Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Entry submitted by Vincent Fourmond. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute!

I’ve recently grown paranoid about my data, and I keep using rsync to keep backup of various files a bit everywhere. It works great for most of the things I use, but it lacks fundamental things you would want from a real backup system, such as the possibility to come back to an earlier state.

So I went looking for something else, and I found that duplicity shows somehow the same syntax and ease of use than rsync: there is no need to write a configuration file, and it uses a very similar way to specify sources and targets. It features among others:

• incremental backup
• uses librsync to backup only what is necessary
• distant scp-like access
• no need to install duplicity on remote machine, just a scp server should do
• GPG encryption and signature to protect data saved on a not-so-trusted host

To use it, just run something like:

duplicity data scp://vincent@server/saves

Or, for local file backup:

duplicity data file:///var/backup/data

The target directory must exist: duplicity does not create it for you. If you don’t plan to use GPG encryption, be sure to add –no-encryption to the command-line. Here is duplicity in full action:

11:58 vincent@server ~ duplicity --no-encryption Data file:///home/vincent/saves
No signatures found, switching to full backup.
--------------[ Backup Statistics ]————–
StartTime 1187949557.65 (Fri Aug 24 11:59:17 2007)
EndTime 1187949577.54 (Fri Aug 24 11:59:37 2007)
ElapsedTime 19.88 (19.88 seconds)
SourceFiles 3869
SourceFileSize 107865956 (103 MB)
NewFiles 3869
NewFileSize 107865956 (103 MB)
DeletedFiles 0
ChangedFiles 0
ChangedFileSize 0 (0 bytes)
ChangedDeltaSize 0 (0 bytes)
DeltaEntries 3869
RawDeltaSize 106836592 (102 MB)
TotalDestinationSizeChange 26514785 (25.3 MB)
Errors 0
————————————————-

duplicity was already part of Debian Sarge and Ubuntu Dapper. Development seems still alive, even though there are some bugs still at large.

Entry submitted by Ingo Wagener . DPOTD needs your help, please contribute!

Everybody must know the feeling – you installed this great program the other day and now you want to run it. You remember the name, but where in the world it is in the menu? Under System? Under Utilities or even Settings to name but a few options? And so the annoying search starts.

Granted, there are ways of getting round this such as the familiar ALT+F2 and then typing the entire name of the program. Some of us would go to (or already are on) the command line – again followed by typing the program name, perhaps aided by hitting a tab or two.

Those who are well organised – and at times I count myself amongst them – incorporate it into the quick starter on the taskbar so as to get accustomed to its icon and see how usage progresses.

But what do you do when you are not at your peak in terms of organisation (i.e. most of the time) or worse, you don’t even remember the full name of the program?

Help is at hand in the form of Katapult. This is a nifty little helper which, once installed, is called into action by hitting ALT+space and greets you with this:

Say I want to take a screenshot. Running KDE I want to call up the program ksnapshot. What is the quickest way of getting to it? 5 keystrokes as far as I am concerned – this is without having a special keyboard shortcut set up, which obviously could reduce this number. How? Here goes, ALT+space and you get the above, then I type a K, as the program I am after starts with a K followed by an S and finally the N and I get the following:

All I have to do is hit enter and my desired programme comes up. So how exactly does it work? Why do I have to type KSN to get the shortcut for Ksnapshot? Here is a breakdown of what happens in between after I have typed both the K and the KS:

You can see the typed letters highlighted in blue and cycles through all the possibilities until it hits on the one you want – and you press enter.

But Katapult will not only work on programs but also functions as a calculator, it even indexes files! Thus, if I wanted to quickly find out what the result of 56324/18*17 is I’d type ALT+space followed by the what I want to calculate. Katapult will answer to this query as follows:

Alternatively, if I wanted to listen to a specific song like “The battle of Epping Forest” I’d type any part of the song’s name, in this case “epping” and Katapult greets me with the following result:

But that is not all, it also indexes your bookmarks. To give you an idea of its manifold capabilities here is a screenshot of its configuration window:

All I can say is that is has increased my productivity, and prolonged the life of my mouse’s batteries in equal measure.

Entry submitted by Casey Stamper. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute!

Conky is one of my favorite applications for all of my Linux distros. It is a light-weight system monitor (according to the project page) that can monitor many different aspects of your computer. You choose what to monitor and you choose where the monitor is displayed on your desktop through use of a configuration file - .conkyrc. I like to have my display on the top right of the screen and I have the background transparent so it looks like it floats on the desktop.

Here is a screenshot: (click on the image for full size)

I especially like the CPU temperature monitor because I like to keep track of how hot the CPU gets when I’m doing CPU-intensive operation. The application is very light on resources (especially important for my Inspiron 5160) but allows you to keep track of a lot of system parameters without the bloat of a GUI front end.

Among other things, I monitor disk space, memory usage, system load, network download and upload speed, internet connections by protocol, RAM usage, swap usage and running processes. Although it takes up a bit more memory to do so, I also monitor the /var/log/messages file (the same as having a window open running tail -f /var/log/messages just to see if anything is happening behind the scenes that I should be aware of.

With this utility running all the time, if something should suddenly crash or if I have any slowdowns or anything else unusual, a quick glance at these various readouts will usually allow me to narrow the problem down to something specific.

If you use GKrellM or another built-in monitoring package, try this one out - I think you will like it.

Links

• Conky’s website
• Table of variables
• This is my .conkyrc
• The man page.
• Many screenshots and examples of how to use this great little app

Entry submitted by Alexey Beshenov. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute!

Burgertime (originally entitled バーガータイム, Hamburger) is a popular 1982 Japanese arcade game created by Data East Corporation. The game even has an interesting entry in Wikipedia. Among other ports and remakes, there are a free X11 clone called “BurgerSpace” written in C++ by Pierre Sarrazin.

The behavior of the original arcade was not replicated exactly in BurgerSpace, but clone has the same scenario. You play the part of a chef Peter Pepper who must create burgers by stepping repeatedly on the ingredients until they fall down onto trays. It’s not so easy since you also must avoid food characters who chase you around the maze.

Evil food enemies (namely Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle and Mr. Egg) could be temporarily killed by crushing them under falling burger slices or dropped with them. The dropped enemies are stunned for a few seconds. You can also shake pepper on nearby monsters to make them harmless for a few seconds.

The game could be started via the command burgerspace or from the entry in the GNOME Games menu.

Use the following keys:

↑ ↓ ← →

Move.

Ctrl

Throw pepper.

P

Pause / resume game.

Esc

Quit the game.

(Unfortunately, there are no complete keystroke configuration.)

You can rich extra scores / peppers by collecting appearing things. Level will be completed if you create all burgers and the next level will be based on more complex maze layout, increased number of burger pieces and elevated speed. Game records available from the official webpage and you can report your outstanding scores to maintainer.

Program requires the SDL multimedia library. Burgerspace could be used on GNU/Linux machines and there are even a port for some-proprietary-system. The burgerspace package is available in both Debian and Ubuntu. Have fun!

Entry submitted by Bart Veraart. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute!

Sometimes you just want to see what connections your machine is making to the outside world and what ports it’s using. While wireshark and tcpdump are really nice for inspecting detailed package contents. IPTraf is really about connections and interface statistics. Because iptraf is based on ncurses the program can be run from a text-console and still have a (primitive) `gui`. Navigation through the menus can be done using your arrow keys. Most of the time all the available options and their keys are shown on the bottomline of the sreen.

Starting up

By default the program is not accessible by ‘normal’ users so you’ll need root access. Also iptraf can put your interfaces in promiscuous mode (this will probably show up in your logfiles as: ‘device eth0 entered promiscuous mode’). Promiscuous mode can be turned off and on in the configuration menu. If no options are given through the commandline iptraf starts up with a splashscreen and then a menu. Some of the menuitems can be reached directly from the commandline (try using ‘iptraf -i all’ if you want to startup in IP traffic monitoring mode).

Configuration

There are some configuration options you might want to check. Turning on reverse DNS Lookups and service names comes in handy when using the IP traffic monitor. Iptraf comes with a separate reverse lookup server -rvnamed- wich is only started and used by iptraf to keep it from hanging on slow lookups. If there’s a lot of network traffic on your box try applying some filters.

Filtering

Filters can be useful if you only want to see info about traffic on certain connections, ports and/or protocols. Filters can be saved, deleted and edited. Multiple rules can be defined.

Screenshots

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Connections	Configuration	Filters	Interface statistics

More information

• IPTraf website
• IPTraf manual
• HOWTO: Monitoring network traffic with iptraf and rrdtool

IPTraf has been available since ages ago in both Debian and Ubuntu.