Just got a used laptop from work today (a lenovo t60p) and decided to install Ubuntu 9.10 on it. Most things were working pretty smoothly, I got the fingerprint reader working by following some of the stuff on http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_enable_the_fingerprint_reader_with_ThinkFinger. I also got the hard drive protection stuff working which is pretty nifty, never had that [...]

I test software on SLES/SLED machines and it is always a pain trying to prepare images for re-use in other locations. SuSE uses hardware specific IDs for booting and configuring network interfaces by default so if you try to make an image and use it on another machine you are out of luck. Also, making [...]

Took me a while to figure out how to make a branch. There is an easy way to do it without even checking out a new local copy. Just:
svn copy https://your.svn.server/svn/location/trunk https://your.svn.server/svn/location/branches/branch_name -m “commit message”
All the work is done on the server. No mess locally and super quick…now I just need to figure out how [...]

Lots of different ways of creating keys and sending them to remote machines so you can login. This is just a quick reference for me and how I do it.
If you haven’t already done so, you need to create keys for your local machine:
ssh-keygen -t dsa
Next, store that key in the remote machine’s authorized_keys file:
cat [...]

If you are like me and like to install the newest versions of software and not just settle for the ones available from a package manager, you may have some trouble if you get to a point where you want to uninstall it if that project uses python’s setuptools or disttools for installation.
Using setup.py is [...]

I use several Windows based apps in Ubuntu under Wine and several times I have noticed that the text in some of the apps just don’t look right. Well, I found a good setup that makes all the fonts look like they are supposed to and also gives somewhat of a sharper look to Ubuntu [...]

So, I was adding applets to my panel and there was one that was messed up. I looked in the gconf-editor and noticed a ton of the applets that I was adding but they were not showing on the panel so I couldn’t delete them. Well, if you want to delete panel applets that you [...]

This is really for my own benefit and quick reference. Here is the command to setup a local tunnel to a remote machine using ssh:
ssh -f -L [local-bind-address]:{local-port}:{endpoint-machine}:{endpoint-port} -N user@ssh-host
The options used:
-f – go into background before executing any commands
-L – For port forwarding [bind address:] local port : host : hostport
-N – Don’t run [...]

Ever accidentally change permissions on a filesystem and don’t know what it was before or how to get it back? Me too…
I was messing around with openSuSE the other day. I installed it on another partition on my hard drive. I mounted my Ubuntu partition and was just trying to copying some stuff over. In [...]

I was just playing around with different feed readers lately. I enjoy Akregator because it gives me all the options I need and probably the feature that I like the most is that it displays the number of unread items in the system tray and can be minimized to the tray as well.
I have installed [...]