remove items from the debian menu

Easier than i thought.  Look for .desktop files for the application you want to remove in .local/share/applications and /usr/share/applications

Real firefox on debian

Courtesy of http://superuser.com/questions/322376/how-to-install-real-firefox-on-debian

(apt-get remove iceweasel first if you have it installed)

sudo apt-get remove iceweasel
sudo echo -e "\ndeb http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ubuntuzilla/mozilla/apt all main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com C1289A29
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-mozilla-build

remove unnecessary packages from your debian install

sudo aptitude remove `deborphan --guess-all`

nothing to it.

if you then want to free up disk space by getting rid of all the deb packages apt has cached, run

sudo aptitude autoclean

For the ultra paranoid... randomizing your MAC address.

I recently wanted to write some python since I've been relegated to the worlds of Java and sometimes C being a college student again.  As a fun and paranoid project, I put together a little script that generates a random mac address and optionally assigns that MAC address to an interface and restarts your network connection.

I initially haven't made it all that complicated or general purpose (for instance, it assumes you're using network-manager, as I guess most of us are now).  The relevant functions are below, but I'd be happy to post the whole script or make it more versatile / general if anyone is interested... post a comment or send me an email.

def mac():
  """
  Returns a randomly generated Unicast MAC Address.

  Returns:
    String - A mac address.
  """
  mac = '';
  i = 0
  count = 6
  while i < count:
    # If the least significant bit of the first bite is onw,
    # ifconfig will fail because those addrs are reserved for multicast
    odd_hex = ['1', '3', '5', '7', '9', 'b', 'd', 'f']
    octet = hex(random.randint(0, 255))
    octet = octet.replace('0x', '')
    if len (octet) == 1:
      octet = '0' + octet
    if (i != 0) or (octet[len(octet)-1] not in odd_hex):
      mac += octet
      if i != 5:
        mac += ':'
      i=i+1
  return mac

 def restartNetwork(iface):
  """
  Assign a random mac address to the given interface and
  restarts network-manager to pick up the changes.

  TODO: error checking for a valid iface.

  Args:
    iface: String representing an assumed valid network interface.
  """
  new_mac = mac()
  subprocess.call(['/etc/init.d/network-manager', 'stop'])
  ifconfig = ['/sbin/ifconfig', iface, 'down']
  subprocess.call(ifconfig)
  #print subprocess.call('/sbin/ifconfig')
  ifconfig = ['/sbin/ifconfig', iface, 'hw','ether', new_mac]
  subprocess.call(ifconfig)
  subprocess.call(['/etc/init.d/network-manager', 'start'])
  print "If everything went as planned, %s should now have " \
    "mac address:" % iface
  print new_mac