Welcome to The Linux Page

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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

Turning sites and modules on and off in Apache2

I always have to looks for the command line option to turn sites and modules on and off (really it is said to be enabled or disabled.)

The commands are as follow:

a2ensite -- enable one site
a2dissite -- disable one site
a2enmod -- enable one module
a2dismod -- disable one module

When you use one of the commands in the command line terminal without specifying which site or module to enable, then you are given a list of the sites or modules you can enable or disable. Note that the configuration files have to end with .conf for this mechanism to work as expected.

Solaris 11.2 (Open SunOS really) has virtual console a la Linux. This works great. You can use the Alt-F1 to Alt-F6 keys to instantly switch between 6 different consoles. I use that to have one console with an editor and another with my make and runtime tests.

Unfortunately, Solaris includes a lock which manes that each time you switch between a console, it hides the content and ask you for your password to unlock the console (that way you could have multiple users on the same computer, each using a different console and the system remains safe since people cannot just go to someone's ...

A little while ago I noticed that I couldn't find documentation on how to get the modification time of a file in micro-seconds. The notorious stat() call returns st_mtime defined as a time_t in the documentation.

Well... The fact is that the structure is really composed of a timeval structure and not a time_t (that applies to all 3 time values: modification, last access, and last status change.) So in fact you can use the name of the field without the last letter and a sub-timeval field as in:

struct stat s;
seconds = s.st_mtim.tv_sec; // == s.st_mtime
microseconds = ...

Now a day I like to install Solaris to check that my code compiles and generally runs under that OS.

I think that's a good way to prove that the code is multi-OS ready even if it is only for Unices.

OpenSolaris is free and can be downloaded from Oracle. The last URL I use was:

https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/downloads/solaris-downloads.html

The system, by default, comes with a directory named /usr/sfw which includes a really old version of gcc. It is possible, though, to move forward with a newer version of the compiler by installing a package. Under Solaris 11.2, this ...

I found it a pain to see the Firefox window gets closed when I click the close button of the last tab.

When I use that same feature in SeaMonkey, it does not close the main window, instead it makes the tab empty.

Today I thought that maybe they had a flag in there to decide whether the main window should be closed or not and indeed they have:

browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab

So all you have to do is change this flag to 'false' (the default in FF being true now) and closing the last tab won't close the window!

To change your Firefox configuration use: about:config

To ...

Convert XML tags and text to a String

Today I started testing a lot of my JavaScript / jQuery code from a website I am building for a customer. I got an error, at some point, saying:

SCRIPT5007: Unable to get property 'replace' of undefined or null reference

The error was in link with the 'replace' function being referenced on an innerHTML of an element. More specifically, one of those XML element (probably the top most one.)

The fact is that Internet Explorer does not support innerHTML in an XML document. Not to be too surprised about that, XML is not HTML so there is really no reason why innerHTML should be ...

Gnome Keyring stopped working...

At some point in time, I upgraded Ubuntu and my Gnome Keyring stopped working. So each time I do ssh I have to enter the password at the prompt and that's a bit annoying after a while (depends how much I access the servers, obviously.)

I read many threads ZERO of them gave me an answer I want to hear. All of them speak of things that do not make sense in that situation. So I tried to install a brand new clean 14.04 server + ubuntu-desktop and guess what... Gnome Keyring is installed and everything makes me think that is is correctly installed (I get the correct SSH_AUTH_SOCK value) and ...

At some point in the past, my system somehow lost the ability to avoid asking me for my key every time I connect to one of my servers. It generally okay, I don't do so much work on that server that I'd have to connect all the time...

However, it is annoying when, once in while, I end up doing a lot of work, back and forth.

The ssh-agent was installed and working. I could add the key manually:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/my-secret-key
ssh-add -l

The ssh-add command allows you to add and remove keys from the ssh-agent. The -l command line option lists the keys currently held by the agent.

...

Supermicro X9SCI/X9SCA, video is gone!

As I am still trying to get my computers to work with a dual seat (or multiseat), I did an attempt in using the onboard video (a relatively decent Matrox card.) So I went in the BIOS and changed the setup for the video from Offboard to Onboard. Big mistake!

The video stopped working. On reboot the computer beeped 8 times and booted the OS normally (I have SSH setup so I could access the computer, but absolutely no video on either port: on board and off board.)

I have a Supermicro X9SCI/X9SCA. Searching for "no video" or "missing video on boot"... returned nothing ...

Today I finally resolved a problem I had for a while on one of my computers.

When logging in using the normal lightdm X11 login screen, directly on the computer, I would get an error and absolutely no menu, no icons, no keyboard functionality, no unity, no nautilus... The only thing I had working was the background which gave me access to the settings, but nothing else. More or less, nothing useful.

I just had an idea and then I found a comment form a user on a forum who said that he just deleted his .config and .compiz directories and rebooted. After that it worked for him. It worked for me ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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