Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Archive for September, 2008

September 29th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , , |

As I am an old-time computer user, I still prefer doing almost everything from the command line (CLI). I program almost everything in bash-scripts and schedule them with cron.But of course I do use a graphical interface to read mail (although I have Alpine configured to read my mail from the CLI) and browse the [...]

September 28th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , , , |

The internet is an amazing thing. Sometimes we forget too fast how things used to be before the internet. Yeah, I know, I'm getting old… I started working with computers when there was no such thing as the internet.
Today I was 'Googling' and by coincidence found a page talking about some software I wrote several [...]

September 28th, 2008 by Niels Horn in ,

I am a big fan of VMware and virtualization in general.At work we use the professional version to install servers that are only used a couple of hours a week, like systems for testing new releases of software etc.At home I use the free vmware-server-1.0.7 version to test new releases of software, different operating systems, [...]

September 27th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , |

Those who use Slackware will know who Patrick Volkerding is. For those who don't: he is the creator and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. Also known as 'The Man'.Browsing for articles about the history of Slackware (I might write something about it in the future), I found an interview with Pat from 1994 from [...]

September 27th, 2008 by Niels Horn in , |

Checked your /tmp folder lately? You might be surprised how many files there are if you do not clean it on a regular basis. To keep mine tidy, I have a small script called 'cleantmp':#!/bin/bashfind /tmp -atime +5 -exec rm -r {} \;find /var/tmp -type f -atime +30 -exec rm {} \;
Basically it looks for [...]

September 27th, 2008 by Niels Horn in ,

Since I am on the subject of networking in Linux, here is another post about some nice things we can do: shaping our traffic so that we can limit how much of our bandwidth we use for each type of traffic.
Just as a small reminder: I am a long-time Slackware user (since 1996) and I [...]

September 26th, 2008 by Niels Horn in ,

Today I finally managed to use my two ISPs together on my desktop, combining both bandwidths into one big (almost 3Mbit!) pipe.
My setup:

ADSL modem 1Mb down, 320Kb up
GSM modem 2Mb down, 512Kb up

Configuring both at the same time is simple, but then we have two default gateways and our packets always go out through the [...]

September 26th, 2008 by Niels Horn in |

I never wanted to start a blog, for several reasons, but mainly because:

I do not have the time to write regular posts
I really do not have too many interesting facts to share with the world

But it seems that nowadays everyone is blogging all over the world. My wife - who really isn't into computers that [...]