Unix/Linux

Update: Thanks to Jayen, there is a better way: $ lsb_release -a<br /> No LSB modules are available.<br /> Distributor ID: Ubuntu<br /> Description: Ubuntu 9.10<br /> Release: 9.10<br /> Codename: karmic<br /> — $ cat /etc/issue<br /> Debian GNU/Linux squeeze/sid n l<br /> Or <br /> $ cat /proc/version<br /> Linux version 2.6.32-trunk-686 (Debian 2.6.32-5) (ben@decadent.org.uk) (gcc version 4.3.4 (Debian 4.3.4-6) ) #1 SMP Sun Jan 10 06:32:16 UTC 2010<br /> Source: Which Linux Distro are you using?...

Finally, the OS X has been removed from MSI Wind U100, and completely replaced by Debian (testing). Whenever the computer is idle, the hdd makes this weird clicking noise. To stop it, we can use hdparm to turn it off. ` kenno@tora:~$ sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda Source: MSI Wind – Gentoo Linux Wiki

There are probably a gazillion ways to do this. I use FAAC, Freeware Advanced Audio Coder, to do this job. It works very well: <br /> faac originalfile.wav -o outputfile.m4a<br />

While reading Linux Journal Issue 181 today, I stumbled upon a section explaining about running Ruby on Rails on Apache using an Apache module called Phusion Passenger, also known as mod_rails. To install Passenger, I followed the instruction provided in the magazine: sudo gem install passenger Unxpectedly, I got the following error: ``Building native extensions. This could take a while… ERROR: Error installing passenger: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension....

Warning: The following is for personal note only, and is not meant to be a tutorial or guide. On Debian server at work, we have /home reside on /dev/hda6 and I want to move to a new hard disk /dev/hdb. First, I need to format /dev/hdb using fdisk. Then use dd to copy the content from /dev/hda6 to /dev/hdb1, the newly createdd ext3 partition. # dd if=/dev/hda6 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1024 The above commands instruct dd to read the content from /dev/hda6 and write it to /dev/hdb1....

One of the advantages of using GNU/Linux operating system is that you hardly have to restart it. I have Debian on my laptop and it’s been running for months, until last night. It crashed and froze. Anyway, that’s not the main point this post was written. After restarting, I saw this new icon in the Gnome top panel (the third icon from the right): Well, for the start, I don’t know what it is and I don’t think I will have a need for it either....

I just noticed the abnormality with Pidgin 2.5.5 (running on Debian) these few days — I couldn’t connect my Yahoo messenger account at all. According to the discussion of Bug #389278 it appears that Yahoo was trying to change its protocol. A quick way to have Pidgin connecting to Yahoo messenger server again is to change the Pager server setting for the Yahoo account in Pidgin. To do this, from Pidgin:...

Install <b>rcconf</b> if you don’t have it yet. <b>rcconf</b> is Debian’s runlevel configuration tool. It allows you to enable or disable the services from starting up automatically. Recently, I got annoyed by <b>postgresql</b> starting up at boot time, so this tool did the trick. Source: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-runlevel-configuration-tool-to-start-service/

The first text-editor in Linux I ever used was pico. Then I was introduced to emacs and remained using for awhile. Nowadays, vi(m) is my favorite and default text editor of choice. Anyway, the main point of this post is to how to start emacs in terminal-mode instead of graphical mode. $ <strong>emacs -nw</strong> That’s it. -nw actually does the trick. Reference: How to get started…

I have installed mysql-server on my laptop running Debian back in awhile. For that reason, I forgot the root password. Just recently, I need to use MySQL server for one of my assignments. So, I was playing around in /etc/mysql/ directory hoping that I could get rid of the server and then reinstall it. The commands apt-get remove <strong>mysql-server</strong> didn’t seem to remove files/directories related to MySQL. Then, I decided to delete the /etc/mysql/ manually....