After a “find” operation spanning the entire disk, I suddenly had System Monitor (2.28.0 of Fedora 12) telling me that 11.5 GB out of the existing 16 GB were used up, and the applet said 75% was “in use by programs”. Really. Virtually nothing was running on the system. Just to be sure, I tried [...]
Fedora 12: It started with some error message about something crashing, and the Workspace Switcher applet was gone. I tried re-adding it to the panel, but I got an error window saying that the panel encountered a problem while loading “OAFIID:GNOME_WorkspaceSwitcherApplet”. And offered me to delete it from the panel. Or not delete it. Nothing [...]
Trying to insmod a kernel module, which was just compiled against the true headers of the running kernel, I got: # insmod mymodule.ko insmod: error inserting ‘mymodule.ko’: -1 Invalid module format And this in /var/log/syslog: mymodule: version magic ’3.3.0-xxx SMP preempt mod_unload ARMv7 ‘ should be ’3.3.0-xxx+ SMP preempt mod_unload ARMv7 ‘ Really? Are you [...]
Since daylight saving time is an issue for political dispute in Israel, the time of switching back and forth changes all too often. To keep my computer on track, I need to update the timezone info file every now and then. There are a lot of tutorials on the web about this, for example these [...]
What happens if a Windows user loses his or her password? No problem, Windows was never meant to be secure. Only appear as if it was. There are several automatic tools out there. I preferred running my Fedora-based LiveUSB and fix it while actually seeing what I’m doing. The whole thing is about modifying the [...]
So there’s this huge pile of source code, with an enormous amount of functions and methods. How can you quickly find where each is defined? IDEs has this functionality built in, but it’s not so easy to push an already existing (and huge) project into an IDE. The solution is so simple. For example, $ [...]
Just a quick summary on how to compile my own cross-compiler in 20 minutes. Download from Buildroot’s home page Run “make xconfig”. The configuration is stored in .config Possibly set BR2_JLEVEL=8 for parallel compilation(even though 0 should just do it right according to the number of processors present) Pick little Endian ARM Cortex-9 for Xillinux [...]
The mission What I really needed was a proper timeout for a certain chunk of Perl code. There is alarm() of course, but one has to watch out with certain commands that cancel it (sleep() and other less expected functions). The script also uses “system()” to run processes outside the native Perl domain, so getting [...]
Every now and then, some USB device misbehaves badly enough to knock out the entire interface, to the extent that the system doesn’t detect any new USB devices. Or work so well with the existing ones, for that matter. The solution for me until now was to reboot the computer. But hey, I don’t like [...]
So I bought this $10 mini DV camera on EBay. Since the user’s manual is pretty out of sync with itself and the product (Chinese and English doesn’t match, even by looking at the specification and drawings) I’ve written down some basic howto, in case I need to remember what to do at a later [...]