Stop or start BOINC daemon after boot

I have installed BOINC client, to subscribe to some projects meant to discovery alien life or at least some new pulsars.
However, I have noticed that the client, in contrast to it’s Windows counterpart, didn’t have an option in Preferences for auto-start on system boot. Of course it was starting up automatically and that’s not good in my book. So I started digging a little bit, and came across the documentation page

In a nutshell, the “init” script is:

/etc/init.d/boinc-client 

The following commands (with self-explanatory options) can be directly run on the script:

./etc/init.d/boinc-client start
./etc/init.d/boinc-client stop
./etc/init.d/boinc-client restart
./etc/init.d/boinc-client status

As I have now found out, in a Debian-based Linux distributions you use the update-rc.d command to turn a system service (daemon) on or off at boot time (I needed to use the -f force option to remove boinc-client, don’t know exactly why):

# tells the system to start the BOINC client as a daemon at boot time
sudo update-rc.d boinc-client defaults 98
# tells the system not to start the BOINC client at boot time
sudo update-rc.d -f boinc-client remove

Cheers

Sync directories excluding file types

I have recently needed to find a solution to moving the content of a directory from one folder into another, but excluding certain file types. After digging through the documentation I have found the rsync command.
Short extract from it’s man pages:

Rsync is a fast and extraordinarily versatile file copying tool. It can copy locally, to/from another host over any remote shell, or to/from a remote rsync daemon. It offers a large number of options that control every aspect of its behavior and permit very flexible specification of the set of files to be copied. It is famous for its delta-transfer algorithm, which reduces the amount of data sent over the network by sending only the differences between the source files and the existing files in the destination. Rsync is widely used for backups and mirroring and as an improved copy command for everyday use.

So, here is the script to copy files from one place to another ignoring certain file types (in this example I exclude .avi files):

rsync /source/folder -av --exclude='*.avi' /destination/folder

The -v option is for verbose, so that we can see in the output what’s being synced.
Enjoy.

Restore lost admin group membership

I found myself recently in the awkward situation of replacing all the groups my user was part of, with a group I wanted to append to.
Due to the fact that I have installed VirtualBox, my user needed to be part of the vboxusers group. All good I thought, so I wanted to add that group to my user.

So I used the following Wrong command

sudo usermod -G vboxusers myuser

As per the help

usermod --help
-G, --groups GROUPS           new list of supplementary GROUPS
-a, --append                  append the user to the supplemental GROUPS

I have realised that I forgot to add the append option. So actually to add the new group to the existing list of groups.
The correct command would have been:

sudo usermod -aG vboxusers myuser

After my reboot, because the effect of the command is not visible until a logout/login is performed, I have found myself without sudo/admin rights. The result of the command:

groups

was myuser and vboxusers. Great, no admin rights.

So here is what I did to solve this problem.

Boot up from the LiveCD. Hope you have one at hand. Doesn’t have to be the latest distribution.

Open the terminal and mount your root:

sudo mount /dev/sda1/mnt
sudo chroot /mnt

Note: instead of sda1 you should use the partition on which your root is mounted. If you are not sure about it, check in Disk Utility application (the default one on your liveCD.

Locate the groups:

cd /mnt/etc

The file which holds the groups is simply called groups. But because you have recently changed this file with the wrong command, you need to check the backup file in order to determine which were your old groups, so that you can add them back. The backup file is groups-.

Now, you have 2 options to go forward. The first one is to manually edit the groups file to add your user against the groups (take the back-up file as an example). The second option is to simply re-add the groups to your user with the usermod command. This way you learn the right format of the command:

usermod -aG group user

Note: there is no need to use sudo in a liveCD session.

Now remove the liveCD and the reboot will make you a happy user

Thanks to fossfreedom and ccollins

Add new application to Open With Other Application…

What if you want to add a new application in the “Open With Other Application…” section? Maybe you want to add that particular application as the default application to open certain type of files.
Here is an example of how I can add Vim as an option to open a text file. Vim will open the file in a new terminal session.

An .desktop file needs to be created in ~/.local/share/applications
So, let’s use vim for this purpose, it is just appropriate.

vim ~/.local/share/applications/vim.desktop

Press i to enter in edit mode and type in the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=;
Comment=Edit file in Vim
Exec=vim %f
GenericName=Process Viewer
Hidden=false
Icon=vim
Name=Vim
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Version=1.0

after that, press ESC to exit the edit mode and type :wq to write to the file and quit.

That’s it. Now when you right click on a file, vim will be present in the list of Open With Other Application section, and you can add it as a default application.

Thanks for this answer to Marty Fried

Install Windows after Ubuntu is installed

If one has Ubuntu already installed, and then Windows is installed on a different partition, they will notice that grub will be messed up. Ubuntu won’t be found anymore.
Here are the steps to safely do this:

1. Firstly, the data should be backed up. Whenever a new OS is installed, mistakes are easily made.
2. Boot the Ubuntu desktop CD, resize Ubuntu’s partition to make space for Windows. The resulting partition must be a NTFS partition. (Skip this if you already have a NTFS partition.
3. Then install Windows into the NTFS partitions.
4. Next boot into Ubuntu CD again and re-install grub. There is a visual tool that helps. It’s called boot-repair

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

Documentation on the tool can be found on Ubuntu boot repair documentation

The tool looks like this:

Thanks for the tip to bodhi.zazen