Linux

2005-04-12
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An operating system of significant and historical renown, responsible for running most of the internet and phones (via Android).

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What drove me to Linux ∞

Written 2009-03-27.

What drove me from DOS to Windows 3.1 was internet access and web browsers.

What drove me away from Windows is its complete inability to back up and restore one's customizations. Since Windows has such broken defaults, I had to so heavily modify it that it took forever. None of it is (was?) scriptable and reproducible except through step-by-step instructions.

A fresh install required following the instructions step-by-step. Re-installing software from scratch, re-configuring everything and doing all kinds of fiddly nonsense. Plus, the better you get with it, the more customizations it required. It was disgusting.

This issue persists even now with Windows XP/Windows Vista. Although there are tools to do backup and restore I'm sure (for a price), I ended up sticking it out. As an aside, Windows has some interesting steady state concepts which I really liked, which kept the system writeable but reverted everything on reboot.

What drove me to Linux, and the only thing that made life bearable until recently was Firefox. Since Phoenix 0.2 or 0.3 as I recall.

I always expected Linux to have a trivial ability to change menus and hotkeys at compile time, but I've been sadly disappointed. Maybe there's something somewhere in internationalization. Since I largely stopped compiling software it doesn't matter much these days.

Now I can set up all my software and trivially back up and restore everything. Heck, I can even remaster my setup into a customized LiveCD. With one command.

I'm also finally learning how to script to solve the issues I have.

All of the documentation I've seen for anything Linux-related SUCKS ASS. That's something I'm working to address.

Some topics ∞

A hell of a lot of Linux-related topics are scattered throughout this place, but here are some which don't really have much of a home:

Getting Linux going:

Other:

Usage and troubleshooting ∞

I've had a long, long history with Linux and I've had to learn things the hard way. I took lots of notes, some of which are embarrassingly obvious years later, and some of which are obsolete by now. Still, here they all are.

  • wall -- Broadcast messages to all terminals
  • strip -- Discard symbols from object files.
  • Startup commands are in /etc/rc.d/rc.local
  • Learn the kernel version with uname -r

  • permanently fix a video index:

    • (MEncoder)
    • mencoder -idx input.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20190915002303/http://www.brunolinux.com:80/01-First_Things_To_Know/Install_Cheatcodes.html

  • automatic inactivity logout:

    • append to /etc/profile. These are overridden by values in .profile (if not readonly)
    • export readonly TMOUT=600 (ksh) export readonly TIMEOUT=600 (bsh)

  • md5sum of a cd:

    • dd if=/dev/cdrom bs=2048 | md5sum

  • Set the current tty terminal to a certain size

    • resize -s 46 127

  • Ask before overwriting files.

    • copy: cp -i
    • move: mv -i

  • Linux "TSRs"

    • Run something from the shell which will persist even when the shell is closed.
    • nohup command&exit

  • Window title

    • Set the title of the current terminal window
    • echo -e "\e]2;This is the new window title\a"

  • Appending to the path

    • export PATH="/foo/bar/baz/:$PATH

  • Adjusting reserved blocks

    • (tune2fs)
    • tune2fs -m 1 /dev/hda10

  • You could create a dedicated file system with "-T largefile" or "-T largefile4" which will give you one inode for every one and four megabytes respectively. (untested)

Configuration ∞

See dotfiles

Misc:
X11
X11 apps

In X-Windows, using the keyboard instead of a mouse ∞

(X)

Say you don't have a mouse, but you want to use X. Well, you can use X without a mouse..

from http://linux.topology.org/xcursor.html

You enable and disable it by hitting control-shift-numberlock. The PC-speaker beeps.

Then you use the number pad to move around:

 / * -   select mouse buttons: first, second, third in that order
 . 8 .   becomes         .       up      .
 4 . 6   becomes         left    .       right
 . 2 .   becomes         .       down    .
  • Holding one of 2,4,6,8 down and pressing number 5 down speeds the mouse

up.

  • Pressing 5 down on its own does a mouse click with the current button.
  • Pressing + down on its own does a double-click with the current button.
  • 0 clicks and holds down the current button.

  • . releases the button that 0 held down.

KDE ~/.thumbnails directory ∞

(KDE)

It's ok to delete the contents. Also see this script:

Display commandline characters properly ∞

(This is an older note from an older Slackware installation, and I don't know if it's accurate)

Make sure that extended characters are displayed properly at the commandline level:

~/.initrc
set convert-meta off
set input-meta on
set output-meta on

Setting the date and time ∞

See Linux date and time setting

C compiler cannot create executables ∞

./configure
creating cache ./config.cache
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler (gcc  ) works... no
configure: error: installation or configuration problem: C compiler cannot create executables.

Reproduced on Slackware 10.0, but has also been seen on earlier versions and could probably happen on other Linux distributions.

Resolution:

installpkg /mnt/cdrom/slackware/l/glibc-2.3.2-i486-6.tgz

or otherwise get GNU libc installed, probably best done with a package specific to your distro and version

For PCLinuxOS it is:

apt-get install gcc-g++

alternatively, on Unity Linux I once got:

configure: error: C++ compiler cannot create executables

and did

smart-root install gcc-g++

--

Later on, I solved it with

smart-root install gcc-c++

Linux and Scroll Mice ∞

Works under Slackware 10.0

(xorg.conf)

/etc/X11/xorg.conf
# Enable the scroll wheel
# Option "Protocol"    "PS/2"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

adding to the path ∞

PATH="/usr/local/ActiveTcl/bin:$PATH"
export PATH

or:

export PATH="/usr/local/X11/bin:$PATH"

Partitioning schemes ∞

I used to do things like this:

hda:
1  p ext3  8    (/boot?)
3  p fat16 500
5  l ext3  500   /         rw,errors=remount-ro
6  l ext3  50    /var      rw?
7  l ext3  50    /home     rw?
8  l ext3  ~700  /tmp      rw?
9  l ext3  1000  /usr      rw?
10 l ext3  7000  /_archive rw,nosuid
11 l ext3  30000 /_mp3     rw,noexec,nosuid
2  p swap  200   (swap)

I don't have the security settings on me.. I think I mucked around briefly. Nothing special.

  • 500MBs for / may not be enough later, but it's reasonable for now.
  • /usr shouldn't be nosuid, as some apps need it.
  • /usr and /home could have been mixed in with /archive but I thought it would be cleaner to separate them. I may run out of room with a 1GB /usr partition, but it's okay for now.
  • /home partition was made solely to appease certain strange circumstances. Under most circumstances I'll be symlinking out from that partition into another to provide more space where necessary.
  • /var holds logs, some keep this small to force awareness of runaway problems. Logs need to be rotated using a cron job.. I've been told that email and news goes here, which may be a bad thing, since I may need more space for news. Must confirm which apps use this space for news.

  • One can fix large archive partitions to use less inodes to not waste so much disk space.

directory indexing ∞

Directory indexing is a performance enhancement:

tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/x

To re-index existing directories (must not be mounted):

e2fsck -D -f /dev/x

TODO - How do I know if a partition is already indexed?

start a second x session ∞

startx -- :1 vt8
  • could be done to have a root x-session for administration
  • could have another user with other tools, or another window manager
  • .. might be able to have the same user with a different window manager, but that would require some voodoo.

  • I do this trivially with my Devuan as of 2016-12-12

cannot connect to X server :0.0 ∞

SOMEEXECUTABLE: cannot connect to X server :0.0

fix with

xhost +

.. revert with

xhost -

run a command as root (using Pam) ∞

Tested 2009-04-26 on PCLinuxOS (version not recorded)

2020-08-11 -- For some reason, BlogText is having a fit about editing this file when ../../ is inside of a code block.

As root, do:

\cd  /usr/bin

\ln --symbolic ../../usr/bin/consolehelper leafpad-root

\cp  /etc/pam.d/synaptic  /etc/pam.d/leafpad-root
\ln  --symbolic  /usr/bin/leafpad  /usr/sbin/leafpad-root

Now I can do interesting things with the new leafpad-root command.

For example, I could edit my Openbox rc.xml and make a hotkey to edit a file as root.

<keybind key="A-S-F5">
  <action name="Execute">
    <command>leafpad-root /path/to/filename.ext</command>
  </action>
</keybind>

Speed improvements ∞

Reading and resources ∞

Stuff ∞

USB devices ∞

Physical backups ∞

This project is dead because I decided to continue with doing backups on secondary and tertiary hard drives.

Randomness ∞

Footnotes

Last updated 2020-12-29 at 02:15:40

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