More fortunes for Mint

If you like to see some funny quotes when opening a new shell terminal, you can enable the fortune-mint script that will be launched automatically.
By default, this script only shows non-offensive quotes and only three different types of animals: the moose, the tux and the koala.
But the cowsay package provides a whole bunch of pictures that can be used.

Cow files in /usr/share/cowsay/cows:
apt beavis.zen bong bud-frogs bunny calvin cheese cock cower daemon default
dragon dragon-and-cow duck elephant elephant-in-snake eyes flaming-sheep
ghostbusters gnu head-in hellokitty kiss kitty koala kosh luke-koala
mech-and-cow meow milk moofasa moose mutilated pony pony-smaller ren sheep
skeleton snowman sodomized-sheep stegosaurus stimpy suse three-eyes turkey
turtle tux unipony unipony-smaller vader vader-koala www

The following patch will enable all these that you have installed in your system, as well as all different eye and tongue styles. If you don't like offensive quotes, you'll have to take off the -a parameter from the fortune command in the last line of the patch below.

Install instructions

Paste the following into a textfile, for example mint-fortune.patch

4c4
<     RANGE=3
---
>     declare -a cows=( $(cowsay -l | grep -v "Cow files in") )
6,17c6,7
<     let "number %= $RANGE"
<     case $number in
<         0)
<             cow="moose"
<             ;;
<         1)
<             cow="tux"
<             ;;
<         2)
<             cow="koala"
<             ;; 
<     esac
---
>     let "number %= ${#cows[*]}"
>     cow=${cows[$number]}
19c9
<     RANGE=2
---
>     declare -a says=( say think )
21,30c11,19
<     let "number %= $RANGE"
<     case $number in
<         0)
<             command="/usr/games/cowsay"
<             ;;
<         1)
<             command="/usr/games/cowthink"
<             ;;
<     esac
<     /usr/games/fortune | $command -f $cow
---
>     let "number %= ${#says[*]}"
>     command="/usr/games/cow${says[$number]}"
> 
>     declare -a states=( "" -b -d -g -p -s -t -w -y )
>     number=$RANDOM
>     let "number %= ${#states[*]}"
>     state=${states[$number]}
> 
>     /usr/games/fortune -a | $command $state -f $cow

Then apply this patch to the original script (a backup will be created) and enable the fortune-teller:

sudo patch -b /usr/bin/mint-fortune mint-fortune.patch
gconftool-2 --set /desktop/linuxmint/terminal/show_fortunes true --type bool

Provide your own cows

You can create your own cow files, just have a look at the manual of the cowsay command. Or just copy the ones I prepared from here into any folder you want.
You could just copy them into the system folder /usr/share/cowsay/cows, but if you want to keep them separated, you can instruct cowsay to look for you ones too (for example in your folder ~/Documents/cows:

mycows=~/Documents/cows ; sudo sed -i.orig 's|/usr/bin/mint-fortune|export COWPATH=/usr/share/cowsay/cows:'$mycows'\n\0|' /etc/bash.bashrc

Example of a Star Wars scene as cow

 _____________
< Hello world >
 -------------
          \
           \                .==.
            \              ()oo()-.
             \  .---.       ;--; /
              .'_:___". _..'.  __'.
              |__ --==|'-''' \'...;
              [  ]  :[|       |---\
              |__| I=[|     .'    '.
              / / ____|     :       '._
             |-/.____.'      | :       :
            /___\ /___\      '-'._----' 

SSH key handling

If you have to work with servers, especially with Linux ones, sooner or later you'll have a confrontation with SSH.

I'll give here some tips and tricks I used so far.

Force user and port for certain servers

When you try to login into a server, by default ssh uses your username and port 22 by default.
But maybe you need to use always another user name or another port.
You could specify this always as parameters for ssh:

ssh -p 22022 [notme@]server-ip

But it is much easier to configure your ssh client to these by default.
Therefore, you just add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file:

host server-ip another-server-name
Port 22022
User notme

host *
User root

You can put here as many hosts with different parameters as you want, '*' is also supported for creating regular expressions.

Change order of authentication methods

There's a another very useful parameter that you might want to add to your server configurations:

host *
User root
PreferredAuthentications publickey,password

This would only allow to use keys or passwords and prevents to use other methods which might not work in your setup and slow down connection attempts.
Put this whenever you notice that it take several seconds to log into a server.

Copy your own key to server

This used to be the first step I do, whenever I access a certain server several times.
So I don't have to give the password each time I access the server.

# Copy my machines public key to the server (will prompt for password):
ssh-copy-id [user@]server-ip

# Unfortunately, ssh-copy-id only works with SSH port 22, so if you have to specify another
# one, you might use this instruction:
ssh-add -L | ssh -p22022 [user@]server-ip "umask 077; test -d ~/.ssh || mkdir ~/.ssh ; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

# Verify the granted access (now without password prompt):
ssh [user@]server-ip
# or when copying
scp afile.txt server-ip:test/ 

Fix non-working ssh public keys

Sometimes, the sshd server doesn't accept a previous copied ssh-key (ssh-copy-id). In that case, make sure you have the following configuration in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys

# If it still doesn't work apply the correct permissions to folders and files:
# chmod go-w ~
# chmod 700 ~/.ssh
# chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

# If it still doesn't work, then disable the permissions checking:
StrictModes no

Restart the ssh daemon again after applying this new configuration.

Debugging and sorting out further problems

The permissions of files and folders is crucial. You can get debugging information from both the client and server. if you think you have set it up correctly, yet still get asked for the password, try starting the server with debugging output to the terminal. /usr/sbin/sshd -d
To connect and send information to the client terminal ssh -v ( or -vv) username@host's

Remove authorized keys

If you have hundreds of keys in your machines ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and you're to lasy to edit that by hand, these one-line shell commands maybe handy.
Just use sed to rip out anything which doesn’t match the regex pattern (for example machine names, part of the hash, whatever:

# rip out anything which doesn’t match the regex pattern
sed ‘/your host name/ ! D’ -i.old ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

# or something more complicated
sed ‘/\(host1\|host2\)/ ! D’ -i.old ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

# with many patterns it is easier with this command
cp ~/.ssh/authorized_keys{,.old} && for p in pat1 pat2 pat2 ; do sed '/$pat1/ ! D' ~/.ssh/authorized_keys ; done

Just the ones specified will be maintained, a backup file will be created.
If you want to do the opposite, remove some specific keys and let the rest untouched:

sed ‘/\(host1\|host2\)/ D’ -i.old ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Music Player Clementine

A few days ago, I discovered another music player which I'm using now daily: Clementine.

Features I like:

• It's quick and stable.
• Mood graphics of songs.
• Dynamic random playlists.
• Discover song information, covers and lyrics from variety of sites.
• Cover manager to retrieve from even more sources.
• Extensive artist information gathered from various sources.
• Tons of visualization algorithms, random changes.
• It integrates well with Cinnamons sound gadget.

Unfortunalty, the handling of external devices isn't perfect yet.
At least, I was not able to add songs from my external harddisks to the random playlist, I had to create a new playlist for that purpose.

Install instructions

Use Y-PPA-Manager and search for clementine package to obtain list of repositories or use the following shell commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clementine

# You need to install the developer version for version 1.1, which features mood bars)
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine-dev

Change LibreOffice progress bar color

Newest LibreOffice splash screen shows a orange-redish colour bar instead of a green one like it was some versions ago. I guess they changed it to integrate better with Unity default colours. But I'm using Linux Mint, so I liked the green one more. The other day, I just stumbled about the /etc/libreoffice/sofficerc configuration file, which defines some variables for the startup and there it is, the ProgressBarColor parameter.

Install instructions

The following instructions change the color from the shell command line, but you could also just edit the file with your favourite text editor (with root permissions).

# Put the color value into a variable
pbcolor=160,195,124

sudo sed -r -i.bak "s/(ProgressBarColor=)[0-9]{1,3},[0-9]{1,3},[0-9]{1,3}/\1${pbcolor}/" /etc/libreoffice/sofficerc

# Check that everything went fine (otherwise you can restore the backup file).
cat /etc/libreoffice/sofficerc

You can find the right colors for example with the Gimp image editor.