Backups && Recovery

 Posted on March 4, 2009  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  3 minutes  |  587 words  |  

Backups Most of the users using computers have a very high dependency on it. Day-by- Day, our data is getting digitized. Everything is getting into electronic formats ( Movies/Pictures/Music et cetera). If you are one, you know how important it is to have a backup. Lately, I haven’t been using Microsoft Windows on a daily basis. So I’ll comment on Linux here. The definition of Backup can be different. People like backing-up only the Important data. [Read More]

pypt-offline goodness

 Posted on December 29, 2008  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  2 minutes  |  364 words  |  

I created pypt-offline with the hope that it’d be useful for people who don’t have an internet connection but would still like to enjoy Debian. Enjoying Debian is about enjoying its Package Manager, APT. I don’t have any data to show if pypt-offline is in use by anybody. I too, use it rarely, when at my hometown. But I hope people who use it, find it useful. At my hometown, I use internet service from my friend’s ISP. [Read More]
apt-offline 

Laptop - Microsoft Windows - Installer - License

 Posted on December 11, 2008  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  3 minutes  |  564 words  |  

Most people who’ve bought laptops, would see a pre-installed version of Windows, for which they’d have already paid. Recently things have changed but still for the majority of the laptop models available, Windows is the most commonly used option. I own a Dell XPS M1210 which too came pre-installed with Microsoft Windows XP. Since the machine was low on hard-drive space, I had to eventually knock-off all Non-Linux partitions to make more space. [Read More]

SELinux in Debian

 Posted on December 11, 2008  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  1 minutes  |  193 words  |  

Thanks to Pierre Chifflier , Debian now has setroubleshoot packaged. The good thing about setroubleshoot is that it gives you a very user friendly message about the SELinux violations that occur on your box while you were doing something. Now that something is very difficult to define (at least for Debian). My day job requires me to work on the RHELdistribution which has very good SELinux policy defined (Same is the case with Fedora). [Read More]
SELinux  Mandatory Access Controls 

SVN Ignore

 Posted on October 31, 2008  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  1 minutes  |  76 words  |  

Ignoring files in subversion during checkout.

You can’t directly ignore folders on a checkout, but you can use sparse checkouts in svn 1.5. For example:

$ svn co http://subversion/project/trunk my_checkout –depth immediates

This will check files and directories from your project trunk into ‘my_checkout’, but not recurse into those directories. Eg:

$ cd my_checkout && ls
bar/ baz foo xyzzy/

Then to get the contents of ‘bar’ down:
$ cd bar && svn update –set-depth infinity

subversion 

distcc

 Posted on March 16, 2008  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  1 minutes  |  126 words  |  

When Rusty was here during FOSS.IN, he mentioned about utilities without which how difficult life would be. Mercurial distcc ccache I have been using Mercurial and really love it. It is wonderful. I always thought of spending some time with distcc and see what all it can help. I am amazed. distcc is exactly what it says. And the setup is so much simple. I had been fucking my laptop by building KDE4 on it every week. [Read More]
gcc 

Linux SCSI Persistent Device Detection

 Posted on January 9, 2008  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  3 minutes  |  437 words  |  

Many of us might be aware of the block level encryption features (LUKS for example) provided in Linux. Most of the articles that I referred to over the internet mention the usage of the traditional scsi block device when creating it as an ecrypted device. Eg. sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdb1 This actually poses a problem. The problem is with the way Linux detects SCSI devices. While many distributions have shifted to using ID/LABEL based access to devices, users still use the old traditional way of using a device. [Read More]

autoEqualizer for Amarok

 Posted on November 28, 2007  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  1 minutes  |  105 words  |  

I recently came into the necessity of having something which could load equalizer prests by reading the genre from the current running track. For Amarok, I couldn’t find anything available. So I filed a bug report. But soon realised that my wishlist could be accomplished just bhy a small amount of work. I then looked at Amarok’s scripting framework. It is amazing. It took me just 3 hrs to get my wishlist item done. [Read More]

Sound...................

 Posted on November 12, 2007  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  1 minutes  |  62 words  |  

Today I, for the first time in my life, bought extra speakers for my machine.

While I’m not a music fanatic I thought of buying extra speakers to bring some change to my boring life. I finally settled down on [Altec Lansing ATP3](http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-speakers/altec-lansing- atp3/4505-3179_7-1587363.html) PC Multimedia Speakers.

I must admit; The bitch is awesome. She rocks. And she blows me off good.

rm \- "-" ??

 Posted on July 1, 2007  (Last modified on January 22, 2011)  |  1 minutes  |  110 words  |  

Does anyone know when really did coreutils get patched for this behavior ? rrs@learner:~$ rm -foo rm: invalid option – o Try rm ./-foo' to remove the file -foo’. Try `rm –help’ for more information. This feature really wasn’t earlier and if you ever ended up with files starting with characters like “-”, it was not a straight task to remove it. Earlier (when I wasn’t aware of this patch), the workaround was to write a small 1 liner and not use getopt at all. [Read More]