Monthly Archives: June 2009

Working with lzma tarballs

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The Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm is a (at least in the Linux-world) relatively new compression method. It features a very high compression ratio that is generally much higher than bzip21. Unfortunately there a quite a few different implementations. So creating and extracting lzma archives on different Linux distrubutions will vary. While the latest Fedora comes with GNU tar 1.22, which has… Read more »

Convert filenames from iso-8859-1 to utf-8

Just as you can convert entire files from one charset to another, you can convert the filenames. For example: would recursively convert all files in the current directory from iso-8859-1 charset into utf-8. Well, not exactly. To finally rename the files you need the –notest flag. Otherwise convmv will perform a dry run without any changes.

Running a script on shutdown

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It’s rather easy to run a command or a script on boot without going through the full Sys V style init stuff. /etc/rc.local is executed after the init scripts on boot, but unlike BSD, Linux doesn’t have a rc.shutdown. So how can we execute a command on shutdown? Usually, /etc/init.d/halt is used for shutting down, which calls /sbin/halt.local (if it… Read more »

Unlocking a luks volume with a USB key

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A luks encrypted disk partition is great. The only thing that can bug you from time to time is that you have to specify the key before you can use it. Or maybe, if you try to mount the volume with /etc/fstab, you’ll be prompted for the password during boot. Wouldn’t it be great, if you could use a real… Read more »

Using udevadm to gather information about specific device

Usually, udevadm requires the sysfs device path of the device in question. But you can also ask udevadm which device path belongs to a certain device node. This gets really helpful if you combine these two queries. Example: You want to get a list of attributes for a specific device. You do not know the complete device path; all you… Read more »

Disabling GDM greeter sound on Fedora 11 [Update]

Due to a bug in GDM there currently is now way of preventing GDM from playing a sound when you login to your Fedora 11 box. This is especially annoying on notebooks, e.g. when you’re sitting in a meeting or in a (quiet) public place like a library. The only workaround (a bit dirty, granted) is to delete or rename… Read more »

GDM AutoLogin

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To login a certain user automatically at boot time, you have to change the daemon-section of your /etc/gdm/custom.conf: With ‘TimedLogin’ being a valid, non-root user and ‘TimedLoginDelay’ being the login delay in seconds. An overview of available configuration variables can be found on live.gnome.org