mikas blog

Yesterday I’ve been at the cinema. My girlfriend and me were watching the german version of ‘The phantom of the Opera’. The pictures are impressive, the sound is great. What we didn’t like was the voice of Uwe Kröger for the phantom because the actor of the phantom didn’t look like Uwe. ;-) Conclusion: A […]

Today I discovered the useful tool tcprobe. Till today I used mplayer and GNU strings for getting details on movie files. tcprobe is part of the transcode package and provides detailed information on files: $ tcprobe -i test.avi [tcprobe] RIFF data, AVI video [avilib] V: 25.002 fps, codec=DX50, frames=1597, width=352, height=288 [avilib] A: 32000 Hz, […]

Linux Server Hacks by Rob Flickenger (ISBN: 0-596-00461-3) is a collection of 100 tips and tricks for servers running linux. I read the german version (ISBN: 3897213613) and enjoyed it. First of all I like the short “stories” because it’s possible to savour the book when you’ve just a few minutes of spare time. About […]

echo ‘Du gruenst nicht nur zur Sommers zeit, nein auch im Winter, wenn es schne it. O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, wie gruen sind deeeeine Blaetter’ | festival –tts

While preparing and testing the Linux kernel 2.6.9 for the grml-system I noticed problems with loading the reiser4-module: # modprobe reiser4 FATAL: Error inserting reiser4 (/lib/modules/2.6.9-grml/kernel/fs/reiser4/reiser4.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg) # dmesg | tail -1 reiser4: Unknown symbol find_get_pages_tag Google does not know the problem (yet ;-)) and taking a […]

While checking for new magazines at the bookstore I discovered Software 2.0 Extra. The magazine is published by Software Wydawnictwo. That’s the company you might know from their other magazines like Linux+, Hakin9 or PHP Solutions. AFAICS there have been already two releases of the german version of “Software 2.0 Extra”, the current one covers […]

As you can see in the screenshot I’m using 2.6.9 for the current devel-release of grml. It was hard work to set it up due to problems with cloop in the initrd (thanks to Worf for his help!) but now it works like a charme on my laptop. Now I’ve to add some more modules […]

You still don’t have a computer on your toilet? Well, make a hardcopy then. ;-) My prefered way of making sourcecode more readable: $ which makereadable makereadable() { output=$1 shift a2ps –medium A4dj -E -o $output $* ps2pdf $output } Together with my a2psrc it provides a readable output. Take a look at my pdf-files […]

Opensource-CD is a german project which provides several open source programs for windows. Version 1.1 provides 70 up2date programs. I just downloaded the ISO and took a look at it. I think I don’t have to build my own ISOs anymore, because most programs I usually need when sitting in front of a windows box […]

At the end of december I would like to release grml version 0.2. Many new packages will be available, some more scripts which should make life easier and a first public version of grml2hd by Jimmy should be available too. Today I installed grml to harddisk with a first version of grml2hd: grml@grml ~ $ […]

I used a self compiled version of mutt for a long time with a lot of patches. Debian’s mutt-package includes also some useful patches so I wanted to switch to debian’s version. First of all I installed the latest version of debian’s mutt. And it sucked. Debians /etc/Muttrc unsets the variable ‘use_from’! :-( That’s awfull […]

netsh is available on Windows systems since Windows 2000. I noticed that even many windows-sysadmins don’t know of it’s existence. ;-( But netsh is really useful if you have to debug network problems on windows boxes or want to set up network without clicking through lots of menus. Using netsh you can configure and display […]

My blog looked like dead in the last few days, I know. Sorry for that, but my load was and still is quite high again. ;-( In the last few days I set up my own rootserver. Apache, Apache-SSL, MySQL, Courier and Postfix are doing their job now. If you can read this message it […]

amaroK seems to rock. I don’t like xmms because it’s just a very bad winamp-clone without an useful file-dialog. xmms is useful for me when I want to use a static playlist and jump to a specific file via ‘j’, but that’s it. A few days ago I tried Muine because Thomas Themel mentioned it […]

Together with jimmy I ordered a Linksys WRT54G router, and got it yesterday . Why I bought the WRT54G is the fact that it’s quite cheap (~70 Euro), you can get the firmware’s sourcecode and it’s running on Linux: $ telnet 192.168.1.1 5431 Trying 192.168.1.1… Connected to 192.168.1.1. Escape character is ‘^]’. help HTTP/1.1 400 […]

Yesterday the admins of the mailserver in VC-Graz activated authentication. I was using exim because setting it up via debian’s eximconfig using a smarthost was quite trivial. Now it was time for changing to Postfix. Setting up postfix was done in a few minutes and I wrote down the required steps. Since a few weeks […]

Is anyone out there who has not installed Ubuntu yet? Ok, one person less out there because I installed it on my workstation at work. :-) Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should […]

DeMuDi is part of AGNULA: AGNULA (acronym for «A GNU/Linux Audio distribution», pronounced with a strong g) is the name of a project funded by the European Commission (number of contract: IST-2001-34879; key action IV.3.3, Free Software: towards the critical mass). After the end of the funded period, AGNULA is continuing as a volunteer based […]

No, that’s not a joke. Using the file dsl-embedded-0.8.3.zip from the DSL-project (Damn Small Linux) let’s you run Linux on your Windows box: It’s running via qemu (QEMU CPU Emulator): START qemu.exe -L . -m 128 -hda harddisk -cdrom dsl.iso -boot d -enable-audio -user-net -localtime It’s not very fast (because of running in an emulation) […]

I just discovered another useful feature of convert (part of imagemagick). Run: $ convert ‘vid:*.jpg’ thumbnails.jpg .. and you’ll get an overview of your jpgs in the file thumbnails.jpg. Also take a look at the examples-section of the convert manual page.