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:

Ubuntu: Network Manager says it is unmanaged (according to state file)

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 ...

Last night as I was compiling a new PECL extension for an install, after a while it worked... I could run php -v and it would give me the version of the PHP modules without telling me that the it couldn't load the extension (i.e. we already had the extension=http; in the php.ini file.)

But when testing with php -v on the command line, it would reload the php.ini and apply the extension feature and such.

However, when testing with Apache, it was still not working. The PECL installation was all correct, so why would it not see the resulting extensions?!

Because you need to restart Apache. ...

Today I helped a customer get a PECL extension going. The first error I was getting was as follow:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib64/php/modules/http.so' - /usr/lib64/php/modules/http.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Obviously the extension was not yet installed... I run pear install pecl/pecl_http in order to get it to work, which it did after I installed the C compiler, the curl header files, and a few other things.

After a few minutes, I got the message:

install ok: ...

Often, when I work with some form of graphics, I do not have a handy library to save the image buffer I'm working with in a file on disk. In most cases, when I want to do that, I make use of the Targa format. This is very easy to save since the header is very simple (18 bytes) and the data can be saved verbatim. Plus, many tools, such as the Gimp, can read the result at once.

Here is my C code to do so. It will work in C++ also. It should be easy to tweak for other languages such as C#.

{
  unsigned char hdr[18]; // the targa file header
  FILE *f;

  memset(hdr, 0, sizeof(hdr));  ...

VTune "New Analysis" button disabled

Yesterday I installed VTune on a system at one of the companies I'm working with. It worked like a charm and I could run a few analysis and see problem areas in the system.

Later I worked on another C++ project in Linux, this morning I woke up on MS-Access, and did a little Drupal after that (PHP). I came back on Visual Studio C++ and... the VTune button is disabled! Not available at all somehow and no error message or anything!?

Turns out, like yesterday I had to start the VTune version of Visual Studio! Without that special version, it simply doesn't work, but it still appears and ...

As FCKeditor becomes old and the new CKEditor is started to get there, I'm updating more and more websites to make use of the newer version of CKEditor. This requires a few steps to make sure you don't lose the previous functionality.

Permissions

The update does not transfer the FCKeditor permissions to the CKEditor. This is because by the time you install the new CKEditor, the FCKeditor should already be uninstalled. In other words, those permissions are gone already. Plus, the scheme is slightly different in the new editor.

Roles

The list of roles who are assigned one ...

MFC80U.dll, MSCRT80.dll, etc. missing

As I was working in Visual Studio today I had a problem with AQtime which I just installed. More or less, AQtime attempts to read the file that you're just writing and at the time you try to save the manifest in the output, it fails because AQtime has the .exe open in Read Only mode.

To fix the problem I simple said don't generate the manifest, which seemed the be the right solution. That made the compilation work great, but then AQtime would not be able to start the executable. Seemingly nothing would happen (i.e. type F5, made sure the parameters were fine, click Run, AQtime and the ...

MS-Access prints white pages

Problem

One of my customers changed a report and all of a sudden was getting an empty page for every other page (it will look like the last page in case you print a single page, but it really is every other page.)

Did you think about the margins?

When you create a report to be printed, you must define its size properly. So if you are printing 8"1/2 x 11" paper, you want to create a report that's exactly (to about 1/100th) the same size.

The total height must be 11" and the total width must be 8"1/2. However, the actual page that you create does NOT include the ...

Drupal paths that won't work!

As I created a new site to list all of my accounts on the Internet, I thought the folder where those accounts appear should be called profiles. But somehow autopath did not generate the URL Alias as expected.

https://alexiswilke.me/profiles/

I tried several times and each time it returned an empty alias. Then I tried adding the alias by hand and that was accepted by Drupal, but when I then tried to go to that page it failed with an Apache error which at first I found odd. Then I recalled that there was a folder named profiles in the top directory of Drupal. The Drupal code (from the

Today I was trying to create a table in a post and just could not get the cell padding I wanted. Without the padding the data is all cramped together which did not look the way I wanted (see Alexis Wilke Accounts.)

I knew I had the following entry in my CSS but did not think it was stronger than the table cellpadding and cellspacing specifications because I thought it worked for me before!

* {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

I was wrong, that definition applies to the td with a greater constrained. So I had to add another entry. I solved the problem using a td definition like this:

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Permissions

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Problem

Did you think about the margins?