October 8th, 2005 SkyHorse
Ubuntu wins Best Distribution Award at the UK Linux & Open Source Awards on the 5th of October, along with a life-time award for Alan Cox, who was desperately needing one.
What do Africa, the ISS and VeriSign have in common?
The man behind Ubuntu, who by the way is trying very hard not to get filthy rich(er) from the whole thing, is Mark Shuttleworth. The same Mark who founded Thawte Consulting (only to sell it to VeriSign for $575 million USD). The same Mark who went to the International Space Station for a short 8 days holiday trip. And yes, he also started Ubuntu two years ago.
For those of you out there who still think “free software” is the same as “free beer”, remember Ubuntu is only alive after SABDFL donated $10 Million USD to the Ubuntu Foundation. (SABDFL is short for self-appointed benevolent dictator for life, apparently what developers call its founder, Mark, in a sweet kind of way. Hey, for $10mil, who wouldn’t?)
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October 7th, 2005 SkyHorse
The only Linux distribution certified for Intel Centrino has just been released for “Club members” only.
Can this beat Ubuntu ? I guess the “rest” of us will have to wait till the 13th of October to find out if the Interactive Firewall or the Quick boot time is just hype.

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October 6th, 2005 SkyHorse
cNet Asia is reporting on a new HTC PDA (HTC is the OEM manufacturer of famous PDAs sold under different names, such as XDA, MDA or Qtek. See XDA Developers for more info)
The smal form-factor of the current XDA Mini fails to achieve the same level of mobile connectivity as its big counterparts like the XDA IIi (which I currently have) or the XDA IIs (with a nifty qwerty sliding keyboard) due to the lack of WiFi network adapter.
This is where the new XDA Atom comes in: even smaller than the mini (The Atom measures 102 x 58 x 18.5 mm compared with the mini’s 108 x 58 x 18.1 mm) this baby has integrated WiFi, 262k-clolor QVGA screen (a lot better than most current PDA’s) and the coveted Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.
It also has O2 MediaPlus (I hope it’s easy to remove).
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September 25th, 2005 SkyHorse
Well, pigs do fly.
What does a Microsoft employee have to do to get MSN Messenger working on their Linux desktops? Fix the bugs in GAIM Messenger of course! Thats what Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s Linux Lab Manager, did when he and his team had a ‘real’ need for MSN via HTTP under Linux. And, because they at Microsoft are so cool, even submitted the patch upstream.
Whats next? Microsoft at the LinuxWorld expo? Done already.
Could this mean we will soon see a “Microsoft Linux” in a laptop near you?
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September 21st, 2005 SkyHorse
I’m one of those who spent hours moving from DirectAdmin to cPanel, and in the meantime I’ve developed a couple of usefull tools to help me do it.
For the sanity of everyone ever trying to achieve this, forget googling because there is no tool available ATM. No one has ever started a script simply because the transition from DA to CP are so different that it is unthinkable.
There are scripts to move from cPanel to DirectAdmin though
I’ve started a BASH script that basically takes the files already available under the directories “backup” and “domains”, puts them nicely under one directory and tar-gzips it all. (the backup and domains directories come from untaring the User Backup created under DirectAdmin)
you then have to upload the resulting tar-gzip to the newly created cPanel account and untar-zip it. The file manager in cPanel does this with a click.
This script still has LOADS of problems, and if you’re unexperienced with the linux FS, permissions, etc… don’t come this way
What this does, however, is saving a lot of time if the accounts in question have many e-mails accounts (I did this because some of my clients had 100+ emails), and also takes care of the user files (public_html and everything else)
Resuming, this is what the script does:
- copy the quota file
- copy the IMAP folders and inbox folder of the main account
- copy the squirrelmail settings
for EACH e-mail account it does this:
- generate the entry and update the shadow and passwd file with its username and password (you keep everyone’s passwords!)
- copy the IMAP folders and inbox to the respective directory
to the domain files, it does this also:
- update references in every file (php, html, etc) by removing “domains/domain.net”
(ie /home/skyhorse/domains/skyhorse.org/public_html becomes /home/skyhorse/public_html)
This does not handle FTP settings, subdomain settings, dns settings, or anything else.
But hey, it saved me hundreds of hours of pain…
It is easily improved, so if you do, please send it back to me
BTW, the scripts assumes you’re using the SAME username in directadmin and in cpanel for each account, and the same domains as well.
It can also take a bit of hard disk space, since it literally duplicates the accounts files. If this is an issue, script around it to use the /tmp directory or even better, do some pipelining with tar
One last thing, although you see the CHMOD command being used, when untaring all files loose the damn permissions.
you NEED to change the permissions manually (inbox NEEDS to be group writable) or find a way to resolve the issue, which I couldn’t.
Here it is anyway, remember to replace the variables with your own settings:
# bash
# Copyleft (C) SkyHorse 2004
# for each account:
# put passwd as passwd + shadow
# quota (if != 0)
# into ~/etc/%domain%
GENDOMAIN=domain.com
GENUSERNAME=accuser
NEWACCPASS=accpass
MYFILESPATH=/home/skyhorse/temp_sites
mkdir result
mkdir result/mail
mkdir result/mail/$GENDOMAIN
mkdir result/etc
mkdir result/etc/$GENDOMAIN
cp $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/$GENDOMAIN/email/quota result/etc/quota
chmod 644 result/etc/quota
touch result/etc/shadow
chmod 640 result/etc/shadow
touch result/etc/passwd
chmod 644 result/etc/passwd
chmod 660 $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/email_data/imap/*
cp $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/email_data/imap/* result/mail
cp $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/email_data/pop/$GENUSERNAME result/mail/inbox
chmod 660 result/mail/inbox
mkdir result/.sqmaildata
cp $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/email_data/squirrelmail/* result/.sqmaildata
ENTRY=`cat $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/$GENDOMAIN/email/passwd`
for line in $ENTRY
do
login=`echo $line | sed s/[:].*//`
pass=`echo $line | sed s/.*[:]//`
mkdir result/mail/$GENDOMAIN/$login
mkdir result/mail/$login
echo $login:x:32120:622::/home/$GENUSERNAME/mail/$GENDOMAIN/$login:/usr/local/cpanel/bin/noshell >> result/etc/passwd
echo $login:$pass::::::: >> result/etc/shadow
chmod 750 result/mail/$GENDOMAIN/$login
cp $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/$GENDOMAIN/email/data/pop/$login result/mail/$GENDOMAIN/$login/inbox
chmod 660 result/mail/$GENDOMAIN/$login/inbox
cp $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/$GENDOMAIN/email/data/imap/$login/.mailboxlist result/mail/$GENDOMAIN/$login/
cp $MYFILESPATH/$GENUSERNAME/backup/$GENDOMAIN/email/data/imap/$login/mail/* result/mail/$GENDOMAIN/$login/
touch result/mail/$login/inbox
chmod 660 result/mail/$login/inbox
done
cp result/etc/* result/etc/$GENDOMAIN/
#domain files
cd domains/$GENDOMAIN
#update file references - this one liner deletes domains/domain.net in every file of the tree.
# efectively changes:
#/home/username/domains/domain.net/public_html into
#/home/username/public_html
find ./ -type f -exec sed -i ’s/domains\/$GENDOMAIN\///’ {} \;
cp -R * ../../result
cd ../../result
tar –owner=$GENUSERNAME –group=$GENUSERNAME -czf ../$GENUSERNAME-$GENDOMAIN.tar.gz *
cd ..
#upload tar.gz
#I have ncftpput installed, but because most people don’t, I’ve commented it out
#ncftpput -u $GENUSERNAME -p $NEWACCPASS localhost / $GENUSERNAME-$GENDOMAIN.tar.gz
#database:
#mysql
#subdomains
#ftp
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