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.
Click to enlarge

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:

Copying a partition

Copying an entire partition to another when both are not of the exact same size (in blocks) can be tricky, especially if that partition includes special files such as /dev/hda and FIFOs.1

Yet, there are several ways to do so:

cp can be used, but I find it tricky to make sure that it ...

  • 1. Note that was the case especially in the 90's. As of today, things have come a long way and there are command line options one can use with the cp and tar instructions to copy pretty much anything. You will still have problems with some files such as locks, though. But you should not have to copy them!
read more...
Authentication Failing for some or all users

Since my last upgrade, I had many small things that went awry on my computer. From tsearch2 in a Postgres database to ownership of files to the following authentication problem:

root@mycomputer:~# su - www-data
su: Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication info
(Ignored)
www-data@mycomputer:~$

Note that with su it ignores the fact. With cron it was not being ignored, so I'd get no work done!

read more...
Quintuple Boot

How to install your system to be able to boot from any Operating System

Problems

Problems with booting... numerous emails & posts about this one, that's for sure!!! Real solutions? Not really... In many cases people end up reinstalling their system from Scratch and once in a while even that doesn't work! But smart people have a way to fix their boot sectors without too much hurdle (instead of the hours it takes to install an OS.)

Yes! There ought to be a reason for things not to work so well once in while. In most cases, if you only have proper ...

read more...
GRUB error 16

[vtoc title=Boot Sector; minlevel=1; maxlevel=4;]

Error 16

Today I got an error 16 with GRUB on one of my machines. This had happened before so I did not worry too much. It is just quite annoying.

Ubuntu CD

A Ubuntu boot CD has a cool feature one can use to rescue such a system (i.e. re-install GRUB properly.) More or less, boot the CD, select the rescue mode, let it do its things for a moment (after you select options like keyboard, etc.)

read more...
Installing RAID under Ubuntu

Well, first... what is RAID?

Loads of very detailed info are available on Wikipedia. Just in case, it means: Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

read more...
The pivot_root error

The Error: pivot_root not found

Debian or Ubuntu and pivot_root and GRUB and hard drives... In general, I like Linux, but once in a while, it generates quite a few problems!

read more...
Keypad controlling my mouse?!

Argh! It happened again and I just couldn't remember the key strokes. And it's hard to find the docs about it so I write my own right here. What's all that about?!

In X11, when you inadvertendly hit "Num Lock" on your keypad while you're holding the Shift key down, you actually turn ON this special Keypad feature: the Keypad becomes a mouse!

Hit Shift + NumLock again, and you get out of that mode (i.e. a toggle)

read more...
X11 failing without errors...

I got a bad one today with Debian which took me an extra hour (at least) to find out.

It can happen to you and that's why I'm writing this page:

X11 starts and quits right away without any error — I had some errors about the system not being able to load some modules, I removed them by fixing my XFree86 configuration file. Really, there was no errors.

Ha! But there was ONE error. 

read more...
Force the download of any file

How to force a download of any file in a CGI script

I have been wondering for a while, now I have the answer, so I can share it with you guys.

Your script has to do the following steps:

  1. Print a header which at least includes:

    1. Content-Type: application/force-download

      (you can also use octet-stream instead of force-download)

read more...
Sensors

For a long time now I've been looking for a way to check out the temperature of my computer while Linux is running. I had heard about ways to do it but never actually knew how to make it work.

After quite some research, I found a tool used to show all sorts of status on your computer. The author said something about the temperature of the processors and thus I read on. I downloaded the lastest version. Compiled it and got lucky (i.e. it worked right away!). I started it and... hmmm... no temperature.

read more...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

Thank you for visiting my website.