Linux

Suspending to RAM on Debian laptop

Posted April 17th, 2008 by Huahai
in

I am tracking Debian sid on my Thinkpad laptop, a few months ago it started to use pm-utils and broke suspending to RAM (sleep) functionality. Basically, the machine would go to sleep then immediately resume.
It turned out that this problem can be easily fixed by creating a file /etc/pm/config.d/local, and put in a line

SUSPEND_MODULES="e1000"

The reason is that pm-utils by default does not unload Ethernet card module e1000, so the machine would be waken up by Ethernet card activities.

How to load context of text files into DB2

Posted December 29th, 2007 by Yunyao
in

The task is fairly simply --- I need to load the content of some text files into DB2. There are many ways to do so, but since I only need to this only once (hopefully), I want to find an easy way without writing any external code.

So here is the solution:

(1) create a table containing a CLOB (VARCHAR should work as well, if we know the maxium size of the files in advance) column. For example:

create table test (docid INTEGER GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY,doc CLOB)

Reference to Individual Email Message in Plain Text File

Posted December 13th, 2007 by Huahai
in

A lot of people implement GTD methodology entirely with Gmail. I don't feel comfortable doing that because gmail is not that secure. And I think depending on a network service is a bad idea for a GTD system. So I still download all my emails to my local computers.

An Mac Look for my KDE Desktop

Posted December 5th, 2007 by Huahai
in
Mac look on KDE

Although I have never laid my hands on an Apple computer, I have seen people going crazy about them. I remember seeing some kids shouting hysterically in front of Apple store on the release day of Tiger a few years ago. The user interface of Apple's OS is said to be one of the selling points. So when I was feeling tired of Mepis Linux's default look last night, I decided to try an OS X look for a change. It turned out to be relatively easy to do.

KDE widget

Use Vim as Info Page Browser

Posted November 29th, 2007 by Huahai
in

In this post, I set up vim as a manual page viewer, using ManPageView plugin. It turned out that the same plugin can be used to view info pages as well. All one needs to to is to add ".i" suffix to the command that you are seeking help on. For example, ":Man sed.i" will show the info page for sed. With this information, we can set up vim as info page browser, just add these lines in ~/.bashrc:

Reverse/Forward Search with Latex-Suite in Vim

Posted November 22nd, 2007 by Huahai
in

When editing a long Latex document, it is beneficial to be able to point from current location in DVI back to Tex, and vice visa. This is what called reverse/forward search between DVI and Latex. With Latex-Suite in Vim, this functionality is already implemented, and there's no need to specify "\usepackage scrltx" in the Tex file. However, it's not fully configured by default. Forward search with "\ls" works, but inverse search by "Ctrl-Left click" in xdiv is not enabled.

kmail hangs due to missing loopback interface

Posted November 22nd, 2007 by Huahai
in

My /etc/network/interfaces got deleted when I removed mepis-network package. Everything was fine, except that kmail would hang since IP address 127.0.0.1 doesn't exist. It took me half an hour to figure it out. Had to create the file with these lines in it:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Now things went back to normal.

Dual head with xrandr 1.2 revisited

Posted November 16th, 2007 by Huahai
in

In this post, I discussed "clone" mode of dual head with xrandr 1.2. Now I got an extra monitor, and would like to use "xinerama" mode, wherein the built-in laptop LCD and the external monitor share a single virtual screen. To set this up, I changed my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to add a monitor section for the external monitor:


Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel 965GM"
Driver "intel"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Screen 0
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"

Complete OpenSSH Client Public Key Solution on Debian

Posted November 12th, 2007 by Huahai
in

My work requires me to connect to many different SSH servers, and I have different passwords for each server. It's a pain in the neck trying to type in many different passwords everyday. The obvious solution is to use OpenSSH's public key login solution, so passwords are no longer needed to connect to SSH servers from a single client (e.g. my office desktop).

Key Generation and Distribution

To use public key authentication, it is necessary to generate a pair of keys on your client machine. Do the following as normal user:


mkdir ~/.ssh

Backup Linux Laptop with USB Hard-disk Enclosure: a Lightweight Solution

Posted November 12th, 2007 by Huahai
in

Most of Linux laptop users have done some customizations on the system so it works the way we wanted. Now we want to save the fruit of our hard labor in case bad things happen. We want to backup not just the /home directory, but the whole / directory, minus some runtime generated files. In the past I have used some heavy-weight applications such as unison and backuppc. These worked well, but they required setting up servers that run all the time.

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