linportal's blog

Mounting samba share with space character from /etc/fstab

If you have a windows share with a space character in it's name, e.g. something like \\server\my share, to properly mount it from /etc/fstab you need to use the octal code instead of a space character. Otherwise parsing /etc/fstab would produce an error, because space character is a delimiter.

The octal code for space character is \040 (don't forget the leading zero!), so you'd put //server/my\040share in the /etc/fstab for the example above.

Key sequence to kill the X server (Control + Alt + Backspace)

Current default for X servers as shipped in various distributions is to not enable the traditional Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to kill the X server. If you would like to re-enable this feature, you may do so in your desktop's Keyboard Preferences application. You may also enable it for the current session using the command "setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp".

Selecting preferred window manager in Gnome 2.26

Gnome 2.26 packages are slowly entering Debian unstable, and at one time my desktop stopped starting compiz after login, but instead default Gnome window manager metacity would start. So my method of selecting window manager by putting WINDOW_MANAGER="compiz" in .gnomerc definitely stopped working. Further inspection revealed that now window manager can be selected only by setting relevant gconf key to some value.

Full screen flash not working under compiz?

If you have trouble maximizing those YouTube videos when run under compiz-fusion, here's what you can do to fix it.

Go to CompizConfigSettingsManager, choose General Options and unclick 'Unredirect Fullscreen Windows' option under General tab. Then click Back and select 'Workarounds'. Turn on 'Legacy Fullscreen Support'. Of course, 'Workarounds' plugin must be enabled on the front page for this to come in effect.

And that should be it!

Now try maximizing flash videos again and report you success below.

Running Nvidia display drivers with X.Org 7.3

This morning, hardworking Debian developers pushed the remaining pieces of the brand new X.Org 7.3 to Debian sid (unstable) distribution. And it must be said, a well done job!

ii  x11-apps            7.3+1      X applications
ii  x11-common          1:7.3+2    X Window System (X.Org)
ii  x11-session-utils   7.3+1      X session utilities
ii  x11-utils           7.3+1      X11 utilities
ii  x11-xfs-utils       7.3+1      X font server utilities
ii  x11-xkb-utils       7.3+1      X11 XKB utilities
ii  x11-xserver-utils   7.3+1      X server utilities
ii  xbase-clients       1:7.3+2    miscellaneous X clients - metapackage
ii  xorg                1:7.3+2    X.Org X Window System
ii  xorg-dev            1:7.3+2    the X.Org X Window System development
ii  xserver-xorg        1:7.3+2    the X.Org X server
ii  xutils              1:7.3+2    X Window System utility programs

Building Debian FreeRadius package with EAP/TLS/TTLS/PEAP support

Debian's FreeRadius package is built without support for EAP/TLS/TTLS/PEAP because of the licensing problems of the OpenSSL library. But, if you want to implement 802.1x network authentication with strong security, you'll need it. This is a short tutorial that explains how to build Debian (sid aka unstable) package linked to libssl and with EAP/TLS/TTLS/PEAP support compiled in.

First, download the newest source package (orig.tar.gz), Debian diffs (diff.gz) and description file (dsc) from the freeradius package page. The version I tested the procedure with is 1.1.7-1.

Renegotiate ethernet card link speed / duplex

Due to software or hardware (network switch or ethernet card) error it may be possible that you need to restart auto-negotiation on the ethernet device. Here's how to do it:

mii-tool -r eth0

or

ethtool -r eth0

Then check the kernel log to see what happens:

% dmesg
eth0: link down
eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1

Thanks for this tip goes to Vivek.

Nvidia Linux driver 100.14.11 and Linux kernel 2.6.23

Well, they're not working together. Unless you're not willing to tweak it a little bit. So, out of the box, you won't be able to test brand new Linux CFS scheduler, merged in the 2.6.23-rc1 release, if you drive your Nvidia card with the proprietary driver. I guess that's what we get for running binary drivers.

Your ATI Radeon very slow on Xorg X server 1.3?

This one has bothered me for a long time. The solution is, of course, simple. But, I still don't understand why was it necessary to force users to search so hard for this piece of information, where all the older X server releases worked OK out of the box?

If you find that after upgrading to X.Org 7.3 your display becomes very slow, and you own ATI Radeon, all you need to do is to put this line in the Device section of your xorg.conf:

Replaying terminal sessions with scriptreplay

OK, this is so cool and sexy, I really don't understand how I didn't find about this earlier. Possibly because it's the recent add-on to the well known script utility?

So, I suppose you all know about script. You type script, do your work, type exit, and you have your complete session logged in the file named typescript. Quite handy if you want to log everything you did in the shell for whatever reasons.

What you might not know is that script has an interesting switch which allows you to also save the exact timing data of the screen output you're capturing. And an additional utility called scriptreplay which can later replay your session in real-time. Like a movie. With perfect timing.

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