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:

Hard to believe, but the FreeBSD top utility does NOT sort by CPU usage by default. I guess there is some other magic. 99.9% of all the system you run now a day will have way more processes that can be displayed in one window. This means you need to have the processes that use the most CPU at the top to see what's running and taking too much time.

In general, I use objdump to check out the list of shared libraries. This is because I usually want to make sure I did not compile against a certain library (i.e. X11.)

The other day, I created the odbcpp library. When I tried to build it on my Mac OS/X 10.4 (Tiger) I got a problem with the dynamic libraries. Instead of a .dylib extension, I got... nothing at all! (this problem was also reported on 10.5) I was sure that it worked for me with other libraries I developed (such as my sswf library) and thus I decided that I was not going to be left alone. Well...

This page is a test page of the Menu per Role module for Drupal (Yes. This site is a Drupal site, did not guess yet?!) The module controls whether a menu entry should be shown to a given set of customer without having to change the permissions of the destination. This is particularly useful whenever the destination is not a node.

As of Dec 2008, I'm the maintainer so I needed a place to test the module. Here it is.

You will need to be registered and logged in to see the corresponding menu item in the drop down. Good luck.

And the following is a node with comments that I use to test the ...

If you were wondering how to make MS-Windows know about your Intranet computers, let me tell you, it's very simple, you just have to add the address(es) to your hosts file. Am I kidding?! Yeah! Right! Have a look for yourself, on NT and Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, etc. you have a "network driver"1 here:

  • 1. For your information, the network stack comes from FreeBSD. That additional module you bought for $100+ for MS-DOS and then MS-Windows 1.0 to 3.1... was free software.

Often, when one writes a game, one wants a specific resolution to make sure that the game works as expected. Zoomed out textures may not look as nice and the speed could be affected too (drawing 1280x1024 pixels instead of 640x480 is more than 4x higher and all video boards won't be as fast as required in this case). Under MS-Windows you can ask the system to change resolution (size & depth) with a call to ChangeDisplaySettings().

If you are using a folder much, then you can create a substitute using the subst command in a shell. This command will assign a path to the given letter and the result is something which looks like you had an additional hard drive.

To look at your processes, threads, modules, network, etc. at a quite low level, you can use the SysInternals Tools. System Internals was bought by Microsoft. So the new site is at Microsoft.com. The old URL still functions though (http://www.sysinternals.com).

Note that since that purchase Microsoft has worked to ameliorate their libraries to give these tools legitimate access to the data they query!

In most cases, these tools work against running processes and not against the source (not the .exe, .dll, etc. files, but their loaded/in memory versions.)

If you're like me, you need to register an OCX, DLL, COM object once in a while. Not so often that you will remember what the command is. So...

In order to register a DLL, an OCX and any other COM object, use the MS-Windows tool regsvr32.exe (which usually is in C:\Windows\system32 or some similar folder).

There is also a way to edit the registry, but frankly, just use the tool!

Question: Is there a regsvr64.exe under Win64? 8-)

Always wondered how they automatically restart an application after a reboot under MS-Windows?

There is a function named RegisterApplicationRestart() that does just that.

There are flags to tell when your application should be started or under which circumstances.

For instance, you can start only if something crashed the OS.

The doc is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/winbase/nf-winbase-registerapplicationrestart

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