six degrees of freedom

  • Drobo Dashboard: cannot add Drobo IP address manually

    I’m using two DroboPro FS units, and the only way to manage them is to use Drobo Dashboard for Windows or OSX. There is no web interface like other NAS have, and there is no way to configure it from Linux natively. The DroboPro FS itself is quite impressive, good performance and easy to set…

  • Toshiba NB300 + Ubuntu Maverick = freezing during install

    This brand new Toshiba NB300 netbook refuses to install Ubuntu 10.10. There seem to be some problems with interrupts and CPU frequency scaling, according to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/638434 . I worked around the freezing installation routine by passing “nohz=off” to the kernel at the PXE prompt. The latest maverick kernel doesn’t seem to have this problem, only…

  • Apple Mail: copy only email addresses, not ‘name address’

    This was introduced in Snow Leopard. Here’s how to get back to the old behaviour: defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool NO Now when you ⌘-C an address in Apple Mail, only the address will end up in the clipboard.

  • Reinstall all installed Ubuntu packages

    for pkg in `dpkg –get-selections | egrep -v deinstall | awk ‘{print $1}’` ; do apt-get -y install –reinstall $pkg ; done

  • Speed of SCP transfers over Gigabit Ethernet

    I’m getting around 20MB/s with the default cipher, but when choosing arcfour: scp -c arcfour file user@host: the transfer speed doubles to 40MB/s. For rsync, add this to the rsync command line: –rsh=”ssh -c arcfour”

  • fglrx in Ubuntu 10.10: disable underscan

    Do you see black borders on your TV when you connect your Linux HTPC with ATI Radeon chipset/card? Usually you would be able to change overscan/underscan settings in the graphical ATI tool – but my plasma is detected as a projector, some underscan is applied and the slider to correct it is missing. The solution…

  • Disable automatic udev rules for network interfaces in Ubuntu

    If you want to deploy a Ubuntu image across different hosts, each time you boot it on a new machine, a new udev rule for its network card will be created. You will then end up with eth1, eth2, and so on. There are different ways to work around this problem. Here is a simple…

  • SSH passwordless login: ssh-copy-id

    To log on to a remote machine without the need to enter a password each time, you need to copy your SSH public key to the remote machine and add it to the .ssh/authorized_keys file. First, generate a keypair using ssh-keygen, then use this script to copy your key to the remote host: #!/bin/sh #…

  • Playing DTS-WAV with Audigy2

    DTS-WAV is a format found on DTS Audio CDs. It’s basically a hack, as it uses a standard WAV header to trick the CD player into playing the track, while the music format is DTS. The WAV header must be removed before the file can be played in Windows. I used the latest BeSplit beta…

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