LiberKey applications work on Debian through Wine

There is this beautiful portable suite called LiberKey which is really a collection of hundreds of open source applications for Windows.

For months, I have searched and tried out several portable applications for Windows. None of them even came close to LiberKey in terms of the range, stability and upgrades.

I’ve used LiberKey from the same USB device on both XP and Vista machines with equal ease. You can update LiberKey on XP machine and run it on Vista and viceversa. In fact, I’ve copied LiberKey onto my “C:\Program Files” on Windows drives and I enjoy free updates of all my open source applications.

What was a good Windows solution, has now proven to be a good Linux solution too.

Today, I tried out several LiberKey applications on Debian through the Wine interface and most of them seemed to be working well. The only fall back is that these applications dont work through the Liberkey interface. But rather each application needs to be run from its folder manually. This is not a set back  as all it takes is a link to a application to open it.

Debian users sure wont have to miss their little windows programs on GNOME or KDE.

How to : Mount an NTFS drive for read-write in Debian Lenny

Traditionally, Linux users mount NTFS partitions for read-write by first obtaining the libfuse2 and ntfs-3g packages and then manually editing the /etc/fstab file. This process required you to remember several things tedious and there was a risk of making the system non-bootable if the /etc/fstab file was incorrectly written.

Today, I was able to do the same thing with the help of a new module called disk-manage on Debian Lenny and Gnome.

Disk-manager detects, mount new unmounted partitions, including NTFS-partitions in real time without requiring a reboot. Disk-manager  can be also used to set mount point for the partitions.

To install disk-manager:

# apt-get install disk-manager

To start disk-manager

System->Administration->Disk Manager

Howto: Manually assigning X authorisation for Debian superuser

Today, while running Debian I noticed that I was able to run some programs as a normal user. But when I logged in as a super user, the program wont run.
eg:
$ gedit starts gedit
# gedit fails giving the following error
———————————————
krishnanondebian:/home/krishnan# gedit
No protocol specified
cannot open display:
Run ‘gedit –help’ to see a full list of available command line options.
———————————————-

X authorisation for the superuser seems to be an issue that has been discussed several times. There is a sux command which is technically “su+x authorisation”. I didn’t know about the sux command so I took the longer route:

1. open a console and login as ROOT : su

2. see who can launch an “X program” : xauth list
if you get an error or the list is empty(you dont get anything) then continue to read on-probably this is you solution.

3. open a console and as USER see who is authorized to open the X programs : xauth list
This should give you something like this :
desktop/unix:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 395a5228d995d958a0cc59a5afe9d521
193.5.93.21:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 45891337dd1f30ea26f45bb6b70449b0
desktop:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 370116e6e873fc798aa4f1429f536219

4. now as ROOT add the ones (hostnames) you want to be able to launch X programs on your DISPLAY :

xauth add desktop/unix:0 . 395a5228d995d958a0cc59a5afe9d521

Do the same for the other entries as well(if you want to be able to launch from other hosts too-try adding all if you dont know which one is the correct one).Notice that the long numbers at the end are the same with the users before!ALSO NOTICE THE DOT “.” between the “desktop/unix:0″ and the number. Now you should be ok.Try to launch the program as ROOT. Should work

Source  : http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-166863.html