Archive for the 'GNU/Linux' Category

10
Feb

Limiting apt-get download speed

create file /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/76download with content:

Acquire
{
Queue-mode "access";
http
{
Dl-Limit "25";
};
};

That limits apt-get to 25KB/s

10
Dec

I’m just an old chunk of coal, but I’m gonna be a diamond some day

A good ol’ from Ubuntu *and* Debian bugs:

Dimitrios Symeonidis wrote on 2008-10-14: (permalink)

this bug will soon celebrate it’s 3rd birthday. it’s marked as confirmed, high importance, and reported upstream (debian). are we going to do something about it, or are we just waiting for debian to resolve this?

(Emphasis added for extra lulz)

23
Jan

SoX, yeah!

ls -1 *.wav | while read FILE; do sox "$FILE" -r 22050 "NOVO/$FILE" compand 0.001,0.15 -28,-inf,-24,-24 -0.3 0 0 resample -qs; done
22
Nov

Remove comments and empty lines sed one-liner

sed -e 's/#.*//' -e 's/[ ^I]*$//’ -e ‘/^$/ d’

…so I don’t have to think of it again.

10
Nov

Deluge Torrent and Etch Backports

Simply wonderful.

I don’t have to get it from testing and “break” my stable box with mixed trees!

21
Oct

backports as default, stable as fallback

Add to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main contrib non-free

Add to /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=etch-backports
Pin-Priority: 750
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700

Add to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00Cache:
APT::Cache-Limit "33554432";
APT::Default-Release "etch-backports";

Do:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

11
Oct

htmldoc

htmldoc --size a4 --linkstyle plain --webpage --no-jpeg --tocheader ... --tocfooter ... --top 0 --bottom 20 --right 20 --left 20 -f book.pdf *.html

11
Oct

Nice webserver uptime

Just checked:

imp@extweb:~> uptime
2:34pm up 674 days 3:03, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.11, 0.09

20
Jul

Apt pinning: installing unstable packages on stable Debian

Minimal sources.list configuration.

/etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable main non-free contrib
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian testing main non-free contrib
deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib

When updgrading, stable versions of packages need to stay on stable. unstable versions are usually newer, so they overwrite stable versions if this is not properly handled with using Pin-Priority as stated below. If not explicitly requested, “apt-get install” installs stable version of a package.

/etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

To install f.e. unstable version of a package with dependencies from unstable as well (preferred method, AFAIK), do the following:
apt-get install package -t unstable

To install the same package, but to resolve it’s deps from stable:
apt-get install package/unstable

12
Jul

Ubuntu 7.04: first thoughts

So, I am about to replace the Linux distro on my desktops, on my laptop and desktop machine, so I’m considering my choices… Debian-based is the way to go, so it’s either Debian or Ubuntu.

I wouldn’t go pure, vanilla Debian because of it’s “correctness” (ok ok, I can add other repositories to the system, but it simply doesn’t feel… “native” enough?). I’ve tried Kubuntu, but it simply didn’t feel polished enough; it felt like Ubuntu’s bastard child, management wise (Adept, KDE based apt frontend, crashed on me several times, dist-upgrade from 6.10 depended on some GTK stuff which wasn’t installed automagically, so I had to figure out “by hand” what to install — more info on that on my Launchpad bug report, etc).

That lead me to try Gnome-based, good ol’ Ubuntu, and I have to say that so far, few glitches aside, it looks good. I haven’t used Gnome for some time now and it seems really nice. Gnome itself and Nautilus, as a file manager, really feel snappy and stable. Gnome Terminal looks nicer than before and more usable.

Anyway, as a regular nitpicker, few downsides. First, LILO didn’t install properly (Grub was complaining about residing on XFS, which is a no-no, eh?), so I had to manually edit lilo.conf, only to find out that some vital options are left out, such as “prompt”, “lba32″ and “compact”, framebuffer “vga” line, too, and I had to add the timeout… Hmm, some really pretty much expected stuff? Why are they left out? Beats me. Then, in fstab, vfat partition had fs_passno = 1, so it was checked on every boot. Onward to Gnome itself. Ugly, anti-aliased fonts? Unlike KDE, Gnome Font preferences don’t include an option to exclude some font size ranges from anti-aliasing, so everything is anti-aliased. Ok, I edited it by hand only to find out that the fonts that came with Ubuntu look terrible when not anti-aliased. I installed MS fonts and… what? They look ugly, too? Hmmm… I remember that Freetype has some bytecode interpreter option that makes those fonts look just like in Windows, but it is, to quote Freetype site, “potentially patent infringing”, so it’s disabled by default in Ubuntu… Damn that correctness. I found on Ubuntu forums a source for bytecode interpreter-enabled version of Freetype, so I installed that and FINALLY fonts looked BEARABLE. Then, the system doesn’t have Adobe Flash player installed as default. Ok, I can understand that, that perhaps in the licence it doesn’t allow automatic installation, or even inclusion in some other form like a Linux distro, but SuSE somehow managed to pull it off: the installer asks you whether you want to install that plugin nicely.

That’s it for the first thoughts, more on Ubuntu later (perhaps) heh.




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