openSUSE 11.3 Countdown - Get your Counter

You can help spread the word for openSUSE 11.3 before it’s released!
The openSUSE project now has countdown banners that display the number of days before the next openSUSE release.

You can display the banner on your site, and the rendering is done via the openSUSE server. You can find the code and the right language for your site on http://en.opensuse.org/Countdown. You can link the banner to http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_11.3 which has information about the 11.3 release and information on testing prior to the final 11.3 release.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!
So, grab a banner and show your openSUSE pride.

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How to access / mount Windows shares from Linux

Many times it required Linux users to access some share folder from Linux system, this can be achieve using mount command with CIFS.

The CIFS VFS is a virtual file system for Linux to allow access to servers and storage appliances compliant with the SNIA CIFS Specification version 1.0 or later.

Popular servers such as Samba, Windows 2000, Windows XP and many others support CIFS by default.   The CIFS VFS provides some support for older servers based on the more primitive SMB (Server Message Block) protocol (you also can use the Linux file system smbfs as an alternative for accessing these).

CIFS VFS is designed to take advantage of advanced network file system features such as locking, Unicode (advanced internationalization), hardlinks, dfs (hierarchical, replicated name space), distributed caching and uses native TCP names (rather than Netbios names).

Below is example of mounting the windows share folder on Linux:

First we need to make a directory on our Linux system where we can mount our windows share

mkdir /mnt/window

Mount suing cifs

# mount -t cifs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/window -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN

Mount using smbfs

# mount -t smbfs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/window -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN

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How To Convert VMWare Image (.vmdk) to VirtualBox Image (.vdi) on Linux

First we need to install QEMU

QEMU is free software written by Fabrice Bellard that implements a fast processor emulator, allowing a user to run one operating system within another one. It is similar to projects such as Bochs and VMware Workstation

sudo aptitude install qemu

Now using qemu, first we need to convert a .vmdk (VMware image) to a .bin format, which can then be converted to a Virtualbox native .vdi format.

qemu-img convert /path/to/original.vmdk converted.bin

VirtualBox is a free, powerful and versatile virtualization program which is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows hosts, and can virtualize many different Operating Systems.
VirtualBox was originally developed by Innotek, but was purchased by Sun and renamed Sun xVM VirtualBox.

Now using VBoxManage utility that comes with Virtualbox we can easily convert the .bin file that we have generated using qemu to a native .vdi format:

VBoxManage convertdd converted.bin converted.vdi

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Convert Linux man pages to PDF files

Anyone who are working on Linux / UNIX are aware of man pages, man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals.

man is the system's manual pager. Each page argument given to man is normally the name of a program,  utility  or  function. The manual page associated with each of these arguments is then found and displayed and these man pages are stored in some special format.

Now, suppose you need to convert these man pages to PDF files which are more readable and easy to print
Below simple command will convert any man pages to PDF file

man -t sendmail | ps2pdf - sendmail.pdf

Output of above command will be pdf file with name sendmail.pdf.

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