 🙂
To create my first ASCII art I used the:
New
menu.
This however didn't immediately show the prompt, where I can type the ascii characters to draw my picture. In order to be able to draw inside the editor, its necessary to open at least one layer, through using the menu:
Add Layer (defaults)
then the interactive ASCII art editor appeared.
While an ASCII art is created with the editor you can select the color of the input characters by using Drawing Color menu seen in the above screenshot.
I've played few minutes and created a sample ascii art, just to test the color and editor "look & feel", my conclusions are the editor chars drawing is awesome.
All the commands available via menus are also accessible via a shortcut key combinations:
aewan controls are just great and definitely over-shadows every other text editor I used to draw an ASCII art so far. Once saved the ASCII art, are by default saved in a plain gzipped ascii text. You can therefore simply zcat the the saves; Don't expect zcat to show you the ascii as they're displayed in aewan, zcat-ing it will instead display just the stored meta data; the meta data is interpreted and displayed properly only with aecat command.
I've checked online for rpm builds too and such are available, so installing on Fedora, CentOS, SuSE etc. is up to downloading the right distro / hardware architecture rpm package and running:
# rpm -ivh aewan*.rpm
On the official website, there are also instructions to compile from source, Slackware users and users of other distros which doesn't have a package build should compile manually with the usual:
$ tar -zxf aewan-1.0.01.tar.gz
$ cd aewan-1.0.01
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
For those inrested to make animations with aemakeflic you need to first save a multiple layers of pictures. The idea of creating ASCII art video is pretty much like the old school way to make animation "draw every scene" and movie it. Once all different scene layers of the ASCII art animation are prepared one could use aemakeflic to export all the ASCII layers as common video.
aemakeflic has the ability to export the ASCII animation in a runnable shell script to display the animation. The other way aemakeflic can be used is to produce a picture in kind of text format showing the video whether seen with less cmd. Making ASCII animation takes a lot of time and effort. Since i'm too lazy and I lack the time I haven't tested this functionality. Anyways I've seen some ascii videos on telnet to remote hosts (some past time); therefore I guess they were made using aewan and later animated with aemakeflic.
I will close this post with a nice colorful ASCII art, made with aewan (picture is taken from the project page):
Probably, many don't know that it is possible to view normal graphical pictures (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP) etc. in plain console tty.
Being able to view pictures in ASCII is something really nice especially for console geeks like me. The images produced sometimes are a bit unreadable, if compared to the original graphics, but anyways most of the pictures looks pretty decent 🙂
Viewing in console / terminal images on GNU / Linux is possible thanks to a library called libcaca, caca labs libcaca project official website here. Below is a shot description of libcaca: hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show libcaca0|grep 'Description' -A 4
Description: colour ASCII art library
libcaca is the Colour AsCii Art library. It provides high level functions
for colour text drawing, simple primitives for line, polygon and ellipse
drawing, as well as powerful image to text conversion routines.
In Debian, Ubuntu and other deb Linux distros viewing GUI images with no need for Xserver or any kind of window manager in plain ASCII is possible with cacaview.
cacaview is part of a package called caca-utils. caca-utils is providing few other great utilities for ASCII freaks 🙂 along with cacaview console ascii viewer prog. The package> is available for Debian distributins since many years, so even on a very old Debians like Debian – (Potato, Woody, Sarge) the package is available in default free package repositories ready to install via apt
To install apt-get it as usual:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install caca-utils
Here is a list of the binaries the package provides:
1. cacaserver a tiny program allowing network streaming of applications written in caca
Belkow is a chop, from man cacaserver
cacaserver reads libcaca animation files in its standard input and serves them as ANSI art on network port 51914. These animations can be created by any libcaca program by setting the CACA_DRIVER environment variable to raw and piping the program's standard output to cacaserver.
Clients can then connect to port 51914 using telnet or netcat to see the output.
The example section of the manual points 1 example use of cacaserver to stream the console output from cacademo. cacademo binary is a short presentation ASCII DEMO in the spirit of the old school assembly demos (demoscene) . To run it to bind on port 51914 one has to type in bash shell: hipo@noah:~$ CACA_DRIVER=raw cacademo | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914
Then to check out how the demo looks, open telnet connection to the cacaserver host; In my case the cacaserver is binded and streamed over IP 192.168.0.2:
hipo@debian:~$ telnet 192.168.0.2 51914
Immediately you got the demo shining; Below are two screenshots of the demo played after succesful telnet connection:
cacademo running over telnet network connection – Matrix
Blur spots cacademo shot of cacademo streamed via network
You see the demo looks quite awesome 🙂
2. Running cacafire to stream over network
Another possible example use of cacaserver is in conjunction with cacafire libcaca test application:
noah:~# CACA_DRIVER=raw cacafire | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914 cacafire is a short application written to render ASCII via libcaca and is just displaying a screen with ASCII (moving) burning fire. It is quite spectacular if you, ask an unexpecting friend to connect to your host to 51914 🙂
Besides that bored sys admins, could run cacafire in console to hypnotize themselves watching dumb the burning fire screen for few hoursor just use it as a screensaver 😉
3. cacaview a program to display a graphic images in console using ASCII art
cacaview takes just one argument – the picture to be displayed.
Below is a screenshot of cacaview ran from my gnome-terminaldisplaying a ASCII text version of the MySQL server logo
hipo@noah:~$ cd /disk/pictures
hipo@noah:/disk/pictures$ cacaview mysql_logo.png
Whether cacaview is invoked in GUI, the libcaca X support is used, so the text image is visualized in new window with graphics, if however it is invoked in plain let's say tty1 libcaca displays the graphics pictures drawing it with only text characters.
Here is also a screenshot, I've made while viewing a GIF website logo in ASCII in plain tty console:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/logo.gif
The logo is in cyrillic, so for latin speaking people some of the characters in the two words seen will be unreadable 🙂
cacaview even supports viewing, the next and previous picture in line, like in any modern graphics image viewer program. To view a bunch of graphic pictures in ASCII with cacaview pass it *.*:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*.*
For simplicity the common unix * is also supported, so I find it quicker to do:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*
Showing pictures forward and backward (Previous / Next) picture is done with n and p kbd keys, whether; n - next;
p - previous
cacaview doesn't crash or stop but skip unknown file formats – if for instance encounters filenames which are not images; lets say you have *.rar archive files along with other pictures.
The complete list of keys cacaview supports are: br />
KEYS ? show the help screen
n, p switch to next image, previous image
Left, Right, Up, Down or h, l, k, j scroll the image around
+, – zoom in and out
z reset the zoom level to normal
f switch fullscreen mode (hide/show menu and status bars)
d toggle the dithering mode (no dithering, 4×4 ordered dithering, 8×8 ordered dithering and random dithering)
q exit the program
4. Converting graphics images to ASCII art like (plain text pictures)
The tool that does "the trick" is img2txt. img2txt has a bit more options while compared to the rest of the aforementioned tools.The following list of arguments are recognized:
the size (font, height)
brightness
contrast
gamma and dither
format type of out the output pic
Anyways I found that the basic just in / out arguments passed are enough to produce pretty good results:
After above img2txt command is run and hipo_avatar_pic.txt to see the colorful output ASCII art img2txt produces, cat it:
hipo@noah:~$ cat hipo_avatar_pic.txt
The image result if screenshot looks quite beautiful and even, can be considered or used as an ART effect image (filter) 🙂
The picture colors are plain ANSI color, so in order to display properly the picture with colors on another computers or Operating System you will need at least basic support for ANSI colors.
Plenty of output file formats are supported by img2txt
Here is the complete list of supported output formats:
ansi : coloured ANSI caca : internal libcaca format utf8 : UTF8 with CR utf8 : UTF8 with CRLF (MS Windows) html : HTML with CSS and DIV support html3 : Pure HTML3 with tables irc : IRC with ctrl-k codes bbfr : BBCode (French) ps : Postscript svg : Scalable Vector Graphics tga : Targa Image
libcaca is available for FreeBSD too, but the caca-utils is not available as a port yet, though probably the deb or rpm packages can easily be ported to BSD.
The orange color in the button for the newly auto-detected smtp.mail-domain.com indicates, something is not right with the SMTP host.
