Fix It Digest: logging and fonts

noreply@blogger.com (Ruslan Kiyanchuk) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:29:00 +0000

Fix It digest highlights some short how-tos and tutorials I found useful and important but too small for a separate post. So here we go.

Enable sudo logging

It's useful to have all priviledged commands been logged. You might use the log for auditing purposes and to refresh your memory about some changes you've done to the system. To enable sudo commands logging you need to edit /etc/sudoers file. But you never edit this file using just the text editor! The only way you can touch the sudoers file is by executing visudo program with root privileges:

$ sudo visudo

This will still launch your default text editor but will prevent you from making mistakes in the sudoers configuration file (it simply won't let you save it until you get it right). Once you can safely edit sudo configuration, add the following line:

Defaults    log_year, logfile=/var/log/sudo.log

This option will enable sudo logging to /var/log/sudo.log file. The log_year option will add current year the the time stamp. It is useful if the log is going to be stored for a long time (multiple years).

Enable boot logging

For some reason boot logging in Debian is disabled by default. It is always useful to be able to see how the system boot goes, so to enable it you need to edit the /etc/default/bootlogd file. Change the BOOTLOGD_ENABLE parameter to yes:

# Run bootlogd at startup ?
BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=yes

Now all the boot messages are logged to /var/log/boot file.

Displaying Japanese fonts

I've noticed that Google Chrome couldn't display Japanese symbols (and other hieroglyphs) even though the encoding was set to UTF-8. As I found out later it had nothing to do with the encoding. Just the needed fonts weren't installed on the system. Installing ttf-ipafont package will fix the problem.

$ sudo aptitude install ttf-ipafont

If you have the same issue with other languages try searching the repository for corresponding fonts with aptitude search. Just search for ttf packages and use grep to filter needed language. For example you can search for Korean language fonts:

$ aptitude search ttf | grep -i korean
p   ttf-nanum          - Nanum Korean TrueType fonts               
p   ttf-nanum-coding   - Nanum Coding fixed width Korean TrueType f
p   ttf-unfonts-core   - Un series Korean TrueType fonts           
p   ttf-unfonts-extra  - Un series Korean TrueType fonts (extra)

Or Chinese fonts:

$ aptitude search ttf | grep -i chinese
i   ttf-arphic-bkai00mp - "AR PL KaitiM Big5" Chinese TrueType fon 
p   ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp - "AR PL Mingti2L Big5" Chinese TrueType f
i   ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp - "AR PL SungtiL GB" Chinese TrueType font
p   ttf-arphic-gkai00mp - "AR PL KaitiM GB" Chinese TrueType font 
p   ttf-arphic-ukai     - "AR PL UKai" Chinese Unicode TrueType fo
p   ttf-arphic-uming    - "AR PL UMing" Chinese Unicode TrueType f

Once all the needed fonts are installed your browser shouldn't have any problems displaying most extraordinary symbols.

Introduction to Vim

noreply@blogger.com (Ruslan Kiyanchuk) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:46:00 +0000

If you have ever had to press these keys on your keyboard:

↑ → → → → → CTRL + C ↓ ↓ ↓ → → → → CTRL + V

or these:

, CTRL → , CTRL → , CTRL → , CTRL → ,

than you use a wrong text editor.

How annoying the routine text editing operations can get?! While doing monkey-editing stuff you lose your time, motivation and sometimes even the idea you've had on your mind. Suppose, you have a string:

Fire Me Up - Manteca - Intro.mp3

And you have to transform it to the following string:

id3v2 -A"Fire Me Up" -a"Manteca" -T1 -t "Intro" "01 Intro.mp3"

Nothing impossible, just another 10-20 key pressings on GUI arrows, some copy-pasting and you are done. But what if you have about 1000 such strings and each one has to be transformed? Panic! "Well, I can write a script and use regular expressions", — some of you might think. But why write the whole script just for one-time case? Besides, how many RegExp rules do you remember? If you have never used Vim or Emacs, you know nothing about text editing and have no idea about how much more comfortable, effective and fast it can get. Studying Vim editor is said to be complex. I'll tell you a secret — all new information is complex for studying. If studying something seemed easy for you, it's just because of former experience with similar problems. And why you need to study something you already know? You won't find out anything new. If you want to learn how to walk and how to run, not to crawl — learn Vim.

Introduction

What makes Vim so different from the rest of the text editors and what makes it so functional and useful? Modes. In contrast to usual one-moded editor, where you are always in insert mode: navigate through text using cursor and highlight stuff with mouse or Shift (Ctrl + Shift at best), Vim has 3 main modes of operation:

Insert Mode — direct text input;
Normal Mode (Command Mode) — text formatting, executing various functions (including user defined functions);
Visual Mode — highlighting the text in various ways. It is much more powerful than anything what you've used before.

Splitting down to several modes enables the editor to be highly optimized for performing any operation on the text you might think of: weather it's highlighting some area (a column, for instance) — Visual Mode, formatting (auto-indentation in source code, defined for your own style), changing the text (replacing words, sentences or whole lines at once) — Normal Mode, inserting text (from new line, from above line, after the third word in the line or at line start) — Insert Mode. Vim can also work with numerous files, perform similar changes to all opened files at once, do some processing on the file before reading, just after the file is read or after writing it to disk (insert templates based on file extension, add author, file creation and editing date, backup — anything).

The capability of Vim is limited only with you imagination and gumption. All you have to do to save days of your life is spend few hours for learning and few days for practicing Vim. It's better to see once than read 100 times (just 3.5 minutes of your time and you'll know how to efficiently solve the previous string transformation problem):

And it's just about 0,1% of Vim power.

How to start?

Only sensible ones who really want to learn Vim have gotten this far. At least, I believe so and want to help you. But I'm not going to create tutorial videos or tell about Vim from scratch. I'm too lazy for that, because far more experienced and competent users have already done that before me. But I'm going to show you what and where to search for.

You can install Vim with the following command:

$ aptitude install vim

or download it from the official site.

For the first familiarity with Vim you should complete the Vimtutor. You can start Vimtutor with the command (no way!):

vimtutor

After learning Vim basics you can move on forward. There is no better resource on Internet for Vim newbies than Derek Wyatt's blog, precisely the Vim section. It has some awesome videos, settings description, and working with Vim and C++. Derek made a great Vim overview, far better than I could ever make. Yet if you'll have any questions I'll try to do my best answering them in comments.

You shold start from the novice tutorial videos. Here Derek explains differences between Vim and everything else and explains basic functioning of Vim text editor.

After the initial acquaintance with Vim you might want to configure the text editor to meet your own needs. I'll talk about my solutions, settings and optimizations in the next blog posts.

PS: You don't necessarily have to memorize all Vim shortcuts at once — you'll get them automatically memorized through time in case of frequent usage. After a while you'll remember all useful shoftcuts.

Zoresvit

Fix It Digest: logging and fonts

Introduction to Vim