bash equivalent to the Windows "start" command line

One of the things that I missed when I moved from Windows to Linux was the start command, which would launch the correct program for a given file. Well, add the following line to ~/.bashrc to get it:

alias start=xdg-open

Then either logout/login, or run (the leading dot & space are important):

. ~/.bashrc

Now you can launch the appropriate file by doing

start artwork.png

Tab size in vi

I use 4 spaces for tabs but the default vi (aka vim) in Debian Etch uses 8 spaces. To make it default to 4, create a .vimrc file in your home directory with the line:

:set tabstop=4

Custom java parameters for Tomcat on Debian Etch

The correct place for custom java parameters on Debian Etch is in /etc/default/tomcat5.5: look for the line:

CATALINA_OPTS=”-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx128M -server”

I usually bump up -Xmx (my server is just for Tomcat) and add -Xss2m.

Custom Server Header for Tomcat in Debian Etch

If you are using Tomcat to serve pages directly (i.e. not through Apache), it will send as server header of “ApacheCoyote/1.0 which I do not like. To change this, go into the /etc/tomcat5.5/server.xml file and in the appropriate tag, add an new attribute:

server=”NCSA/1.0a6″

Or whatever name you would like it to send. In the same spot, you can add the

URIEncoding=”UTF-8″

Which is necessary for full Unicode support.

Network interfaces for a Debian Etch guest under VMWare

I’m using Debian Etch as a guest OS under VMWare. When you copy the VM (to another machine or another instance on the same machine), VMWare wants to give it a new UID (you should let it so you don’t end up with duplicate machines). A side effect is that you get a new ethernet MAC address. In Debian Etch, a side effect of that is that it thinks you have a new network card but it doesn’t forget about the old network card, so instead of the network interface being eth0, it is now eth1. And the next time you copy the VM, it is eth2, and so on.

It is really a pretty simple fix, once you know where to look. The clue is that udev is what is remembering the old MAC address. In my VMs, the addresses were in:

/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

It is just a plain text file. Delete the lines with the old MAC addresses and change the last one to be eth0.