24 Jan 10 Accidentally Locking Up Screen
Anyone who uses GNU Screen frequently will one day press Ctl-A s (lower-case s) whether purposefully or accidentally. It would seem that there is no way to unlock the screen. Actually, the solution is to press Ctl-A q (lower-case q). You will then be prompted to enter the user’s password to resume using Screen.
Tags: screen
29 Nov 09 Resizing Multiple Images in Linux
During the lifetime of using the computer, I believe everyone will inevitably face the scenario where you will want resize multiple images to a certain size.
In Linux, you can do it will such ease that makes you wonder what you use Windows for.
This effect can be easily done using the command line. Naysayers will probably disclaim the effectiveness of this tip but it really is easy for those who know Linux. All you have to do is to go into the directory where the images are stored and run the following command:
for k in $(ls *.jpg); do convert $k -resize 1024x768 -quality 100 re_$k; done
03 Jun 09 Restoring GRUB for Linux
Frequent Linux users who dual boot their machines with Linux and Windows will inevitably find their GRUB boot loader corrupted at some point in time. This post will help you restore your GRUB boot loader.
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16 Sep 08 Customisation for Vim Editor
When doing some simple programming, I like to use the Vim editor instead of using a full-blown IDE. It’s a good editor but I want to use it more efficiently. Some of the things I customise for myself are:
- auto indentation – this is a must for programmers
- tab size – to indent I use the tab key but different applications represent the tab character with different number of spaces; I like mine to be 4
- I like my colours to be different
These settings are saved in a file named .vimrc in each user’s home directory. Simply save the vi commands in this file to have your customisation. But remember to remove the semicolons. Below is my .vimrc contents to achieve my customisation.
set tabstop=4
set autoindent
colorscheme wombat
wombat is a colour scheme file which I saved in the directory /usr/share/vim/vim71/colors/.
P.S. While searching for some help on setting the file types in Vim, I found this page in wikibooks.org that describes the tips a programmer would use. It’s unbelievably useful. Do check it out if you use vi editor!
Another page with some useful tips is http://tips.webdesign10.com/general/vim
Tags: tips
29 Aug 08 Converting PS files to PDF
In openSUSE 10.3, there is no readily available solution (that I know of) that lets a user print to PDF. The closest thing there is to that is a PostScript (PS) file. Fortunately there is a easy way to convert PS files to PDF. There is a command called ps2pdf which does exactly that. Its usage is very straightforward as well:
ps2pdf document.ps document.pdf
How much simpler can that get?
Tags: tips
28 Aug 08 Installing Fonts in Linux
Installing fonts has been somewhat of a neglect in Linux. Although I haven’t checked, it seems that recent distributions of SUSE Linux has made it GUI-friendly.
Nevertheless, being a console guy, I believe it’s better to know a more reliable way to make things work that is more ‘portable’ (i.e. work in other distributions as well).
So for fonts, the most straightforward way I know is to copy the font into your personal directory’s hidden font folder e.g. /home/coder/.fonts
After having done that, the next step is to then make the font available to your applications. This can be done with the command:
fc-cache -fv
That’s all there is to it!
14 Aug 08 Eee PC – Installing openSUSE 10.3 on SD Card
I’ve always read that installing an operating system, regardless of Windows XP or Linux, on a SD card in the Eee PC is possible. But I haven’t got the chance to prove that – until now.
Tags: dual-boot
07 Aug 08 Making the USB Thumbdrive Bootable
In my previous post, I mentioned that I sometimes have trouble using the mksusebootdisk script make the thumb drive bootable. In a recent endeavour to install openSUSE 10.3 onto the Eee PC again, I encountered the same problem. This time though, I was in a rush for time and simply refused to do the whole process from formatting the file system (till this date I still have not figured out what is the cause of the problem).
So I turned to Google. Lo and behold, by chance I bumped into John Anderson’s blog. In this particular page he described the manual steps that can be taken to make the thumb drive bootable. And it works!
All that needs to be done are but just a few steps. First step is to simply copy ALL the files under <installation_dvd>/boot/i386/loader/ to the root directory of the thumb drive.
Then rename the file isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg in the thumb drive.
Finally unmount the thumb drive and run the command below (the syslinux package has to be installed), assuming that the thumb drive device name is /dev/sdb:
syslinux /dev/sdb1
And you’re done!
15 May 08 Extracting RPM Files
To extract the contents of a RPM file, you need the rpm2cpio and the cpio tools. Use them this way:
rpm2cpio name_of_package.rpm | cpio -tv
This will extract the contents of the RPM file.
15 May 08 Installing SLED10 SP1 on EeePC Part 2
In the previous post, I described how to create the installation thumb drive. After creating the installation thumb drive, the next step, of course, is to use it to install.
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