This page is a summary of hints and tricks that I have used to configure my GNU/Linux-machines.
Some of these may be useful, some may not, some could screw up your machine!
Kernel-config
RedHat-specific
Misc
User Applications
Sometimes when you've interrupted the compilation of a new kernel (for whatever reason) it's impossible
to restart the 'make' process. Even make clean won't work. You can solve this
(at least...it worked for me) by removing the file /usr/src/linux/.hdepend
After the latest upgrades from the manpages I was receiving this error (resulating from the
cron.daily/tmpwatch script) :
error: lstat() of directory /var/cache/man/X11R6/cat? failed: No such file or directory
This is easily fixed by creating the missing directory with
mkdir -p /var/cache/man/X11R6/cat
It's possible to search for specified content in several files. One remark, this works (obvious)
only for plain-text files.
find . -name '*.txt' | xargs grep -l findthisthing
This will search in the current directory for all files with extension *.txt for the string findthisthing.
Changing the system date is very easy.
date MMDDhhmm
Where MM is the month, DD is the day, hh are the hours
and mm are the minutes.
Sometimes when you run configure with different settings you will notice that it seems that your settings
are not reflected in the configure script. By removing the file config.cache before running the
configure script you're certain that you always use the latest settings.
This message can pop up when you try to build something from source. The problem here is the fact thay your software-clock
is not in sync with the hardware clock. Try adjusting both of them with date and hwclock
When you try to install the new zlib from source on a machine where there's already a zlib installed from RPM you can fail!
Standard configure, make, make install doesn't work. When you read the Makefile you'll notice a line
that says that you need to run ./configure -s for shared libraries. When you use this option, it will
install fine.
When you want to use your precious wheel mouse with X-applications (for example with KDE) you can configure it
in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. Just look for the section InputDevice and
there for the setting Option "protocol". When you're using a PS/2-mouse, you can replace
the existing protocol ("PS/2") with ImPS/2. Restart your X-server and you
should be ready to go.
Tired of burning countless iso-images that you've never used again? There's a way you can easily mount the iso-images
just like an ordinary cd-rom. Become root and create your mount-point. Then issue
mount -o loop,unhide -t iso9660 -r myiso.iso /path/to/mountpoint
Enter ssh-key-gen -t dsa.
Upload the pub-file to the other host and place it in .ssh.
First of all, you need to remove the .Xauthority files in your home-directory. I'm not sure
why but when I used it, my login just stalled after accepting the password. Removing these files
(both at the local computer and remote computer) solved the problem.
Next, on your local computer, start the X-server with
xinit
Now, in the X-terminal window start your ssh-connection to the remote host. Make sure X-forwarding
is enabled on both remote (sshd_config) and local (ssh_config) side.
Once you're logged in you can start all kinds of applications, even startkde should work.
Make sure your kernel supports ext3!!
First, create the journal with
tune2fs -j /dev/hdxx
After the conversion, adjust the file /etc/fstab so that it mounts with ext3.
Sometimes it is not possible to start SSH-sessions as a 'regular' user. The root-user doesn't have this problem. You can solve this by adding your regular user to the 'tty'-group.
When you arrive on a webpage that needs a special plug-in, chances are high that Mozilla will offer you
to download the Netscape plugin. When the plugin is correctly written, it will install itself in
both Netscape and Mozilla. Unfortunately, sometimes this is NOT true. For example the Real Audio Player
plugin only appears in Netscape. To use this plugin with Mozilla, you need to place a symbolic link
in the Mozilla-library to the plugin library of Netscape. Do this with :
ln -s /usr/lib/netscape/plugins/rpnp.so
This works in the same manner for all other plugins.
After a recent upgrade on ffmpeg the '-b' setting changed from accepting kilobytes to bytes. As a result whenever I tried to create ISO files from my recording I had files that where varying in size between 450 and 550 MB. Clearly not a DVD-style ISO. This can be changed by altering the file
/usr/share/mythtv/mytharchive/encoder_profiles/ffmpeg_dvd_pal.xml
and setting the correct (*1024) values for the -b parameter.