IRC on Linux de-mystified for new users only

The other day, I was trying to fix something in my firefox and found that the way to go was to login to IRC and go to the mozilla <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/server" title="Server (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_%28computing%29">server and join #firefox.

Though IRC is quite native to <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/linux" title="Linux" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux">Linux, I did not know where to start. So, I noted down the list of steps that need to be done to get you started. (Note this may not be new to most of you).

Default files and settings for new users on most Linux distribution – Linux Ubuntu

For most common distributions of Linux the default settings for the newly created user with GUI or useradd command is taken from the directory /etc/skel

All the files (including the hidden files) are copied to the newly created users home directory. This can be used to modify the defaul .bashrc .vimrc and other such files in the users home directory. You can copy the files in &#8221;/etc/skel&#8221; the files that you want to keep in the users home directory. This can contain soft links or hard links also (Be careful to link to the full path in this directory).

Verify all the paths in the PATH directory

Here is the command to test that all the directories in your path actually exist.

(<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/internal_field_separator" title="Internal field separator" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_field_separator">IFS=:;for p in $PATH; do test -d $p || echo $p; done)

And the explanation :

Set the IFS to &#8221;:&#8221;

now we loop through the PATH variable

and test all the directories with &#8221;test -d&#8221;

Here is another version without IFS:

for i in ${PATH//:/ };do test  -d $i || echo $i;done

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Play media files in fedora.

Found <a href="http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=100206">here .<div class="smallfont">

Media (DVD, web content, video & audio) playback in Fedora

PuTTY ssh without password

you can do a ssh without password.. Today we will see how to do this with putty.

Generate public/private (DSA)key pair using puttygen.
copy the public key to ~/.ssh/authourized_keys on your server (moonware/sunware/skyware). Same key can be used on all the servers.
make sure that your home directory permissions are 755
directory permission for .ssh is 700
file permission for authourized_keys is 600
now login using putty and specify your private key in the configuration of putty and also specify your username.

How To Install Ailurus On Fedora

For those who have not yet heard about ailurus:

<img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ailuruslogo.png" alt="" width="24" height="24" />What is Ailurus?

Ailurus is cross-Linux-<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/linux_distribution" title="Linux distribution" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution">distribution <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/gnu_general_public_license" title="GNU General Public License" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License">GPL <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/computer_software" title="Computer software" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_software">software, which aims at making Linux easier to use, for newcomers.

<img src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ailuruslogo.png" alt="" width="24" height="24" />What does Ailurus hope to do?

Ailurus hopes to reduce the difficulty which newcomers encounter when they are using Linux.

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Security — Installing and monitoring snort logs.

Snort is a very good security tool to install if you are concerned about the security of your system. I find it really useful but the problem is I keep forgetting to monitor the logs so what did I do, I installed snort and configured cron to send to logs everyday, here&#8217;s how.

On fedora, snort is available in the repository but the rules are not. So to install snort just type in the following in a terminal: