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…
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…
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…
When debugging and optimizing programs, developers sometimes need to generate and investigate into the assembly generated by the compiler. Generating a mixed source and assembly list will help a lot for debugging and optimization. gcc can achieve this by working with the assembler. Generate assembly list mixed with the source code Just add these gcc…
The apache’s default “404 Error not found” page seems ugly. And may some hosting service put theire ads in it. We can add some entry in .htaccess to change the defualt 404 error page. This method can also be used for some other error codes. A list of the server returned codes can be found…
Shutting down servers is a common operations for managing a cluster. However, if this server is configured to a Xen Dom0 and has Xen VMs (DomUs), the VMs should be shutdown first to avoid data lost on these VMs. xm supports a -a option to shutdown all VMs: # xm shutdown -a Add the -w…
I frequently run some commands/scripts on a batch of servers whose IPs are already collected in a file. I usually use a simple loop and call the ssh to run these commands remotely and automatically. This operation, however, is common and can be abstracted into a separate script. Here is the script that I come…
With a list of servers, it is common that one or more are down or crash. Lots cluster management tools can detect the aliveness of servers. However, it can be easily done with ping with a Bash script. I summarize the script that I used and share it here: check-alive-server.sh. Usage: usage: ./check-alive-server.sh file Each…
With Emacs, I feel happy. I love the rich functions of Emacs, such as compiling, quickly jumping to the lines with compilation error and debugging with gdb, and more. I ever wrote small tips posts about Emacs before. But it is a good idea to put them together and keep adding new ones. Here comes…
I ever discussed Starting KDE from Command Line by startx for KDE and GNOME. Recently, I installed MATE desktop on Fedora 17 and am very happy with it—dear, Gnome 2 is back. However, I checked the /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients script which is called by ‘startx’ and it only includes ‘startkde’ and ‘gnome-session’ without support to MATE. But…
The new development of Xen and Linux kernel make it easy to install Xen on Fedora as the Domain-0 now. This post uses Fedora 17 as an example platform to introduce how to set up Domain-0 on Fedora Linux. Compared to our old method (https://www.systutorials.com/setting-up-stable-xen-dom0-with-fedora-xen-3-4-3-with-xenified-linux-kernel-2-6-32-13-in-fedora-12/) which requires manually compiled Xen and patched kernel, the current…
Linux booting is usually controlled by Grub or the new Grub2. Setting the default booting entry is a frequent operations. Here, we introduce how to set the default entry in Grub2 and Grub. Setting the default booting entry in grub2 Note1: With some version of grub2, the grub2-set-default method and the script below may not…
We may drop the file system caches on Linux to free up memory for applications. Kernels 2.6.16 and newer provide a mechanism via the /proc/ to make the kernel drop the page cache and/or inode and dentry caches on command. We can use this mechanism to free up the memory. However, this is a non-destructive…
This post introduces how to erase / blank / format a DVM+RW media on Linux in the command line. First, you need to find out the device of the DVD/CD+RW drive on your Linux box. For example, on my box with Linux 3.3.4 kernel, my DVD/CD+RW drive is /dev/sr0. You can also see what the…
Vim is my favourite text editor and I also prefer to use Vim to compose Email. I ever used Vim as Thunderbird’s External editor with the help of plugin. I started to use KMail as my email client on KDE and I find it is not hard to configure KMail to use Vim as email…
MPlayer is a universal (nearly) movie/music player on Linux and many more systems. It’s also my favourite player and MPlayer plays movie or music files in any format that I drop to it. Now, let’s take a look at how to use MPlayer play DVD. MPlayer plays “DVD” in many formats: DVD disks, ISO files,…
I write a lot latex documents and most of the documents have images in it. Latex deals EPS very well, while sometimes we need to add JPG / PNG images to it. I find converting the JPG images to EPS ones is the most convenient way to embed JPG images to latex documents. On Linux,…
We introduced how to create a LVM group with two hard disk partitions, which the LVM group can be used for [[setting-up-lvm-backed-xen-domu|installing LVM backed Xen DomUs]]. The LVM volume can have large capacity from several hard disks. However, we may use all the disk space after some time and we may need to extend the…
Fedora’s repositories provide most of the software packages needed when using Linux. However, for various consideration, they do not provide some packages, such as MPlayer, ffmpeg. Fortunately, some community maintained repository provides these software. And they may also package propriety software, such as ATI fglrx dive, NVIDIA driver, into rpm packages. In this post, we…
We usually have video files in .wmv .mpg .rmvb or .mkv formats. The iPod, iPhone or iPad only accept a limited number of video file types, such as .mov and .mp4. To play these video files in .wmv .mpg or .rmvb format, we should first convert them to .mov or .mp4 files that can played…