Diigo, Spurl, Delicious; next?

Ok that's sneaky; Diigo just turned off my ability to search my bookmarks. I thought that it was a glitch so I waited a few days but hey this is getting a little annoying. Dig dig dig and ok what do I find? I have to pay $20 a year to be able to search my book marks? They call it a "full text search".

It's a good service, I don't begrudge them for asking for money for it. Again I'll say it's a good service, and if I pulled in the kind of salary that I used to pull in then perhaps they would have gotten that twenty spot out of me.  But then again I might have just taken it on as a personal challenge to try to find a solution that I didn't have to pay for so I could pass on that solution to others that could not afford to pay for it.

But hey I'm that guy now; I live in a third world country and I don't have retirement so away I go looking for my next social bookmarking replacement. Something that I seem to have to do once every three or four years. I used to be a "del.icio.us" guy and then I moved on to "spurl". But when both of those started acting up and I see even worse that "del.cio.us" is getting ready to be shut down by Yahoo it looks like it's time to find a new home again.

So, after digging through a lot of possibilities (I'll spare you the three or four hours of research and testing that I did) I finally settled on creating a solution based on the free wordpress.com hosting. Want to see what I've done so far then check this out. But be kind on your first impressions. I just copied and pasted my book marks on one page to start off with and will gradually cut and past each one of them into a separate entry.

Wordpress too has a bookmarklet that will allow me a one click post of any new bookmark online. So that's covered too. Everything is searchable and exportable/importable. I think it's a pretty nifty solution. Thankful that God's given me a little creativity from time to time.

Setting Up Your OWN Local Repository

Ok, well I just finished downloading all eight repository DVD ISOs for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. Thought I would make a post here for my own notes and hopefully for a little help for others if they run across this on the net.

This is useful for a lot of different reasons. For me it's to support Ubuntu installations on computers that have low or no Internet access. And with that in mind here is an important note. When you download these ISOs some of the files will become out of date real quick; not entirely of course but partially. For 'that' I have a link to a tutorial that I went through and is working great.

That above tutorial has a neat trick where you can keep a local repository on your local drive or a external drive; then issue a command line argument that will update 'only' the changes to the repository. It didn't seem "to take" for me at first. But then my system rebooted overnight (not sure if it was a brown out or not). In any case the local repository is working great for me now. Installations now take two minutes instead of twenty :-)

I should also give an honorable mention to the Stubborn Tech and a 'strong' mention to LUVR whose perspectives on the subject gave me some great incite into this. LUVR had some extra stuff that thankfully I didn't have to use; though I was able to read the value of it in case I had had some problems.

... Good stuff !

Following .lnk files (Windows Shortcuts) in Ubuntu

Chapter 1 - The Exclamation
Chapter 2 - How I Discovered It
Chapter 3 - How it Works
Chapter 4 - Still Willing to Help with This Script


The Exclamation

USING .LNK FILES (Windows Shortcuts) IS BUILT INTO LUCID 10.04 (VIA WINE) AND NOBODY TOLD US !!!!! ARGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!
:-)
:-)

Ok, that's not an "I'm mad" string of capitals; that's an "I'm relieved" (after about fifteen hours of work and searching) string of capitals. I just, on accident, figured out how this functionality is already built into Ubunut Lucid 10.04 and either it's not documented or it's too hard to find amongst the avenues that I've been chasing through.

How I Discovered It

One of the very first things I had tried a few days ago, on about the first hour that I was testing a BASH script with a new found Linux guru acquaintance, was to see if WINE could open up these .lnk files. Well that didn't work. I had even looked at the "Drives" tab in the "Configure WINE" options. However since I am still an Ubuntu and WINE newbie I guess "it" didn't click.

It wasn't until about the twelfth or thirteenth hour (over the course of about four days) in troubleshooting the workings of this sym2lnk script that I stumbled back through the "Drives" tab in the "Configure WINE" options. And partly for the sake of troubleshooting and partly out of a sense of nostalgia I set my external drive as the target for it's old 'windows' drive letter "G:\" in aforementioned "Drives" tab.

How it Works

Well that didn't help the script any. However what I just discovered (a couple of troubleshooting hours later) is that I had inadvertently fixed WINE's apparent built ability to handle Window's shortcuts. Now I can follow a .LNK file with a "Right-Click" on it in Nautilus and select "Open with WINE Windows Program Loader" (which opens up the WINE file manager).


Still Willing to Help with This Script

If the author of the BASH Script is still willing to work on that script I will still be willing to help with the testing of the script that the thread (linked to above) is centered on for a couple of reasons. Namely I still see it would be useful for those that are having trouble with WINE or would, for various reasons, still want to have native Linux Symlinks for their files. Even after this BASH Script is working well I will very likely continue to see this through to other forums and get it working in Nautilus. Again I do see value in this little tool and think it's important to give back to the Linux community in some small way for all the cool free stuff that is allowing me to create a machine I am be productive on.

God bless !

Best Download Manager for Linux

Just a short update/link this week. I've been wrestling with trying to find the best download manager. And after looking at at least a dozen and a half reviews I will recommend this review and come to the same conclusion that they came to. Having spent most of my life behind MS Windows I know there are a lot of great download managers there.

But the Linux winner (aria2c) does something for free that I was only able to get in a download manager you have to pay for in the MS Windows world. What it does is it, using the -s command line argument, is it will take a large file that you are downloading, break it up into two to four pieces, and then download each of these pieces separately and put them all back together at the end. It's quite smart. Now keep in mind that I'm using aria2c v1.8 and I've heard (but haven't verified yet) that they've taken that functionality out of later releases.

Note this is also a good resource for best usage of aria2c.