Linux: Yet Another Google Chrome “Aw, snap” solved.

“Aw, snap” in Google Chrome happens when a process (or thread?) involved with Chrome dies unexpectedly. I got quite a few of those, and learned to live with them for about a year, as I couldn’t figure out what caused them. It was clear that it had to do with Adobe Flash somehow, and that [...]

Issue with making a bootable Ubuntu 15.04 USB stick

I wanted to create a boot USB stick from an Ubuntu 15.04 desktop that was running in a Virtual machine. So I plugged in a clean USB stick, and picked “Startup Disk Creator” from the Launcher. Then picked the USB stick as the target, and waited for 15 minutes. When the utility was done, it [...]

Playing with Linux namespaces

Intro Linux namespaces is the foundation for container-based virtualization, which is becoming increasingly popular. Aside from the ability to isolate a shell (and the processes it generates) from the “main environment”, as is required for this kind of lightweight virtualization, namespaces is useful for overriding selected functionalities. So I’m jotting down things I use myself. [...]

Sample EDID info from a few monitors (video resolution parameters)

On Linux machines, there’s a command saying $ xrandr –verbose which outputs a lot of information about the display, in particular the EDID information obtained from the monitor. Among others, it’s a detailed listing of the video modes that the monitor is willing to accept. These modes are usually the standard VESA graphics modes, but [...]

Linux: Quick multiple page scanning with scanimage

It’s often required to scan a lot of pages in one go, even manually. The problem is that when doing individual scans, there’s a significant delay between each scans, as the computer initializes the scanner for each. The trick is to use scanimage’s batch scan feature. A typical command for scanning an 10 A4 pages [...]

ImageMagick convert from pdf to jpg and vice versa

To convert all pdfs into a jpgs with fairly good resolution (Linux, bash): for i in *.pdf ; do convert -density 300 “$i” “${i%%.*}.jpg” ; done Without the -density parameter, the result is pretty lousy. To prepare a lot of image scans for printing, into a single pdf doc: convert *.jpg -colorspace gray -contrast-stretch 1% [...]

Install an HP USB printer on Fedora 12

Just a quick note: The printer was connected via USB, but I sent jobs to it, and nothing happened. Solution: As root, type hp-setup and flow with the wizard (I unchecked the “fax” part). As non-root this didn’t work: It failed to install the queue, and asked me to rerun CUPS. But that didn’t help. [...]

Console kit stop and start on Fedora 12

Not clear if this is really useful, but since I’m at it: I killed the Console Kit daemon as root (by process number) and nothing happened except for the following in /var/log/messages: Apr 14 17:24:52 gnome-session[3378]: WARNING: Could not connect to ConsoleKit: Could not get owner of name ‘org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit’: no such name Apr 14 17:24:52 [...]

Making a video clip visualizing sound with libvisual on Ubuntu 14.04

Intro The purpose of this mini-project was to create a video clip with visualized audio, instead of just a dull still frame. Libvisual is the commonly used graphics engine for Linux’ media players, but I wanted the result in a file, not on the screen. Libvisual’s sources come with lv-tool, which is a command-line utility, [...]

Fixing the mouse sensitivity on Gnome 2

This related to my Fedora 12 machine with a Logitech M705 mouse. It had a generally bad feeling, I would say. This is actually written on this post already, with some more details on this one, but I prefer having my own routine and final values written down. So first get a list of input [...]