How To Backup/Restore Your Installed Packages And Applications - Ubuntu/Linux Mint

In this tip, we will learn how to make a backup of all packages and applications installed from repositories or Ubuntu Software Center under Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or any Debian-based system. This will help you easily restore them after installing a new copy of your operating system without the need to install each package separately. With just a few commands, you will be able to store a list of all installed applications and packages in a text file, then you can use this file to install all your packages automatically.

Getting Started

1. Open the terminal and make a backup copy of your applications with this command:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > backup.txt

Now move the backup.txt file to another location (USB drive, CD, external hard drive, etc.)

2. After a new installation of Ubuntu/Linux Mint, cd to the folder containing your text file (backup.txt), then restore your packages with these commands:

sudo apt-get install aptitude 

sudo dpkg --clear-selections 

sudo dpkg --set-selections < backup.txt 

sudo aptitude install

Then follow given prompts.

Note: You may also use Ubuntu Software Center to sync and reinstall your applications on different Ubuntu computers. Open Ubuntu Software Center and head to File > Sync Between Computers.

Verizon employees steal nude photos, share them with random customer

Everyone loves stupid criminal stories, and when they involve technology, well, that’s just icing on the cake. In this case, it’s also a cautionary tale: never trust Verizon employees with your nude photos. Ever.
In fact, we would go so far as to suggest that you take no nude photos at all, unless it proves to be an absolute necessity. Nothing good ever comes of it. Case in point: a Verizon employee in Florida has been arrested after allegedly stealing nude photos of a woman whom he and another employee were supposedly helping. As bad as that is, the really cringe worthy part is that they… wait for it… decided to share the photos with a random customer.
As if that weren't idiotic enough, they even implicated one another. When one of the employees, Joshua Stuart, couldn’t find the photos on his computer, he called over another employee, Gregory Lampert, who had already saved them to his phone. Unfortunately, the customer they decided to share the photos with turned out to be a friend of the woman in the pictures.
Long story short, the woman’s friend stayed cool, finished his business in the store, then let her know what had happened. After that, they contacted the police, who found the images on a laptop and two phones owned by Lampert, who then confessed to stealing them and has been charged with two felony counts of dealing in stolen property, along with a host of minor stuff. Unfortunately, Stuart is apparently still on the lamb, but we expect that’ll change before long.
At any rate, let this be a lesson to all of you: don’t take nude pictures. Seriously. They always end up in the wrong (sticky) hands. And then on the internet. Just don’t do it!

DragonFly BSD 3.2.1

 Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 3.2.1, an updated version of the BSD operating system originally forked from FreeBSD 4: "The 3.2.1 release of DragonFly BSD is available now. Significant work has gone into the scheduler to improve performance, using postgres benchmarking as a measure. See the PDF of graphed results to see the improvements. DragonFly should be now one of the best selections for PostgreSQL and other databases. USB4BSD has been incorporated into this release. More USB devices are compatible with DragonFly, and xhci (USB 3.0) users may be able to take full advantage of their newer hardware. Since this is a new feature, it is available in 3.2 but not built by default. See the release announcement and the release notes for further information. Download (mirrors, MD5) the standard CD or the "GUI" DVD images from here: dfly-i386-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (184MB), dfly-i386-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (918MB), dfly-x86_64-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (203MB), dfly-x86_64-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (942MB).

Arch Linux 2012.11.01

Pierre Schmitz has announced the availability of Arch Linux 2012.11.01, the latest of the regular installation CD images that the project providing a popular rolling-release Linux distribution now makes available at the beginning of each month. This is mostly a bug-fix release. From the release announcement: "The latest snapshot of our install and rescue media can be found on our download page. The 2012.11.01 ISO image mainly contains minor bug fixes, cleanups and new packages compared to the previous one: first media with Linux kernel 3.6; copytoram=n can be used to not copy the image to RAM on network boot - this is probably unreliable but an option for systems with very low memory; cowfile_size boot parameter mainly for persistent COW on VFAT, see the README file for details." Download: archlinux-2012.11.01-dual.iso (417MB, MD5, torrent).

How To Extract Audio From Video Using MPlayer Under Ubuntu/Linux Mint

In this tip, we will see how to use MPlayer in the terminal to extract audio from video files. You can save the extracted audio track in various sound formats such as MP3, OGG, WAV, etc.

Getting Started

Under Ubuntu/Linux Mint, open the terminal and run this command to install MPlayer:

sudo apt-get -y install mplayer

Via the terminal, use the cd command to access the folder containing your video file and run this command:

mplayer -vo null -dumpaudio -dumpfile audio.mp3 video.avi

or

mplayer -ao pcm:fast:file=audio.mp3 -vo null -vc null video.avi

audio.mp3 >>> replace it with any name of your choice followed by the desired audio format (wav, ogg, etc.)

video.avi >>> replace it with your own video file followed by the video extension

The audio file generated will be saved in the current folder location.

How To Record Videos Without Microphone or System Audio With RecordMyDesktop - Ubuntu/Linux Mint

In this tip, we will see how to configure RecordMyDesktop to not record audio coming from your microphone or system.

Gettinsg Strated

1. Open the terminal and install first the "pavucontrol" package with this command:

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

2. Launch now RecordMyDesktop and start recording a video.

3. While RecordMyDesktop is recording, start pavucontrol with this command:

 pavucontrol

4. In the "Recording" tab, click the dropdown menu and select "Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo":

From now on, RecordMyDesktop will record videos without sound.

Note: this configuration doesn't affect other installed applications.

How To Clone And Backup Your Hard Disks/USB Drives/CDs & DVDs In Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/Linux Mint 13

In this tutorial, we will see how to clone hard disks, USB keys, CDs/DVDs, etc. in a system running Ubuntu/Linux Mint. There are many tools for copying data under Ubuntu, but in this article we will see only two.

1. Mondo Rescue

Mondo Rescue is a command line utility that allows users to backup/restore from/to hard disk partitions, usb flash drives, CD-R/RW disks, DVD disks, etc. To install Mondo Rescue in Ubuntu 12.10/12.04 or Linux Mint 13, open the terminal and run these commands:

wget ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/ubuntu/`lsb_release -r|awk '{print $2}'`/mondorescue.sources.list

sudo sh -c "cat mondorescue.sources.list >> /etc/apt/sources.list" 

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install mondo

To start it, run this command:

sudo mondoarchive

Select now the media where you want to store your data:

Then follow backup instructions.

2. Clone Disks with the DD Command

You can also use the dd command line utility to backup your disks. Here are some examples:

- To clone a partition to another parition, use this command:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda2 bs=4096 conv=noerror

- To copy a whole disk to another disk, use this command:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda3 bs=1M conv=noerror

- If you want to copy your partition to an image file, use this command:

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/path/to/backup-file.iso bs=4096 conv=noerror

- To copy a CD, run this command:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/backup-file.iso

- To copy a DVD, use this command:

dd if=/dev/dvd of=/path/to/backup-file.iso