How to Use Google Apps Account for GTalk in Pidgin

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I believe many users are using pidgin and google apps. Google apps support Google Talk. Can we use it in Pidgin? The answer is yes. How to use Google apps account for Google Talk in Pidgin will be introduced in this post. Let’s use one email address as the example: eric @ example.com First add
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How to Set Up eCryptFS on Linux – The Manual Way

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How to set up eCryptFS in Linux will be introduced in this post. We can store encrypted files in one eCryptFS directory, the manual way. The content can be seen only after it is mounted as eCryptFS file system. Otherwise, the users can only see garbled characters in the files. Note that this tutorial will
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Setting Up a NFS Server on Top of tmpfs /dev/shm

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tmpfs has blazing speed. Why not set up a high speed NFS server on top of tmpfs? A little trick is required for setting NFS server on top of /dev/shm. If we add a normal entry in /etc/export and them run # exportfs -a exportfs will give us a warning like this: exportfs: Warning: /dev/shm
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Speeding Up Firefox in Linux

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Firefox can be much faster on Linux! Let’s speed up Firefox on Linux system. Part 1 and 2 only config firefox, so it can also be used on other platform such as Windows. 1. Pipe-lining network connection Most of us use a broad band width network, then why not pip line the connection from Firefox?
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How to Backup Linux Home Directories Using rsync

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I need to backup my Linux home directory to one of my portable hard disk. I tried to use git, but failed since git doesn’t support large file (I failed after many tries, I have file larger than 5G). I find rsync, the fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool and I am happy with
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Setting Up Xen Dom0 on Fedora : Xen 3.4.1 with Linux Kernel 2.6.29 on Fedora 12

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Please refer to for the latest stable Xen Dom0 solution. In this post, the detailed tutorial for setting up Xen 3.4.1 dom0 on top of Fedora 12 with kernel 2.6.29 will be introduced. Hardware: Dom0 hardware platform: Motherboard: INTEL S5500BC S5500 Quad Core Xeon Server Board CPU: 2 x Intel Quad Core Xeon E5520 2.26G
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Gnome2 Style: Shiki Colors+Gnome Colors

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The Linux Gnome style that I like is Shiki-color + Gnome colors icon theme. It looks pretty and professional and it is fast. How to install them: Gtk engine: # yum install gtk-murrine-engine Icon theme: # yum install gnome-colors-icon-theme Theme: Dowload from here: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Shiki-Colors?content=86717 Install it by Appearance Preference -> Install. Configuration: Appearance Preference ->
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Mounting Remote Folder Through SSH

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SSH is a very convenient tool on Linux that can be used to [[port-forwarding-using-ssh-tunnel]], [[proxy-using-ssh-tunnel]] and others besides its basic functions (remote shell). We can also use SSH to mount a remote folder to a local directory. We can use `sshfs` to mount remote folder through SSH tunnel securely over network. Install sshfs Install `sshfs`
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How to Set Up Password-less SSH Login on Linux

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Automatic passwrod-less ssh login can make our life easier. To enable this, we have 2 options: using key-based authentication by copying our SSH public keys to the remote machines for automatic password-less login or using password-based authentication. I will introduce the 2 options in the post. Before you start, please note that key-based authentication is
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How to Capture Desktop Video on Linux using ffmpeg

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ffmpeg is a powerful tool and it can do the work of capturing Linux desktop video very well. ffmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter that can also grab from a live audio/video source. ffmpeg can grab X11 input and create a video file such as mp4 at specific fps with the specific
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How to Install MPlayer and MEncoder on Fedora

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Fedora does not include MPlayer or MEncoder for some reasons in its official repositories. But RPMfusion does it for us. Let’s install mplayer and mencoder and learn some tricks to play rmvb files. 1. Add RPMfusion repository: Enable RPM Fusion repositories 2. Install MPlayer and MEncoder # dnf install mplayer mencoder 3. Get codecs Most
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Installing akmod NVIDIA Driver on Fedora

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Installing akmod NVIDIA driver from rpmfusion on Fedora 12. First make sure your nvidia card is in “Supported NVIDIA GPU Products List”: Click here for the list 1. Add rpmfusion repository: Enable RPM Fusion repositories 2. Install akmod nvidia driver akmod builds the required kmod on bootup # yum install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686 3. Add nouveau
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Sending Email Using mailx/s-nail in Linux Through Gmail SMTP

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The heirloom mailx (or s-nail if you are using Ubuntu 18 or later or similar releases) command in Linux is still providing service for guys like me, especially when we need to send email automatically by script. Gmail is great. Now, how to use gmail’s smtp in mailx/mail? gmail is a little special since gmail’s
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Setting Up Linux Network Gateway Using iptables and route

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Sharing the networking is important and setting up a gateway is a good solution to it. Building up the gateway on a Linux box is easy, cost efficient and reliable. With a Linux box, you can share the internet connection or the only cable connected to the network. The Linux box network configuration The Linux
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Guake: An Excellent Quake Like Drop-down Terminal for Gnome

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Guake is very fast and stable enough for use. It’s an excellent quqke like drop-down terminal for gnome. I used yakuake on KDE. It’s professional but a bit slow. I used tilda also on gnome. But unfortunately, there are too many bugs. Then after I find Guake, I am happy. Guake is invoked with a
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How to Control or Disable SELinux in Fedora and CentOS Linux

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For most of cases, you should not disable SELinux. However, for some users, SELinux may cause problems or is not needed. We may just make it not block operations or totally disable it. Making SELinux log warnings instead of blocking For many cases, people find SELinux blocks operations. For tests or some other situations, you
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How to Set Up Socks Proxy Using SSH Tunnel

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We can set up a socks proxy on top of a SSH tunnel. Besides the common proxy functions, such as web browsing, the proxy on top of SSH tunnel also ensures the security between the browser and the proxy server (the SSH server). In this post, we introduce and explain how to set up a
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Automatically Backing Up Xen File-backed DomU

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A script for backing up file-backed Xen DomU is introduced in this post. This script can be changed to similar platform. In our cluster, virtual machines are stored under /lhome/xen/. Virtual machine with id vmid is stored in directory vmvmid. The raw image disk file name can also be derived from vmid. Some more details
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Unified Xen DomU configuration file

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Previously, we create a configuration file for each DomU virtual machines in our cluster. Most of the content in these configuration files is the same. The differences are only the name, memory size and image file address. There are several disadvantages of this method: We must create and configure a new configuration file when creating
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