How to find version of your ubuntu installation

In order to find the version of the ubuntu installation, you can follow any of two easy steps. The first easier way is to go to System->About Ubuntu where the version of your ubuntu installation will be shown. The next way is to view the content of the file that stores the version name of your ubuntu.

To find ubuntu version from terminal, you can type:

cat /etc/issue

/etc/issue file holds the issue/version information of your ubuntu installation.

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We'll always miss you Narendra

On March 30, one of our beloved friends Narendra Bist(2046/12/15 B.S.-2067/12/16 B.S.) had to lose his life just one day after his birthday celebration and we all the classmates are in deep shock and we can't still believe that the accident happened. I still think he's still watching movies in his room as he always does.

Well, please do not take this as april 1 post, it is just the co-incidence

Narendra Bist was one of our close friends and my neighbor in the hostel and we always used to have little chit chats everyday and its been so hard for me to believe that he has passed away. He was too young to die and I can't understand why the f**king god takes good people away from us. Now I feel that there must be one chance for anyone who dies so that he/she can return again.

He was pulled by the water stream while swimming and he could not swim out from the evil water stream in Indrawati river at Dolalghat. But, the ultimate reason for his death is Kathmandu University administration as KU admin was acting so lame. We continuously had 1 month long strike in the university and KU admin didn't show any responsibility in opening the university. The students had to find some way of time-pass and our friend lost his life because of this.

There's nothing we can do now. We just keep on thinking "if we could do". Only thing we can do is take lesson from this accident.

Few photos of our beloved Narendra Bist(You will see he is too young and innocent to die this young):

My all time favorite "Too much love will kill you" by Queen:



We'll always miss you Narendra. With love.
C.E. 09

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Torbutton for Firefox 4

Torbutton is a 1-click way for Firefox users to enable or disable the browser's use of Tor. It adds a panel to the statusbar that says "Tor Enabled" (in green) or "Tor Disabled" (in red). The user may click on the panel to toggle the status. If the user (or some other extension) changes the proxy settings, the change is automatically reflected in the statusbar.

I lately upgraded my firefox 3.6 to firefox 4 and so far it looks pretty good and I am having fun with the new firefox. But many of the old add-ons were not working and I had to upgrade them as well. Among them, torbutton was also not working so I checked the mozilla addons site but apparently didn't find any update to it. I could each time edit the network preferences to set the proxy but I am too lazy to do that always so checked the torproject site and found new release of torbutton.
Torproject has released alpha version of new torbutton that will work for firefox for now. Though its still in testing phase and might need to be worked on, we can still use it and seems to work well except I can't see the menus properly when I right-click on the torbutton icon.

To download and install torbutton in FF4, Click Here. Btw, the new add-on manager makes the installation process pretty simple and sleek.

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emesene : A lightweight MSN Messenger client

emesene is a nice and simple MSN Messenger client. It tries to be similar to the official client, but with a simpler interface and a nicer look.

emesene has got very simple and cool graphics and is fully coded in python using pyGTK, GTK+. Hence, its a cross platform messenger with binaries available for different platforms and the source code available under GNU GPL license.

Following part is taken from wikipedia entry on emesene.

The current version of emesene is compatible with the Windows Live Messenger protocol MSNP15.

Official Windows Live Messenger features supported by the client are:

Offline messaging
Personal messages
'Now Playing' personal messages
Nudges
Contact list retrieval from server
Nickname retrieval from server
Tabbed chat windows
File transfer
Webcam support (1.6.3 working)

Other features specific to emesene are:

Plugins (now playing, AES Encryption, Gmail checker, POP3 mail checker, spell checker, Youtube videos, last.fm song reporting, MSN Premium and others)
Auto-reply
Minimize to notification area (System Tray)
Window and icon themes
Emoticon themes
Multilingual support

To install emesene in ubuntu, open the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install emesene

To download and install emesene under under OS, you can go to the Download page of emesene.

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Passing variable/arbitrary number of arguments in PHP

Sometimes, we might need to pass arbitrary number of arguments in PHP and probably we might have been using the option arguments feature of PHP for this purpose but we have got yet another function that can be utilized for passing arbitrary number of arguments to your functions.

func_get_args() is a very useful function available to achieve the passing of arbitrary number of arguments. The function returns the array of the arguments passed to the function. The following sample code will clarify.

<?php
function func()
{
 $args = func_get_args(); //array of the arguments passed to the function
 //now we could do anything with them..
 
 foreach ($args as $key => $val)
 {
  echo "Argument $key : $val
";
 }
 
 }
 func();
 func("I love my Nepal");
 func("I love my Nepal", "I love my culture");

?>

Hope it helps some of you out there.


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xRDP installation how to

Based on the work of rdesktop, xrdp uses the remote desktop protocol to present a GUI to the user.

The goal of this project is to provide a fully functional Linux terminal server, capable of accepting connections from rdesktop and Microsoft's own terminal server / remote desktop clients.

We can download and install the xRDP directly from the ubuntu software center under ubuntu and the source can be downloaded for other distros. After the installation, we can execute the command from the terminal as below to verify if its working correctly or not.

rdesktop 127.0.0.1

In the sunde terminals and probably in other such hardware products, we don't have to remember this command. Sunde gives us the option to choose Linux from the configuration display and that would be enough for running xRDP. And it seems to work pretty fast.

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Copying a file to all subdirectories in Linux

You might sometimes need to copy a single file to all the subdirectories and this can be easily achieved with linux terminal by simply using some commands.

Below is how I copied password.txt file to all the subdirectories inside the Moviez directory from terminal.

find /samar/Moviez -type d -exec cp -i /samar/Readme/password.txt {} \;

Isn't it simple? And it will surely come handy sometimes. Have fun. :)

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Backtrack 5 Release date announced

Backtrack Linux is the most widely used security pentesting distro and its now near to v. 5. The backtrack team has announced the release date of the BT5.

More INFO HERE

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