The encoding of x86 and x86-64 instructions is well documented in Intel or AMD’s manuals. However, they are not quite easy for beginners to start with to learn encoding of the x86-64 instructions. In this post, I will give a list of useful manuals for understanding and studying the x86-64 instruction encoding, a brief introduction…
The USB standards have evolved to 3.1 and the supported throughput have been increased too. On Linux, the support to USB standards are following the standards development. In this post, we will survey the standards that common hardware support and the support in Linux. USB standards USB 2.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB_2.0 Speed: <= 60MB/s, or 480 Mbps…
Attaching a USB keyboard to a laptop is common when using a laptop because a normal keyboard may provide a more convenient typing experience. The laptop keyboard is not used in these situations. However, the laptop keyboard may still be touched by accident. In this post, we will discuss how to disable and enable the…
The hplip packages contains all the tools you need to set up the HP scanner. For scanning, you may use the sane and xsane tools. The tricky part to enable the scanner is carefully choose which driver to use from the hplip package. If you choose a non-suitable driver, only the printer will work and…
RAID systems such as MegaRAID add signatures to disks to maintain the infomration on these didks. When we simply remove these disks and install them to another server, Linux on the new server may detect these RAID signature infomration and refuses to continue write to the disk. Here is one example that mkfs reports “apparently…
First time getting my hand on a plotter (HP Designjet 500) directly to print a poster, I found it was an interesting experience. But configuring the printer settings was not that straightforward compared to using normal office A4 printers. I took photos of how it was configured for reference of my own and also those…
In Extending a Mounted Ext4 File System on LVM in Linux, we introduced how to extend a mounted ext4 filesystem on LVM Logical volume by adding a new physical volume. It is also common to shrink an ext4 file system as to spare some disk space. In this post, I will discuss how to shrink…
WhatsApp is a great messenger app on smart phones. There was ever some tricks to install WhatsApp app on iPod Touch or iPad. However, it is not possible now. But the good news is that the WhatsApp web is available so that users can use WhatsApp inside of a browser and the iPad or iPod…
The Linux disk names (e.g. sda1, hdb3, etc.) are not reliable—they may be changed if there are hardware changes, such an adding or removing a disk. Additionally, the order for the Linux device names is not always the same as the order of SATA poets. For example, the disk connected to SATA port 0 (first…