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Category: Linux
Learn how to filter iptables log messages to a separate file. Two methods are presented: one using traditional syslog and one using rsyslog.
Firefox 3 added native form widgets on Linux. Most of the time they look great, but on some sites including mine, they look awful. Here’s how I styled my forms to avoid native widgets.
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Safely Removing External Drives in Linux
Simply unmounting a filesystem is not the ideal way to remove an external USB/firewire/SATA drive in Linux. This tutorial explains why and gives a solution.
S.M.A.R.T. is a system in modern hard drives designed to report conditions that may indicate impending failure. smartmontools is a free software package that can monitor S.M.A.R.T. attributes and run hard drive self-tests. Although smartmontools runs on a number of platforms, I will only cover installing and configuring it on Linux.
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Updated awstats for Debian
The awstats package in Debian is pretty outdated. Etch has version 6.5. Sid has 6.7. Version 6.9 was released on December 28, 2008. I’m a statistics junky and the new version has better robot detection so I built an updated package on my lenny/sid machine: awstats_69-1_all.deb. This package also works perfectly on my etch server without […]
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How to Shrink an LVM Volume Safely
Logical Volume Management is a vast improvement over standard partitioning schemes. Among many other things, it allows you to decrease the size of a volume without recreating it completely. Here’s how.
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Fixing uTorrent File Associations in Linux
Running uTorrent under wine works pretty well in Linux. One problem with installing under wine is that file associations are not set correctly. This means that double-clicking a .torrent file or opening a .torrent link in your browser won’t automatically start uTorrent. Here’s how to solve that.
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RealPlayer on x86_64 (amd64) Debian Linux
There are a few tricks to getting RealPlayer to work right under x86_64 Linux. Realplayer is a 32-bit application and needs a bit of coercing to run smoothly.
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Making KDE Play Nice on a GNOME Desktop
I prefer GNOME for the most part, but some KDE applications are simply better than their GNOME counterparts. That said, there are some problems getting them to work well together. I recently discovered that installing k3b cause my GNOME menus to, for lack of a better word, explode. Here’s how I went about fixing them.
There are two different ways to monitor a UPS with nut: either expose the UPS hardware to GNOME Power Manager through hal or monitor the UPS directly with upsmon and upsd. There are trade-offs with each approach. Let’s take a look at both.