Workaround: “git push” from msysgit (git for Windows) hangs
I had set up my plain git-daemon and everything seemed to work fine, until I tried it from Windows. It just didn’t return from the command. According to a discussion in a newsgroup, the problem is a...
View ArticlePermission denied to directory, despite group permission set OK
I tried to change directory to eli from other users belonging to the group “eli” and it failed with $ cd ../eli/ -bash: cd: ../eli/: Permission denied despite everything begin OK with the classic UNIX...
View ArticleSetting up a VPS server. It was a bumpy road.
Introduction These are my own notes as I set up an OpenVZ VPS server, based upon CentOS 5.6 to function as a web and mailing list server. A $36/year 128 MB RAM machine was good enough for this. Since...
View ArticlePerl script rectifying the encoding of a mixed UTF-8 / windows-1255 file
Suppose that some hodge-podge of scripts and template files create a single file, which has multiple encoding of Hebrew. That i,s both UTF-8 and windos-1255. If the different encodings don’t appear in...
View ArticleA perl script sending mails for testing a mail server
Just set up your mail server? Congratulations! Now you should test it. In particular, check if it relays mails to other servers and if the response time is reasonable. Here’s a script for doing the...
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Mini DV MD80 thumb camera: Usage notes with Fedora 12
So I bought this $10 mini DV camera on EBay. Since the user’s manual is pretty out of sync with itself and the product (Chinese and English doesn’t match, even by looking at the specification and...
View ArticleAvoiding reboot: Resetting USB on a Linux machine
Every now and then, some USB device misbehaves badly enough to knock out the entire interface, to the extent that the system doesn’t detect any new USB devices. Or work so well with the existing ones,...
View Articlefork(), wait(), timeout and the return codes in Perl
The mission What I really needed was a proper timeout for a certain chunk of Perl code. There is alarm() of course, but one has to watch out with certain commands that cancel it (sleep() and other less...
View ArticleSetting up a cross compiler: Buildroot notes
Just a quick summary on how to compile my own cross-compiler in 20 minutes. Download from Buildroot’s home page Run “make xconfig”. The configuration is stored in .config Possibly set BR2_JLEVEL=8 for...
View ArticleFinding a function / method in a large C/C++ project
So there’s this huge pile of source code, with an enormous amount of functions and methods. How can you quickly find where each is defined? IDEs has this functionality built in, but it’s not so easy to...
View ArticleResetting a Windows XP/7/8 password, the Linux way
What happens if a Windows user loses his or her password? No problem, Windows was never meant to be secure. Only appear as if it was. There are several automatic tools out there. I preferred running my...
View ArticleUpdating time zone information on a Linux machine
Since daylight saving time is an issue for political dispute in Israel, the time of switching back and forth changes all too often. To keep my computer on track, I need to update the timezone info file...
View ArticleLinux kernel version magic: Adding the missing plus suffix
Trying to insmod a kernel module, which was just compiled against the true headers of the running kernel, I got: # insmod mymodule.ko insmod: error inserting 'mymodule.ko': -1 Invalid module format And...
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Gnome 2 failing to load an Applet for no apparent reason
Fedora 12: It started with some error message about something crashing, and the Workspace Switcher applet was gone. I tried re-adding it to the panel, but I got an error window saying that the panel...
View ArticleA ghost process eating up all RAM?
After a “find” operation spanning the entire disk, I suddenly had System Monitor (2.28.0 of Fedora 12) telling me that 11.5 GB out of the existing 16 GB were used up, and the applet said 75% was “in...
View ArticleRunning a nested X-Windows server
Why? It’s sometimes desired to run an X-Windows program in a separate “screen” but not actually have another screen. The expensive way is to bring up a whole virtual server. But if it’s fine to run the...
View ArticleUsing xargs to run a commands from a bash batch file in parallel
Suppose that we have a file, batch-commands.sh, which consists of independent commands to be executed, one for each line. Now we want to run several of these in parallel. xargs -P 8 -n 1 -d "\n" -a...
View Articlestmmaceth: NetworkManager fails to bring up a wired Ethernet NIC
The problem In short: Running linux 3.8.0 on Altera’s Cyclone V SoC, NetworkManager doesn’t bring up the Ethernet port. It also makes false accusations such as Jan 1 00:00:17 localhost...
View ArticlePulseaudio for multiple users, without system-mode daemon
This is a simple and quick solution for those of us who want to run certain programs as a different user on the same desktop, for example running several user profiles of a browser at the same time....
View ArticleList all files in a subdirectory, with the SHA1 sums
Useful for diffing two sets of filesystems, just to see where the changes are (and maybe catch a file that was accidentally copied in) Symbolic links and other non-regular files are ignored. If they’ve...
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