Grey Panthers Savannah

Category: linux

  • Setting the CPU speed visually in Ubuntu

    This is a nice little tip from a friend on how to make the your CPU frequency indicator actually work. Some things I discovered in the process: The sticky bit, which, if I understand correctly is an other way for privilege elevation under *NIX (the other two I know of are sudo and su). This…

  • Bash shortcuts

    Or: never do history | grep again! The command line interface of the *nix systems is amazing and Windows doesn’t have anything that comes even close to it (although I still have to experiment with PowerShell – I like very much the base idea that instead of text lines you get objects with well defined…

  • Setting up Xming or RDP equivalent for Linux

    To give a little background: the GUI under Linux (and Unix) is usually distributed the following way: X (the short term commonly used for X Windows System or X11) – this knowns how to draw some primitive elements (like boxes, text, etc) and to get input (from keyboard, mouse, etc) and also has the primitive…

  • As one podcast goes away an other one starts

    I’m Cd-MaN and I’m a podcast addict 🙂 I listen to many podcasts, most of them related to technology, but the Linux podcasts have always had a special part on my mp3 player, because I’m a beginner with Linux and I want to learn as much as possible about it. So here are the Linux…

  • Finding a Windows computer based on its NetBios name

    A short tip: when working in hybrid environments (that is where both Windows and Linux machines are present), it is useful to be able to lookup a machine IP based on its NetBios name. You can do this by writing nmblookup [the name of the computer]. This will do a broadcast on all the interfaces…

  • Offline updating of Debian systems

    It has been my experience that a Linux system is much more usable if it’s connected to the Internet, because then the package management system can be used to resolve the dependencies of the programs. From what I’ve seen (and please bear in mind that I’m fairly new to it), in Linux it is much…

  • Checking out CVS and creating patches

    Update: Qemu moved from CVS to SVN. While the CVS repository is (and will be) available for some time, you should look at the new checkout instructions. Lately I started to dive into open-source development, specifically Qemu. Since I’m relatively new, here are some commands I found useful: cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/sources/qemu co qemu – to…

  • Why not to chain remote desktops?

    Quick tip (learned the painful way): do not chain remote desktops, meaning don’t open a remote desktop (or VNC sessions for that matter) to one computer and open in that session a remote desktop to an other computer, unless you have bandwidth to waste and don’t mind the increased delay :-). The explanation is rather…

  • Installing and using Truecrypt on Ubuntu

    Update: while truecrypt still doesn’t offer native packages (ie. .deb / .rpm) for Linux distributions, their shellscript installer works just fine. So the simplified version of the installation procedure is: Download the correct package from Truecrypt (either 32 or 64 bit – you can find out which you need by typing uname -a – if…

  • Linux tips

    Via the All About Linux blog: bash completion – if you type ls — in your terminal and you tap the tab key twice, it will list all the available options. This works only of the most important commands (like ls, rm, …) but it’s still a nice add-on. And best of all – it…