Here Be Penguins

Fun with roguelikes on an old Palm

2010-02-24T06:45:00.001+01:00

Nothing Unix related this time, however I unearthed a Tungsten T from the depths of my "ancient electronics" cabinet. Due to the device being too limited in terms of free dynamic memory, there was nothing really productive I could do on it; it choked and reset itself on something as harmless as opening a PDF file with PalmPDF. It makes a nice audio and video player however and can cope with a

German license plate - 40 years of Unix

2010-01-18T17:43:00.001+01:00

I found a license plate generator online and as you probably guessed, this was the result: This is actually a valid German license plate (Unna county in Northrhine-Westfalia, just around the corner from here) and it is very likely already taken (two-digit numbers are rare, except for motorcycle plates; this is a full-size car plate however). I occasionally spot geek license plates; here in

dritune updated to v0.02

2010-01-14T20:02:00.000+01:00

I just updated dritune, a CLI interface for setting DRI driver options, to 0.02. This is a bugfix release with enhanced error handling and there is also a .deb package available now for easy installation. More here.

YaKuake - Instant terminal for KDE

2010-01-09T19:54:00.000+01:00

YaKuake is for you if you ever wished for summoning a customizable terminal with a single keypress. Being in KDE extragear, it is most likely contained in your repositories. To check it out, install the yakuake package and start it from the K Menu. Once it is started, press F12 to show/hide the Yakuake terminal. Nice and practical, isn't it? What makes this application even better is that it

dvtm - a console based tiled window manager

2009-12-28T01:47:00.000+01:00

In my last post, I outlined how to do some form of rudimentary multitasking in Bash, but I was still not satisfied. Further research showed that there would be no way around a terminal multiplexer, however screen sucks for me due to its steep and unintuitive learning curve. On K.Mandla's great blog I found the solution: dvtm, a very lightweight tiled window manager for the console. Its beauty

How to work with multiple jobs in Bash

2009-12-20T03:27:00.002+01:00

An important feature often overlooked by novice console users is job control. It allows some amount of multitasking on a shell by delegating processes to the background and resuming them at a later point. That way, you don't have to launch a second shell or use additional utilities like screen to manage multiple tasks. Job control is easy. Let's say you have Midnight Commander running. Hit CTRL

How to recover lost data on an ext3/4 partition

2009-12-13T22:03:00.000+01:00

I recently had a late-night oopsie with tar, overwriting the file I wanted to package (source code I had worked on for a week). After a few seconds of creepy feelings, I remembered that I use a journaling filesystem and thus, there would be a good chance that there would be several copies of the data still physically lying around on the storage medium. So, what to do when you lost a file? For

Set DRI driver options via the CLI using dritune (updated 2x)

2009-12-12T06:34:00.003+01:00

Aaaah, what a nasty cold I catched that I could not blog for ten days. However, I have not been totally idle during that time and found out that enabling texture tiling in the Intel X.Org driver finally not only works properly on my 915 chipset, but gives a breathtaking speed boost! Warzone 2100 is now playable at high resolutions on my netbook with the attached LCD monitor. No fiddling with

How to modify basic system settings with dpkg-reconfigure

2009-11-30T22:48:00.000+01:00

You have probably been told at some point to dpkg-reconfigure a package. This command belongs to the debconf infrastructure and what it does is execute the package's configuration script. The script usually recreates data or configuration files belonging to the package, and it may ask you a few questions in the process. Reconfiguring packages is one way of configuring and customizing your

Build a secure home network using SSH

2009-11-30T02:14:00.001+01:00

This Howto explains how to build a local network where communication between machines takes place over the Secure Shell Protocol. This is not only more secure (especially over wireless) but also enables you to conveniently get a remote shell on every machine. I'm assuming the machines are connected to each other via a dedicated hardware router, but network topology does not really matter as

Store volatile data in RAM using tmpfs

2009-11-29T00:19:00.000+01:00

There are several reasons why you might want to hold certain data in non-permanent memory. Applications that create a lot of temporary data, causing system slowdown and strain on the storage medium, are an example, or you want the data to be gone after every power cycle because it is of no use anymore at that point, or the data would simply eat up too much storage over time. Unix-like

GUI vs. CLI: Apples vs. oranges

2009-11-26T20:17:00.000+01:00

I have never managed to wrap my mind around the tired old GUI (graphical user interface) vs. CLI (command line interface) debate and which is "better", and why you should try to avoid or strictly stick to the one or the other. It is like comparing a brush and a hammer. Both are tools, but for different purposes, and if you want to be prepared for a wide variety of home improvement tasks, you

How to generate PHP code from Bash

2009-11-24T20:52:00.004+01:00

If you are into server side web programming, you will probably have had some exposure to PHP. Advantages of the language are that it is very widely supported, and that it can be freely mixed with HTML within the same file. You might want to have some script running on the server for the purpose of generating PHP code. Unfortunately, you cannot throw everything at Bash's string functions as-is

Howto: Plasmoid that shows your online Kopete contacts

2009-11-22T23:42:00.001+01:00

Together with Pidgin, Kopete is certainly one of the top choices for a multi-protocol messenger in a Linux environment. Although it doesn't support all of the (usually rather annoying) extra features of some protocols, it allows me to keep in touch with my family and fellows without having to install three different chat applications. What sort of bugs me is the currently missing IRC support,

Gmail works with Konqueror now! Sort of

2009-11-22T03:57:00.001+01:00

Konqueror's KHTML rendering engine is known to not be really full-featured when it comes to full-blown web applications like Google Docs, Gmail, iGoogle and Zoho. Of course I have kpart-webkit installed so I can toggle engines on the fly, but it is just buggy in a different way, so it doesn't work with these apps either. Arora works fine but is in an early stage of development and crashes

How to rip DVDs to Theora

2009-11-21T20:43:00.000+01:00

It came to my attention lately that K9Copy has evolved from a pure DVD transcoder to a remarkably full-featured video backup solution. Thus, I decided to rip my newly-bought 7 DVD Asterix collection to disk. But ... by Toutatis! It supports both ffmpeg and mencoder as a backend, but none would let me rip to Theora with Vorbis audio. I decided to rip to hard disk without encoding first, then work

More fun with X keymaps - dead keys

2009-11-20T21:30:00.000+01:00

I already demonstrated lately how to input nice typographic characters using Alt Gr, but depending on your keyboard layout there are more possibilities of producing more or less useful glyphs using combined keystrokes. You may know that certain keys on your keyboard are dead keys, which create a diacritical character when followed by a letter key, or themselves when pressed twice or followed by

Boot Debian faster with Upstart

2009-11-19T21:10:00.000+01:00

The Upstart daemon has been in development for quite some time as a contemporary replacement for the classical System V init. Being fully backwards compatible with existing init scripts, Upstart introduces support for event based, parallel execution of startup tasks in the form of "jobs" stored in the /etc/init directory. Looking at the job scripts, I see it doesn't do much more so far than

Can we have more Qt apps please?

2009-11-18T22:40:00.000+01:00

Managing software has been sort of a hassle for me lately, as I like to keep my package base free of cross-desktop dependencies. More precisely, it has become harder to find GUI software outside of the KDE application suite that doesn't depend on Gtk. I suspect a number of reasons is responsible for this. Ubuntu, the most popular starter distribution, uses Gnome as its default desktop, and its

Make commands behave nicely by default, using shell aliases

2009-11-17T22:05:00.000+01:00

You have surely been in situations where a command needed an unwieldy parameter list to do things in a specific way, and editing a config or parameter file, or creating a shell script for the task, was not an option. I already wrote an article on how to search your command history, but in many cases you will not be executing the command interactively; it will be called from a script or such.

The hidden powers of Alt Gr

2009-11-17T19:21:00.000+01:00

If you are using a non-US or a US-International keyboard, you will probably be aware that the Alt Gr key allows for input of certain foreign characters and symbols, which are also printed on the keyboard. In case you are on a *nix box running the X Window System, you have easy access to a lot more characters; in fact most keymaps contain a full Alt Gr and Alt Gr+Shift mapping. Most interesting

ARM netbooks still not hitting store shelves

2009-11-16T22:43:00.000+01:00

If you knew me quite well (but you don't, as I started this blog ... well, yesterday), you knew I would sell my soul for one of these. I have been desktop free for ca. two years now because upgrading the box resulted in a 23% increase of power bill with me basically doing the same internet, programming and graphics editing work as before, at exactly the same speed. My current primary

Quick & dirty intro to Bash history search

2009-11-16T08:26:00.000+01:00

So you typed that loooong incredibly useful command a week ago and no amount of pressing the Up key will unearth it, or you just want to save a few keystrokes on a command you use regularly? Let me introduce you to Bash's builtin history search, a feature that tends to be underused and only partly understood. There are two ways for quickly searching the history: Incremental search and plain