How to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions: 1. Get the VBoxGuestAddiitons.iso file from http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html 2. Make the VBoxGuestAddiitons.iso available to your “guest” OS: In the Devices menu open “CD/DVD Devices” and select checkbox next to the VBoxGuestAddiitons.iso or if the iso is not there use the Add button to locate and add the iso file […]
Git remote branches: how to create, track, remove/delete
1. Here’s how to to create a remote branch in git:: git push origin origin:refs/heads/my_branch … or even simpler and more straightforward: git branch my_branch # create branch locally git push origin my_branch # push it to server 2. To push your changes to the remote branch: git push origin my_branch 3. To delete the […]
How to find out my libc (glibc) version?
To check your libc (glibc) version type “ls -l /lib/libc.” and hit TAB. This should expand the line into the name of your libc library file, e.g. something like /lib/libc.so.6 Umm… no, the .6 does not mean that your glibc version is 6, unfortunately it is a little more complicated than that 🙂 … but not […]
Can’t play MP3s in Fedora 9…
If you’ve installed Fedora Core 9 you won’t be able to play your MP3 audio files out of the box. I suppose some other Fedora versions also have this “feature”. I won’t go here into a lengthy explanation as to why exactly FC9 does not play mp3 – Fedora actually handles that quite good (the […]
Remove XFCE global shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl-F4)
This was something which I found to be quite annoying on the Xfce Desktop Environment version 4 (4.4.3), it probably is the same for some other Xfce versions too… The XFCE Window Manager defines the so called global Window shortcuts, meaning that when this key-combo shortcut is pressed, no matter where (from which application), the […]
No sound on my Linux box and alsamixer gives error in function snd_ctl_open failed
On my newly installed Fedora box (I said “newly” but this may be a bit misleading as I installed FC9, which is an old distribution but I have to use it for compatibility reasons with other software…) I had the following problem: I had no sound (e.g. YouTube plays a clip and there is no […]
What files comprise an RPM package? Which package a file belongs to?
If you want to find the relationship between files on your system and RPM packages (which one owns/belongs-to which) then this page will be of help to you. 1. Contents of an RPM package 1.1.1. This RPM command will show you the contents of a package which is already installed on your system: rpm -ql […]
INIT: cannot execute “/etc/init.d/rcS” (or rc)
PROBLEM: The Linux init process gets an error that looks like this (in the stderr output): INIT: cannot execute “/etc/init.d/rc” Several things may cause this error but in my case it was happening because the rc script had #! /bin/sh on the first line, and /bin/sh was missing. SOLUTION: In /bin provide a link called […]
How to use emacs to replace Mac carriage returns (the ^M line endings, and that includes even the “stubborn” ones!)…
The below information was shamelessly copied, word for word, from http://mike.kruckenberg.com 🙂 Changing end-of-line Mode in Emacs (replaces ^M line return) Every now and then I run into this. I export CSV data from Excel and find that when trying to use it in other places the line-returns aren’t quite right and unix tools like […]
Help! Unable to automount my usb flash disk!
PROBLEM: On certain Linux distributions removable media (USB flash drives, CD’s,…) are auto-mounted by default and all users can read and write to them (if media is writeable of course). On others, inserting a removeable media results in an error message similar to Failed to mount “200GB Volume”, e.g. an error message from your file-manager […]