mikas blog

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 […]