Category Archives: Software

Everything related to the non-physical digital world.

MC Startup Delay

If Midnight Commander needs several seconds to startup, check the interfaces line in your smb.conf. According to this page, the built-in Samba code of mc is outdated and doesn’t recognize device names like eth0 or lo as the newer smbclient does. So it tries to resolve those into IPs which takes ages until they time… Read More: MC Startup Delay »

Wake-on-LAN

Preparing to go asleep To make Linux not shut down the network interface upon halt, edit the file /etc/init.d/halt, find the line with the halt command and remove the parameter -i if there. This parameter does ifdown on all networking interfaces. As the manpage for halt states, this is unneccessary for newer kernels – also… Read More: Wake-on-LAN »

Dual-headed X11

per user The native screen-size detection doesn’t work for dual-head installations. To let X11 handle both screens as one large display, find the section Screen in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the following lines: This is for two 1280×1024 displays side-by-side (1280+1280 = 2560). Now you can use xrandr to set displays. Shows all available displays.… Read More: Dual-headed X11 »

Windows License keys

At My Digital Life you can read about Belarc Advisor spreading Windows license keys. Advisor is a system profiler which also includes the Windows key in its reports. Users posting them to the Internet also publish their Windows key. A common string of Advisor reports is “Belarc Advisor Current Profile“. Together with the desired Windows… Read More: Windows License keys »

Partition Numbering

After removal of the first primary partition, you might notice, that the names of the remaining partitions didn’t change. /dev/sda2 stays /dev/sda2. To renumber the partition, use fdisk and create a new primary partition no. 1 which is located behind sda2. You might want to delete your swap partition, create a new one in partition… Read More: Partition Numbering »

Colourful boot messages

The functions used for the status messages upon boot are defined in /lib/lsb/init-functions and may be overwritten in /etc/lsb-base-logging.sh. To add colours, in that init-functions file find the function log_use_fancy_output() and below the fi add the lines After that, edit the lsb-base-logging.sh and change e.g. the output of log_end_msg(): Your next boot will look like… Read More: Colourful boot messages »

Optimizing Linux

At Ubuntu Unleashed you can find a document about different settings to optimize startup times of the system and applications itself. The noatime and nodiratime settings are unneccessary in Hardy as the default option relatime only updates the access time if the file has been modified after the last access timestamp. You can enable the… Read More: Optimizing Linux »

bash Tips & Tricks

Bourne Again Shell. bash magic Some handy bash magic. sudo last command If you forgot sudo after executing your 3-lines-command, sudo bang! bang! will repeat the last entered command with sudo prefixed. More parameter magic bang Expands to !$ last argument of previous command !$:p just show last argument of previous command, don’t add to… Read More: bash Tips & Tricks »

event.d/init.d script

event.d script This is an event.d-script for the new Ubuntu Upstart. The event gets started/respawned on runlevels 2-5. If you change to level 0, 1 or 6, the process gets stopped/killed.Manual start/stop works through the same commands start and stop. With status you can check the status. init.d script This does the same using the… Read More: event.d/init.d script »