How-To Geek

When you are programming a Windows Forms application, you will invariably need to get variables from a second form window, such as an options form or popup search prompt.

If you have an unwieldy text file that you are trying to process, splitting it in sections can sometimes help processing time, especially if we were going to import a file into a spreadsheet. Or you might want to just retrieve a particular set of lines from a file.

Setting up an SSH server on Ubuntu is about as simple as it gets. The server of choice is OpenSSH.

The ASP.NET development environment on Ubuntu Linux is called XSP. This is a simple webserver written in C# that can be used for either ASP.NET 1.0 or 2.0 applications. You can install both environments side by side if need be.

Update: These instructions are out of date. You should instead install MonoDevelop from source.

When you are trying to install software on Ubuntu or Debian linux using the apt-get package system, quite often you’ll forget the exact name of the package you are trying to install. Here’s how you can get a little help figuring out what the name is.

If you are doing any kind of PHP development, you’ll almost always be using Apache along with it. Here’s the quick and easy way to get PHP up and running on your Ubuntu box.

There is no easier way to get your Ubuntu installation up and running with the tools you need than Automatix. I’m not entirely certain why this hasn’t been integrated into the core of the system yet, because it’s about as easy as it gets.

Windows has included batch files since before it existed… batch files are really old! Old or not, I still find myself frequently creating batch files to help me automate common tasks. One common task is uploading files to a remote FTP server. Here’s the way that I got around it.

If you are familiar with linux/unix, you will be very accustomed to the ability to kill (and start) processes from the command line. Linux gives you a very rich set of command line tools that simply don’t exist on Windows by default.

To interact with the services panel from the command line, Windows provides the Net utility. From the command prompt, you can use this utility to start, stop, pause and continue services. What most people don’t realize is that you can also use this to display a list of services that are running on your computer.

The Routing table dictates where all packets go when they leave your system. On most environments, all packets that leave your system will be forwarded over to your router or hub, and from there out to the internet.

This seems to help out with the memory usage quite a bit. Generally, when you minimize a window the memory usage goes way down because that application isn’t active. Unfortunately, Firefox by default doesn’t adhere to this behavior. Here’s how to force it to.

For this exercise, we will use the mysqldump utility the same as if we were backing up the entire database.

From a command prompt or terminal window, run this command:

Very simple, either use the clear command:

To find files containing keywords, linux has a powerful command called grep, which you can use to find the lines inside any file or a list of files. I use this very often to find a function declaration in a set of php files that I’m unfamiliar with.

Run this command from a terminal window. This works on debian, ubuntu, and redhat. I’m sure it works on others but those are the only ones I have access to.

This approach works for any linux operating system, including Ubuntu, and is probably most often used in conjunction with web development work.

If you are doing any kind of PHP development, you’ll almost always be using Apache along with it. Here’s the quick and easy way to get PHP up and running on your Ubuntu box.

Repositories on Ubuntu are the locations that you can download software from. As a general rule, the default repositories don’t contain the right locations for most software packages that you’ll want to install. You will want to open up the /etc/apt/sources.list file, find and uncomment the following lines

Run this command from a command prompt inside your project directory:

Sometimes you will want to freeze the version of Ruby on Rails that you are using to ensure that system level upgrades to the Rails framework don’t break the application you are working on. From within your project directory, you will want to run this command:

There are many reasons you would want to restore a database from a backup file… But you should also test this on a test server just to make sure that your database backups are working correctly. Here’s the syntax:

Backing up your database is a very important system administration task, and should generally be run from a cron job at scheduled intervals. We will use the mysqldump utility included with mysql to dump the contents of the database to a text file that can be easily re-imported.