OpenSSH for windows not recognising rsa authentication

It appears there is a bug in OpenSSH running on windows where it will not allow public key authentication.

To fix this simply edit sshd_config file in the /etc/ directory and change the strict modes line to show as

StrictModes no

Hopefully this saves some of you time.

Creating a launcher for FreeMind on Ubuntu

You've installed the FreeMind Software by using
graham@graham-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get update
graham@graham-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install freemind
and you've exported your shell variables by using (if bash is your default shell, other wise substitute .bashrc for your shell startup script.)
graham@graham-laptop:~$ echo export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.13/ >> ~/.bashrc
graham@graham-laptop:~$ echo export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.13/bin/ >> ~/.bashrc
but you would rather not have to type
graham@graham-laptop:~$ freemind
to start the software. (According to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Freemind the launcher should appear under Applications->Office but mine didn't)

Lets face it, we like pointing and clicking on pretty icons. It makes you feel like a man.

First off, we need an Icon, and some kind guy called malefico andauer has created some. Here the are.




Save the image you want to use, I'm going to use the biggest one, into the directory where FreeMind has installed. Should be in /usr/share/freemind. As you will have to be a superuser to copy files to this location, type

graham@graham-laptop:~$ sudo cp /home/graham/Desktop/freemind_icon/48x48/freemind.png /usr/share/freemind/freemind.png

Once that's done, Right click on the Applications menu and select "Edit Menus".

I'm going to place FreeMind by kdissert (in Accessories) because I'm going to be testing both programs but you can put it wherever you want.

Click "New Item" and in the panel that appears type the following
Type=Application
Name=FreeMind
Command=/usr/share/freemind/freemind.sh
Comment=Mind Mapping Application

Then click ok.

If you want it to appear in your top panel, you can right click on the top panel and select "Add to Panel...". Then select "Custom Application Launcher" and enter the info above.

To select the icon, click on the spring button, click browse, then browse to /usr/share/freemind then click "Open". Select the icon then click "Ok".

That's your Launcher ready. Just click close and enjoy.

Removing line feed characters from dos files for use in UNIX

Here are a couple of commands to remove line feeds from files created in windows for use in UNIX.
I had a list of usernames in a csv which I wanted to run an ldap search on however the line feed characters were causing this to mess up the command

To get around this you can either run

dos2unix current.csv newfile.csv

or you can open the text file in vi. The text file looked like this

johnhe02^M
paulke04^M
marymc04^M
elainp02^M
jimfor01^M
markad01^M
johnmc12^M


then basically open up your command prompt by pressing the colon key ":", and enter the following

%s/^M//g

Note to get the ^M character you hold down ctrl and press V and then M (V and M must be pressed while holding down ctrl)

Another way to acheive the same results as dos2unix is by using the flip command. Thanks to Jadu Kumar Saikia for pointing this out :o)

Online FTP client and file editor

The online ftp client, http://www.net2ftp.com/, I have been using for a while, to get around my works firewall and update my website is for some reason inaccessible. For anyone looking for an alternative, http://www.web2ftp.com/ is quite nice. I used to use it previously, and then the host shut it down due to misuse, which was the reason I started using net2ftp in the first place. It is not as feature rich as net2ftp, but it does what it says on the tin.

UPDATE (3rd July '08)
I tried to log in to web2ftp this morning and got the following error.

Web2FTP deactivated !!!Sorry, but we had to deactivate our free service Web2FTP.We have introduced new security functions as logging User actions, Ip-Numbers and blocking whole IP-Ranges from Asian and African networks, but some users continued to upload Phishing sites. We are working on a new solution for registered user.Leverkusen, 03.07.2008

Setting up jUploadr for ubuntu

jUploadr is a nice little java application which allows you to upload photos to flickr, zooomr and any other photo sharing site you are a member of which allows api access. When you read the FAQs for linux, which are virtually non existent, it basically says that you have to run the application by typing the following into the command line.

./jUploader

This is a touch on the crappy side as many users may not be confident enough with command line working, It also means that you need to remember where you stored to directory and run cd to change to that directory.

It's much easier to add the application to the top panel and here's how you do it.

• Download jUploadr for linux
• Once you have extracted the contents of the tar file to your desktop, enter the following into your command line.

sudo mv jUploadr-1.1.2-linuxGTK-i386 /usr/bin/jUploadr-1.1.2-linuxGTK-i386

• Note that jUploadr-1.1.2-linuxGTK-i386 should be changed to whatever the version you have is called. Run ls on your Desktop to find out and allow an easy copy and paste.
• Right click on the top panel and select "add to panel"
• Select "Custom Application Launcher"
• The main bit here is to browse to the file "jUploadr" within the directory you just moved to /usr/bin.
• Click on the little spring platform image and this lets you select the icon to chose. Navigate to the directory you just moved to /usr/bin and click open, you then have the choice of 3 image files to select.
• There you go. Just click and this will open jUploadr.
  

Nominate Ubuntu for SourceForge's OSS award

SourceForge are holding their annual Community Choice Awards for open source software. I have nominated Ubuntu Linux. If you want to nominate Ubuntu as well, click the link below.



You can view last years winners and nominees here, http://sourceforge.net/community/cca07.

Gmail displaying annoying error about full cache

When I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, on Windows XP SP2, I started getting an error on gmail which says

Your browser's cache is full and may interfere with your Google Mail experience.

Since clearing my cache did not help in the slightest so I tried a few other things.

• Tools > Internet Options > Advanced tab. make sure that “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” is unchecked.
• Tools > Internet Options > Browsing History Settings, Change “Check for newer version of pages at every visit” to "automatically". This originally worked for me but then something happened on my laptop and then it started again.
• The size of my cache was sitting at 1024MB so I lowered this to 250MB. (From Browsing History Settings again)
• The final thing I tried ended up getting rid of the error. I added mail.google.com to the list of allowed sites.
• Somewhere advised that deleting your temp Internet files and recreating it might help but I didn't try this, nor can I advise if it works.

If anyone has anything else that can be added please leave a comment and I'll add it in.

UPDATE: The message came back after adding mail.google.com to my list of allowed pop ups. After further rooting around I found that if you access gmail through https://mail.google.com/ using secure http the message disappears. As far as I'm aware you still need to go into your internet options on explorer and ensure that “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” is unchecked.

This poses a problem if you access your gmail through google toolbar however, google allows you to edit the xml behind the custom buttons such as gmail. Here's what you have to do in order to get your gmail button on your google toolbar pointing to https://mail.google.com/.

• Click the settings button on your toolbar.
• Click on "Custom Buttons"
• Find the gmail option and click "Edit"
• Click "Advanced"
• Press ctrl + f and search for http://mail.google/ and change all instances to https://. There should be 3 urls you need to change.
• If you like, you can change the message you get which tells you that you have new gmail. Search for or just and between the tags, put something like, "Hey bawbag! Check your email."

You can also do this "advanced edit" in forefox's google toolbar, however firefox doesn't cause gmail the confusion that internet explorer does.

UPDATE (again) - gmail now offers you the option under "settings", to always use https. Tick this option and this whole problem goes away which is good because the iGoogle gadget still takes you to the http: site.