mikas blog

Quoting the project homepage: Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). It really rocks, especially as it works for Linux/Unix […]

Hopefully fuzz testing is well known nowadays, right? But did you check how smart your software can handle ENOSPC – the ‘No space left on device’ error? I like stress testing software (to be honest: no, not really). Yesterday I debugged a problem regarding zsh history writing on ENOSPC. Usually I use the grml Linux […]

I wrote a small python webpage for the grml-wiki to provide some information regarding Python-development on grml. I just upgraded Vim on my main system to version 7.1 and omnicompletion with vim-python became better once more. So time for a short demo of ctrl-x-o: I also very much like ‘%ed’ within ipython using the following […]

Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt: stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!) thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!) the filter language feature of the […]

It’s done. grml 1.0 is available. New features? Tons of them. 8-) Just check out the official release notes for grml 1.0. Need grml for a x86_64 system? No problem, grml64 0.1 is waiting for you. You are used to grml-small? Check out grml-small 0.4. You want to know what are my favourite features of […]

docbook2odf is a toolkit that automatically converts DocBook to OASIS OpenDocument (ODF, the ISO standardized format used for texts, spreadsheets and presentations). Conversion is based on a XSLT which makes it easy to convert DocBook->ODF, ODT, ODS and ODP as all these documents are XML based. This piece of software is pretty rocking for example […]

As formorer mentioned already we have new release candidates of grml: grml 1.0-rc1 with codename Meilenschwein is available as well as grml-small 0.4-rc1 with codename Springinkerl. We are proud to be able to present a 64bit version of grml as well: grml 64 0.1-rc1 with codename LiveShell which is based on the amd64 port of […]

I got ‘remote: abort: No space left on device:’ when running ‘hg push’ via ssh during a repository migration (from subversion to mercurial). Huh?! The partition with all the repositories on it has enough free space, so what? Ah, wait a second. When pushing data via ssh, mercurial does a ‘ssh $HOST hg -R /path/to/repos […]

As grml supports booting from usb devices (harddisk installation via grml2hd as well as booting from usb pens via grml2usb) and I helped many people at debugging booting problems I think I stumbled upon every existing pitfall. 8-) There are several situations where booting might fail. So here we go with a summary of the […]

Do you already know crm114? Taking quotes of the crm114 book: What is this? Some kind of grep bitten by a radioactive spider? — apocryphal ­CRM114 isn’t ugly like PERL. It’s a whole different kind of ugly. — John Bowker Want to get a calculator using crm114? No problem: % cat > calc << EOF […]

Update on 2007-09-12: updated shell script and added Pre-Invoke to dpkg configuration. Based on Bart Trojanowski’s blog article “etc snapshots with git” I removed one further item from my todo list: maintain /etc with mercurial on my Debian systems. First step is creating the repository and securing access to the repository. As mercurial stores all […]

Ok, a little bit delayed due to busy days… – anyway. Last weekend Chemnitzer Linuxdays 2007 took place and as already written in the grml-develblog I’ve been there. As every year Chemnitzer Linuxdays were great. I really enjoyed meeting people, hacking and giving support at the grml-booth, though it was quite stressful for me overall. […]

The countdown is running… On 3rd and 4th of March 2007 the Chemnitzer Linux Days will take place. We’ll present grml (Linux Live-CD for sysadmins / texttool-users / geeks) at a booth there! If everything works as intented we will have a demo system as well as CDs of a special grml release named “Dioptrienotto […]

A problem everyone stumbles across (at least) once: % tar zcf stats_2005.tar.gz stats_2005* zsh: argument list too long: tar The reason? Too many files for the ARG_MAX limit. ARG_MAX defines the maximum length of arguments to the exec function (more precise: bytes of args plus environment for exec), defined in /usr/include/linux/limits.h on your Linux system: […]

Ever wanted to insert a character in your terminal but don’t have a keybinding for that character? zsh provides a nifty feature called insert-unicode-char: autoload insert-unicode-char zle -N insert-unicode-char bindkey ‘^Xi’ insert-unicode-char Figure out the character’s code (take a look at unicode.org/charts/ for example) and press ‘ctrl-x i’, followed by the character’s code and press […]