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:

MS-Access sub-form auto-resize instead of staying put

Problem

Today I ran in a problem where I created a new form and the sub-form inside that form would auto-resize itself. Strangely enough, all my other forms also have a sub-form and that sub-form is not auto-resized... so what gives?!

I did not find anything about preventing an auto-resize of a sub-form. Found many pages on the net about how to write code to resize a form "manually". But that really did not help.

Solution

As I created that new form, I marked it as "Auto Resize" to No. This seems logical if you do not want a form to get resized. Think again! The ...

MS-Access query sort not working

Looked around on how to sort out a report properly as it was sorting on the wrong field (actually at first it did not even look like it was sorted at all, but I did not notice that other field was indeed sorted!)

The sort in a Query Report form (opposed to just an SQL query) is defined by the Group & Sort feature and not the SQL results. Actually, you most certainly don't need it in the SQL because otherwise you'll be sorting twice.

It took me a while, but I'm glad I found the solution. All the documentation I searched only talked about the wrong methods: use the Query sort ...

Cannot log in user with Samba

Today I wasted another hour or so in trying to get samba to work for one of my Windows computer so I could connect to one of my Linux computer. I knew that the installation was correct since I could log in with another computer/user that had worked for a long time. So... why would this one fail?

Two things, for of all, I could see NOTHING happening in the logs. Really wondering why the default is to log close to nothing with such a non-secure piece of software, but that's a different question. I added the following to actually get about enough logs to understand what was happening:

log ...

As I write programs, mainly in C++, I document them using the Doxygen tool. This is a very powerful parser that is capable of finding functions, variables, macros, and many other things in the source code and attach the corresponding documentation to those functions, variables, macros, etc.

This is extremly practical when creating large projects or libraries that you want to share with others.

One problem though, by default it seems like global functions (and thus C functions) and variables do not make it to the documentation, when C++ classes work fine.

Here are two potential issues in ...

I don't personally program in Java, but since I use Cassandra, Java is a requirement on my system.

The OpenJdk works, but it is presented as having problems when running Cassandra. Having run in a problem (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11182637/data-in-cassandra-not... on Stack Overflow,) I thought I would finally give a chance to Oracle and install their version to see whether that was the culprit.

I was really thinking that the OpenJdk was working fine because I have two other systems working just fine, but those two ...

MS-Access and Focus handling

MS-Access can be programmed with VBA which is neat. I do that a lot because the default forms do not allow you to strongly verify the data validity or even better: prevent you from editing certain record because they are too old, you don't have permissions, it was already archived in some way (i.e. invoice paid), etc.

However, I often encounter problems with the focus. The main thing I do to make it as safe as possible is show or hide buttons. If you cannot activate function A, then there is no point in having a button for function A. Instead, we should hide the function A button when we ...

You can check that all the packages currently installed on a Debian system (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) with many different tools.

Root Kits

I run rkhunter to verify for root kits.

Some hackers replace a well known command such as ls or cat with a version that takes over your computer by becoming root without your consent and then hacking your system in all sorts of ways. In most cases, just the feat of installing such a tool requires the hacker to already have root access, so it generally doesn't happen, but better safe than sorry!

File Changes

I use tripwire to verify that ...

I started the stock SeaMonkey browser by mistake as my Unity icons disappeared (i.e. seamonkey as is on my command line started /usr/bin/seamonkey which is not the correct version!) This had several bad side effects. For of all, it destroyed my bookmarks (argh!) and then it decided to install the 64bit Flash plugin. That did not work well since the version I like is a 32bit version.

Once I had the correct version started again, each time it was trying to open a Flash animation, it would be "stuck" for a few minutes, until I tried to open a page with a movie in a Flash shell. That ...

MS-Access has forms, but no real means to know whether a form exists. It looks like you could go through the list of forms (Forms.item(i)) but I'm not too sure that would work in all circumstances.

Instead, I used code I found on another site which runs a system command to determine whether a form is currently attached to a window (has a state other than zero.)

The code looks like this:

IsLoaded = False
If SysCmd(acSysCmdGetObjectState, acForm, strFormName) <> 0 Then
    If Forms(strFormName).CurrentView <> 0 Then
        IsLoaded = True
    End If
End If

The first ...

Polkit-1

This feature works along systemd and loginctl to create sessions for users and check current statuses defined in rules files. This is supposed to be enough to prevent someone from shuting down a computer from the GUI when an administrator is logged in via SSH.

Thus far, I have not been able to find a way to get that to work for like 1 year. I'm going to put information about my research. Various pages talking about, documentation, etc.

First of all, there is a manual page which is likely already installed on your system:

man pklocalauthority

Now a list of pages I have ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Problem

Solution

Root Kits

File Changes

Polkit-1