Linux HowTo

There is a possibility to run terminal commands inside Vim. Just type: :! command [Hit Enter] Also you can invoke a shell inside Vim: :! bash [Hit Enter] Also Vim has third party addons (vim-shell) that allow to use shell in more natural manner. But I would not recommend you to use Vim this way. There is much better way to achieve the same things - just use screen . It allows you to split your terminal vertically by pressing Ctrl-A S. Then you can use Ctrl-A Tab or Ctrl-A Ctrl-I to switch between them.

I've recently upgraded to xorg-x11 1.6 (it is shipped with several up-to-date Linux distributions like OpenSuSe 11.2) and encountered a problem with my keyboard. All keypresses repeated twice, which made impossible to use xorg-server. After looking through /var/log/Xorg.0.log I found that somehow Xserver decided to add my keyboard twice. So all events from the keyboard were processed two times. I fixed this problem by adding this line to xorg.conf into Section "ServerFlags" block Option "AutoAddDevices" "off"

If you need to watch the realtime sound output level on some graphical meter, you might consider difficult to find the program for these needs. After some searching I found nice software called ameter especially for these functions. This program can be used with the most of ALSA and OSS apps. After program installation you should create .asoundrc in your home directory with the following contents: pcm_scope.ameter { type ameter } pcm_scope_type.ameter { lib /usr/local/lib/libameter.so } pcm.ameter { type meter slave.pcm 'hw:0,0' #can be hw or hw:0,1 etc... scopes.0 ameter } pcm.dsp0 ameter The program source can be downloaded from here Also I have created an ebuild for easy installation on Gentoo Linux. Simply add it to your local overlay # Copyright 1999-2009 Gentoo Foundation # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 # $Header: $ EAPI="2" DESCRIPTION="Alsa meter plugin for audio software with GUI" HOMEPAGE="http://laugeo.free....

If you want to get temperature of your hard drive, you can simply run # hddtemp /dev/sda This method has one disadvantage - hddtemp must be executed as root, otherwise you will get /dev/sda: open: Permission denied But there is a quick solution to run hddtemp as a normal user. Most Linux distributions have hddtemp daemon. After you run it you should be able to use just telnet or netcat as a normal use to get your hard drive temperature: ~ telnet localhost 7634

If you are using Google Custom Search on your site, you may wonder how to change the count of search results per page. Okay, if you take a look at the custom search form html code, you will find this line <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js"></script> Now open this script in browser and look into the code itself. This line does the trick h=(h=b.googleNumSearchResults)?Math.min(h,20):10 It checks if the variable googleNumSearchResults exists and if true, the count of search results per page will be set to minimum value from googleNumSearchResults and 20. If the googleNumSearchResults is not set, the count of search results per page will be set to 10. So you can easily customize the results count by adding this line to your custom search form code (remember you can't get more than 20 results per page) var googleNumSearchResults = 15;

I've been looking for application simular to mythfrontend that can play Live TV from MythTV server (mythbackend) under Windows for a while. Currently there is a windows port of mythfrontend but it needs to be built from source with MinGW/MSys. So I searched for an easier way and found pretty good application called MythTV Player. It doesn't require any additional software or multimedia codecs and simply works out of the box. It is still in development stage so you may experience some issues during video playback, but after almost week of hard usage there was quite few player hangs and no other noticeable bugs. Here is the screenshot and the download link MythTv Player latest version

The one of the biggest problems of usb flash drives is a slow data write speed. This article will guide you through the process that can possibly increase your flash stick write speed. Okay, first I bought Transcend 8GB usb flash stick. It had been formatted with FAT32 filesystem initially. So I decided to run data read/write speed test. Mount the filesystem and execute following # hdparm -t /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing buffered disk reads: 102 MB in 3.05 seconds = 33.43 MB/sec $ dd count=100 bs=1M if=/dev/urandom of=/media/disk/test 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 29.5112 s, 3.6 MB/s The disk read speed is good enough, but the write speed is not so good. That's because most of NAND flash drives (the most commonly used flash sticks) have 128k erase block size. Filesystems usually have 4k (4096 bytes) block size. And here we came into problem. If the filesystem blocks are not aligned to flash drive blocks, the performance overhead during disk writ...