Problem

You cannot play new WMA media (aka wma9) content on your 64bit Linux system because of missing audio format support, e.g you get an error message similar like that:

Cannot find codec for audio format 0x162.

Solution

Get win32codecs

Unpack the files to /usr/lib/codecs ,e.g. with

    tar xvjf essential-20071007.tar.bz2
    mkdir -p /usr/lib/codecs
    mv essential-20071007/* /usr/lib/codecs/
    ln -s /usr/lib/codecs /usr/lib/win32 

add the path to the library search path so the libraries can be found:

    echo "/usr/lib/win32/" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/win32codecs.conf
    ldconfig 

Obtain the mplayer 32bit package (built for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala). Only the 32bit version can make use of the win32codecs!

Install the deb package:

    dpkg -i mplayer32_1.0svn_amd64.deb 

Run the 32bit mplayer with /usr/bin/mplayer32 <URL>

MPlayer should now play the stream or file, enjoy!!

To add a new spelling dictionary, hyphenation dictionary or thesaurus files for another language, at least for OpenOffice 2.x:

Close all OpenOffice applications
Obtain the file for your language from OpenOffice Dictionaries Wiki
Unpack the zip-file to the dictionaries directory, e.g.:

    cd /usr/lib/openoffice/share/dict/ooo
    unzip /path/where/downloaded/de_CH-20071211.zip 

Run install-dict:

    /usr/lib/openoffice/install-dict 

Now you should see the new language module with Tools / Options / Language Settings / Writing Aids under "Available language modules"

Paths may vary, on my gentoo machine, the OpenOffice files are under /usr/lib/openoffice/

Some simple shell scripts for synchronize your data using rsync.

You only have to adapt the variables at the beginning of the scripts according your needs.

rsync_home.sh

This one can be used if you have your remote system mounted onto the local file system, e.g. using NFS or SAMBA

Variables:

MOUNTPOINT: Path on local system where you have mounted the exported path of remote system
LOCALDIR: Path on local system from where you want to synchronize (by default your home directory)
EXCLUDEFILE: File where you can enter all path's (one on a line) that shouldn't be transferred
LOGFILE: File to log output of rsync into

rsync_home_ssh.sh

This one is an example if you want to access the remote system over SSH.

Variables:

REMOTEHOST: Full qualified host name of remote system
LOCALDIR: Path on local system from where you want to synchronize (by default your home directory)
REMOTEDIR: directory on remote host after the colon (":") (by default your home directory)
EXCLUDEFILE: File where you can enter all path's (one on a line) that shouldn't be transferred
LOGFILE: File to log output of rsync into

Remote Host can be either preset or passed as a command line parameter.

For not have to type your passphrase for your ssh key every time, you can store it within your SSH agent.

Follow those steps for automounting every user's homedir under a particular directory:

Make sure you have installed autofs

Add the following line to the automount.master file (mostly in /etc/autofs/):

    /home/net    /etc/autofs/auto.home 

Then Add this line to auto.home (mostly in /etc/autofs/):

    *	-rw,soft,intr	server:/& 

or for a SAMBA server:

    *	-rw,soft,intr,fstype=smbfs,uid=&,gid=100,credentials=/home/&/.smbpasswd             ://server/& 

But what does that mean?
The Asterisk (*) stands for any (pseudo)-directory under the given mountpoint. After the dash, there are the mount options, and with the Ampersand (&) we refer to the directory name that would be accessed by the user. So the appropriate NFS export or sharename will be automounted. For SAMBA, it is used also for setting the owner of the files in the mounted directory and for the credentials file in user's (local) home directory for authentication.

With this, users can just use their home directory on a server, e.g. by cd'ing to /home/net/<username>. After some time of inactivity, the directory will be unmounted without manual intervention.

Sometimes, you need some SSL certificates for providing SSL encrypted pages.

You can obtain a server certificate from Verisign or Entrust but they're quite expensive.

Or you can make them yourself. Here are some tools to get there. I won't provide information about cryptology at all, neither you will find a professional PKI solution here.

Creating your "own CA" makes only sense for sites where encryption should be in place, without providing official trusted credentials. Every user connecting to your secured site get a warning message every time he connects to your site, until he manually accept your CA Certificate.

First you need OpenSSL, the code which deals with digital certificates.
For information on the command options of the OpenSSL tools look at the OpenSSL Documentation (from openssl.org)
Then get the SSL CA-Tools 0.2 (SSL CA-Tools 0.2). This is a version slightly modified so you can also renew certificates easily.
If you do prefer to use the original version, you can find it here: SSL CA-Tools)

The SSL CA-Tools are easy to use scripts which query the necessary information in a dialog and execute the appropriate openssl commands. Untar it somewhere, e.g. under your openssl directory, look at the README, and create a self-signed CA certificate, user- and server certificates and finally sign them with your CA key.