Posts Tagged ‘support’

Configure own Media streaming minidlna Linux server to access data from your Smart TV

Friday, February 18th, 2022

dlna-media-minidlna-server-linux-logo

If you happen to buy or already own or just have to install a Smart TV to be connected with a LAN Network to a Linux based custom built NAS (Network Attached Storage) server. You might benefit of the smart TV to Share and Watching the Disk Storage Pictures, Music, Video files from the NAS  to the Smart TV using the Media Server protocol.

You have certainly already faced the Media Server at your life on many locations in stores and Mall Buildings, because virtually any reoccuring advertisements, movies projected on the TVs, Kids entertainment or Floor and Buildings Room location schedules or timeline promition schedules are streamed using the Media Server protocol, for many years now. Thus having a brief idea about Media Server proto existence is foundamental stuff to be aware of for sysadmins and programmers.

Shortly about DLNA UPnP Media Streaming Protocol

Assuming that your Smart TV has been already connected to your Wireless Router 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz Wifi, one would think that the easiest way to share the files with the SmartTV is via something like a simple SAMBA Linux server via smb:// cifs:// protocols or via the good old NFS Server, however most of Samsung Smart TV and many other in year 2022 does not have embedded support for Samba SMB / CIFS Protocol but instead have support for the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) streaming support. DLNA is part of the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) Protocols, UPnP is also known to those using and familiar with Windows Operating Systems realm simply as UPnP AV Media server or Windows Media server.
Windows Media server for those who never heard it or used it 
 allows you to build a Playlists with Media files Video and Audio data files, that can be then later played remotely via a Local LAN or even long distance over TCP / IP remote side connected Internet network.
 

1. Set up and Stream data via Media server on  Windows PC / notebook with integrated Windows Media server 

Windows Media server configuration on Windows 7, 10 and 11 is a relatively easy to configure via:

Network and Sharing Center -> Media Streaming Options -> Turn on Media Streaming 


Then you have to define the name of the Media Library, configure whether Media server should show
on the Local Netework
for other conected devices and Allow or Block access from the other network present devices.


 2. Using a more advanced Media Server to get rid about the limitation of DLNA set of supported file codecs.
 

The Windows default embedded DLNA server is the easiest and fastest one to set up, but it’s not necessarily the best option.
Due to the way DLNA works, you can only stream certain types of media codecs supported by the server. If you have other types of media not defaultly supported and defined by DLNA win server, it just won’t work.

Thus thanksfully it was developed other DLNA servers improve this by offering real-time transcoding.
If you try to play an unsupported file, they’ll transcode it on-the-fly, streaming the video in a supported format to your DLNA device.
Just to name few of the DLNA Media Streaming servers that have supported for larger MPG Video, MP3 / MP4 and other Audio formats encodings,
you can try Plex or the Universal Media Server both of which are free to use under freeware license and have versions for Linux and Mac OS.


Universal_media_server-windows-screenshot-stream-media-data-on-network

 

3. Setting up a free as in freedom DLNA server MiniDLNA (ReadyMedia) on GNU / Linux


ReadyMedia (formerly known as MiniDLNA) is a simple media server software, with the aim of being fully compliant with DLNA/UPnP-AV clients. It was originally developed by a NETGEAR employee for the ReadyNAS product line.

MiniDNLA daemon serves media files (music, pictures, and video) to clients on a network. Linux Media servers clients you can use to test or scan your network for existent Media servers are multiple perhaps the most famous ones are applications such as totem (for QT users) and Kodi (for KDE).
The devices that can be used with minidlna are devices such as portable media players (iPod), Smartphones, Televisions, Tablets, and gaming systems (such as PS3 and Xbox 360) etc.
 

ReadyMedia is a simple, lightweight, the downside of it is It does not have a web interface for administration and must be configured by editing a text file. But for a simple Video streaming in most cases does a great job.


3.1 Install the minidlna software package 

Minidlna is available out of the box on most linux distributions (Fedora / CentOS / Debian / Ubuntu etc.) as of year 2022.

  • Install on Debian Linux (Deb based distro)

media-server:~# apt install minidlna –yes

  • Install on Fedora / CentOS (other RPM based distro)

media-server:~# yum install -y minidlna


3.2 Configure minidlna

– /etc/minidlna.conf – main config file
Open with text editor and set user= ,  media_dir= ,  port=, friendly_name= ,  network_interface= variables as minimum.
To be add minidlnad support symlinks to external file locations, set also wide_links=yes

media-server:~# vim /etc/minidlna.conf

#user=minidlna
user=root
media_dir=/var/www/owncloud/data
network_interface=eth0,eth1

# Port number for HTTP traffic (descriptions, SOAP, media transfer).
# This option is mandatory (or it must be specified on the command-line using
# "-p").
port=8200
# Name that the DLNA server presents to clients.
# Defaults to "hostname: username".
#friendly_name=
friendly_name=DLNAServer Linux
# set this to yes to allow symlinks that point outside user-defined media_dirs.
wide_links=yes
# Automatic discovery of new files in the media_dir directory.
#inotify=yes

Keep in mind that it is supported to provide separete media_dir and provide different USB / External Hard Drive or SD Card sources separated only by content be it Video, Audio or Pictures short named in config as (A,V,P).

media_dir=P,/media/usb/photos
media_dir=V,/media/external-disk/videos
media_dir=A,/media/sd-card/music

You might want to diasble / ineable the inotify depending on your liking, if you don't plan to place new files automated to the NAS and don't care to get indexed and streamed from the Media server you can disable it with inotify=no otherwise keep that on.

– /etc/default/minidlna – additional startup config to set minidlnad (daemon) options such as setup to run with admin superuser root:root 
(usually it is safe to leave it empty and set the user=root, whether needed straight from /etc/minidlna.conf
That's all now go on and launch the minidlna and enable it to automatically boot on Linux boot.

media-server:~# systemctl start minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl enable minidlna
media-server:~# systemctl status minidlna

 

3.3 Rebuilt minidlna database with data indexed files

If you need to re- generate minidlna's database.
To do so stop the minidlna server with the
 

media-server:~# systemctop stop minidlna


 command, then issue the following command (both commands should be run as root):

media-server:~# minidlna -R

Since this command might kept in the background and keep the minidlna server running with incorrect flags, after a minute or two kill minidlna process and relaunch the server via sysctl.

media-server:~#  killall -9 minidlna
media-server:~#  systemctl start minidlna

 

3.4 Permission Issues / Scanning issues

If you plan to place files in /home directory. You better have a seperate partition or folder *outside* your "home" directory devoted to your media. Default user with which minidlna runs is minidlna, this could prevent some files with root or other users being red. So either run minidlna daemon as root or as other user with whom all media files should be accessible.
If service runs as root:root, and still getting some scanning issues, check permissions on your files and remove special characters from file names.
 

media-server:~# tail -10 /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log 
[2022/02/17 22:51:36] scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Videos/FILE006.MPG
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] scanner.c:819: warn: Scanning /var/www/owncloud/data finished (10637 files)!
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
[2022/02/17 22:52:08] playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.
minidlna.c:1126: warn: Starting MiniDLNA version 1.3.0.
minidlna.c:1186: warn: HTTP listening on port 8200
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/admin/files/origin/External SD card/media/Viber Images/IMG-4477de7b1eee273d5e6ae25236c5c223-V.jpg
scanner.c:489: warn: Unsuccessful getting details for /var/www/owncloud/data/Videos/Family-Video/FILE006.MPG
playlist.c:135: warn: Parsing playlists…
playlist.c:269: warn: Finished parsing playlists.

 

3.5. Fix minidlna Inotify errors

In /etc/sysctl.conf 

Add:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=65536

in a blank line at end of file and do 

media-server:~# sysctl -p

Debugging minidlna problems, index errors, warnings etc

minidlna does write by default to /var/log/minidlna/minidlna.log inspect the log closely and you should get most of the time what is wrong with it.
Note that some files might not get indexed because minidlna won't support the strange file codecs such as SWF encoding, if you have some important files to stream that are not indexed by minidlna, then install and try one of the more sophisticated free software Media Servers for Linux:

plex-media-streaming-server-screenshot

Note that most Linux users from my quick research shows, MediaTomb is the preferred advanced features Open Source Linux Media Server of choice for most of the guys.

mediatomb-linux-media-streaming-server-picture.jpg.webp
 

 

4. Test minidlna Linux servers works, getting information of other DLNA Servers on the network

media-server:~# lynx -dump  http://127.0.0.1:8200
MiniDLNA status

  Media library

   Audio files 0
   Video files 455
   Image files 10182

  Connected clients

   ID Type                   IP Address    HW Address        Connections
   0  Samsung Series [CDEFJ] 192.168.1.11  7C:0A:3D:88:A6:FA 0
   1  Generic DLNA 1.5       192.168.0.241 00:16:4E:1D:48:05 0
   2  Generic DLNA 1.5       192.168.1.18  00:16:3F:0D:45:05 0
   3  Unknown                127.0.0.1     FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF 0

   -1 connections currently open
 

Note that there is -1 connections (no active connections) currently to the server. 
The 2 Generic DLNA 1.5 IPs are another DLNA servers provided by a OpenXEN hosted Windows 7 Virtual machines, that are also broadcasting their existence in the network. The Samsung Series [CDEFJ] is the DLNA client on the Samsung TV found, used to detect and stream data from the just configured Linux dlna server.

The DLNA Protocol enabled devices on a network as you can see are quite easy to access, querying localhost on the 8200 server dumps, what minidlna knows, the rest of IPs connecting should not be able to receive this info. But anyways since the minidlna does not have a special layers of security to access it, but the only way to restrict is filtering the 8200 port, it is a very good idea to put a good iptables firewall on the machine to allow only the devices that should have access to the data.

Further more if you happen to need to access the Media files on Linux from GUI you might use some client as upmentioned totem, VLC or if you need something more feature rich Java eezUPnP .

eeZUPnP-screenshot-java-client-for-media-server

That's all folks !
Enjoy your media on the TV 🙂

CentOS 8 / Redhat 8 insert additional guests additions to VM to enable Fullscreen, Copy / Paste and Shared Folder from host OS

Monday, January 10th, 2022

virtualbox-guest-additions-install-on-centos-8.3-linux-oracle-logo

My experience with enabling virtualbox additions guest tools on many of the separate Linux distributions throughout time is pretty bad as it always is a pain in the ass to enable fully functional full screen and copy paste for Virtualbox…
 
For those who installed it for a first time vbox guest addition tools for Virtualbox are additional software components added so the Emulated Operating system
could allow better screen resolution and better mouse integration support.

So far I've installed virtualbox additions tools to CentOS 7 and Debian Linux various releases and faced complications there as well.
Few days ago my colleague Georgi Stoyanov have installed CentOS 8.3 with current version of VirtualBox 6.1 (vesrsion from beginning of 2022) and he has also shared had issues with enabling the CentOS 8.3 Linux to work with guestadditions but eventually found a resolution.

Thus he has shared with me the solution and I share it with you, so hopefully someone else could enable Guesttools on his CentOS 8.3 with less digging online.
The error received is:

# ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Trying to install Guest Additions in RHEL 8.3.

VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel
modules. This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: To build modules for other installed kernels, run
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup
VirtualBox Guest Additions: or
VirtualBox Guest Additions: /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the modules for kernel
4.18.0-193.el8.x86_64.

VirtualBox Guest Additions: Look at /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log to find out what
went wrong
ValueError: File context for /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-6.0.20/other/mount.vboxsf already defined
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Running kernel modules will not be replaced until
the system is restarted
Press Return to close this window…

No idea what to do next. Been trying for sometime.


To enable guestaddtions in CentOS 8.3, e.g. get arount the error you have to:


1. Install all necessery dependncies RPMs required by GuestAddition tools

 

# dnf install tar bzip2 kernel-devel-$(uname -r) kernel-headers perl gcc make elfutils-libelf-devel

# dnf -y install gcc automake make kernel-headers dkms bzip2 libxcrypt-compat kernel-devel perl

2.  Run below semanage and restorecon commands

 

# semanage fcontext -d /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-/other/mount.vboxsf
# restorecon /opt/VBoxGuestAdditions-/other/mount.vboxsf

 

3.  Insert Virtualbox guest additions ISO and Run it

 

centos-insert-guest-additions-linux-virtualbox-screenshot
 

Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD Image

 

Click Run button to exec Vbox_GAs_6.0.18 script or run it manually

Run-Guest-Additions-screenshot-virtualbox-centos-8

or mount it manually with mount command and execute the VBoxLinuxAdditions.run to do so:

 

$ cd /run/media/`whoami`/VB*
$ su
# ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
Installing additional modules …
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules.  This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Running kernel modules will not be replaced until the system is restarted
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.

 

4. Reboot the VM
 

# reboot

5. Check and Confirm Virtualbox guest additions are properly installed and running
 

# lsmod | grep vbox

 

6. Enable Copy / Paste from to Virttual Machine e.g. Shared Clipboard / Shared Folder etc.

 

Share-Clipboard-in-Virtualbox-screenshot-centos-8

 

The three options most useful besides the support for FullScreen OS emulation by Virtualbox to enable right after
guesttools is on are:


1. Devices -> Shared Clipboard -> Bidirectional
2. Devices -> Drag and Drop -> Bidirectional
3. Devices -> Shared Folders -> Shared Folder Settings

 

Heroes of Might and Magic 2: Best old-school turn based strategic game to play on your Android mobile phone

Monday, June 16th, 2014

heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-for-your-mobile-smartphone-android-screenshot

Probably many people which are my age (I'm aged 30 now), spent many days and sleepless nights being totally addicted playing probably one of the most addictive (and in my view greatest strategy game of all time) – Heroes of Might and Magic II (HOMM2).
In that thoughts it will be a great news for you if you're owning smartphone that you can turn-back some nice memories and play (for free) a port of Heroes 2 for Android.

Free Heroes 2 Android port is it is made to support multiple screened devices so game  version could be played on both Android Tablet a tiny screen smart phone or a middle sized mobile. Also Free Heroes 2 mobile port allows you to choose 'The Magnifying glass' option on first game boot, so if you're on a tiny screened mobile you can still zoom by pointing on a game object. Free Heroes 2 Android port is there thanks to Gerhard Stein who is also an author of OpenTyrian mobile phone port and the amazing old computer jump-and-run arcade Commander Keen. Game pointer controls of FHeroes2 are pretty convenient and playing the game is almost as confortable as played with a PC mouse.
Free Heroes 2 is port of Free Heroes 2 engineFree implementation of Heroes of the Might and Magic II engine in SDL and because SDL is platform independent Free Heroes is also available for both Windows / Linux. Maybe here is time too mention that Heroes2 original DOS game works perfectly on any modern Linux distribution when started through DOSBOX DOS emulator.

By default Free Heroes2  has no game campaign support yet. In order to enable campaing support into Free Heroes 2, download FULL Heroes 2 gameput data files to mobile SD card to dir app-data/net.sourceforge.fheroes2 and campaign option will be there too.

heroes_of_might_and_magic_ii_play-on-android-best-strategy-old-game-for-android

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 – The succession Wars (or HEROES2, as it is widely known in Gamers communities) is a turn based strategy game  from year 1996 developed by Jon Van Caneghem by his New World Computing company it was marketed under on the market under brand of 3DO Company. Heroes II was voted the sixth-best PC game of all time by PC Gamer in May 1997. Heroes2 has also a game expansion pack called the Price of Loyalty released in 1997 as well as Heroes of Might and Magic II – Gold – from 1998. The game graphic design looks very beautiful and combined with the soundtrack makes playing it an awesome and calming experience. The game is very notable especially for soundtrack which is all of a beautiful classical music.

Heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-best-games-of-all-time-screenshot-HOMM2
(Picture taken and copyrighted by Wikipedia)

Gameplay

The titular heroes (horse) are player characters who can recruit armies, move around the map, capture resources, and engage in combat. The heroes also incorporate some role-playing game elements; they possess a set of statistics that confer bonuses to an army, artifacts that enhance their powers, and knowledge of magical spells that can be used to attack enemies or produce strategic benefits. Also, heroes gain experience levels from battle, such that veteran heroes are significantly more powerful than inexperienced ones.

On a typical map, players begin a game with one town of a chosen alignment. Each town alignment hosts a unique selection of creatures from which the player can build an army. Town alignment also determines other unique traits such as native hero classes, special bonuses or abilities, and leanings toward certain skills or kinds of magic.

heroes-of-might-and-magic-town_castle-sorceress-screenshot

Towns play a central role in the games since they are the primary source of income and new recruits. A typical objective in each game is to capture all enemy towns. Maps may also start with neutral towns, which do not send out heroes but may still be captured by any player. It is therefore possible, and common, to have more towns than players on a map. When captured, a town retains its alignment type, allowing the new owner to create a mixed army. A player or team is eliminated when no towns or heroes are left under their control. Usually the last player or team remaining is the victor.

As heroes visit special locations called obelisks, pieces are removed from a jigsaw puzzle-like map, gradually revealing 'The Ultimate Artifact location to the player. Once found, it confers immense bonuses to the player capable of breaking a stalemate: the grail can be taken back to a town and used to build a special structure, while the ultimate artifact provides the bonuses directly through possession.

heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-battle-for-castle-screenshot

Whenever a player engages in battle

The game changes from the adventure map display to a combat screen, which is based on either a hexagonal or square grid. In this mode, the game mimics the turn-based tactics genre, as the engaged armies must carry through the battle without the opportunity to reinforce or gracefully retreat. With few exceptions, combat must end with the losing army deserting, being destroyed, or paying a heavy price in gold to surrender. Surrendering allows the player to keep the remaining units intact. Battles can be led army army to army or castles / villages can be fight and (captured) occupied. Owning a town gives your hero daily an income of money later used to buy and upgrade castle buildings.

heroes-of-might-and-magic-ii-the-succession-wars-wizard-castle-building-options-screenshot

Also you your moved heroes could overtake mines producing different goods like minerals, sulfur, gold, emeralds etc. Building different buildings and building war units for army usually cost gold and some kind of resource.

Game Story

Heroes II history continues after Heroes I. Ending of Heroes I results in Lord Morglin Ironfist's victory. In the following years, he has successfully unified the continent of Enroth and secured his rule as king. Upon the king's death, his two sons, Archibald and Roland, vie for the crown. Archibald orchestrates a series of events that lead to Roland's exile. Archibald is then declared the new king, while Roland organizes a resistance. Each alignment is represented by one of the game's two campaigns. Archibald's campaign features the three "evil" town alignments, while Roland's campaign features the three "good" town alignments.

If Archibald is victorious, Roland's rebellion is crushed, and Roland himself is imprisoned in Castle Ironfist, leaving Archibald the uncontested ruler of Enroth. The  ending, however, results in Roland's victory, with Archibald being turned to stone by Roland's court wizard, Tanir.

If you're more interested to play modern games and get some more games modern games more entertaining take a look at Kevin Martin's JoyofAndroid Best Adnroid Games post here.

Enjoy

ConEmu and Clink – Add Linux shell shortcuts, tabs and tab completion to Windows command line – Far Manager Windows text file explorer

Thursday, June 12th, 2014

If you're a Linux geek and forced to work on Windows for some reason. You will probably want to add some Linux & Feel to Windows console. Yesterday in a discussion with a colleague who is considered to be our team's Windows Guru, I noticed his Windows 7 command line looks slightly different and asked him, "is it some cmd.exe customization?" and this is how I learned about existence of ConEmu and Clink.
ConEmu is advanced console window where you can run any shell of your choice.

conemu-tabbed-command-prompt-cmd-wrapper-like-gnome-terminal-for-windows

ConEmu (Console Emulator) + Clink combination is very much like MobaXterm (tabbed SSH client and win cmd line) in many sense except it doesn't have an embbed ssh support client. By using Conemu + Clink (Powerful bash style line editing) wrappers to cmd.exe you get the invaluable Linux / UNIX tab completion, command line shortcuts like CTRL + R, CTRL + A, CTRL + P etc. into Windows OS. ConEmu is very useful in Windows environments when you have to heavily use Windows PowerShell

If you're get used to Linux's Midnight Commander (MC)  and you're looking for MC for Windows you will certainly want to check out Far Manager (File and Archive Manager). Far Manager provides simple and intuitive ncurses (mc) like interface on Windows and supports view, edit, copy rename and a lot of other basic operations supported also by mc.

far-manager-mc-like-text-file-browser-for-windows-linux-mc-windows-alternative-software


Clink combines the native Windows shell cmd.exe with the powerful command line editing features of the GNU Readline library, which provides rich completion, history, and line-editing capabilities. Readline is well-known and used in Unix shell Bash, the standard shell for Mac OS X and most of Linux distributions.

In my view coolest Clink command shortcut is reverse-search allowing you to auto-type by letters commands (from command line history), lets say you want to invoke dir – you press CTRL + r and type D and all occurances earlier typed starting with "d", pops up as possible choice.

clink_bring-linux-bash-shell-powerful-command-line-editing-for-windows
Everyone who had to administer Windows servers know how annoying is that by default cmd.exe doesn't support window resize.
Using ConEmu solves that as it supports resize of command prompt Window (horizontal and vertical resize).
ConEmu has a status bar, support (configuration colors) and even transperancy but most importantly for old school dos geeks is that it supports integration with dosbox run old DOS applications (games) in Windows 7.

To use the tools use gui installers, here is latest mirror copy of Conemu (for download), current latest Far Manager release and latest present release of Clink (download link). Once installed it is a must to spend some time configure ConEmu to match your preferences. To configure it press with right mouse button on top of Cemu window and do the needful 🙂

windows-conemu-good-substitute-for-linux-bash-shell-for-microsoft-windows-users-split-screen-how-to-tab-completion-windows
Once everything is installed, you will have to get into the habit to launch ConEmu instead of cmd.exe (as ConEmu doesn't interfere with cmd.exe). To launch far manager from ConEmu command line simply type:

C:> far

To open new tabs in ConEmu the well known Firefox used CTRL + T will not work, but 'open new tab' key shortcut can be customized and also set to CTRL + T.  Default key shortcut for opening new tab in ConEmu is 'Windows Button' + SHIFT + W. While Opening new consoles in ConEmu, there is also the useful option of Splitting console (top and right).

Here is also list with all Clink command shortcuts

C-@     : set-mark
C-a     : beginning-of-line
C-b     : backward-char
C-c     : ctrl-c
C-d     : delete-char
C-e     : end-of-line
C-f     : forward-char
C-g     : abort
C-h     : backward-delete-char
C-i     : clink-completion-shim
C-j     : accept-line
C-k     : kill-line
C-l     : clear-screen
C-m     : accept-line
C-n     : next-history
C-p     : previous-history
C-q     : reload-lua-state
C-r     : reverse-search-history
C-s     : forward-search-history
C-t     : transpose-chars
C-u     : unix-line-discard
C-v     : paste-from-clipboard
C-w     : unix-word-rubout
C-y     : yank
C-z     : undo
C-]     : character-search
C-_     : undo
A-C-c   : copy-line-to-clipboard
A-C-e   : expand-env-vars
A-C-g   : abort
A-C-h   : backward-kill-word
A-C-i   : tab-insert
A-C-j   : vi-editing-mode
A-C-m   : vi-editing-mode
A-C-r   : revert-line
A-C-u   : up-directory
A-C-y   : yank-nth-arg
A-C-[   : complete
A-C-]   : character-search-backward
A-      : set-mark
A-#     : insert-comment
A-&     : tilde-expand
A-*     : insert-completions
A–     : digit-argument
A-.     : yank-last-arg
A-0     : digit-argument
A-1     : digit-argument
A-2     : digit-argument
A-3     : digit-argument
A-4     : digit-argument
A-5     : digit-argument
A-6     : digit-argument
A-7     : digit-argument
A-8     : digit-argument
A-9     : digit-argument
A-<     : beginning-of-history
A-=     : possible-completions
A->     : end-of-history
A-?     : possible-completions
A-     : delete-horizontal-space
A-_     : yank-last-arg
A-b     : backward-word
A-c     : capitalize-word
A-d     : kill-word
A-f     : forward-word
A-h     : show-rl-help
A-l     : downcase-word
A-n     : non-incremental-forward-search-history
A-p     : non-incremental-reverse-search-history
A-r     : revert-line
A-t     : transpose-words
A-u     : upcase-word
A-y     : yank-pop
A-~     : tilde-expand
C-x,C-g : abort
C-x,C-r : re-read-init-file
C-x,C-u : undo
C-x,C-x : exchange-point-and-mark
C-x,(   : start-kbd-macro
C-x,)   : end-kbd-macro
C-x,e   : call-last-kbd-macro


 

 

 

Linux convert and read .mht (Microsoft html) file format. MHT format explained

Thursday, June 5th, 2014

linux-open-and-convert-mht-file-format-to-html-howto
If you're using Linux as a Desktop system sooner or later you will receive an email with instructions or an html page stored in .mht file format.
So what is mht? MHT is an webpage archive format (short for MIME HTML document). MHTML saves the Web page content and incorporates external resources, such as images, applets, Flash animations and so on, into HTML documents. Usually those .mht files were produced with Microsoft Internet Explorer – saving pages through:

File -> Save As (Save WebPage) dialog saves pages in .MHT.

To open those .mht files on Linux, where Firefox is available add the UNMHT FF Extension to browser. Besides allowing you to view MHT on Linux, whether some customer is requiring a copy of an HTML page in MHT, UNMHT allows you to also save complete web pages, including text and graphics, into a MHT file.
There is also support for Google Chrome browser for MHT opening and saving via a plugin called IETAB. But unfortunately IETAB is not supported in Linux.
Anyways IETAB is worthy to mention here as if your'e a Windows users and you want to browse pages compatible only with Internet Explorer, IETAB will emulates exactly IE by using IE rendering engine in Chrome  and supports Active X Controls. IETAB is a great extension for QA (web testers) using Windows for desktop who prefer to not use IE for security reasons. IETab supports IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9.

Another way to convert .MHT content file into HTML is to use Linux KDE's mhttohtml tool.

linux-kde-converter-mhttohtml

Another approach to open .MHT files in Linux is to use Opera browser for Linux which has support for .MHT

Note that because MHT files could be storing potentially malicious content (like embedded Malware) it is always wise when opening MHT on Windows to assure you have scanned the file with Antivirus program. Often mails containing .MHT from unknown recipients are containing viruses or malware. Also links embedded into MHT file could easily expose you to spoof attacks. MHT files are encoded in combination of plain text MIMEs and BASE64 encoding scheme, MHT's mimetype is:

MIME type: message/rfc822
 

FreeBSD 10.0 RELEASE is out pkg_add FreeBSD default package manager to be substituted with pkg

Thursday, January 23rd, 2014

freebsd 10 is out logo pkg add to be removed - freebsd big news pkg_add to be substituted by another package manager

New latest version of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE is out this. FBSD 10  is the latest stable release of 10 branch. The biggest change in FBSD 10 is removal of long time used pkg_add and its substitute with the newer and more advanced pkg. For BSD users who don't know pkg  stiill check out handbook on pkgng

Key highlights of FreeBSD 10 as taken from FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE announcement;
 

  • GCC is no longer installed by default on architectures where clang(1) is the default compiler.

  • Unbound has been imported to the base system as the local caching DNS resolver.

  • BIND has been removed from the base system.

  • make(1) has been replaced with bmake(1), obtained from the NetBSD Project.

  • pkg(7) is now the default package management utility.

  • pkg_add(1), pkg_delete(1), and related tools have been removed.

  • Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve(8), virtio(4), and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V.

  • TRIM support for Solid State Drives has been added to ZFS.

  • Support for the high-performance LZ4 compression algorithm has been added to ZFS.

    There is a big news for Raspberry Pi lovers as from FreeBSD 10 there is an official support for Raspberry Pi
    Happy new release. Cheers to testers 🙂

Unique MenuetOS – Free Software 32 / 64 bit OS entirely written in assembly language

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

 

unique operating-system menuetos written-in-assembler-programming-logo

Something very unique, I stumbled on some time ago and worthy to mention and recommend for everyone to test is MenuetOS. Can you imagine, someone might write an operating system entirely from scratch in 32 / 64 bit Assemler? Idea sounds crazy and impossible but in fact developers of MenuetOS already achieved it!

Unique OS - menuetos asm free os start-menu screenshot

Normally every modern operating system nowadays is based on some kind of UNIX / Linux / or NT (Windows) technology or at least follows some kind of POSIX standartization.
 The design goal of MenuetOS since the first release in year 2000, is to remove the extra layers between different parts of an OS. The more the layers more complicated the programming behind is and therefore this creates bugs more bugs. MenuetOS follows the idea of KISS model (Keep It Simple Stupid). Its amazing what people can write in pure asm programming!! 64 bit version of menuet is also backward compatible with 32 bit. MenuetOS supports mostly all any other modern OS does. Here is list of Supported Features:

 

 

 

 

  • – Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multithreading, multiprocessor, ring-3 protection
  • – Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1920×1080, 16 million colours
  • – Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
  • – SMP multiprocessor support with currently up to 8 cpus
  • – IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
  • – USB 2.0 HiSpeed Classes: Storage, Printer, Webcam Video and TV/Radio support
  • – USB 1.1 Keyboard and Mouse support
  • – TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
  • – Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
  • – Hard real-time data fetch
  • – Fits on a single floppy, boots also from CD and USB drives

MenuetOS has fully functional Graphic interface (environment). Though it is so simple it is much more fast (as written in assembler) and behaves more stable than other OS-es written in C / C++.
Its bundled with a POP3 / Imap mail client soft

menuetos assmebly OS mail client
As of time even some major legendary Games like DoomQuake, Sokoban and Chess are ported to MenuetOS !!!

doom2-id-games-running-on-menuetos-operating-system-in-assembler-from-scratch

MenuetOS Doom

quake legendary game running on Menuetos asm free OS

Quake I port on MenuetOS

Below are some more screenshots of Apps and stuff running

Maniac Mansion running on MenuetOS assembler build free Operating system

The world famous Maniac Mansion (1987)

Prince of Persia running on 32 64 bit assembler written GPL free-OS

Arcade Classic of 16 bit and 8 bit computers Prince of Persia running on top of dosbox on MenuetOS

For those who like to program old school MenuetOS has BASIC compiler, C library (supports C programming), debuggers, Command Prompt.

It even supports Networking and has some  most popular network adapters drivers as well as has basic browsing support through HTTP application.

unique-os-menuetos-browsing-with-httpc-browser

You can listen music with CD Player but no support for mp3 yet.
To give MenuetOS a try just like any other Live Linux distribution it has Bootable LiveCD version – you can download it from here
MenuetOS is a very good for people interested to learn good 32 bit and 64 bit Assembler Programming.
Enjoy this unique ASM true hacker OS 😉

How to remove and disable BlueTooth support on Debian GNU / Linux servers

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

How to remove / disable bluetooth support on Debian GNU / Linux servers
If you running Debian Squeeze Linux (as server Apache, MySQL, Qmail etc.) on brand new purchased hardware with bluetooth support; you will notice default Linux kernel will detect and load modules for Bluetooth

This would not be a problem only if Bluetooth does not pose possible errors or (even at cases even maybe system hangs ups?). The actual reason in my case to want to disable bluetooth on a productive Linux server operating like host was I found out in dmesg produced output, some errors related to Bluetooth, here they are:


root@deb:~# dmesg|grep -i 'call trace' -A 8
[323406.744439] Call Trace:
[323406.744440] [] ? lapic_next_event+0x18/0x1d
[323406.744450] [] ? __report_bad_irq+0x30/0x7d
[323406.744453] [] ? note_interrupt+0x105/0x16e
[323406.744455] [] ? handle_fasteoi_irq+0x93/0xb5
[323406.744458] [] ? handle_irq+0x17/0x1d
[323406.744460] [] ? do_IRQ+0x57/0xb6
[323406.744463] [] ? ret_from_intr+0x0/0x11
[323406.744464]

I saw this error and similar ones occuring, every now and then obviously displaying something wents wrongs with IRQs related to BlueTooth Communication with Kernel (as it keeps processing requests loaded in system memory) …

Well anyways having the bluetooth kernel module loaded on memory just takes up few chunks of useless assigned memory.
I don't have intention to use bluetoothever in future on these host so I decided to completely remove bluetooth support on those Debian.

1. Remove blueetoh support on Debian GNU / Linux

First to check info about the loaded kernel module bluetooth.ko and its assigned module load alias run:


root@deb:~# /sbin/modinfo bluetooth
filename: /lib/modules/2.6.32-5-amd64/kernel/net/bluetooth/bluetooth.ko
alias: net-pf-31
license: GPL
version: 2.15
description: Bluetooth Core ver 2.15
author: Marcel Holtmann
srcversion: 9FD5BF98FC88505DC637909
depends: rfkill
vermagic: 2.6.32-5-amd64 SMP mod_unload modversions

Secondly disable memory preloaded bluetooth.ko on the current host with cmds:


root@deb:~# rmmod -f bnep
root@deb:~# rmmod -f l2cap
root@deb:~# rmmod -f sco
root@deb:~# rmmod -f bluetooth

Default way to control if Bluetooth (on host support is ON or OFF) is through /etc/default/bluetooth. Inside /etc/default/bluetooth is a control variable:


BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=1

To shut it off change its value to 0:


BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=0

Then to permanently prevent bluetooth.ko from being ever in future loaded its also good idea to blacklist modules – bnep, btusb, bluetooth:


root@deb:~# echo 'blacklist bnep' >> /etc/modprobe.d/bluetooth.conf
root@deb:~# echo 'blacklist btusb' >> /etc/modprobe.d/bluetooth.conf
root@deb:~# echo 'blacklist bluetooth' >> /etc/modprobe.d/bluetooth.conf

Onwards re-build, current kernel initramfs:


root@deb:~# update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r` -v
......
......

Next update boot init scripts with update-rc.d to make sure bluetooth (service / daemon) is not started:


root@deb:~# update-rc.d bluetooth remove
......

That's all bluetooth will not load up anymore on next boot and at present time will not take up useless mem space.

2. Re-enable disabled blueetooth on Debian Linux
 
I've been asked in one of comments, what to do If you need to re-enable bluetooth on your Debian Linux at some time in future, so here are the steps to turn back blueetooth on again


/etc/modprobe.d/bluetooth.conf

Change variable:

BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=0

to 

BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=1

Open  /etc/modprobe.d/bluetooth.conf and remove any blacklisted modules, e.g:

'blacklist bnep'
'blacklist btusb'
&39;blacklist bluetooth'

Rebuild again kernel ramfs

root@deb:~# update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r` -v
 
Enjoy 🙂