On a debian server with mediawiki installed and running with a local mysql. root@myserver:~# apt-get install automysqlbackup root@myserver:~# crontab -e # m h dom mon dow command 5 4 * * …

This post is no longer necessary as microsoft now provide official virtualbox images, yay! http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads Microsoft provide Virtual PC images for testing yo…

LVM + ReiserFS for the win! It's so easy to add more space root@atom:~ # lvextend -L +100G /dev/vg2/local Extending logical volume local to 200.00 GiB Logical volume local successfully resized root@…

getting supybot to announce new bugzilla bugs - I've just put here the key non-obvious things that tripped me up when trying to set this up. All done on Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS Install supybot and the supyb…

Steps I took to get a backuppc server on an ubuntu 8.10 pc in order to be able to back up a windows vista business pc. I've only documented the non-obvious and undocumented items here. Added a user c…

If you trust everyone who has physical access to a pc (if not then you are encrypting your files, right?) then there seems little point in having to type a password just because more than one user use…

If you are like me and my coworkers, you often end up running stuff as root in your home folder and end up not able to access your own files. For the record, here's the commands to reset the permissio…

I couldn't find anything exactly matching this on the net when I was figuring it out, so here's what I did. This is working against a remote svn (subversion) server, but applies even without one. On t…

Here's how to recursively remove execute permissions on files that have been copied from a windows system. find * -type f -exec chmod -x {} \; ie, find all files (not directories), and execute a comma…

I like a new line in my prompt so that if I'm deep in a path I don't end up with 10 characters left to type in, and pretty colours so that it's easy to spot the prompt when scrolling through lots of o…

A quick howto... Take a series of photos on your digital camera. Copy them onto your linux box. shrink the photos to a more managable size: mogrify -verbose -resize 600x400 -quality 60% *.JPG Preview…

Challenge of the day was to fit as many photos as possible on a single flash card to stick in a digital photo frame. Here's how it's done. The frame from Philips goes by the memorable name of 9FF2M4 ,…

This weekend, I finally got the tv-out working under linux (Ubuntu 7.10 aka gusty gibbon) on my laptop. Here's what was involved, including some of the (time consuming) red herrings involved in gettin…

Howto prevent ubuntu locking the screen when closing the laptop lid. Thanks to jrib in irc://freenode.net/#ubuntu for this one. Run gconf-editor (with alt+F2) Go to or search for /desktop/gnome/lo…

Here I outline the solution I chose for backing up my life, er... I mean home folder. (I'm sure there's life outside /home/tim somewhere...) My requirements were: backup to dvd+rw >20GB of data to…

http://starfighter.nongnu.org/ Whilst looking for backup packages on ubuntu via synaptic by searching for the word "tar", I stumbled across the package "starfighter". So I installed it. Then ran it. …

me and partimage I recently reorganised the partitions on my laptop, with the help of some invaluable OSS tools. The laptop was split into OS partitions, with a data and swap partition at the end, but…