Linux HowTo

If you've recently upgraded to MySQL 5.1.45, you might experience a problem running mysql client. The error message says: /usr/bin/mysql: unknown variable 'character-set-server=utf8' The reason is that mysql client no longer supports character-set-server parameter. Actually I don't know why, the official ChangeLog doesn't include any explanations. The solution is to disable character-set-server option inside /etc/mysql/my.cnf [mysql] character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets #character-set-server=utf8

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;