![[Tux]](../images/tux.gif)
Linux information
(being a collection of papers, tips, and links Akkana considers
to be worth sharing with the world).
And I keep some of my
configuration files
on GitHub, online in case they're useful to anyone.
Some of My Linux-Related Articles
Most of these are old.
There are a lot more recent articles on
my blog, "Shallow Thoughts";
in particular, if you only want the Linux related articles, use the
Linux tag.
Some Linux-Related Presentations:
(Most of these recorded video and asked for slides, but they're not
always easily findable.)
Older Articles (likely out of date)
Articles on external sites
Quick Tips
Fun or useful little hacks I've discovered which aren't
major enough to deserve a page of their own.
General
- For window managers which don't display background images,
like openbox or the debian builds of icewm, good options are
feh, hsetroot, or
xsetbg (part of the xloadimage package).
- Need to know who's using a file? (Perhaps so you can eject a
CD or rmmod a driver.)
fuser pathname
I can't believe I went this long without knowing about fuser.
- If you've been beating yourself up trying to get a parallel
printer working, check the BIOS and try "ECP/EPP".
Linux is pickier than Windows about parallel port settings,
and newer Linux versions are pickier than older ones.
Sound
- If your distro doesn't remember your volume setting properly,
you can use aumix to set it at boot time or when you start up X.
For instance, put a line like this in ~/.xinitrc :
aumix -v 70 -p 100
- I recorded a sound that had dead space at the beginning and end,
and wanted to cut out the dead space. I couldn't find a linux
sound editor (everybody points to snd, but that's a huge bloated
lisp-driven package that requires installing a whole separate
version of guile, and I didn't want to deal with it; I installed
glame but it dumped core when I tried to edit a .wav with it).
But I discovered that emacs works fine for editing sounds.
It was pretty obvious which part of the file was the dead space
and which part was the real content, so I just cut out most of
the dead space parts and wrote the file (no, don't put a newline
on the end. :-) play complained "Premature EOF on .wav
input file" (I guess a .wav must have something at the beginning
saying how long it is) but "sox fil.wav fil2.wav" fixed that.
- (Related to previous tip) If you don't have a microphone, you
can plug headphones into the microphone port and talk into them.
Mozilla
- You can go to a URL in Mozilla or Netscape by selecting the URL
in any application, then clicking the middle mouse in Mozilla's main
content area. No need to go clear the URLbar first, paste there
and hit return -- the single middle click is much faster.
Once you try it you'll wonder how you lived without it.
- (General browser tip, not just for linux:)
If you don't already know about browser bookmarklets, they're
pretty amazing.
Here's some
information about them. But they're not just for the
personal toolbar (I don't even use one); if you give a bookmark
a keyword (at least in mozilla) you can then invoke that bookmarklet
from the urlbar. For instance, I have a bookmarklet with keyword
"bug" that goes to "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s"
and if I type "bug 12345" in the urlbar (or paste it into browser
content) I get taken to that mozilla bug. Awesome!
- To replace the Mozilla splash screen with your own,
convert your splash to an xpm named splash.xpm
(you can do this with the convert tool from ImageMagick,
convert youricon.jpg splash.xpm)
then put splash.xpm into mozilla's lib directory (wherever
Mozilla keeps its plugins and chrome and so forth).
It may have to be a specific size.
Shallow Sky home
...Akkana