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:

Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration...

Versions 11.04, 11.10, and 12.04

Okay! That one took me too long!?

I was searching for "Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration..." and just couldn't find where the heck that was hidden. It's in /etc/default/failsafe.conf and if you look at that file you'll see a few sleep in there.

I'm not too sure what that's really used for, but having to wait 2 minutes for the server to boot seems dramatic when before it used to start immediately and worked just fine.

So, edit the file, scroll down and remove the sleeps... I do not recommand you do that ...

WordPress user "nicename" and spaces

Today I noticed that I had quite a few 404 errors on one of my websites. That one uses Wordpress that I got from someone else. Because I wanted to include a blog, I had to change the login name and Wordpress does not allow you to do that by default.

So to change the login and password, I directly edited the database makeing user 1 me, essentially.

I replaced the user_login and user_nicename with my own name. This worked just fine. At least at first it looked like everything was working right. Then I noticed that the author link had my name in it. The one with the space. Something like ...

I am working on an A/V switch with the kids and was annoyed by the fact that the page talking about how to do that did not include anything like a schema (it has some bus drawing... who cares?!) This being said, the concept is perfect and works just fine. It's just hard for me to see that when the person just says connect this here and that there and voilà!

Original A/V switch information:

https://www.engadget.com/2007-03-13-how-to-make-a-solid-state-a-v-switcher.html

The source is a gschem file as created by gEDA Schematic Editor (a free tool you can get on Ubuntu.) Already the free ...

Introduction

Today I was requested by my wife to make her Nook work on our wireless network (she usually can use our neighbors but the connection drops all the time.)

The Nook makes use of DHCP only. So on my static IP address only network, it's kinda not going to work as is! (I must have static IP addresses for security so I can setup a strong firewall.)

So I had to go through a few hoops as follow to get everything to work. Interestingly enough I have not found another website that was talking about such things and their solutions on Linux.

Oh! Wait! Nookers are probably not Linux ...

Distributed compilation with Linux C++

I really want to try that feature! I have been using Incredibuild on MS-Windows and it can make a software compile 5 to 6 times faster. (i.e a software normally compiling in 1h compiles in 10 minutes!)

Under Linux some people worked on the C compiler front end to move the process to other machines as required. This is called distcc (i.e instead of using cc to compile, now you use distcc). This front end has a list of all the C compiler machines and uses them whenever possible.)

From what I can see on the front page, the setup should be a breeze (yeah... I know) and it does not even require ...

I have been wondering about setting up one of my computers for 2 or 3 users with 3 mice, 3 keyboards and 3 monitors.

This apparently may require 3 video boards with Ubuntu. That could be a problem with AGP, but PCI Express may work fine with that. Only problem, in most cases boards only have 2 slots these days...

Anyway, if I ever try to do that, I'll put the info here on how I got it to work... for now, you'll want to look at this page on Ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiseatX

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiseatTeam/Status

...

As I was working on a table extracted from a PDF file, I wanted to load that table in Excel. By default it would put all the fields in column A. Not good. So I put that in a text file, added a pipe at the end of each time and then join lines really quick (with vim, it's J to join lines.)

Now I had a nice .csv file, with fields separated by a pipe (|) character.

123|Something|More info|This "worked" before?!

Now, time to load that file in Excel. I tried that and it gave me everything cut in "strange" places but especially, no way to select the column separator. Why ...

In the last few days I have been working on a small project to get a really nice form for one of my sites. The form uses a lot of JavaScript for all sorts of fancy things (such as check user input to make sure we don't accept total crap such as an empty entry or just "1" as a credit card number.)

The information finds itself in an IFRAME, which was the easiest way to get the time to load at decent speed and to better manage the form in a separate area and not the main landing page. This will make it easier to maintain the landing page itself.

however, that created ...

Large version of the waiting wheel As I'm working on a new feature for our Snap! Website system I wanted to have a turning wheel that asks users to wait while the computer does work.

The graphic is very simple: a rectangle with a border and a background color that rotates. However, I do not have a tool (that I know of) which could create the graphics automatically. So I did it with quite a bit of manual labor, but it was fun to learn a few things along the way.

I use inkscape to create such graphics. First I created the rectangle on the left. With that I had to have it rotated going 360 degrees repeating the rectangle 24 ...

jQuery and hidden IFRAME bug

In the last 3 days I've been working on a new page and ran in some strange problem. There was an error in the console but things seemed to otherwise work just fine so I ignored it (since it wasn't in my own code...)

That error was an unhandled jQuery error which resulted in "let's stop the JavaScript at once." This meant all the page initialization failed (or did not occur.) The code was there otherwise. What give?!

The script in question was loaded from a hidden IFRAME, something like this:

  <div style="display: none;">
    <iframe ...

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Versions 11.04, 11.10, and 12.04

Introduction