General Gtkwave is a simple and convenient viewer of electronic waveforms. It’s a free software tool at its best: A bit rough to start working with, but after a while it becomes clear that the decisions have been made by someone who uses the tool himself. Really recommended. So here are my jumpstart notes for [...]
It worked all so nicely on my Fedora 12 machine, and then on Ubuntu 14.04.1 it failed colossally: $ make gcc -Wall -O3 -g -lusb-1.0 -c -o bulkread.o bulkread.c gcc -Wall -O3 -g -lusb-1.0 -c -o usberrors.o usberrors.c gcc -Wall -O3 -g -lusb-1.0 bulkread.o usberrors.o -o bulkread bulkread.o: In function `main’: bulkread.c:39: undefined reference to [...]
Emacs’ (and hence XEmacs’) VHDL mode has an annoying thing about hopping in and “help me” with composing code. Type “if” and it tells me I need to add an expression. Thanks. I wouldn’t have figured it out myself. So here’s how to disable this annoyance: Add in~/.xemacs/custom.el, to the custom-set-variables clause ‘(vhdl-electric-mode nil) ‘(vhdl-stutter-mode [...]
After finishing a backup to a USB stick, I like to verify that all is in place by reading through all files. Using the “tar” utility with verbose file output seemed to be a good idea. But… Don’t $ tar -cv . > /dev/null For whatever reason, the files aren’t really read. Only the names [...]
Trapping Call a function (byebye in this case) just before exiting a script: trap byebye exit Or a command: trap ‘echo “Farewell cruel world!”‘ exit It’s possible to catch various signals with “trap” as well. Quit on error In short: Have a set -e at the beginning of the script. It’s a global on-off feature, [...]
Introduction Wanting my media center computer to maintain consistent behavior and be tolerant to sudden power outages, I looked for a way to have the root filesystem read-only. This can cause problems with programs that expect to write to all kind of files allover, and media related software has this tendency to break when things [...]
Desktop wallpaper setting Get the current one: $ gsettings get org.cinnamon.desktop.background picture-uri ‘file:///usr/share/backgrounds/linuxmint/default_background.jpg’ And set it to another: $ gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.background picture-uri ‘file:///usr/share/backgrounds/linuxmint/edesigner_linuxmint.png’ Notes: The “file://” prefix is mandatory. There also an org.gnome.desktop.background attribute. Apparently, org.cinnamon.desktop.background overrides the former. For an effect on the screen, the “set” command must be run on the active [...]
Running Linux Mint 18.1 (kernel 4.4.0-53) on a Gigabyte Brix BACE-3160 (with an i915 graphics controller) , I had all kind of minor graphics artifacts (in particular a sluggish mouse pointer and Kodi felt heavy). So obviously, I went for updating the graphics stack. Intel supplies an tool for doing this automagically on a selected [...]
I needed to update a lot of releases, each designated by a tag, with a single fix, which took the form of a commit. This commit was marked with the tag “this”. #!/bin/bash for i in $(git tag | grep 2.0) ; do git checkout $i git cherry-pick this git tag -d $i git tag [...]
Single-source utilities This is the Makefile I use for compiling a lot of simple utility programs, one .c file per utility: CC= gcc FLAGS= -Wall -O3 -g ALL= broadclient broadserver multicastclient multicastserver all: $(ALL) clean: rm -f $(ALL) rm -f `find . -name “*~”` %: %.c Makefile $(CC) $< -o $@ $(FLAGS) The ALL variable [...]