HowTo's

Update 2: With newer version it is much easier to just follow the instructions here. On windows I mostly use Putty as my SSH client. But in some cases for example when I use unison or rsync I use the ssh client from cygwin. Following good practice I use public key authentication and Putty’s Pageant to manage my password protected keys. This works great with Putty and Plink. I thought this would be great if I could use the same agent for cygwin too.

Sometimes there is a bug in a package from Ubuntu that is not yet fixed, or you just want to modify something in the source of a software. Here is an easy way to build your own package from the Ubuntu sources. First you need to install the required tools for building software from source sudo apt-get install build-essential Let’s assume you want to build a package called foo and apply a patch bar.

I just found a nice method to invoke screen automatically if after login via SSH. So you don’t have to manually start it first. Put the following at the end of your ~/.bashrc # Auto-screen invocation. see: http://taint.org/wk/RemoteLoginAutoScreen # if we're coming from a remote SSH connection, in an interactive session # then automatically put us into a screen(1) session. Only try once # -- if $STARTED_SCREEN is set, don't try it again, to avoid looping # if screen fails for some reason.

Since I switched to Snow Leopard I was not satisfied with the printing drivers for my old HP OfficeJet 95. I used the included Gutenprint drivers. For text they worked ok, but images looked terrible. Today I decided to do something about it. From Linux I know that HPLIP has some pretty good driver (hpijs) for most HP Devices. Fortunately I can use the same drivers for Mac OS X to.

I recently had the problem to enable 5.1 Sound with 3 click outputs on an Nvidia ION board. By default Linux configures it with only one plug configured as output. After some research I found a solution in the OpenSUSE Wiki you have to set during module loading to get it working. Basically you have to add options snd-hda-intel <strong>model=3stack-6ch</strong> enable=1 index=0 to your modeprobe.conf to tell the driver to use all its 3 plugs as output.

Update: Sony released a new version of their BIOS which allows the activation via menu. I found a nice tutorial how to enable the Support for Intel VT on a Sony Vaio, with Firmware. Just follow the tutorial on this site.

I recently had the problem that my VLC Media Player took about a minute to start. First I didn’t know what caused the problem until I remembered that I imported my Music Library into VLC, so it always scanned the whole Library to import the meta data. To disable the Media Library do as follows: Open: Tools -> Preferences Under Show Setting select «All» to show all settings

Unfortunately I still was not able to get dfu-util working properly under Mac OS X. But at least I can work around the problem. Here a small resume of the workaround: Boot the Openmoko into U-Boot (AUX+POWER) Plug in the Openmoko via USB Execute the dfu-util command you want. To flash the rootfs execute: dfu-util -a rootfs -R -D rootfs_filename.jffs2 You will get an error like: _Cannot set alternate interface: usb_setaltinterface: could not set alternate interface

Here is a small tutorial on how to get the RestructuredText Wordpress Plugin working at Hostpoint.ch: Preparation At hostpoint.ch each $USER has folder where all it’s content lives. Where $USER is your hostpoint username. This folder is /home/$USER. It’s the same folder you see as / if you connect via FTP. We create a bin directory which hold the necessary scripts to render ReST. If you access via FTP just create a bin directory at the same level as your www and public_html directories live.

Today I watched a movie with VideoLAN but towards the end I encountered a problem I had several times before. The video and audio became asynchronous really badly. Knowing that VLC has functions to do almost anything, I decided to dig into the deep of the VLC preferences and I discovered what I searched. I found some Hot-keys which might be useful in this context: press: g to augment the audio delay press: f to decrease the audio delay If you watch movies with subtitles the following might be useful as well: