Well, first... what is RAID?

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

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!

Yesterday, I used apt-get upgrade to upgrade my system which I hadn't do for the last 2 months or so. 460 packages upgraded and many more untouched. So far so good. The TeX installation failed because I said I'd want a group and the installer did not automatically create that group. I created the group and all was fine (though, looking at the logs, many X11 entries were half installed.)

As it went on, I ...

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)

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. 

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)

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.