The Linux Page

Help other users realize that everything is possible, especially avoiding Windows for their own personal use.

Welcome to The Linux Page


Fox Trot by Bill Amend. Click to enlarge.
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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:

Introduction

These are common questions for MS-Access users:

  • How can I get the name of the currently logged on user?
  • How can I get the name of the computer the user is working on?

Both names are available in the Kernel and we can make use of a function declaration to access those names.

MS-Access Functions

To determine the name of the current user:

Private Declare Function GetUserName Lib "advapi32.dll" _
    Alias "GetUserNameA" (ByVal lpBuffer As String, nSize As Long) As Long

Public Function GetLogonName() As String
    Dim lpBuf As ...

Today I started having some problems with my tables.

I had a default value set to Now() and it would tell me that it was invalid. I removed it and the save worked.

What would really be the problem though?

The thing is the compiler is used against ALL your Visual Basic modules and if any one of them fails to compile, then you get the error. I had one error in one module. Definitions of external (DLL) functions such as GetUserName() and GetComputerName() must all appear before any function declation. I had the GetUserName() declaration such as:

Private Declare Function GetUserName Lib ...

For a week now I have had a warning when shutting down saying that there was yet another update to install on shutdown...

I did not really check on it for that long, but today I decided to check the auto-update as I was running the computer. There was the installation ready to be run. So I clicked on the button to start the installation.

After a moment, the installation process stopped with a really weird error:

Error message: Code 13EC, it's an unknown error.

It's funny that any programmer would create an error that the computer cannot figure out... Way beyond me.

This being ...

Yesterday I got a surprise. My junk email stayed in my Inbox instead of going to my Junk folder... Why?

The automated function doesn't give you any error. It just doesn't do anything.

When I tried to mark a message as junk, that's when I got an error message saying...

Your Junk Folder is Full

Wow! I looked again... but I knew. It was still FULLY empty. Hmmm...

Looking around I found a post on some random website saying that the limit of a folder was 4Gb. Okay. But my folder is EMPTY. I look for any other Junk folder, just in case another one was filled up. Nope. All empty! (I ...

Today I needed to test a transfer from a file system to another making sure that a 750Mb file was being tranfered correctly. For this I wanted to run an md5sum on the file from the native OS (MS-Windows) and then on the target OS (Linux).

I found a nice utility that worked right in and returned the correct result (what I'd expect.)

MD5sum by Jem Berkes, SysDesign

Okay, it has been a little while now, but each time I just have to search forever to find out how to create a multi-level numbering list.

By default, a list will appear as this:

1. Chapter

    1. Section

        1. Sub-Section

Which may work for you, but in many cases you want to have all the list numbers appearing in your section and sub-sections as in:

1. Chapter

    1.1 Section

        1.1.1 Sub-Section

Okay, so that in itself it actually very easy, but it used to be that you could ...

Today I had an interesting experience... all of a sudden, all the blocks of a given theme disappeared.

It has been working just fine for months, so I really wasn't sure what the heck it could be.

The fact was that the theme was called the same as the module (as I work for a given client, I tend to do that...)

At some point, I must have added a function with a specific name and that would influence the theme. The result being blocks going bye bye!

I checked and the block content is computed just fine, the problem is the theme('block', $block) call. Although the ...

Once in a while, I need to get the complete list of all the variables available in a PHP piece of code.

This is done with the get_defined_vars() PHP function. It's very simple, it returns an array of name / value pairs. You can then print that value using print_r() or var_dump().

That's it!

Today I got this weird error: Application-defined or object defined error.

Looking into it, I could not find the right answer.

The failing code was in a sub-form and when called it generated the error immediately. The code I wrote was:

Parent.NewSelection

And of course, in the parent I had the NewSelection function defined:

Private Sub NewSelection
    DoSomething
End Sub

The DoSomething would update a button as required...

For real MS-Access pros, you may already have noticed what the problem was. What's really annoying is that the error we get is not capable of telling ...

I just received my new D-Link USB wireless dongle to connect my Linux system to my wireless network...

I looked like it was detected as the device was flash and lsmod showed all sorts of USB entries as expected (with the correct device number, something like 2800.)

But the thing would not connect.

Looking at the log I had a message saying "networking is disabled by state file". This came from the Network Manager which was indeed disabled! Editing the following file:

/var/lib/NetworkManager.state

and changing the NetworkingEnabled variable from false to true made everything ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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