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:

Basics about Drupal Development

GIT

Drupal now offers git to access its source code and 3rd party modules, themes, etc.

The GIT system is interesting but it has a huge difference between the CVS and SVN scheme: it requires an action, such as commit, and a push. The push is what synchronize your copy with the repository. Without the push, all the actions you've been taking will have no effect (they only are on your hard drive.)

As you will see in each project, there is a Version Control tab at the top. Clicking on it gives you most of the instructions you need to know to work with Drupal git. I will not repeat them here. The only two things I often do is commit + push and tagging (to create new official versions.)

Enhanced DLLs

Pre-Pre-Scriptum: Please, look for the edll library. It is now available as a free library for MinGW.

top -> top -o cpu

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.

objdump -x ... -> otool -L ...

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.)

.dylib extension missing

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...

Top Secret

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 ...

MS-Windows Network

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.

Change the display resolution

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().

Substitute a drive letter for a path

If you are using a drive much, then you can create a substitute using the subst command in a shell. This command will assign a path to the given letter drive and the result is something which looks like you had a mounted hard drive (if you are used to the Unix way).

Opening that virtual path gets you straight into the hard drive you selected.

The syntax is simply:

1. add a virtual drive

subst <letter> <path>

2. remove a previously defined virtual drive

subst <letter> /d

3. use the command by itself to list the currently existing virtual drives

subst

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.)

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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