You have been warned This post shows how to cripple the installation of a Debian package, and make the system think it went through OK. This might very well bring your system’s behavior towards the exotic, unless you know perfectly what you’re doing. In some few cases, like the one shown below, it might actually [...]
There are many ways to ask a Linux machine how it’s doing. I’ve collected a few of them, mostly for my own reference. I guess I’ll add more items as I run across new ones. General Info inxi -Fxxxz (neat output, but makes the system send me security “password required” alert mails because of attempts [...]
When Bluetooth goes poof Having rebooted my computer after a few months of continuous operation, I suddenly failed to use my Bluetooth headphones. It took some time to figure out that the problem wasn’t with the Cinnamon 3.8.9 fancy stuff, nor the DBus interface, which produced error messages. There was simply no Bluetooth device in [...]
TL;DR Bought an Orico PCIe adapter for USB 3.0 for testing a USB device I’m developing (PVU3-5O2I). It has the VL805 chipset (1106/3483) which isn’t xHCI compliant. So it works only with the vendor’s own drivers for Windows, which you’ll have to struggle a bit to install. Update: Be sure to read the comments at [...]
Instead of using my scanner, I put my cell phone on some kind of stand, and shot a lot of paper documents (voice activation is a blessing). But then the files are unnecessarily large. Don’t need all that resolution. So $ for i in * ; do convert “$i” -scale ’33%’ -quality 75 “smaller/scan_$i” ; [...]
On a test computer, I use /dev/sda1 to contain whatever operating system I need for the moment. At some point, I installed Linux Mint 19.1 properly on that partition, and then I wanted to return to Windows 10. After writing the Windows 10 image to /dev/sda1, I got a message from grub saying it didn’t [...]
Introduction Trying to solve a 90 second wait-on-some-start-job on each boot situation, I found that there’s little info on how to tackle a problem like this out there. Most web pages usually go “I did this, hurray it worked!”, but where do you start solving a problem like this if none of the do-this-do-that advice [...]
Introduction After installing wireshark (and tons of packages it depends on) on a rather fresh and bare-boned Debian 8 (Jessie), I got the “A start job is running for sys-subsystem-net-devices-eth0.device” message for a minute and half on every boot. It was exceptionally difficult to find the reason, because so many packages were installed along with [...]
The incident All of the sudden, playing videos with Mplayer opened a black window. Sometimes going fullscreen helped, sometimes it didn’t, sometimes with video playing but without OSD. ffplay worked, but somewhat limping. Setting: Linux Mint 19 on an x86_64, with a couple of fanless GeForce GT 1030 graphics cards and Cinnamon 3.8.9. Mplayer’s output [...]
TL;DR: SELECT queries in Perl for numerical columns suddenly turned to zeros after a software upgrade. This is a really peculiar problem I had after my web hosting provider upgraded some database related software on the server: Numbers that were read with SELECT queries from the database were suddenly all zeros. Spoiler: It’s about running [...]