Tag Archives: Linux

In a heated discussion about the grand vision that people have for the Irish Linux Users Group, Justin Mason suggested (sorry! no link, the archive is broken again!) that we use a Wiki to keep the information on the site current and uptodate. He outlined his own ideas and suggestions in his post, How to have turn a stale project site into a useful Wiki and it’s not a bad idea at all!
I’m in favour of it, who’s with me? Why use a wiki?

Niall Sheridan writes:

>> On Tue, 2004-09-28 at 15:50 +0000, Niall Walsh wrote:
>> [snippage]
>>
>
>>> > The website contains lots of out of date information.
>
>>
>> Update it then. From what I hear, the webmaster happily will accept
>> contributions.

A good tip — moving to a wiki helps a *lot* here. We found that our stale old SpamAssassin website has become the main source of live, up to date info now that we wiki-ized it.

(It turns out that vandalism and people throwing up crappy info isn’t a serious problem at all. See http://taint.org/2004/09/28/191712a.html for details.)

After a few small glitches and problems I have Debian Testing running on my desktop machine at home.
The install process is a lot easier than before and really, I have/had only 2 problems. One was with setting up X – The “generic mouse” entry which pointed at /dev/input/mouse/mice or something didn’t work so I commented that out. The detection of my monitor worked, but it generated mode lines which were a little conservative. I couldn’t get more than 1024×768 on a 19″ monitor! That was easily solved by copying the values from my FC2 install.
The locale setting is a bit screwy too. I tried to get it to understand the Euro symbol by choosing ie_IE@euro (or similar) but now ‘”‘ becomes “#” and “|” becomes “>”! I’m sure there’s an easy fix, and changing the locale settings seem to fix bash/screen sessions but not X. More work to do there!
Anyway, xmms with mp3 support was installed by default, but I noticed mplayer wasn’t there. You can download mplayer packages for Debian here, makes things simple to install!

Have you ever tried du -csh .* to find the size of all the hidden files in your home directory? It never works properly for me as I think it only counts the size of the .* files in each of the named directories.
Anyway, the following solves that problem and shows you where all those thumbnails have been generataed by gthumb or nautilaus.. 🙂

for i in `ls -A`; do du -sh $i; done

Yes, this desktop screenshot is just showing off! Who wants a transparent movie? 🙂

A lengthy thread on the ILUG list over the last few days has sparked my interest in installing Debian again. I tried Stable several years ago and wasn’t impressed by how ancient all the packages were. I should have used testing as it’s fairly up to date!

Well, well. It’s much simpler these days to configure Squid as a transparent proxy than ever before! Getting it to limit bandwidth is a piece of cake too! 🙂

Anandtech published a guide a few days ago on installing and using MythTV, a Tivo-like program that you can install for free on a PC to record TV programs.
‘Course they should probably have used KnoppMyth instead and saved themselves some hassle!

Silly me! I *always* forget that “2>&1” is how you redirect the error channel to standard output! I don’t use it very often so here it is when i want to use it again in a few months time!

I arrived into work on Friday morning to find my machine hung and in need of a reboot. With some regret at the lost uptime of my desktop machine I flipped the switch on the case and watched the bootup. Disaster! The 2 drives on the first IDE channel failed to show! After much cursing and general worry I tried again and this time the BIOS booted fine! Woohoo!
This morning, almost the same thing happened. I checked my mail, loaded up the dozen tabs I needed for a fix of information in the morning and suddenly my browser died. Then went Thunderbird. At the same time my machine got a lot quieter and I guessed I had disk problems again!
I brought it back to life again and managed to get everything off it and used the opportunity to install Fedora Core 2.
I installed apt from freshrpms.net but fedora.us looks like a better apt-ge trepository, if for no other reason than it has “Window Maker” rpms! Gnome and Nautilaus were way too slow on my humble machine!
If you’re upgrading from an earlier RedHat release, make sure you update the fonts your apps use. I copied over my Mozilla and Thunderbird directories and they still used “serif” and “sans serif”. Once I updated them to the “Bitstream Vera” versions, as well as the monospace font too, everything looked much better! Now to download the xmms mp3 and mplayer rpms!
Later … Freshrpms has xmms-mp3 and mplayer. Fingers crossed that both repositories can co-exist!
Later Still … It seems to be fine. Don’t forget to install the Freshrpms GPG key too!
Hmm.. Why wasn’t my sound card detected?