Posted on - 2 Comments on How to Read OpenOffice / LibreOffice Files from the Command Line

How to Read OpenOffice / LibreOffice Files from the Command Line

Let’s say you have edited a file in LibreOffice Writer, but later you access your computer remotely via SSH for example. You don’t really want to bother copying the file to your current machine, and rather just quickly check its content in the terminal. Is there a way? Since odt files are just some zip files containing XML files, you could manually decompress the file, and open XML files, but there is a more convenient the program is called odt2txt. On an Ubuntu / Debian machine it can be installed with: For basic usage, you just need to pass the filename as parameter: But there are also a few more options: This also wrote with ods (spreadsheets) and odp (presentations) files with ods2txt and odp2txt which are just symlinks pointing to the same program as odt2txt, namely odt2txt.odt2txt.

Posted on - 1 Comment on Linux Command Line Guides

Linux Command Line Guides

I’ve found and reshared two interesting graphical resources about the Linux command line via Google+ Linux Community, and I thought I’d also write about it here to reach a wider audience. The first graphic shows which tools to use to monitor or analyze specifics parts that may run in Linux. The command I personally run the most in the list above are iotop for disk write/read throughput, top or htop to check overall and current processes CPU usage, as well as memory usage. Ping is also an all time favorite to check network connectivity. although I sometime use mii-tool, not listed above, to check Ethernet link status. Strace can be very useful to debug binaries, but I don’t use it that often. The next picture, called “Linux Commands Cheat Sheet” is less specific, and can be interesting if you are not familiar with the Linux command line. If the resolution is too low, you can also download the PDF version.  …

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Posted on - 5 Comments on dmesg gets Human Readable Output

dmesg gets Human Readable Output

Many Linux command line tools, such as ls or du, have a “human” option to make it more readable by… humans. When you want to get the kernel log, to find otu potential problems, you’d usually run dmesg, which dump the complete log in one go and looks like: [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu [    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuacct [    0.000000] Linux version 3.11.0-15-generic ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.8.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.8.1-10ubuntu8) ) #25-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 30 17:22:01 UTC 2014 (Ubuntu 3.11.0-15.25-generic 3.11.10) [    0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.11.0-15-generic root=UUID=9c042788-fa75-4fc4-9b12-598c809410e8 ro quiet splash [    0.000000] KERNEL supported cpus: [    0.000000]   Intel GenuineIntel [    0.000000]   AMD AuthenticAMD [    0.000000]   Centaur CentaurHauls [    0.000000] e820: BIOS-provided physical RAM map: [    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000000000000-0x000000000009f7ff] usable [    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x000000000009f800-0x000000000009ffff] reserved [    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x00000000000f0000-0x00000000000fffff] reserved [    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000000100000-0x00000000bfd9ffff] usable [    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x00000000bfda0000-0x00000000bfdd0fff] ACPI NVS [    0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x00000000bfdd1000-0x00000000bfdfffff] ACPI …

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Posted on - 12 Comments on How to Upload YouTube Videos with the Command Line in Linux

How to Upload YouTube Videos with the Command Line in Linux

Like many people, I access Internet via an ADSL connection at home. ADSL stands for “Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line”, with Asymmetric being the key word here, as it just mean your download speed will be (much) higher than your upload speed. My ISP promises a theoretical 10 Mbps download speed, and 512 Kbps upload speed, and this is pretty close in reality: Data Rate: 10240 (downstream), 509 (upstream) kbps. Assuming a 265MB video, in the very best case (63 KB/s), it would take 1 hour and 12 minutes to upload a video to YouTube, but in practice it’s often closer to 2 or 3 hours. If it’s a video you’ve shot yourself, and copied inside your computer, there’s very little you can do, except processing the video with tools such as HandBrake to make it smaller before upload. But if the video files are located somewhere in the Internet, and you happen to have access to a VPS or dedicated …

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