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Today, I came across cowsay, another weird Linux command. So what does it do? Well, what do you think? Yep, it prints an ASCII cow:

The cowsay manpage documents some nifty options that allow to customize the eyes, the tongue or, lo and behold!, the whole cow. What an over-engineered easteregg.

Now back to the other tab.

If you’re familiar with Linux, you probably know the ls command. It lists the content of a directory when executed. Sometimes, when in a hurry, you might mistype it and end up with sl.

A programmer named Toyoda Masashi created a program called sl – an easter egg. If you install it and execute „sl“ by accident, a funny ASCII art animation will be displayed in your terminal. Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »

The Ubuntu 9.04 packages contain only the outdated version 3.2 of the popular IDE Eclipse. If you want to install Galileo/3.5, the latest version, you will have to do it yourself. This will guide you through the necessary steps to install Eclipse on your Ubuntu machine (or any other Linux Desktop).

First, download the latest version of Eclipse to your desktop. I recommend to use Eclipse Classic (scroll down). While your computer is downloading the file, get yourself a cup of tea (or coffee).

When the download is finished, open a terminal and navigate to the opt directory, where optional software is to be installed.

cd /opt

This is were you want to unpack the downloaded tarball:

sudo mv ~/Desktop/eclipse-SDK-3.5-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz /opt
sudo tar xfvz eclipse-SDK-3.5-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz
# we do not need the tarball anymore
sudo rm eclipse-SDK-3.5-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

Please note that if you did not download the file to your Desktop directory or want to use another version of Eclipse, e.g. 32bit, you will have to modify the lines above. Use tab to save yourself some keystrokes.

Okay, now let’s run it with root rights. Why root rights? Because we want to install some plugins.

cd eclipse
sudo ./eclipse

Eclipse will ask for a workspace. The default should be fine. If Eclipse started successfully, click Help and then Install New Software to install your favourite plugins. I usually install C/C++ Development Tools, Ruby Development Tools as well as PHP Development Tools from the default update site (for 3.5 it is called Galileo) and PyDev (Python), Subclipse (Subversion) and TeXlipse (LaTeX). Right-click on the aforementioned links to copy the URL of the update site.

When you finished downloading and installing plugins, close Eclipse and execute the following command:

sudo ln -s /opt/eclipse/eclipse /usr/local/bin/eclipse

Now you can create a new starter and point it to eclipse. Click it, to start Eclipse. Tada! You are almost finished.

You might want to delete root’s workspace using the following command:

sudo rm --recursive --force /root/workspace

Now, you are finished. Congratulations! Fasten your seatbelt and start coding.

Today, I tinkered a bit with git and came across a strange error when I tried to push my commits to a remote repository.

git push origin master
# fatal: invalid number of threads specified (0)
# ...

Argh!

This has to do with git packing objects before transferring them. Being the optimized piece of software that it is, git can spawn several threads for this in order to reduce packing time on machines with more than one CPU. Obviously, the configuration variable, pack.threads, was set to 0. According to the man page, this should lead to an automatic decision. For some reason this did not happen on my machine (Ubuntu Hardy). So I just configured it manually in ~/.gitconfig.

Tada, problem solved. I hope this posts will help some poor soul out there. (Hi!)

Recently I came across a very nice dark theme for the GNOME Desktop: Shiki-Colors. It’s far more than just a new set of colors: a fresh set of icons as well as login screen are included. Yeah, I could not resist:

Here’s the shopping list: GTK Theme, GDM Theme and Icon Theme. Again, I opted for a David Lanham wallpaper: Spring Trees.