First, we need to add the repository where all the cool backports and upgrades are. At the command prompt, type:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and add this line at the bottom:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

To save, use CTRL – X and Y to save.

Now we need to add the public key ring for backports, at the command prompt, type:

wget -O – http://backports.org/debian/archive.key | apt-key add -

Once that is successful, update apt by entering:

apt-get update

Finally, we’re ready to install Open Office 3 on Debian Lenny. Type this at the command line:

apt-get -t lenny-backports install openoffice.org

And it will show dependancies and what files it will need to download and install. If all looks ok, enter Y and the install will commence.

Got my info from a few sources here and here.

If your extraction left you with file(s) that have multiple underscores or spaces, right-click the file choose Rename. Edit and remove extra spaces and underscores but leave the extension .ttf . This will make it a lot easier to copy these files from the command line as you’ll see in a moment.

Open up your Terminal as Super User (su). I usually just select Applications | System Tools | Terminal Program – Super User Mode

Enter your su password.

At the command prompt, path out to your Desktop directory by entering:

cd /home/name_of_your_homearea/Desktop

*Note: In Linux, case matters, so Desktop must have the capital D.

*Note: Enter the exact name of your home area after /home/

To copy the ttf files to your fonts area, enter this at the command line:

cp name_of_file_you_downloaded.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/

If you are wanting to copy and entire folder to the fonts area, at the command prompt enter

cp /home/name_of_your_homearea/Desktop/folder_name /usr/share/fonts/truetype -r

*Note: There is a space after cp and after the folder name in the command line

You will have to restart your computer for the changes to go into effect but that’s it!

If you want to check and make sure the files are successfully copied over, open your file explorer and path up (usually it will default open in your home area, so you’ll need to use File | Open Parent a few times to get all the way to the top of the file structure. From the top (double-click Computer and choose Filesystem), path out to usr/share/fonts/truetype and you should see all your fonts including the newly copied ones.

*Note: If you can’t see certain directories, they may be hidden. To view hidden files and folders, select View | Show Hidden from your Explorer window.

Interested in installing the Microsoft fonts to your Linux system in one quick download? Check out this fab tutorial by Mark Sanborn.

First download the latest deb package of KompoZer to your Desktop.

Next, open up your Terminal as Super User (su). I usually just select Applications | System Tools | Terminal Program – Super User Mode

Enter your su password. Now, lets install the package with gdebi by entering gdebi plus the path to the downloaded file at the command line. Press the Enter key to begin the install.

gdebi /home/your_home_folder_name/Desktop/name_of_file_you_downloaded

See an example of my entry at the command line and the name /location of the downloaded file – click the image to enlarge. Remember, Unix/Linux based system are case sensitive, so Desktop has to be capitalized in your command line.

Now you will see gdebi unpacking the file and checking for dependancies. It will display the author’s description of the package. And it will ask if you want to install KompoZer. Enter Y and press the Enter key.

Now it will do the actual install. When it’s done, and Terminal returns to the command prompt, type logout to exit Terminal. Click image for a larger screenshot:

That’s it! Kompozer is now installed! I found the icon for it under Applications | Internet.

Now, how to use it, right?! From the fine folks on the sourceforge forums for this app, sessileoak posted some links to two guides. Check them out here:

And for everything you ever needed for installing, setting up, and building the perfect debian lenny system can be found in this awesome tutorial by falco on the How To Forge site. Many thanks to falco – all kudos and good karma to you for your great instruction.

Open Gimp and then open an image you want to try this out on, preferably a photo that needs correction and/or has a grey wash to it. If you need an image to practice on, you can download this one.

Within Gimp, on the Image’s menu bar, select Colors | Levels and this dialog box will open up.

Notice the granular adjustments you can do, however correcting most photos I’ve found can be done with just pulling in the slider triangles from each edge to the beginning of the color levels for each photo/image, like so:

What’s nice about this tool, and Gimp in general, is that as you slide the triangles the image will change accordingly. I start by pulling the triangles in to the edges of the image’s color levels and check the image. If it looks good, just click OK and there you go, easy color adjustment with the Levels tool.

Notice that on different images the Level Input area will be different, so just adjust the triangle sliders in from each side to the beginning of the color level for each photo/image for quick color correction:

Ok, now that you’ve got Gimp, lets rock the crop! Open an image you want to crop by choosing File | Open. Now, click on the Rectangle Select Tool from the main left toolbar, like so (click the image below to see a larger version):

Click and drag to select the area you want to crop to, or what you want the final image to look like. Let go of the click and you will see the dashed lines around the area. You can use the mouse, click and drag, to adjust these lines as needed. Just move your mouse to the edge of the dashed lines and the cursor will change to indicate you can drag and move the lines.

Here’s the important part – you have to invert the selection, so you can delete the area surrounding the final image you want. So, use the keyboard shortcut, CTRL-I (or you can select it off the menu by choosing Select | Invert) to invert the selection, so now you will have the area around the image crop you want selected. The dashed lines will now extend from the crop line to the edge of the image like this:

Next, we want to delete the now selected inverted area, so on the keyboard press CTRL-X to cut it away. I like to use Cut so I can undo if needed. Now you will have white space around the image crop:

Finally, to get rid of the white space and trim down to your cropped image, from the Image Menu (the menu right off the top of your image), choose Image | Autocrop Image

You will now have the picture cropped and can save accordingly.

Well, I finally found a package that will rip audio cd’s to mp’3 in Linux! Let me walk you thru how to set it up and use it.

Use your package manager, or aptitiude, to install kAudioCreator. Comment if you need to know how to do this or look at this tutorial that walks thru installing stuff in Linux. I downloaded it using my package manager Synaptic, searching for the keyword: kAudioCreator

After Kaudiocreator is installed, you will find the icon off your menu. Mine happens to be located at Applications | Sound & Video | kAudioCreator

Insert your legally purchased CD into the cdrom drive. Now, on my linux system, SoundJuicer automatically pops up. No big, just close whatever program automatically opens.

When you open kAudioCreator for the first time, you will get an error message that tells you to configure your settings. No problem, we were going to do that anyway right!

And everytime you open kAudioCreator you will get a prompt about how to format your information from CDDB, the CD database that automatically fills in your artist, album and track information. Just select your preferred format:

Next we will configure the encoder. Click on the left icon that looks like a funnel:

Click on MP3 as the encoder type. Now we have to set the encoded file location and format. Here’s where it gets a bit tricky, trying to figure out the correct fomatting for how you want the tracks stored and written as files. The default location and format is:

~/%{extension}/%{albumartist}/%{albumtitle}/%{artist} – %{number} – %{title}.%{extension}

Let me walk you thru what each part means, so you can change as you prefer:

~ will put the files in a folder at your home directory.

/%{extension}/%{albumartist}/%{albumtitle}/% will put them in a folder based on the extension, in the default case, a folder called mp3. Then in a folder named for the album’s artist, and finally in a folder named after  the album title.

{artist} – %{number} – %{title}.%{extension} will names these files Artist – TrackNumber – Title of Track.mp3

So, the only thing I had to edit was where to store the files. I wanted them to go into an existing folder called Music. Everything else was cool so I simply removed {extension} and added Music to the path like so:

~/Music/%{albumartist}/%{albumtitle}/%{artist} – %{number} – %{title}.%{extension}

There is a File Location and Formatting Wizard if you need help and a beautiful “Defaults” button to reset everything. A note on the Defaults button. If you click it, it will set ALL the settings back to default. All as in every panel All. Use carefully.

I didn’t care for the wizard, but here’s a screen capture if you want to see it:

Next thing to set is the Ripper information. Click on the left icon that looks like a blue widget. Here we set the Default Temporary Directory, where kAudioCreator will use space to rip and then encode the files. This directory has to be writable, so for simplicity I just use my home directory. kAudioCreator cleans up these files automatically after ripping, so there’s no leftover junk in the home directory. Enter the location you want to use as a Default Temporary Directory and any other settings you want here:

Now, once these are set you won’t have to do this everytime. Yay! Let’s rip a cd! When you insert a cd, remember another program might popup, but close that program and open kAudioCreator. You’ll get the prompt for how to format your CDDB, choose one and you’ll have this screen:

Click either Select All Tracks or manually click the track(s) you want to rip. When you select a track, a check mark will be next to it like this:

Now click on the Rip widget icon:

To watch the status of kAudioCreator ripping your tracks (and then encoding them to mp3), click on the Job Status tab. It will rip first to OGG:

Then encode to MP3:

Finally saving it to your specified location:

So that’s it! Post any comments or questions on this tutorial below.

Once you download it, there will be several icons off your menu systems. You have to Use the Etherape (root) icon in Applications | Internet for it to work, otherwise it’ll open with an error. It has to be used as root.

Or open your Terminal as root then enter, “cd /” then “cd /usr/bin/” and then “sudo etherape”. You might have to type in your root admin password at this point to run it from the Terminal.

Yes, I have blocked out some of the IP addresses, but you get a general feel for how it looks. The size of the line grows and shrinks as network traffic increase and decreases to different addresses and services on your network. Pretty sweet!

If you click on View | Protocols you can see a simple status breakdown of all the network traffic, to go a bit more granular in your investigations. From this tool, I found that my Lenny distro was running a bunch of “extra” protocols that I didn’t need – such as mDNS, which I removed to optimize my internet connection even more.

I am on a network with Windows computers, so some of this traffic in my grid is theirs but then I have a good reason to yell at them for playing World of Warcraft when I’m trying to publish this blog, right!

Sure, you can run over to Terminal as Root and enter that command everytime your reboot and want to use Cinelerra, and yes, that’s 7 f’s. But why not make a more permanent change. This error message is just trying to say to allocate more memory space to Cinelerra. Cinelerra will be happy. Linux will be happy. You’ll be happy. So let’s go team!

Open terminal in super user mode, I just used the icon already on Debian, under Applications | System Tools | Terminal Server – Super User Mode and enter the following at the command prompt to make a backup of this file. You always make a backup, right!?

cp /etc/sysctl.conf /etc/sysctl.conf.backup

Now let’s edit this file. Enter this next:

nano /etc/sysctl.conf

At the very bottom of the file, add this line, and remember that’s 7 f’s, we’re talking memory size here. After adding this line, save and close the file, CTRL-X and then Y for yes to save it.

kernel/shmmax=0x7fffffff

Now, let’s put this file in action, at the command prompt enter:

sudo sysctl -p

Test by opening Cinelerra. Yay! No more annoying error message! Well, at least at startup.

The volume control did not find any elements and/or devices to control. This means either that you don’t have the right GStreamer plugins installed, or that you don’t have a sound card configured.

After some research, I found that the new kernel did not have built in support for Alsa sound firmware! What?! Ok, I’m not going to rant about this too much, suffice it to say, it worked with the previous kernel why in the world would they not include it in the most recent kernel? Rant over. Let’s fix it.

First thing, you have to do a manual install of the alsa-source and the build-essential files. Open terminal in super user mode, I just used the icon already on Debian, under Applications | System Tools | Terminal Server – Super User Mode and enter the following at the command prompt:

aptitude install alsa-source build-essential

This will take a few minutes, but now you’ll have the groundwork for installing the firmware to connect to your sound card in Debian Lenny. Next, you’ll need to download the firmware for Alsa from here:

ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/firmware/alsa-firmware-1.0.16.tar.bz2

Make a directory to store this file:

mkdir /usr/src/alsa

At the Terminal command line, copy the downloaded file to the sources area you just created. Adjust this path as needed, depending on where you saved your download (remember Unix is case sensitive):

cp /home/nancyfusco/Desktop/alsa* /usr/src/alsa

Now path out to that area, so you can unpack the tar:

cd /usr/src/alsa

Unpack it:

tar -vxjf alsa-firmware-1.0.16.tar.bz2

Path out to the unpackaged folder:

cd /usr/src/alsa/alsa-firmware-1.0.16

Are you ready? Good! Here we go! Now to compile and install the firmware and configuration for your sound card. At the command prompt enter:

./configure && make && make install

Watch it work while sipping on a cold one. Reboot. Hey! Look! We got sound again! Now go watch some Charlie the Unicorn to celebrate!

Instead, use sysctl to disable IPv6 without rebooting by typing this in Terminal (you may need to enter your password):

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

To disable permanently add

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

to /etc/sysctl.conf.

[ Got this tip from Andreas N in the comments of this article: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-disable-ipv6-in-ubuntu.html ]

Make a backup of the alias file by opening terminal in super user mode, I just used the icon already on Debian, under Applications | System Tools | Terminal Server – Super User Mode:

cp /etc/modprobe.d/aliases /etc/modprobe.d/aliases.backup

Now, lets open it for editing. Since your in Super User mode (you are right!?), you will be able to save this file after making these changes.

Open aliases by entering:

nano /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

Find this line:

alias net-pf-10 ipv6

Replace it with these three lines:

alias net-pf-10 ipv6 off
alias net-pf-10 off
alias ivp6 off

Now, save the file by pressing CTRL-X and saying Yes to save the changes.

Close out of Terminal Mode.

While we’re at it, let’s tweak IceWeasel to not use IPv6 as a default.

From within IceWeasel, open a new tab window. Type the following in the address/location bar:

about:config

You’ll get a funny message about being sure you know what you’re doing. Of course you do, click OK/Yes.

Search/Sort/Filter for the following by starting to type it:

network.dns.disableIPv6

Double-click (toggle) it to set it to true

Close IceWeasel and Reboot your entire system. To see if you’ve really turned off IPv6, open Terminal and enter this command:

ip a | grep inet6

If some lines are displayed, IPv6 is still on. If nothing is returned, IPv6 is off. Happy fast surfing!