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How to get Linux box ping a Windows machine via netbios/wins

Name resolution in Linux is controlled by System Databases and Name Switch Configuration file which is located in /etc/nsswitch.conf, at least for my Debian based system. Note this is only true I think with libc5 and newer with NYS support and the GNU C Library 2.x (libc.so.6). The most import section to get a Linux to ping a Windows machine is the hosts statement. # ~: nano /etc/nsswitch.conf # <----- several lines before this one hosts: files dns wins What this says is that the gethostbyname and similar functions will first check the local database (/etc/hosts). If the name cannot be found then do use dns and finally wins. But for wins lookup to work, winbind needs to be installed. Winbind provides 3 major functions for integrating with Windows network. But we are not really using anyone of those 3 major functions but rather we need the functionality provided by /lib/libnss_wins.so library. So to get this file installed, do: #: apt-get install winbind And as a side note, I have

Creating Windows icon using GIMP

Windows application icons normally used in an application is a multi-page icon. One is 16x16 at 4bpp and 32x32 that can be set as high as 32bpp. Creating an icon in GIMP is a easy a creating a new graphics document. Set the background to transparent and size to 32x32. On the first layer, add 16x16 and on the second layer add 32x32 picture. Save the file as .ico and select 4bpp for 16x16 image and 32bpp for 32x32. That should be it and off you go, you know have a nice looking Windows icon.

Installing Bugzilla in Ubuntu 7.04

Bugzilla is server software designed to help you manage software development. I though that installing this software in Ubuntu 7.04 is as easy is launching Synaptic Manager and install Bugzilla. But it turns out that there are few quirks here and there. Or shall we say installation is not really straight forward. I got it to start working by getting some information in Ubuntu forums, specifically this post . Since my main goal of installing this software is to try out the Task Based perspective of Eclipse, Mylyn, but it turns out that Task Repositories does not like http://localhost/cgi-bin/bugzilla/editparams.cgi, so I am pretty much stuck. After poking around, I got it working by modifying /etc/apache/httpd.conf, adding the following lines: #: nano -w /etc/apache/httpd.conf #<-- lots of lines before this of course Alias /bugs/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/bugzilla/ AddHandler cgi-script .cgi Options +Indexes +ExecCGI DirectoryIndex index.cgi AllowOverride Limit

Install vmware-tools in Debian Sarge

Since Debian Sarge is not officially supported by VMWare, getting Debian to work efficiently on VMWare needs some minor adjustments. Like the video driver, NIC and mouse driver needs to be updated. To take the full functionality of VMWare and to get better performance, user needs to install the vmware-tools. Below is a quick guide on how to install the vmware-tools in Debian Sarge. Note: need to log-in as root. 1) Get the version of Linux kernel. #: uname -r A sample output of the above command could be: >> 2.8.18-4-686 which basically says that you have a linux-2.8.18-4-686. 2) Now let us check if we have Linux headers for the version as shown above. #: apt-get install -s linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686 The statement above means that we will do a simulated install of package "linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686". See below for a sample output: technomachine:/home/techno# apt-get install -s linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... D

Generating UUID in Jython

I have been poking around STAX/STAF recently and I found a need to generate UUID or GUID in Windows. I tried uuid module in CPython but I can't call it inside my STAX job. I tried to create STAX process but I noticed that if the program is under heavy usage I cannot guarantee that the STAX process that runs the CPython gets the resulting UUID string. Since STAX is using Jython, I reasoned out that this should be possible in Java. A quick search in Google shows java.util.UUID. This class is just what I need. So, basically, in Jython I can generate a UUID using the following command: import java print java . util . UUID . randomUUID () ~ts~