(Picture above represents the logo of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution.)

The following is a list of the Ubuntu Releases with their versions and their name.

I find it really annoying when someone says "I have such" and he/she has no clue what version (i.e. 7.10) it is. Then I have to look it up because I don't memorize the numbers to the names, but I know what the numbers entitles.

So... I need a table and I had one on Wikipedia, but that was wiped out. So now, I'll keep my own here and I'll try to keep it up to date. I start with the version Mar 16, 2009 from the Ubuntu ...

Create ISO File to Burn

When creating a CD you use mkisofs (make ISO file system--ISO stands for International Standard Organization, a non-profit organization used to write standard procedures used in business and other places to better organize interoperability between many companies in the world.)

mkisofs -o my-cd.iso directory

The "directory" are all the files you want to write to the ISO file.

Verify Disk Before Burning

Then you should verify that it looks as you expected. This is done by mounting the ISO file:

sudo mount -o loop my-cd.iso /mnt/cd

Assuming ...

Ordeal

Today I made a mistake and create the file /etc/sudoers.d/timeout which was definitely not compatible with sudo. The file was JSON when sudo only accepts very basic var=value lines.

Result?

I could not use sudo anymore on that VM. I had to find a way to fix the file system without having to rebuild the entire disk because that would have taken way too long.

How to Mount a VDI File

Since your VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) files are literally disk files, they should be mountable, right? Yes! They are. Actually, that's certainly exactly what the VirtualBox code does, but ...

Introduction

When I create a new DigitalOcean droplet I have to run a few commands that I don't otherwise use very much at all so I was thinking that adding them here would make it easier to remember.

Creating a New Key with ssh-keygen

I use the same key for each group of computers I manage there. Each time I create a new group, I create a new key with the ssh-keygen command as so:

% ssh-keygen -t rsa
...
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/alexis/.ssh/id_rsa): ...
...

WARNING: as we can see ssh-keygen asks you to write the resulting keys using the default ...

Situation

I had some problems (and may still have some problems) with a computer which at times drops its transfer speed to 100Mb instead of running at full speed (1Gb).

I think that one possible problem is that the card detects a "weak" cable, probably because it's a very long one.

Today I was surprised that it ran at full speed, though. I really thought that the network card was dead for good, especially because I tested with a MS-Windows laptop which would get the 1Gb transfer rate as expected.

Linux

Discovering Connections

Under Linux, you first need to ...

In an Excel Spreadsheet (Microsoft)

I have been wondering how to lock a few rows and/or columns at the top-left in Excel. I have seen that being done many times, but did not know how to do it myself...

In the Windows menu (Before Office 2007) and in the View menu (Since Office 2007) you will find an option named Freeze Panes. You have three selections:

1. Freeze the selected top rows
2. Freeze the selected left columns
3. Freeze the selected top rows and left columns

If you just need one row and/or column, place your cursor in the A1 cell (the very first top-left cell).

...

Problem Loading SeaMonkey

Today, I finally upgraded to SeaMonkey 2.49.3.

It was out on Nov 4, 2017 but I did not check for it any time sooner. Bad for me as there were some bugs in 2.48 that banks and such were warning about (oh and WordPress too...)

Anyway. I downloaded the new version. Extracted the files. Updated my icon with the new path. Click on the icon to open the browser. Nothing.

So I know that it is likely that it prints out some errors when nothing happens like that, so I went to my console and tried to start seamonkey in my command line window.

Indeed, errors were ...

Introduction

The Qt library version can be retrieved in all sorts of ways, using your command line or C++ code. There are a few I use:

Test Whether Qt is Installed

Before testing the version, you probably want to verify that Qt is installed.

qmake is pretty much always installed whenever you install Qt. Debian and Ubuntu use the qt5-default package which directly depends on qtchooser which includes qmake. Other architectures are likely to use different package names, but you certainly get a similar effect. Many script depend on qmake being installed to check the Qt version which is ...

Introduction

A QTableWidget uses QVariant as its value type. By default, though, it expects a string (in the construtor, you do not have support for QVariant).

Note that the QVariant uses the QTableWidthItem::setData() function and it keeps the variant as such.

This is great, only sometimes (always?!) you need a formatted number and that's not likely to work as expected because a formatted number requires you to use a string, not just a number and a format (which would be a better solution, i.e. a per column format such as defined by the QString::arg() functions.)

Setup a ...

Problem

Working on a project that creates many threads handling many messages using secure sockets for everything, I ran in an interesting error (I broke up the error on multiple lines so it's easier to read than a one liner with a scrollbar!):

# OpenSSL error
06/11/18 14:31:39:error: tcp_client_server.cpp/bio_log_errors(367):
       OpenSSL: [336236705/20|169|161]:[<no libname>]:[<no
       funcname>]:[<no reason>]:[ssl_lib.c]:[1963]:[(no details)]

# My library error
06/11/18 14:31:39:error: safe_thread.h/run(468): a standard
       exception occurred in ...