Archive for July, 2009

Linux command line bandwidth monitor

You can find out how much your machine is using with a simple tool called “bwm-ng”. In , install it with

aptitude install bwm-ng

Then, just type ‘bwm-ng’ in the command line. It will give you something like this:

bwm-ng v0.6 (probing every 5.000s), press 'h' for help
  input: /proc/net/ type: rate
  -                            Rx                   Tx                Total
  ==============================================================================
               lo:           0.00 KB/s            0.00 KB/s            0.00 KB/s
             0:        2221.47 KB/s           48.13 KB/s         2269.60 KB/s
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            total:        2221.47 KB/s           48.13 KB/s         2269.60 KB/s

Pressing the “h” key while it is running wil actually pull up a nice menu to change some of the options you are looking at.

bwm-ng is very basic, “iptraf” is another tool that provides some more functionality if you want to drill further into what is moving in and out of your box.

Batch extract a directory full of split RAR archives “part1″, “part2″

If for some reason you have a directory full of archives, and each is into parts, extracting them individually can be a pain. If you just type “ *” into the , you will each file multiple times depending on how many “parts” it has. First, install the “unrar” package:

sudo aptitude install unrar

then cd to the directory with all of your RAR archives. Then type:

unrar e '*..rar'

make sure to keep the single quotes.
If the rar is password protected, add the “-p” switch followed by the password without any spaces.

unrar e -p
 '*.part1.rar'

In Ubuntu Jaunty, shift, ctrl,alt, and caps lock buttons stop working

This appears to be related to , to correct: open up the , and type:
. Thats it.

Pidgin OSD pop ups in Ubuntu Jaunty

You can remove or the pop up’s that you see from . Buddies logging on/off, and in my case, new messages. I didn’t want every new message i receive to be blasted up on the desktop . To control what you see there, Pull up your Pidgin window (buddy window, not your conversation box), then: Tools -> Plugins -> . When you have selected the libnotify pop-ups, click on “configure plug-in”. That will give you some check boxes to customize the behaviour