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

Archive for the 'Linux' Category

August 1st, 2011 by Niels Horn in , , ,

Another simple update… Or not?
This weekend I finally updated my LG X130 netbook to Slackware 13.37. This is one of my "stable" machines that I use all the time for day-to-day tasks, so I do not run -current on it, as I depend on it too much. Slackware-current is very interesting for research and testing [...]

March 20th, 2011 by Niels Horn in , ,

Only a few days ago I was informed by a user that the VHBA kernel module - for which I maintain the SlackBuild script - stopped working with the new 2.6.37.3 and 2.6.37.4 kernels in Slackware 13.37 (actually, it's still officially -current).
When I say "stopped working", I'm actually being nice… It caused a fatal crash [...]

October 23rd, 2010 by Niels Horn in ,

Is it possible to change the boot logo in Slackware?
This is a question that pops up once in a while on IRC and the forums, and the answer is yes, but there are some little details to take care of.
I made a step-by-step how-to once for myself, so I thought I might as well put [...]

October 19th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , |

Fixing problems with Linux systems is something I like. I've been in the support business for most of my professional life, and solving a difficult problem still gives me that satisfaction
The system
Recently I upgraded a system that was still running Slackware 13.0. It's a not-so-new system, but should be good enough to serve [...]

October 12th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , |

Yesterday I installed Slackware on a computer that came with a Debian-derivative installed. Nothing against Debian, but I'm more used to Slackware, and the hard drive had enough space left…
This box is an all "no-brand / low-price" system, but has very reasonable specs: Quad-core AMD GHz processor, 4GB memory, 400GB hard drive, NVIDIA 6150SE nForce [...]

February 23rd, 2010 by Niels Horn in , ,

Today I received my new GSM Modem, a Nokia Internet Stick CS-10. It had the size of an overweight pen-drive and can connect (depending on your service-provider) at speeds up to 7.2Mbps (my contract only goes to 2Mbps).
Here is a picture of the modem, taken from the Nokia site:

As was to be expected, it comes [...]

January 4th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , |

After some DNS troubles, the new blog is up & running
Something went wrong when I canceled the "CNAME" entry in the DNS server that pointed "underpop.online.fr/n/nielshorn" to the old blogspot site. When I created the new "underpop.online.fr/n/nielshorn" subdomain I couldn't get it to point at my own server. :-/
But with a little help [...]

December 31st, 2009 by Niels Horn in , |

When Slackware released its first test version of Slackware64, I installed it on a separate partition to try it out. I was immediately impressed by the performance boost of some programs, especially some graphic programs I use.
Since I compile most programs that are not available on a standard Slackware installation from source, I didn't have [...]

December 24th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , ,

Some time ago I promised to give some basic instructions on how to create nice images of Lego constructions with POV-Ray on Linux. Now that Christmas is arriving, I finally found some time to convert my own instructions into something that can almost be called a "tutorial"
What will you need:

LeoCAD - to "build" [...]

November 29th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , , , , |

I've been busy over the last few weeks evaluating some software to monitor servers, network utilization, etc. I have tested several programs and ended up using three: nagios, cacti, and ntop.
All of these are free & open software. For nagios and cacti you can download SlackBuild scripts from slackbuilds.org maintained by me. For cacti, if [...]