Rsync Crash Course

Today a friend asked me to give him a crash course in rsync, a great program that I use a lot to copy files from my servers to home, and visa-versa. Have you ever tried copying a file over a network only to have your terminal hang for a while until you realise that your wireless has disconnected, your cat has pulled out the phone line, or the little man inside your computer decided to have a field day and took a toilet break? Let rsync save you from that knowing that pain again.

Background:
rsync is another alternative to cp/scp. Except it has a lot more features. Such as the ability to resume a transfer, copy computer to computer, and has the ability to transfer over ssh with a beautiful progressbar.

General Usage:

 rsync <source> <destination>  

CMus: Console Based Music Player for Linux

Lately i was trying to get some music on my gentoo netbook, as lets be honest, if you can't play music, what do you listen to while your performing your latest hack? CMus was my answer. 

 

CMus
This is one of the best, feature-rich players for console. Built using ncurses and thus offering a text user interface, CMus has several view modes, organizes your music by artist/album, provides playlists and a library view, a filebrowser, it allows searching, Last.fm/Libre.fm scrobbling via this script, and it uses Vi-like keyboard shortcuts.

It is by far the easiest to install and use of the music players i tried out.

Installation:

Build From Source/Source Forge Link 

 git clone -b pu git://gitorious.org/cmus/cmus.git  
 cd cmus  
 ./configure prefix=$HOME/cmus  
 make install  

Build From Gentoo Repo:

 emerge -va cmus  

Help/Usage Page:

 man cmus  

For those of you that arnt going to bother to read the man page just to quickly add and play some songs, here is a great link, to quickly add your music library. Add Music: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cmus#Adding_Music

Unable to Mount USB or DVD

As a Linux Ninja, one cannot be held up by errors when trying to crack that latest security or get into the new server that you've been hired to get into legally. So when a nice error like 'Unable to Mount, Not Authorised' Comes up, it may make you out as being a fool. Once installing Gnome under Gentoo usually everything works fine, And then the errors come. When using startx and ~/.xinitrc some quick fixes are needed and you can be on your way to ninja history!