Open OpenOffice documents from a network share using nautilus

Under my gnome desktop, I had a problem when tired to open documents from a network share with OpenOffice. When I tired the spalsh screen appeared, but the document did not open.

After some searching I found the debian squeze has a package openoffice.org-gnome. I was curious what is the difference between the standard openoffice.org package and this one. Soon I found it's home page: http://projects.gnome.org/ooo/

Almost the first line said:

Gnome-VFS - G/OO.o allows transparent access to allow documents to be loaded / saved from a range of Gnome VFS backends, eg. Samba shares.

I installed and the problem went away.

django-expense v0.2.0

Django-expense, a simple personal expense tracker application for Django.

Version 0.2.0 has just released with the following new features:

• Charts, using flot jQuery library.


• Updated documentation with screen shoots.


• Fixed expense screen appearance with django 1.3.


• Added test application into the source tree to make trying/testing easier.
• Added initial data.

Source code is available on bitbucket.


If you have any question, feel free to open a ticket or send a message.

Have fun!

Resize files using one command

Using ImageMagick it is easy to resize multiple images by the following command:

for i in `ls *.JPG`; do convert -resize 1024 $i $i; done

A bit detailed version of this script can be found in my bitbucket repository: resizer.sh

django-expense

About two years ago I tired Dajngo, the popular python web framework. I was impressed how easy and logical is the usage of it. I started to create some simple apps only for personal usage. One of these apps was django-expense, a simple personal/family expense tracker application.

Now I refactored a bit and put the source to bitbucket.

From the user view: It is uses the default Dajngo admin site and you can record expenses and check them in monthly or yearly view.

From technical view, you can find examples to the following django specific areas:

• Aggregation


• Customized ChangeList view


• Custom filterspec

If you interested you can get the source using mercurial from bitbucket or download the latest version.

IKEv2 VPN Client Setup on Debian Squeeze

Recently my company was set up a Windows 2008 VPN server. It is configured to accept only SSTP and IKEv2 protocols.

I did not find any working clients for Linux that uses SSTP protocol, but for IKEv2 strongSwan provides a quite easily configurable and working solution.

To set up the VPN client I did the following:

1. Installed the strongswan-ikev2 package.

# apt-get install strongswan-ikev2

2. Configured the /etc/ipsec.conf file (changed the bold values):

# ipsec.conf - strongSwan IPsec configuration file

# basic configuration

config setup
charonstart=yes
plutostart=yes

# Add connections here.
conn %default
ikelifetime=60m
keylife=20m
rekeymargin=3m
keyingtries=1
keyexchange=ikev2

conn companyvpn
leftfirewall=yes
leftauth=eap
eap_identity=username
right=serverip
rightauth=pubkey
rightid="C=XX, ST=State, L=Location, O=Organization, OU=OrgUnit, CN=CommonName, E=email"
rightsubnet=192.168.1.0/24
auto=add
leftsourceip=%config

include /var/lib/strongswan/ipsec.conf.inc

3. Set up the password for the user name in the /etc/ipsec.secrets file:

username : EAP "password"

4. Put the certificate of the Certificate Authory into the /etc/ipsec.d/cacerts/ directory to trust the certificates which was created by this CA:

# mv CA.cer /etc/ipsec.d/cacerts/

5. Restart ipsec:

# /etc/init.d/ipsec restart

6. To run the VPN connection type:

# ipsec up companyvpn

7. Use the VPN connection.
8. To stop the VPN connection type:

# ipsec down companyvpn