Wednesday, August 15, 2012

How to create a continuous digital clock in the terminal



A digital clock is actually nothing special, most distros include one by default. However, in this article, I will show you how to get a continuous digital clock in the terminal.

The basic command you can use to display date and time in the terminal is "date". When you open the terminal and run "date", you will have an output of the current date and time. To abbreviate the output to display the time only, you can add a tag (like "+%r" or "+%T") to the "date" command.

With "date", you can display the current time. To create a continuous digital clock, we just need a continuous output. One method is to combine the "watch" command with "date". Thus, to get a continuous digital clock in the terminal, you can just open the terminal and run the following command:

watch -n 1 date +%r

You will have this result:


In case you want a clean output in the terminal, you can use the "echo" command to display the output of the date command and placing that command in an infinite loop. By this method, you can also have a continuous digital clock in the terminal that updates every 1 second.

The command you can use is:
 clear; while true; do echo -e \\b\\b\\b\\b\\b\\b\\b\\b`date +%T`\\c ; sleep 1; done  

And the result is:

 In this command, "echo" is to display the output of "date +%T", the "\\b" string is to delete the former output (How many "\\b" will depend on the output, ie: the output of "date +%T" is 8 characters long so you will need at least 8 times of "\\b", if you use "date +%r" whose output is 11 characters long, you will need at least 11 "\\b".) The "\\c" part is to tell "echo" not to create a new line.

Anyway, it's just a geeky way to play with the terminal and some basic commands. If you seriously need to check the time, I recommend you to use other applications than the terminal :D.

Webconverger 14


 Kai Hendry has announced the release of Webconverger 14, a Debian-based speciality distribution designed for web kiosks: "We have been hard at work and 14.0 marks several major enhancements: new i686 kernel, which should show better performance on multi-core hardware; NVIDIA 302.17 support via Bumblebee and VirtualGL for easing deployment; Mozilla Firefox 14.0.1, using the official distribution; 'noclean' API option for deployments where the default clean slate is not desirable (e.g. Granny's bungalow); 'swarp' API for mouse positioning; critical Flash update 11.2.202.238; better XRandR screen handling; time synchronization doesn't alter the BIOS clock; logging tweaks to increase signal over noise; better lock down." Read the full release announcement which includes related links and credits. Download: webc-14.0.iso (459MB, MD5).

How To Install VirtualBox Guest Additions From CLI Under Ubuntu 12.04/Linux Mint 13 (Guest OS)


 If you find difficulties installing guest additions via the VM "Devices" menu, you can easily follow this tutorial which will help you use the command line under Ubuntu/Linux Mint running as guest to install VirtualBox "Guest Additions", which is a set of tools and system applications that allow the user to copy/paste between host and guest, enable full screen resolution, and it also includes device drivers (graphics card, keyboard, wireless cards, etc.) to ensure better usability and performance for the guest OS.

The tutorial is workable for Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/11.10 or older (applicable also for Ubuntu derivatives such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.), and any Ubunu-based system like Linux Mint 13/12 or older. Open the terminal and install VirtualBox guest additions with these commands:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-additions

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-x11 virtualbox-guest-utils

After installing all packages mentioned above, restart the virtual machine to enable guest additions.

gBurner v3.2


gBurner is a powerful and easy-to-use CD/DVD burning tool, which allows you to create and burn data/audio CDs and DVDs, make bootable data CDs and DVDs, create multisession discs. Moreover, this software can be used as a disc image file processing tool, therefore it will allow you to create, extract, open, edit, convert or burn ISO/BIN image files.

Key features of "gBurner":
· Create and burn data / audio CD and DVD. gBurner supports the following disc types: CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-R DL, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD+R DL, DVD-RAM
· Create multisession CD/DVD
· Make bootable CD/DVD
· Burn data, audio and video image file
· Copy CD/DVD
· Erase rewritable disc
· Optimize file layout to save disc space
· Open, create, extract, edit and convert ISO/BIN Image file. gBurner can convert almost all image file formats to ISO/BIN image file format
· Easy and friendly interface. gBurner supports context menu, drag and drop, clipboard copy and paste

OS : Win XP/2000/Vista/Win 7
Language : English