OpenSource, Text-To-Speech/SingingSynthesizer

Hatsune Miku is one of the best singing synthesizer. It is getting popular in the United States as well. (you type, Miku sings)

For opensource solution, Linux has several text-to-speech packages that work out-of-the box too. Do not overlook accessibility software, they can be amazing.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/doc/LanguagesAndSpeechSynthesis

Say Hello World in your Linux terminal:
# espeak -v en "Hello World"

OpenSource, Git Push Email Notification

git support email notification with diff on each push. Here is how to do it.

1.  go to your git hooks directory, $git/hooks.
2.  rename post-receive.sample to post-receive
3.  uncomment the last line, so the script will run this after someone git push.
     . /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/hooks/post-receive-email
4.  go to your git directory, $git
5.  add to your "config" file:
     [hooks]
     mailinglist = "mail1@gmail.com mail2@gmail.com"
     showrev = "git show -C %s; echo"
     emailprefix = "[your email subject prefix]"
6. open "description" file, add the project name if you like
7. try git push something from somewhere else, and you will get the git notification email.

OpenSource: How to build and install calendar/ligntning to thunderbird from source

1. prepare your .mozconfig, build it
(python client.py checkout && make -f client.mk)
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-tb-debug
ac_add_options --enable-application=mail
ac_add_options --enable-calendar
#ac_add_options --enable-debug

2. launch your thunderbird -> tools -> add-ons
3. find the  lightning.xpi you just built
e.g ./objdir-tb-debug/mozilla/dist/xpi-stage/lightning.xpi

4. drag lightning.xpi to the add-ons panel.

5. done!

OpenSource: RKHUNTER

If you have a good root password, your Unix/Linux core system should be pretty secure. For additional security audit, try rkhunter which scan rootkit, hidden folders, network backdoor, and several configuration file like sshd.



rkhunter --check

Migrate from Evolution to Thunderbird

Very easy:

1. locate your evolution mail folder.
   e.g. ~/.evolution/mail/local/
   
2. locate your thunderbird mail folder.
   e.g. ~/.thunderbird/sdfesfbox.default/Mail/pop.gmail.com/
3. copy Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Drafts files in your evolution mail foder,
   to your thunderbird mail foder.
   (It will overwrite the the files in your thunderbird mail folder, click
   "yes" if you want them to be replaced)
4. Very easy right? Just copy every files from your evolution mail folder, WITHOUT any extension.(Berkely mailbox file type, if you re curious) That means if you have created a sub-folder in evolution, find the sub-folder, and copy the file to the thunderbird mail folder.  
5. Restart thunderbird, the new Inbox, Outbox, Send, Drafts, (and any other mail files you copy over), will show up. You can arrange them, create folder, and organize them if you like.

Open Source Software, git

What to do first when you have your awesome git installed?

Get your name and email ready:

$ git config --global user.name "myname"
$ git config --global user.email myname@example.com

Ignore files that you do not want git to track globally:
edit your ~/.gitignore
*.pyc
*~
/a/folder/

$ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore 

Ignore files that you do not want git to track locally to your repository:

just add/edit a .gitignore to that repository  

Build The Latest FIrefox

Firefox is great, but the new version is always delayed :)
Why not building Firefox yourself? You can use the latest
Firefox, contribute your patch, and enjoy the rich
configuration options FF has provided to you!

1. FF depends on various library, here are some you might need.
sudo apt-get install autoconf2.13
sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libnotify-dev
sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev
sudo apt-get install libidl-dev
sudo apt-get install libiw-dev

sudo apt-get install yasm
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

2. Get the FF source:
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ src

3. add .mozconfig in your src directory: (this a a debug version of FF)
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ff-dbg
mk_add_options AUTOCONF=autoconf2.13
ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-debug 
ac_add_options --enable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-application=browserac_add_options --disable-webm

4. Build Firefox!
make -f client.mk build
(have some coffee)
search your dependencies http://packages.ubuntu.com/
Do you miss source-base Linux now? :)
5. Run your fresh Firefox!
objdir/dist/bin
./firefox
(in the .mozconfig above, objdir is ff-dbg)

Linux, Get Your Linux to Send Email with your Google account in 1 minute

For many users who already have Gmail accounts (or other email accounts), why not just use Gmail to deliver email for you if you simply want to send email from your machine? ssmtp is a very nice MTA to do this, securely.

sudo apt-get install ssmtp heirloom-mailx

edit your /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

root=youremail@gmail.com
mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587
UseSTARTTLS=yes
UseTLS=yes
AuthUser=youremail@gmail.com
AuthPass=yourgmailpassword

Now run a simple test, send a email from your machine
echo "SSMTP" | mailx -s 'Hi' youremail@gmail.com

You are done!
Also, get the right permission to secure your password.
http://wiki.freebsd.org/SecureSSMTP
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=500454

Now you can even use your editor such as emacs to send email.

• C-x m (compose a email)
• fill the email header and body
• C-c C-s (send email)

done!

why not Sendmail or Postfix?
They are overkill. and good luck maintaining your own SMTP server :)
If you want your lovely Linux box to send email, you need to configure it as a mail server. That means you want to install/configure a SMTP server on your machine. Sendmail and Postfix are the powerful Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to install for this purpose. The are ridiculously powerful to send and receive mail, with the cost that you might spend hours on configuration.

OpenSource, jfbterm to Display Unicode on Console

When people are in the graphical environment (X11), such as Gnome or Kde, to display Unicode characters is not a problem. It is a different story when we are under the console. Here is a good news, a program "jfbterm" can turn your English only console to display Chinese, Japanese, or Korean! Under FreeBSD, it's in port sysutils/jfbterm.

After installing jfbterm, just type jfbterm and you are all set.

What's so good about it? You don't need to use X for your slow slow pc just to see Unicode characters.
(for emacs-w3m lover, you can browse the web to view UTF-8 characters ;D )


reference:http://opal.com/jr/freebsd/unicode/

OpenSource, OpenOfficeOrg

A feature rich office application. A nice note is that if you build OpenOffice yourself, it might takes several hours or a day. It is a good idea to track with the build progress. Pay attention to the configuration log early, you can locate a file unxfbsdx.pro.build.html that will display the current build progress.

OpenSource, SDCV Command Line Dictionary

SDCV is a command line dictionary for StarDict. SDCV supports many dictionaries that you can download on the Internet. Why command line? It is very fast and small.

OpenSource, Darkstat

Do you like to monitor your bandwidth and see a summary of which hosts you visit? Darkstat can output the stat inside your browser.

Darkstat -i your_network_interface_card_name

now you can go to http://localhost:666 or http://localhost:667 to check the summary.

Apache, permission denied to open password file

You set the path of your password file correctly, and permission correctly, but when you still cannot access your password file. The Apache log throws you the error:

Permission denied: Could not open password file:

If you have SELinux running, this could very well mean that SELinux denied the permission for your Apache to read the password file. You must run the following to tell SELinux that your added files can be trusted:

chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/PasswordDir

And then your Apache can read everything under /var/www/PasswordDir.


Note that chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/www/PasswordDir
httpd_sys_content_t is one of the file types that SELinux recognizes, you can change the file type accordingly when SELinux audits your new files.

OpenSource, Set Up Apache in Fedora 12

Fedora 12 comes with firewall to protect your PC, and therefore setting up Apache will not "just work." Some points to notice are:

• apache in fedora is called httpd, yum install httpd
• /etc/init.d/httpd start
• system-config-firewall, run it as root to open port 80
  
• /var/log/httpd/, inside there you can check the Apache log
• /var/www/html/, is the document root, i.e. http://yourip(or localhost)/
• /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, is where you can modify your Apache config
  

Open Source, VirtualBox

VirtualBox has fast virtualization support (usually faster than QEMU)

You need to load the vboxdrv kernel module and a mounted /proc filesystem.

% mount -t procfs proc /proc
% kldload vboxdrv

For bridged networking you also need to load the vboxnetflt kernel module.

% kldload vboxnetflt

You also have to add all users to your vboxusers group in order to use vbox.

% pw groupmod vboxusers -m jerry

Running VirtualBox as non-root user may fail with a fatal error
NS_ERROR_FACTORY_NOT_REGISTERED. In this case delete /tmp/.vbox-*-ipc file.

Check wiki page for known issues and troubleshooting:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox

Please report any problems to emulation@. Thanks!

Open Source, NCDU

ncdu under ports of FreeBSD is a very useful file system scanner to tell you big chunk of data.

Open Source, DTrace

Great Profiling Tools.
In FreeBSD 8, it requires re-compiling the kernel.

Video
Easy Guide
Handbook
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dtrace.html#DTRACE-SYNOPSIS

Open Source, KuickShow

Very quick and light-weight image viewer.


cd /usr/ports/graphics/kuickshow-kde4/ && make install clean

Open Source, Krusader File Manager

cd /usr/ports/x11-fm/krusader2/ && make install clean

Krusader 2 uses Qt4 as back-end library. Twin panel and extremely customizable.


VLC, Lua, And Youtube RSS Feed

If you do not have Flashplayer, and you would like to watch youtube video,
you can use VLC and combine Lua to play the videos directly.

For example, in FreeBSD, compile VLC with Lua support. (You can find the script which extracts the direct video link in /usr/local/share/vlc/lua/playlist/youtube.lua)

Just open the youtube url under VLC, the script will do all the work for you.

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?orderby=updated&vq=your_stuff
You can use the above link to retrieve the latest rss feed of your_stuff

Reference:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html
http://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Play_HowTo/Building_Lua_Playlist_Scripts
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/01/youtube-feeds.html