Author Archives: admin

Simulating a lowpass filter with gEDA and ngspice

Getting started with ngspice can be quite tricky. It’s a very powerful piece of software and although the user manual is quite comprehensive, its complexity can easily scare off beginners. Here’s a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to simulate a very simple electronic circuit. It should enable you to run your own simulations of circuits you designed.

Minimal privoxy tor configuration

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Privoxy is an extremely versatile and powerful non-caching web proxy. It’s often used in combination with Tor to anonymously surf the web. The downside to privoxy’s versatility is that it can be very difficult and complex to configure. The Tor wiki however has a nice minimal privoxy configuration example. Assumed Tor listens as SOCKS-proxy on your local host at port… Read more »

Generating puppet password hashes

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Puppet needs user passwords in configuration files to be encrypted in the format the local system expects. For Linux and most unix-like system, that means, you have to put the sha1 sum of the password into the configuration file. There are quite a few ways to generate those password hashes, e.g. You can then take the hash string and use… Read more »

fish kioslave and “Could not enter folder” error

The kioslave fish:/ enables you to access remote files through ssh, even if sftp is not installed on the remote host. It’s much more convenient than its cousin sftp:/, e.g. because dolphin remembers file associations etc. Unfortunately, fish:/ requires perl. It copies a perl script to the remote host and executes it there. So if you run into an error… Read more »

How to list rpm packages from certain repository

Usually, rpm –queryformat can be used to generate all sorts of rpm package listing. You could, for example, use the vendor tag to separate the packages that are tagged with RPM Fusion from the list of all installed packages (rpm -qa): Unfortunately, there is no 1:1 mapping between rpm’s vendor tag and the install repository. In some cases, the vendor… Read more »

KDE global shortcuts daemon stealing shortcuts (aka Netbeans Ctrl+Shift+I doesn’t work any more)

If Netbeans’ keyboard shortcut for fixing import statements (or any other shortcut) stops working, it could be the KDE global shortcuts daemon interfering12. Per default, Ctrl+Shift+I is bound to Kopete’s read message function, so if Kopete runs in background, Netbeans doesn’t catch the shortcut. Quick Fix: Close Kopete or simply remove the global shortcut. To check, if the kglobalaccel daemon… Read more »

Okular uses ridiculous amounts of memory

Especially on large pdf files, okular tends to occupy insane amounts of memory. That’s because already rendered pages are kept in the cache for faster revisit and as you scroll quickly through a large pdf (let’s assume a couple hundred pages), okular can easily occopy Gigabytes of RAM for a few MB sized pdf file. The problem is existing for… Read more »

Error “you have not created a bootloader stage1 target device”

This rather cryptic error may appear during a Fedora 16 installation and simply tries to tell you, that you forgot to create a BIOS boot partition. If you’re doing a kickstart install, a look at Fedora’s Kickstart wiki page may be helpful. A big yellow alert box essentially tells you to add the following line to your kickstart file that… Read more »

Changing rpmbuild working directory

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Usually, rpmbuild related variables are set in ~/.rpmmacros. To change the current working directory, one could simply alter the default settings: This would change rpmbuild’s working directory on a per-user basis. Sometimes it’s quite convenient to keep the default setting and change the working directory on a per-project basis: To use the current directory as working directory, one could invoke… Read more »