Updating X11 Fontcache
After adding some fonts to the /usr/share/fonts directories, you have to re-login to see the added fonts. To update the fontcache without a log-cycle, use the following command:
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 According to this page, the built-in Samba code of mc is outdated and doesn’t recognize device names like eth0 or lo as the newer smbclient does.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 »
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 »
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 »
NASA Roger Beep
The “Roger” beep after transmissions from Space missions is @ 2475 Hz for 250 ms. According to everything2, there should be a pre-transmission tone @ 2525 Hz for 250 ms. They are called Quindar tones.
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 »
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 »
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 »
Prompt with 2 directories
bash To only show the last 2 directories in prompt, there are two scripts at the Muffin Research Labs.The best one would be this: Add this to .bash_profile and replace \w by $(PWD) (note the parents!) in your PS1 line in that file. A more comfort version which replaces the home directory by a tilde,… Read More »
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 »