apt-get/aptitude

Many a times we mirror some iso-s of debian and put it on our laptops and/or local LAN to work as a repository. While installing it asks for authenicity of the packages.And we have to press/write 'Yes' all of the time. To get rid of this we can just write the following in /etc/apt/apt.conf

APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 1 ;

And please mind the spaces.

gnome-mount

Okay I agree that I dont use gnome/gnome-mount anymore. I have switched to halevt. But yesterday an acquaintance of mine (using gnome) ran into a problem. Her machine was not able to automount the usb thumb disks. I tried my hand for sometime making the normal user a member of some groups. But still it didn't work. Then I tried logging into root and mounting from there. But no fruits. At last I searched on net and found a command line for gnome-mount

$ gnome-mount -v -b -d <device point>

This device point information is available from the command dmesg. So i replaced <device point> with sdb1 and it gave a slight hint that some thing with media directory is creating a problem (dont remember the actual message). So I checked the /etc/fstab file and somebody has created an entry for /media and /media/sdb in fstab. I removed those and everything started fine. So just a piece of advice:
"Documenting the changes your are making to your system on a simple sheet of paper can come handy many-a-times."

nfs-debian-squeeze-portmap-ext4

cryptic topic name?
Ya I know. But I was unable to find a better heading. I wasted my full week in searching for the solution of mounting nfs on the configuration of ext4+squeeze(debian)+nfs4. But was unable to do it. The reason was not obviuos due to my lack of networking knowledge (sorry I am a telecom+elex engg by degree). It was gving some rpc error. Finally i hit the nail. The problem was at the server from portmap as it was only listening to the localhost. I just opened /etc/default/portmap and commented the only uncommented line in it.

#OPTIONS="-i 127.0.0.1"

And just gave a restart to the machine. (I could have restarted portmap but the incidents/failures happened in last 1 week made me go for "the orthodox restart"). And voila everything (ok i agree - nfsmount :( ) started working on the client.
PS: The whole simple process is working fine on debian lenny release.

recording desktop using xtv

Recently one of my friend asked me for some way to record his desktop for some purpose. I told him to go for recordmydesktop. But as he is already running some heavy-weight applications , his system became too slow Then I introduced him to vnc (xvncserver) on local and record it on a remote machine. And he was a bit happy but still the memory consumption was quite high.
Then I found xtv which can be installed on debian as

#apt-get install xtv

And then on the machine whose display he want to view: remove -no-listen-tcp so that display can be exported. Then write

$xhost + remote_machine_ip

where remote_machine_ip is the ip where you want to run the recordmydesktop application. and then on the remote machine just run

xtv -d local_machine_ip:0

where local_machine_ip is the ip whose display you eant to record. And check the memory consumtion. This is the best I can get at this moment.

process viewers

From a long time I was dependent on top and gnome-system-monitor for looking for the culprit process and killing them at my whim. Now I found another pair of tools which are better suited for my kind of job (looking for culprit and killing 'em). These can be installed on debian by

#apt-get install htop iotop

The htop gives process view in a bit graphical(can I use this word here) format. Also you can see cpu core wise usage. All the blood-shed is possible here. And the second one i.e. iotop helps in finding the cause of the churning sound coming from harddisk (basically amount for I/O for those few privileged users of flash HD). So enjoy using these tools. Once again I m in love with linux-debian.

And also one more news: debian is moving to time based release system with the delivery of "squeeze" expected in Dec this year.

here comes one more display manager

I recently configured "slim" display manager (ya its name itself is silm) on one of my machines. Its works nicely. A light weight manager as compared to other two normally available. The coolest point that I like is that if you want to restart or switch off from there is to give halt/restart command in username field and superuser password in password field. Isn't it nerdy.

iconifying all windows in fvwm

I added these lines in the end of Startup file of fvwm-crystal (~/.fvwm-crystal/preferences/Startup). These iconify all windows except the fvwm and desktop ones. delay is in milli-seconds.

#to iconify all windows except fvwm and the desktop ones
Schedule 10000 All ("*", !"Fvwm*|panel|gdeskcal") Iconify