Some handy command line tools to burn CDs/DVDs and work with .iso files: Burning .iso files: Basic usage of wodim (formally know as cdrecord): wodim dev=/dev/DEVICE image.iso Replace DEVICE with the name of your drive, e.g. hda. You might need to be root/use sudo or have the appropriate permissions to access the device. If your [...]
Read more ›I use both the zsh and bash shell, and most of the time I run them in screen. This happens in my favourite terminal: urxvt (aka rxvt-unicode). I have a pretty consistence terminal title in both shells. I use hostname[last part of current path]: I have the following in my ~/.zsh: if [[ ${TERM} == [...]
Read more ›We had a problem with the nagios check_mailq plugin at work, it kept timing out. So I wrote a simple bash script (instead of 610 lines of perl) which is “compatible” with check_mailq (supports the same arguments) which uses “exim4″ and is very quick. Just drop it in /usr/local/bin/check_mailq_simple.sh and adjust your nagios conf to [...]
Read more ›I decided to bring my Powerbook Titanium back into service as a server/torrent fetcher. So I downloaded ArchLinux PPC and installed it. I just followed the instructions available in the ArchLinux wiki, and here are my notes on the installation. Install issues I experienced 2 issues with the /arch/quickinstall script. First it failed because wget [...]
Read more ›I’m using Xine as the preferred video player on my MythTV frontend, because it has a nice video output driver called “xxmc”. This driver enables hardware accelerated playback of mpeg1/2 streams (e.g. ivtv recordings or DVDs) on Geforce 7xxx and other Geforce chips. The driver should fall back to the xv driver if the stream [...]
Read more ›Even though a Xfce panel is “hidden” (i.e. “Autohide” is enabled) 3 pixels of it is still visible. But there is an easy way to hide it completely (Requires Xfwm4′s compositor to be enabled): Right click on the panel you want to hide, select “Customize panel” Set “Transparency” to 100% Click “Make active panel opaque” [...]
Read more ›My MythTV frontend depends on the masterbackend to be up and running, mainly because some partitions are nfs mounted. So I created a simple script to check if the backend is responding to ping: #!/bin/bash function isup() { ping -q -n -c1 -w2 BACKEND_IP > /dev/null if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then sleep [...]
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