I got sentimental… PCLinuxOS 2009 ISO Promotional Videos…

Hi all.

I was browsing my HDD and I have found my old videos that I made around 2009 to promote PCLinuxOS on my no longer existing YouTube channel. Here You go…

PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE 3.5.10 Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009 MiniMe KDE 3 Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009 MiniMe KDE 4 Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009 LXDE Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009 XFCE Phoenix Edition Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009 ZEN Mini Gnome Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009 ZEN Mini Gnome Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009.2 Gnome Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2009.4 XFCE Phoenix Edition Promotional Video.avi

PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE4 AndrzejL’s Remaster.avi

PCLinuxOS KDE4 Wallpapers Promotional Video.avi

Torcs PCLinuxOS 2009 MiniMe Promotional Video.avi

Hope You will enjoy watching those as much as I did when I re-discovered them…

Andy

WordPress on The Wardrobe was down for 2 hours for the maintenance reasons.

Hi all.

Since I love my little server and want it to feel as comfortable as possible in my little geekindom once in a while I have to take it off the wardrobe and give it a cuddle.

Last time it was done on the Eastern Sunday so not so long ago but today I started hearing this annoying brrr brrr brrr sound. It was the sound of “I need new fan or I will fail soon enough!”. Luckily I was clever to buy new fan sometime ago when I have started noticing first signs of a problem and was just waiting for a good moment to replace it. So I took the machine down tonight and wrapped it securely to transport it to my friends house. He has all the tools I needed. Short – 10 minutes walk and I was there.

During the maintenance I had to do few things.

– disassemble the AC/DC adapter
– dismount the fan in the AC/DC adapter
– clean everything inside the AC/DC adapter box
– clean the AC/DC adapter fan and give it a bit of WD40
– take off the CPU fan and radiator (it was old and tired)
– replace the CPU fan with a new one
– I had a bigger radiator too so I replaced it as well
– add extra fan in front of the machines case (the blue light on the photos)
– add extra fan on the HDD / CD rack so it blows the air on the HDD / CD
– all the fans were cleaned before mounting and sprayed with WD40
– CPU got a new heat grease on
– external HDD pocket was added in a free slot – waiting for ata100 tape for it

In other words – I did the best I could to ensure a quieter work, lower temperature, longer (at least I hope so) life expectancy and last but not least external backup possibility for my machine.

Here are few shots of the inside of the machine…

Server maintenance in progress 1

Server maintenance in progress 2

Server maintenance in progress 3

Server maintenance in progress 4

It was fun and pleasure. This machine serves me well for a very long time now. Why wouldn’t I make something nice for it when it needs me most?

Long live the Server!

Andy

Solution for horrible bug in nano that renders the text editor completely useless.

EDIT: This solution will be implemented in the nano rpm and should soon be available as upgrade in PCLinuxOS repositories via Your package manager.

Thank You gseaman.

Hi all.

I have noticed this ages ago and it annoyed the BeeGeeses out of me. When You enter a long line of text in nano editor it “wraps” the lines. It “wraps” them like other text editors do – fine. The problem occurs when You try to save the file… all of the sudden long line of text becomes 3 or 4 lines of text… I have recorded this little video to show You an example of what I mean. Now imagine using nano on Your /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Edit the line – even just change the vga=xxx mode and when You reboot Your grub is going into “YOU MESSED UP DUDE!” mode.

Solution to this is to run this command from the terminal:

su -c "sed -i 's/# set nowrap/set nowrap/' /etc/nanorc"

and give it a root password when asked for it.

Fixing nano 1.

This will turn off the word wrap completely.

However if You are like me and You like the word wrap option BUT You want to keep one line as one line You may want to use this command as well:

su -c "sed -i 's/# set softwrap/set softwrap/' /etc/nanorc"

This will cause the nano editor to softly wrap the lines and when You will save the file – the lines won’t break. In other words if You will type a long line it will be shown as many rows of text BUT when You will save the file it will still be a one long line. Both commands have to be used in order for the soft wrap to work.

Fixing nano 2.

Thanks to the Andrzej3393, Enlik and Rsanti – guys from the Polish PCLinuxOS IRC channel – for testing and ideas.

Hope this helps somebody someday.

Regards.

Andy

Installing / configuring GNU Screen…

Hi all.

Today I will try to show You how to install and configure GNU Screen.

First? What is Screen. Manual page explains it very well.

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells). Each virtual terminal provides the functions of a DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ISO 6429 (ECMA 48, ANSI X3.64) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g. insert/delete line and support for multiple character sets). There is a scrollback history buffer for each virtual terminal and a copy-and-paste mechanism that allows moving text regions between windows.

By default screen looks something like this:

Screen 001

Screen 002

It looks like a ordinary console window. In my own words I would call Screen “many console windows in one…” it’s not a perfect description but that’s the best one that I could come up with. By default screen does not looks very interesting does it?

And what if I will tell You that by copying and pasting few commands You can make it look like this? This is a screenshot taken from my pCLI-NoX installation.

Screen 003

or like this if You are using KDE4…

Screen 004

Still not interested? And what if I will tell You that if You ssh to Your shell account and run screen command and then close the connection the screen will stay active and that You can re-open it when You connect next time with screen -dr command? Better huh? Thought so… And if I will tell You that You can share the screen session with a friend to show Him what are You doing at the moment or to teach him something new? Hehe I see I got Your attention. You are still reading aren’t You?

Ok first things first – we need to install screen then we will configure it. I assume that You have fully upgraded Your PCLinuxOS installation. Run those commands:

su

Give it a root password and then run:

apt-get update && apt-get install screen

Wait till it’s finished and run:

exit

You should be back into the user mode. Now copy and paste the following commands:

cp /etc/screenrc $HOME/.screenrc

mkdir -p $HOME/.bin

touch $HOME/.bin/my_battery.sh

chmod +x $HOME/.bin/my_battery.sh

echo 'acpi -b | cut -f 2 -d |' > $HOME/.bin/my_battery.sh

touch $HOME/.bin/my_temperature.sh

chmod +x $HOME/.bin/my_temperature.sh

echo 'acpi -t | cut -f 2 -d |' > $HOME/.bin/my_temperature.sh

echo 'caption always "%{= Wk}%-w%{= Bw}%n %t%{-}%+w %-="' >> $HOME/.screenrc

echo 'defutf8 on' >> $HOME/.screenrc

echo 'backtick 1 1 0 $HOME/.bin/my_battery.sh' >> $HOME/.screenrc

echo 'backtick 2 1 0 $HOME/.bin/my_temperature.sh' >> $HOME/.screenrc

echo 'hardstatus alwayslastline "%{+b kr}[%H]%{kg} %1`%{kw} %2` %{ky}Load: %l%-=%{kb}%c %d.%m.%Y"' >> $HOME/.screenrc

sed -i 's/#startup_message off/startup_message off/' $HOME/.screenrc

After all this You should see something like this:

Screen 005

Now type in:

screen

and You should see something like this:

Screen 006

Voila! All done. Now close the Konsole window and reopen a fresh one.

Screen 007

Type in:

screen -dr

Screen 008

Screen session is now re-attached to Your Konsole window.

Screen 009

That’s one of the coolest things about screen.

Now I said there are multiple windows in one right? Right. See this whiteish bar with blue rectangle on it and with the 0 bash in it? Make sure that the Konsole window has focus and press and hold CTRL + A and then let them both go and press C.

Screen 010

Now look at that white bar. There are two entries 0 bash and 1 bash. Blue color rectangle moved to the second entry. Why? By pressing the above combo You have opened another “window” in screen and it has the focus now.

As You have probably noticed CTRL + A + key is how the screen operates. It’s very simple and the basic keys are:

c – open / create new window.
n – go to next window
p – go to previous window
k – kill the active window (must be confirmed by pressing y)

Those are the basic things You need to know about screen. Want more? Ok. Have fun. The Key bindings section should be of interest to You.

Special thanks to Hootiegibbon who wrote a large part of the .screenrc file config. Also thanks to Enlik for showing me (and helping with config of) the GNU Screen app in the first place and for helping me when I got stuck at some point while writing this howto.

Hope someone will find it useful.

Regards.

Andy

Need a suuuper uuuultra liiiight PCLinuxOS iso? Check out pCLI-NoX…

Hi all.

A good friend of mine Hootiegibbon is just working on pCLI-NoX iso. What is it? In His own words:

pCLI-NoX is a PCLinuxOS but without X designed to run on minimal specs yet still be productive and fun to use. It’s a good way to learn command line. It’s a perfect solution for advanced users wishing to exercise their imaginations

Here is pCLI-NoX running on IBM Thinkpad 600. Ancient machine designed to work with Windows 98… running PCLinuxOS 2011.

Host/Kernel/OS “Hootie.edition” running Linux 2.6.38.8-pclos3.bfs i386 [ PCLinuxOS release 2011 (PCLinuxOS) for i586 ]
CPU Info Pentium II (Deschutes) 512 KB cache flags( – ) clocked at [ 265.239 MHz ]
Videocard Neomagic NM2160 [MagicGraph 128XD] tty resolution ( 128×48 )
Network cards Xircom Cardbus Ethernet 10/100, at port: 1800
Processes 77 | Uptime 41min | Memory 25.2/279.2MB | HDD ATA IBM-DARA-212000 Size 12GB (7%used) | Runlevel 3 | Client Irssi 0.8.15 | Infobash v3.05

Interested? Check out this thread on the forum for more Info.

Edit: New and improved iso should be available soon.

Regards.

Andy

Do we have it in the repository? Search repos from the terminal.

Hi all…

How many times were You asked “Do You have package XyZ in the repositories?“? Sometimes You know the answer and You will be able to say “Yes we do coz I am using it.“. Sometimes however You just don’t know… So You open synaptic and search for the package name… And what if there is MUCH quicker way?

apt-cache search packagename

Apt-Cache Search...

This is also the way to find out the proper name of the package in case of installing from the CLI… without access to the synaptic ;).

If You want to make sure that You are searching amongst the most recent packages in the repository You may want to run this command before searching:

su -c "apt-get update"

Regards.

Andy

Fix for the older ATI Radeon cards vs 2011.6 iso and xorg server 1.10.3 from the testing section.

Hi all.

Just wanted to let You know that the fix is still working perfectly well under the latest release of PCLinuxOS even if You will install Xorg server from the testing repository. It’s not recommended to install stuff from testing – but if all goes well this will soon be available in our normal repositories as a upgraded package. So just letting You know that the Radeon keeps working fine at least here it does ;).

[andrzejl@wishmacer ~]$ X -version

X.Org X Server 1.10.3
Release Date: 2011-07-08

Regards.

Andy

Avast Antivirus Home Edition on PCLinuxOS 2011.6

Hi all.

Yes yes yes… I know… Linux does not needs antivirus software. True. BUT then – if You are dualbooting with Windows You may want to be able to check the other OS once in a while… Rootkits / malware / spyware / rougeware / viruses and so on and so forth… Even if You are not dualbooting another way of using this would be to use Your remaster to check Your computers at home that are using Windows from the LiveCD / LiveDVD level… Seems useful right? You can access the Windows partitions with read / write permissions under Your PCLinuxOS. Nastiness cannot hide itself from the antivirus with few entries in the registry… Sounds really good… So how does one installs Avast on the PCLinuxOS…

First we need to download a copy of it (it’s legal if You are using it at home on a non-commercial machines. For more info read the Terms and Conditions).

Open konsole and issue this command:

wget -c http://files.avast.com/files/linux/avast4workstation-1.3.0-1.i586.rpm

Downloading Avast #1

Now wait for it to finish downloading

Downloading Avast #2

Done right?

Downloading Avast #3

Now You need to gain root privileges. Issue those commands:

su

give a root’s password when asked.

Now for the installation part issue this command:

apt-get install avast4workstation-1.3.0-1.i586.rpm

and wait for it to finish.

Installing Avast #1

Done?

Installing Avast #1

Great. Now issue those two commands:

echo '' >> /etc/rc.local

Installing Avast #2

echo 'echo 128000000 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax' >> /etc/rc.local

Installing Avast #3

Done?

Close the konsole window and go to Kmenu. Type in ava in the search box.

Installing Avast #4

There You go – that’s Your avast. Click in it. Registration box will pop-up.

Installing Avast #5

Click on the “Click here to obtain registration key” link.

You can choose what browser do You want to use.

Installing Avast #6

Fill out registration form correctly and wait for the e-mail from avast with Your product key.

Installing Avast #7

Copy and paste the registration key into the Registration window and Ok it.

Installing Avast #8

You have just installed Avast home edition for Linux workstations.

Installing Avast #9

Close the avast window and reboot Your machine. When it’s fully rebooted open Avast and upgrade / configure it to Your liking.

Upgraded and configured Avast Antivirus under PCLinuxOS 2011.6 KDE4

Avast does not have to be installed on KDE4. It can be installed on any other DE available with PCLinuxOS. If You want to You can scan the files from the command line… Type in

avast --help

for more details and the command syntax.

Avast configuration files and viruses database are stored in the ~/.avast folder.

If the menu entry was not created and You are planning on creating Your own launcher use:

avastgui

in the command box.

Icons are available here:

/usr/lib/avast4workstation/share/avast/icons/

Hope that someone will find it interesting.

Regards.

Andy

25th January 2012 EDIT:

If You follow this HOWTO and You get

E: Couldn't find package avast4workstation-1.3.0-1.i586.rpm

error then open Dolphin in your /home/login directory. Go to View > Show Hidden Files (make sure it’s ticked),

MiniMe fix

then look for the file, .bashrc, and open it with kwrite. Look for a line;

alias su='su -'

Put a comment in front of that line # so it looks somewhat like this:

# alias su='su -'

Save the file.

Reboot. Redo the howto from step one. It should work without problem for You now.

Solution by Old-Polack – thanks Dude.

Moving hard drive from one machine to another can be hacky…

Hi all.

Due to a hardware failure I had to say goodbye (I think permanently this time) to one of my fav machines. I have a spare one so I am not going to cry over it but what got me worried for a moment was will I be able to get my data / installation from the old machine to the new one. In the past when I was moving from one machine to another I was just reinstalling fresh with my latest remaster. This time however I was moving hdd from a AMD based machine to a Intel based machine. The hdd has a installation that is running on the a64 kernel… Intel will not run well with a64 kernel I thought… I was right. First thing I have noticed was hdd timeout (different modules / architecture) and soon after kernel panic followed… Yeah that went well I thought… Remaster was made with a64 kernel too so… that idea was as good as… I didn’t wanted to loose all my data or to spend a great deal of time reinstalling from the scratch (I have to many customized settings on this installation…) so I thought for a while and I recalled a great post by a good Friend of mine Old-Polack on the PCLinuxOS Forum…

With the hdd in the machine I have booted the computer with PCLinuxOS 2011.6 KDE4 LiveCD choosing Console from the grub options. Then I have logged in as root using password root.

Then I have issued the following commands:

mkdir /here

mount /dev/sdaX /here

In my case it was sda1

mount -o bind /proc /here/proc

mount -o bind /sys /here/sys

chroot /here

service network start

apt-get update

apt-get install kernel-2.6.38.8-pclos1.bfs

This basically means that from the LiveCD level I have became a root of my hdd installation / started network connection there and installed BFS kernel. After this was done I pressed the power button and allowed the machine to power-off slowly.

Then I have booted the machine from the HDD installation but I chose BFS kernel entry from the grub which now appeared there and was ready to be used. After a while of waiting for the modules to compile I was able to boot the machine into the KDE4 desktop.

I redid my xserver, sound, cpufreq and grub (defaulted to BFS kernel) settings and I was good to go… All my stuff but in a new machine without reinstalling…

Now You can use this method to reinstall kernel / upgrade kernel / install apps / change settings and so on if the booting from HDD installation fails.

Awesome trick. Thanks Old-Polack.

I have decided to re-post the info here just in case…

Now can someone please tell me how to do the same thing under windows without the BSOD??? 😛 Not that I need it… I was just pointing out another Linux advantage… 😉

Regards.

Andy