I’ve been publishing browser stats for FileFormat.Info and December 2007 marks a couple of milestones:

• Firefox (all flavors) passed Internet Explorer (all versions).
• IE7 passed IE6.

I suppose FileFormat.Info is a fairly technical site, so this may not be representative of the internet population as a whole.

I am not doing anything browser-specific so it doesn’t really affect me directly, but it is good to see real competition.

I got an inexpensive flatbed USB scanner and was disappointed with the bundled (Windows-only) software, so I tried it on Linux. Debian Etch installs xsane by default, but it would not recognize the scanner. I tried a whole bunch of things but nothing help, until I accidentally started xsane from a root terminal, and it “just worked”, despite the warning from xsane about running as root.

I had to download an ISO image to test some new firewall software and it got interrupted halfway through. Fortunately, curl has a way to continue from where you left out with the “-C -” option. A full command line looks like:

curl -C – –compressed –output disk.iso http://example/download/disk.iso

I am working on something that needs a list of words, without regard to american vs. british or accents or anything: just has to be as many words as possible.  There are a whole bunch of aspell dictionaries available.  First expand the files:

preunzip *.wl

Then merge into a single list, eliminating duplicates:

sort –unique –ignore-case *.wl >list.txt

In additon, I want everything to be UTF-8:

iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 list.txt >ulist.txt

Pretty simple.  The merged english word list has 137,883 words.

I use Debian’s “Places -> connect to server…” dialog to setup connections to a couple FTP servers. Copying and such like work fine, but when I try to use GEdit, it always opens the file read-only. I can “Save As” to the exact file, so it wasn’t a permission problem. The trick is in some totally obscure config file. Here’s the (in GUI) steps to fix it:

1. Run gconf-editor
2. Open the tree to /apps/gedit-2/preferences/editor/save
3. Edit writable_vfs_schemes
4. Add ftp to the list

Voila. Gedit saving FTP. Via the kaylus on the Ubuntu Forums, but it is the same in Debian Etch.

I recently had to install VMWare Server on a server that didn’t have the GUI bits installed.  This is the list of additional packages that need to be installed for VMWare to install:

apt-get install psmisc libxrender1 libxt6

Then it will install, and the VMs can have GUI even though the host doesn’t!

At work we have a slower (1.1 Mbps) internet connection and I don’t want to hog it when I need to download a big file. Fortunately, curl has a –limit-rate option. For example (should be one line):

curl –verbose –output bigfile.tar.gz –limit-rate 3000 http://download.example.com/bigfile.tar.gz

This are my notes on setting up a PDF printer on Debian Etch for the local machine (i.e. not as shared printer).

Install cups-pdf:

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Add a printer. I find that the browser-based configuration works better than the GUI versions (Foomatic-GUI and Gnome CUPS Manager):

• browse to http://localhost:631/
• Add a printer
• Choose the type Generic postscript color printer rev4
• Choose the location cups-pdf:/

The PDF files are put in a PDF subdirectory of your home directory (~/PDF). However, if you print while logged in as root (for example, the test page from the web interface), the PDFs usually end up in /root/PDF but once I found it in /var/spool/cups-pdf/ANONYMOUS.

One other thing to note is that it uses the title of the print job as the file name. The title is set by the program that’s printing, but if it is there is an existing file with the same name, it will overwrite it silently. Generally this isn’t an issue, but Firefox/Iceweasel uses the page <title> as the print job name, so if pages have generic/bad titles, you have to be careful.

I have several books that came with floppy disks or CD-ROMs. I’m worried about whether they’ll last and wanted to make copies of them. It is trivially easy on Linux:

dd if=/dev/scd0 of=/iso/book.iso

I got a rawread script that supposed solves some compatibility problems. I found that dd worked fine on two disks that the script had problems with. The script is called with

rawread.sh /dev/scd0 >book.iso

To mount a image (mkdir /media/iso directory first):

sudo mount -o loop book.iso /media/iso

For floppies, use /dev/usb0 (I have a usb floppy drive) and .img as the extension.

An awk snippet to swap columns in a text file:

awk -F'[ ]' '{ print $2, ": ", $1 }' original.txt >swapped.txt

The '[ ]' is the separator in the original file (a regular expression). The ": " is the separator that is put in the result file.

You can also be done with cut and paste command line tools.

My command for making thumbnails with ImageMagick (should be a single line):

convert original.png -thumbnail ‘160×160>’ thumbnail.png

Just so I don’t have to wade through the tutorial every time I need to do it.

Note: those are single quotes: WordPress seems to switching them to some sort of fancy quotes that don’t work if you cut and paste.

Update: not only is WordPress screwing with the quotes, but it is making the x into a non-x multiplication sign.

So I am reading an interview with Linus Torvalds, and they ask him which distribution he runs, and he comes out with:

…the only distributions I tend to refuse to touch are the “technical” ones, so I’ve never run Debian, because as far as I’m concerned, the whole and only point of a distribution is to make it easy to install (so that I can then get to the part I care about, namely the kernel), so Debian or one of the “compile everything by hand” ones simply weren’t interesting to me.

Far be it from me to contradict the gospel, but that is just plain wrong. I used to use Red Hat, and now run Debian. While I switched because of the licensing, I was amazed at how great apt-get is. It makes maintenance so simple. My machines are totally up to date, and I spend almost no time doing it (unlike with Red Hat). And I am absolutely not a “compile everything by hand” kind of guy either.

This comment really lowered my opinion of him. It makes me think there’s more than a grain of truth in other sour grapes.

It is pretty simple: these are just my notes so I don’t have to think next time I do it.

Download from http://www.winterdrache.de/freeware/png2ico/

chdir /usr/local
tar -xvzf png2ico-src-YYYY-MM-DD.tar.gz
apt-get install libpng12-src
make

My Online Png To Icon converter is just a wrapper around this.

VMWare didn’t start after I installed the latest Etch updates. The error message is printed to the terminal, which is pretty useless if you’re starting it from the GUI. Anyhow, the fix is pretty easy:

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

I guess the update had a new kernel and VMWare needed to re-install its hooks.

I use JCharset to get some additional character sets, including UTF 7 and GSM DEFAULT. While it was trivial to setup in development (where I launch Tomcat from an ant task with all sorts of parameters), it was a different story in production where I’m using the default Debian Etch install of Tomcat 5.5. It was very picky about where the JCharset.jar file went: it didn’t like in:

• WEB-INF/lib
• jre/lib (which has Sun’s charset.jar)
• /var/lib/tomcat5.5/shared/lib

It has to go in:

/usr/share/tomcat5.5/endorsed

No errors or anything came up: it just didn’t load. I didn’t notice until I saw 404’s on the missing pages.

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

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

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.

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.

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.