A quick Google pointed me towards a post on the useful Add-On Mirrors site. I then went to the homepage of the author and installed the nice tool KeyConfig.

A quick restart of Firefox, then open KeyConfig (via Tools > KeyConfig), search for the Ctrl+q key press and disable.

Another restart of Firefox and it’s complete, no more accidental quits of Firefox! KeyConfig is a very nice and simple to use Add-On and will certainly be added to my default Firefox pack from now on, ace!

Take for example this, imagine having a long hostname, with an odd port and a different user. Typing that would be a pain, most people would do something like:

alias ssh-short="ssh -p 12345 someotheruser@somelong.hostname.com"

In their ~/.bashrc, however the same can be filled into the configuration file. Edit the file ~/.ssh/config (or make it!):

Host short
  HostName somelong.hostname.com
  User someotheruser
  Port 12345

After doing this you can simply do:

$ ssh short

How much easier do you need it to be?!

unrar t file.rar
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
  echo "Rar file is good?"
fi

However it was returning zero all the time, even when the file wasn’t a rar:

# unrar t file.rar
 
UNRAR 3.80 freeware      Copyright (c) 1993-2008 Alexander Roshal
 
file.rar is not RAR archive
# echo $?
0

So it fails the test but returns zero regardless. This makes it very unhelpful for using in scripting. Fortunately enough a mate on IRC discovered that his version did.

So I first download the existing SRPM and installed it:

# yumdownloader --source unrar
# rpm -i unrar*.srpm

Then I installed that and simply modified so I downloaded the latest, created a RPM and installed.

I have submitted the updated spec file to RPMfusion.

The first step is to get your drivers and for Broadcom, which is relatively easy as they produce them for us. So first download the driver (these drivers support BM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based cards) and was also successful in this case with BCM4328.

Check that the package ‘linux-headers’ is installed, this is really just for completeness sakes. Gentoo would not work for long without this package!

(gentoo)# emerge linux-headers
... output ...

Unpack the downloaded drivers and build for your current kernel:

(gentoo)# tar -xzf hybrid-portsrc-ARCH-VERSION.tar.gz
(gentoo)# make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
... output ...

Remove any existing wireless drivers.

(gentoo)# rmmod ndiswrapper b43 ssb bcm43xx b43legacy

Add in some modules required for WPA wireless:

(gentoo)# modprobe ieee80211_crypt_tkip

Test the newly built wireless driver:

(gentoo)# insmod wl.ko
(gentoo)# iwconfig
.. output ...
(gentoo)# iwlist scanning
... output ...

If that is working we can copy in the driver to the kernel and add to the autoload:

(gentoo)# cp wl.ko /lib/modules/`uname-r`/kernel/net/wireless/
(gentoo)# rmmod wl
(gentoo)# modprobe wl
(gentoo)# echo 'wl' >>/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

So now we have a working driver we can go on to configure for WPA. Alter the /etc/conf.d/net (note we assume that eth0 is wireless):

# Prefer wpa_supplicant over wireless-tools
modules=( "wpa_supplicant" )
 
# It's important that we tell wpa_supplicant which driver we should
# be using as it's not very good at guessing yet
wpa_supplicant_eth0="-Dmadwifi"

Next set up the network in the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

# This setting is required or the connection will not work
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
 
# Ensure that only root can read the WPA configuration
ctrl_interface_group=0
 
# Let wpa_supplicant take care of scanning and AP selection
ap_scan=1
 
# Only WPA-PSK is used. Any valid cipher combination is accepted
network={
  ssid="example"
  proto=WPA RSN   # RSN is needed for WPA2
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  pairwise=CCMP TKIP
  group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
  psk=06b4be19da289f475aa46a33cb793029d4ab3db7a23ee92382eb0106c72ac7bb
  #The higher the priority the faster it connects
  priority=2
}

And that is it, you should find that your wireless is enabled on boot.

Thanks should also go to DJ Kaos for the preparation of the driver.

I have owned this dinky wee notebook for sometime now and can highly advise it for anyone looking for a Linux Notebook.

Some tricks I have are:

Alt+F2 > xfce-settings-show > Desktop > Behaviour > Show desktop menu on right click.
The will enable the XFCE menu on right click, which is useful to me.

Alt+F2 > xfce-settings-show > Sessions and Startup > Advanced > Launch Gnome services on startup
This will allow NetworkManger to use gnome-keyring and therefore finally store the keys for wireless!

Simple but effective!

Simply download the key by using the GPG tool:

gpg --keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-key E6F33B6628973CC0

Then import that key into either apt:

gpg -a --export 010908312D230C5F | sudo apt-key add -

Or rpm:

gpg --export -a 010908312D230C5F >key.txt
rpm --import key.txt

Simple!

First off lets make a simple script to convert the HTML into text. Several terminal based browsers exist and these can do the conversion for us (make sure to place it in your PATH somewhere).

#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -z `which links | grep -v 'no links'` ]
then
  links -html-numbered-links 1 -html-images 1 -dump "file://$@"
elif [ ! -z `which lynx | grep -v 'no lynx'` ]
then
  lynx -force_html -dump "$@"
elif [ ! -z `which w3m | grep -v 'no w3m'` ]
then
  w3m -T text/html -F -dump "$@"
else
  cat $@
fi

Add this to your ~/.muttrc:

auto_view text/html
alternative_order text/enriched text/plain text text/html

And then this to your ~/.mailcap:

text/html;html2txt %s; copiousoutput

Start up Mutt and get nothing but text e-mails.

So here is how you can do it for yourself. If you require to setup any partitioning scheme before hand, I highly recommend Partition Logic as a good run-from-CD partitioning tool. You will also need to download the small CentOS NetInstall ISO.

• Boot from the ISO
• Type linux askmethod at the boot prompt
• Select the required network setup. Normally DHCP is good enough, disable IPv6 unless you plan on using it.
• Select HTTP as the installation method.
• If you have a local web server with your RPM’s on it then put in the information there. Otherwise use: mirror.centos.org and centos/5.3/os/i386.
• Finally start the installation process.

The whole thing should take no more than a couple of hours to complete. This method allows you to quickly start an installation of CentOS without the need to download all 6 of the CD’s or the DVD image.

ENOTOBACCO		Read on an empty pipe
EBEFOREI		Invalid syntax
ECHERNOBYL		Core dumped
ECRAY			Program exited before being run
EDINGDONG		The daemon is dead
EFLAT			System needs tuning
EGEEK			Program written by inept Frat member
EIEIO			Here-a-bug, there-a-bug, ....
EIUD			Missing period
ELECTROLUX		Your code could stand to be cleaned up
EMILYPOST		Wrong fork
END.ARMS.CONTROL	Silo overflow
ENOHORSE		Mount failed
ENONSEQUETOR		C program not derived from main(){printf("Hello, world");}
EWATERGATE		Extended tape gap
EWOK			Aliens sighted
EWOK			Your code appears to have been stir-fried
EWOULDBNICE     	The feature you want has not been implemented yet

Not to be out done, a new signal:

SIGNUKE     	Nuclear event occurred (cannot be caught or ignored)

(Orlando) sed regex kicks my ass.  I like to remove the second : in the
line. So that in 123:456:6789 it will only returns 123:456.  I can find the
first :, but I have not been able to use s/:{2}// to find the second
one, and remove the rest.

I enjoy regex (I know I’m weird, leave me alone), so I was able to provide an answer to this problem:

(@znx) Orlando: the trick is to use [^:] and \1 ..
(@znx) like:   s/\(:[^:]*\):.*/\1/

Now obviously at first glance this regex could be a bit intimating to someone who is still picking up the skills but as with most things if we break it down it becomes easier.

Working out to in, \( \):.*, that says match something with : at the end and all the character after it. The . is a special meaning “any character” and * to match multiple characters. The first match will be stored by sed and assigned into the \1 for the replacement (that is what the brackets do). Inside the brackets we have :[^:]*. The sequence [^ ] is a negated list, that means that we are asking it to match everything that is NOT inside the list, in this case :.

Putting it altogether we are saying: Match a leading : and a trailing : with any characters after it. Placing the contents between the two : in memory. Then finally we replace the contents.

% echo 123:456:6789 | sed 's/\(:[^:]*\):.*/\1/'
123:456

Sucess, however as with most things, there is more than one way to skin a cat and regex is rarely the prettiest method. So what other ways can we solve this problem?

With AWK:

% echo 123:456:6789 | awk -F: '{print $1":"$2}'
123:456

With cut:

% echo 123:456:6789 | cut -d: -f1,2
123:456

As always, experimentation with the mass of GNU tools you can find on your system will bring a greater deal of power to your tool chest. Mind you, then I wouldn’t get complements for helping would I?

(Orlando) Wow, When I grow up, I like to remember this thing like you do.  

Haha, till next time!