Today I installed Linux Mint on an Asus X551CA laptop. Everything was fine except Mint being shit and the damn Elantech touchpad being even worse than Mint. I will never understand why the fuckers at Canonical and whoever is in charge of Mint development are always 6 months late with important updates like new kernels with added hardware support. The damn Elantech touchpad is supported since kernel 3.12., too bad Mint is stuck with 3. …

Since fstab (even with <em>nofail</em> option enabled) doesn’t seem to behave too good when trying to mount at boot something that isn’t actually plugged in (like an USB HDD) I realized it was a good idea to write a small script to run at startup which will be able to handle the situation a bit better. Arch Linux uses Systemd and even though a rc.local file can be created I decided to take the opportunity to understand a little bit of how it works and write a mount script for it. …

From wikipedia: Avahi is a FLOSS Zero-configuration networking (zeroconf) implementation, including a system for multicast DNS/DNS-SD service discovery. Long story short: Avahi is used to resolve hostnames of LAN devices. I happen to have an ARM box on which runs a pretty minimal Arch Linux installation. Installing Avahi is pretty easy: [root@k* ~]# pacman -S avahi nss-mdns The latest version of Avahi (0.6.31-11) makes use of SO_REUSEPORT which is a new feature introduced in Linux kernel 3. …

To password protect a directory xyz and every file and subdirectory in it open the configuration file (nginx.conf or one of the virtual host configuration files) and add the following two lines: location /xyz/ { auth_basic "Restricted Area"; auth_basic_user_file conf.d/htpasswd; } htpasswd file must be encrypted, it can be created using a tool named htpasswd. [root@xenserver ~]# cd /etc/nginx/conf.d/ [root@xenserver ~]# htpasswd -b htpasswd user password

XenServer, like many other bare-metal hypervisors, only supports a small bunch of RAID controllers. The difference between it and for example VMware ESXi is that XenServer is pretty much a CentOS minimal install with some proprietary administration tools and a pretty decent remote manager (only for Windows as long as I know…) while ESXi is a completely proprietary closed source blob. XenServer being based on CentOS makes it possible to do many weird unsupported things, like installing it on a software fake RAID on ICH8R. …

Let’s say we have a big single FLAC file we want to split into multiple files, we are on Fedora and we don’t want to use anything but the command line. First of all: [root@fedora ~]$ yum install lame ffmpeg shntool cuetools To split the single FLAC file run: [user@fedora ~]$ shnsplit -o flac -f file_name.cue -t "%n - %p - %t" file_name.flac This will produce n single files, -t parameter is used to specify file name format (in this case: track_number – performer – track_name). …

One year ago or so I wrote about my experience using the Logitech G500 on Linux, I like the mouse a lot, especially the scroll wheel, but there were also a couple of issues I couldn’t live with: no driver for Linux, tuning DPI settings is a real PITA; the fucker doesn’t track on close to every surface, be it a gadget mousepad you got for free at a meeting, a wooden table, a plastic-something table or a 20 € mousepad. …

Long story short: in Fedora 20 (and as far as I remember also 19 and 18) XScreenSaver doesn’t power off the monitor backlight when locking the screen. Being the lazy ass I am it took like me 2 or 3 years to find the motivation to solve the issue. It was actually pretty simple, no need to edit some obscure config file or else, in XFCE just click on: Application menu -> Settings -> Screensaver. …