I use Emacs in terminals and start/close Emacs frequently as needed like in a file checking-editing-closing loop. However, Emacs seems take some time to start up especially some heavy modes are used. How to make Emacs start up faster? (If you just want the solution/script first, find the command in the summary section.) My solution…
Gnome 3 is great and I can understand that it emphasizes on simplicity. However, the configuration settings for Gnome 3 does not provide tools for certain functions that I need. One of them is customizing the fonts. This post will summarize the tools/tips that I adopted to customize the fonts in Gnome 3. Usually, the…
Vim is a fast and handy editor on *nix systems. Like Emacs, Vim has a steep learning curve as you get constantly get new things. However, the effort deserves it as you efficiency is highly improved. Here, I summarize the tips and howtos I learned using Vim. Some previous posts on vim are tagged with…
A method to send email notification to a list of email addresses by the remote git server after every push from the client will be introduced in this post. An example notification email after a commit is shown in the figure below. The subject contains a prefix, the repository name, the branch name and the…
I ever introduced seting up git server using SSH or gitosis. However, gitolite is the way to go for managing git servers if you want an lightweight authentication layer. gitolite provides many very usefull features which can control each user’s right on each branch. I set up one gitolite git server and am very happy…
Before statically linking you C and C++ programs, you should be aware of the drawbacks of the static linking especially with glibc. There are some good discussions already: with glibc you’re linking static programs which are not really static and some others here and here. That said, you can choose to statically link C and…
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…
How to Send Email from mailx Command in Linux Using Gmail’s SMTP introduces how to send email using heirloom mailx (or s-nail if you are using Ubuntu 18 or later or similar releases) command in Linux through Gmail’s SMTP which requires some configuration. On the other hand, there are many environments that do not require…
The ports used by NFS server can be dynamically assigned by rpbind to any higher number. We need to fix the ports used by NFS server to configure firewall or port forwarding mechanism. The ports used by NFS server and how to fix these ports will be introduced in this post. There are seven ports…
Port forwarding (or tunnelling) is a method to forward one network traffic to another. We will introduce how to forward ports using SSH tunnel in this post. A simple example Let’s start with a simple and useful example: we want to forward local port 8080 to server:port. We can easily do this by using ssh…
The performance of Xen’s Dom0 is important for the overall system. The disk and network drivers are running on Dom0. I/O intensive guests’ workloads may consume lots Dom0′s CPU cycles. The Linux kernel calculates various network related parameters based on the amount of memory at boot time. The kernel also allocate memory for storing memory…
In Linux, we use passwd to change password, but passwd requires input from stdin to get the new password. It is common case that we may want to change the password non-interactively, such as creating new user accounts and change or set password for these accounts on a number of Linux boxes when the new…
For UNIX users/developers, having the power of the user 0 (root’s UID) on our hands is essential. It also allows us to have complete control over the system. And one more thing we all have in common is that we hate Windows. Thus, we set out in search of an operating system for our own…
The socks proxy I created following Proxy Using SSH Tunnel works very well on both Linux and Windows. However, when I try to configure my iPhone and iPad with iOS, I find iOS does not support socks proxy in its settings interface. I don’t know why it is not added while socks proxy is indeed…
xclip is a tool to copy the copy the output of commands from a command line in a terminal to X selection or clipboard. It connects the command line interface and the X selections (clipboard) and is a very useful tool. For example, processing some text in vim in a terminal and then copying it…
Google Drive is nice cloud storage which provide document editing features. However, it does not yet provide a Linux client. I find a good third party tool that works with Google Drive on Linux very well: google-drive-ocamlfuse. The website of google-drive-ocamlfuse provides easy to follow instructions to install it. In this tutorial, we show a…
Symbolic link or soft link files are very common and useful on Linux/Unix systems. It works as a alias file for a file. You can create a symbolic links and it can operate transparently for most operations just as normal files. Programs that read or write to files named by a symbolic link behaves as…
Integers are natively supported in Bash shell. However, what if we use floating point in Bash shell? The short and direct answer is using ‘bc‘ command – “An arbitrary precision calculator language.” Just run bc and enter some floating point calculation expression, such as “1.2+8.2”, bc will give the result. In a script, we certainly…
Make is a utility that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called makefiles which specify how to derive the target program. Make is widely used, especially in Unix/Linux world. More introductions to Make and it’s history can be found on Wikipedia. In this post, I list articles for Makefile…
I begin to use vim for programming. I like the tools that focus on one function. I used to use emacs. But I think I like vim more. For debugging, I use gdb. But I use the front end cgdb. I can see the codes with the cursor when debugging. I can use F8 for…