Bright Edges: July 2008

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Ubuntu getting slow....

The day I installed Ubuntu and the day after few upgrades.. I noticed drastic decrease in speed. I thought the problem was with my user, so I deleted the configuration files within my ~/ folder many times but never got a preferred result. Nautilus took 10-20 sec to just open, furthermore my gnutop went indiscoverable in my Hostel's LAN Server and I was receiving error messages after login. The symptom which took me towards the solution to this problem was, I got this message everytime I used sudo :

sudo: unable to resolve host HOSTNAME

After a bit of googling I found that it was already reported : Bug #195308.

Here is the solution (if it ever happens to you):

Open Terminal
Edit your /etc/hosts file
```
sudo vim /etc/hosts
```

There replace :
```
127.0.1.1 hostname.domainname
```
with
```
127.0.1.1 hostname
```
Example in my case:
Hostname : gnutop
Domainname: workgroup

Save and Exit

This worked for me as a charm and thought of removing Ubuntu remained a thought.. now Ubuntu is as fast as ever.

Grab your IP

Often you need to know your IP, particularly when your are connected by DCHP kinda connection. So here are some handy tips :

CLI

Displaying the current config for all NIC's :
```
$ ifconfig
```

Displaying the current config for a particular device :
```
$ ifconfig device
```
Example:
```
$ ifconfig ppp0
```

For knowing your IP via which you are accessing WWW:

$ ifconfig  | grep 'P-t-P' | cut -d: -f2 | awk {'print $1'}

$ wget -q -O- http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp

Here we are taking the help of http://www.whatismyip.com/

Additional Jobs:

Display the kernel’s IPv4 network neighbour cache:
```
$ arp
```
Display the kernel’s IP routing tables
```
$ route
```
Pinging:
```
$ ping IP addr
```
Example:
```
$ ping 192.169.25.15
```

There are many more tools for advanced usage like nmap and others, but these are the basics.

SOURCE

Thursday, July 24, 2008

LAN Messenger

Today I was searching for a LAN messaging client on my Ubuntu box, so after a bit of googling I turned to Pidgin. I searched if it was possible to configure Pidgin as a LAN Messenger and out of my surprise it was simpler than I ever thought of. Here's how:

1> Open Pidgin

2> Then Navigate to Accounts > Manage > Add

3> Select Bonjour

4> Fill the other details as per your choice.

5> Do the same setting in other nodes and enjoying offline chat

Pidgin is a Crossplatform Mutliprotocol Instant Messaging client, so it doesn't matters if you are in Windows or Linux. The only thing that may matter is it comes preloaded in most of the present Linux Distros where as you have to install it in Windows.