Zen of Linux

Recently, while using an USB memory stick formatted in FAT32, I accidentally deleted a few files. My first idea while sitting on a Windows machine was to seek for a simple utility from the DOS world to get the files back. I thought it would be a no-brainer, but after wading through tons of Google […]

Recently, I installed a dual-boot OS on a brand-new laptop, absolutely fresh system, no OS, no formatted disc. I started with Microsoft XP and after the basic install was complete, I added vlc-0.9.9 to test DVD playback. Surprise: I did not work. Although vlc should be able to playback a DVD without any further decryption […]

Basically, every dir that is under your world-browsable path in your www directories will be accessible. Under normal conditions, that’s exactly what you want. For example a domain example.com pointing to /var/www/example.com will allow users to browse around in all subdirectories of /var/www/example.com.
Now, what if you add directories to this path you want to exclude […]

Today I had a strange error while trying to download my emails from my POP3 account. I am using Thunderbird and after downloading a few messages it stopped and spit out an error:
“The RETR command did not succeed. Error retrieving a message. Mail server mail.example.com responded [SYS/PERM] could not read message file.”
on a German speaking […]

Following Alvaro’s guide today, to repair my broken printer support after my dist-upgrade from 6.04 to Ubuntu 8.04 (amd64!) with version 3.9.2 of hplip from sourceforge. I ran into some issues I’d like to share.
After the process, the printer properly showed up in the System Setup > Printer Window and seemed to work okay, but […]

I recently had the idea of trying to use a NFS (Network File System) share over the network and did a bit of research about it. Here are my results:
As became obvious, the idea is not that new, with threads dating back to the 80s (here and here). The most important concern seems to be […]

Using mercurial (hg) recently, I came across an interesting problem. I had a number of files, properly dated back to their modification time by the filesystem (file_v1.ext was from 2008-June, file_v2.ext was from 2008-Aug etc…). In order to get versioning on these files finally right, I thought about adding them to a mercurial repository, thus […]

Using redundant drives, keeping backups etc. might help to keep your data save. Anyway, being a bit more ahead of the curve is better than just waiting for harddrive failure. Now, how can we improve the overall management of our drives and how can we estimate when it’s getting likely that a drive fails. What […]

After 3 years of solid service, it was time to update a few machines running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake. A complete system wide upgrade is called a DistUpgrade - in contrary to updating/upgrading individual packages installed on your system, usually done with apt-get update && apt-get upgrade.
Be sure to read some more manuals on […]

The handy nano editor (official homepage, wikipedia) on linux/unix type systems is a very easy to use little text editor (far more intuitive than the much followed vi) and allows very efficient text editing once you get the knack of the keyboard shortcuts. Read the manual if you are completely new to it.
Most functions to […]