I encountered the problem on iPhone that MKV video files with AC3 are played with no sound. The OPlayer reports to me that “According to DTS patent, DTS is forbidden to play , None of the media player on iPhone/iPad can play DTS”. However, the video file can be played in MPlayer on Linux just…
Controlling the mounting of filesystems is a useful technique for managing Linux systems. The mounting configurations are mostly in the /etc/fstab file. In this post, we will discuss 2 common and useful techniques for controlling the filesystem mounting by playing with the /etc/fstab file: allowing non-root users to mount/unmount filesystems and avoiding mounting failures blocking…
Having to go the the server room to reset servers is the most headache thing for admins managing a cluster of Linux servers in a remote site. Either you can ping the server but can not ssh to it, or you even can not ping it. There are various reasons that may cause a Linux…
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…
My best favorite disk partition table manipulation tools are cfdisk/fdisk on Linux. However, for large disks, cfdisk/fdisk (of the versions by this post is written) will just give up with a message suggesting GPT partition table format and using GNU parted like WARNING: The size of this disk is 6.0 TB (6001042391040 bytes). DOS partition…
iPhone is nice to take videos. However, one headache is the video may be rotated by 90 degree if you play it with non-Apple software such as MPlayer on Linux or Windows. This tutorial will introduce how to rotate the video taken from iPhone or other sources on Linux by 90 degree. The tool we…
MPlayer is a great movie player. SSH is a great tool to connect and transfer data over the network securely. Combining these 2 great tools together will be greater. You may already has a small server storing some movies or videos or music and playing them on your laptop will be convenient. In this post,…
The Linux kernel has a generic driver for a graphic framebuffer named vesafb on intel boxes. It provides a nice large console for most of modern displays. Setting VESA modes for Linux kernel with 32-bit and 16-bit boot protocol are different. We introduce both methods here. Linux kernel with 32-bit boot protocol For machine with…
The posix_spawn() and posix_spawnp() functions create a new child process from the specified process image constructed from a regular executable file. It can be used to replace the relative complex “fork-exec-wait” methods with fork() and exec(). However, compared to fork() and exec(), posix_spawn() is less introduced if you search on the Web. The posix_spawn() manual…
Hadoop 2 or YARN is the new version of Hadoop. It adds the yarn resource manager in addition to the HDFS and MapReduce components. Hadoop MapReduce is a programming model and software framework for writing applications, which is an open-source variant of MapReduce designed and implemented by Google initially for processing and generating large data…
LVM is a great tool to manage hard disks on Linux—you can abstract the hard drives away and manage logical volumes from volume groups, you can dynamically add or remove hard drives while the file systems on the logical volumes need not to backed up and recovered, and you may create many snapshots of the…
git merge is frequently used during development of projects managed by git. There are many common questions about git merge and I find most are solved and discussed on StackOverflow. Here, I summarize useful ones so that others who want to learn git merge need to do the search again. Merge, rebase, fast forward and…
In this post, creating a file-backed virtual block device (VBD) and installing Fedora 20 in the Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. This domain is created on a Fedora 20 Dom0 as introduced in https://www.systutorials.com/installing-xen-on-fedora-20-as-domain-0/. For better performance, you may consider using LVM backed VM. Create file-backed VBD The actual space of VBD will…
I ever introduced [[installing-xen-domain-0-on-fedora-17]] as the first try to use the xen package delivered from Fedora and get away from manually compiling Xen and patching the kernel. In this post, I introduce installing Xen Dom0 on Fedora 20. Installing Xen First, install the xen pacakges: # yum install xen The Linux kernel is already ready…
It is common to set up git servers to host git repositories. Branching is lightweight in git and a very friendly mechanism to manage code. Here, I summarize a cheatsheet of common git branching commands for working on repositories from a git server. This post assumes that you have basic knowledge with git. If you…
git submodule is a very useful tools in git to include other git repositories in one repository to handle cases such as library dependencies. In this post, I summarize some commonly used commands that I find useful for working with git submodule. For the list of full commands, check the git submodule manual. Add a…
Programs may want to catch the kill signals sent by the kill command in C programs on Linux so that it can gracefully shutdown itself before it is killed. For example, I have a daemon progd running, and it may be killed by pkill progd. The progd may want to save some in-memory state to…
VMware Player and VirtualBox are two cool and free full virtualization solutions and both can run on top of a Linux host. In this post, I introduce how to install, run, and uninstall VMware Player and VirtualBox on Fedora Linux. VMware Player Install VMware Player Download the installation bundle from VMware’s website. For example, the…
git is a great tool and it is common to have a git server over SSH possibly managed by gitolite. However, there are situations that we can not directly connect to the git server but be able to SSH to another node that can connect to the git server. The git server may allow only…
Update on Oct. 9, 2014: You should be aware of the possible security problems of blowfish and it is suggested not to be used. Instead, you may consider ChaCha20 as suggested by Tony Arcieri. To use this with OpenSSH, you need to specify the Ciphers in your .ssh/config files as chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com possibly with another default…