Miscellaneous stuff

Wouldn't the sentence "I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign" have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Enlightenment desktop @ RPI-CS

Are you stuck with CDE or worse, with Gnome while working on the RPI-CSLab workstations? Use Enlightenment instead :

The following tweak applies only to the CS workstations with Solaris 9 installed on them. If you own your *nix box, then use the standard procedure of setting Enlightenment to be your default X window manager. (Also note that from version 0.17 onwards, Enlightenment will become a desktop shell instead of just a window manager.)

  • Add the following lines to your .profile. (If you dont have one, create a new file called .profile in your home directory) 
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib:/cs/kulkam/sw/fnlib/fnlib-0.5/lib:/cs/kulkam/sw/imlib/imlib-1.9.14/lib 
export LD_RUN_PATH=$LD_RUN_PATH:/cs/kulkam/sw/fnlib/fnlib-0.5/lib 
exec /cs/kulkam/sw/enlightenment/enlightenment-0.16.5/enlightenment/bin/enlightenment
    (Assuming that you are using bash like syntax within your .profile)

  • Log out, then at the login screen, select a CDE session (make it your default session to avoid having to do this always.) Enlightenment should start instead of CDE.

Non-invasive booting of OS X and Linux after upgrading OS X

If you have OS X and Linux installed on any Apple Mac, and if you upgrade OS X to a newer version, or perform a major system update, then it is more than likely that the next time you start your computer, it boots automatically into OS X. This is because OS X, like Windows, does not like to coexist with other operating systems on the same drive (Although it is perfectly capable to do so). Presumably, before this happened, you had set things up so that a boot loader (like yaboot) loaded first and gave you the option of choosing either OS X or Linux. The partition on which yaboot resides was originally "blessed" during the Linux installation process and that enabled the OpenFirmware to recognize it as the boot device. But, the OS X upgrade prepends the boot-device OpenFirmware variable with a value that points to the Mac OS X kernel and thus, OS X gets booted.

Here are a few things you can do in this situation:

  • First, find out if your Linux partition still exists and is uncorrupted. To do this, restart the computer while holding the alt key. This should start the boot loader that comes with OS X. You should see two (or more, depending on your setup) partitions. Locate your Linux root partition and click on it. If your computer successfully boots into Linux then you are fine. If you are happy with this default behaviour - booting into OS X automatically, and hitting alt to get into Linux, then you are all set.
  • Else, restart the computer while pressing the command-option-p-r key combo. This resets the OpenFirmware to its factory default settings. Let the bell chime a couple of times. Then let go of the keys. This time, the computer will hopefully boot into the yaboot loader (or whichever bootloader existed originally) and you can enter the wonderful worlds of either Linux or OS X at the touch of a keystroke.
  • If the above does not work, then restart the computer into Mac OS X. Go to a root shell (you might need to enable the root user via the netinfo utility) Use the pdisk command to view the partition map and note down the partition number of the bootstrap partition. (The Yellow Dog distro names it as Apple_Bootstrap. Your mileage might vary) Now, restart the computer while pressing the command-option-o-f key combo. This time, you will find yourself at the OpenFirmware prompt. Now, type boot hd:x,yaboot where x is the partition number you found out above. If you had a different boot loader originally, then use its name instead of yaboot. If all goes well this time, then restart the computer in OS X, go to a root shell, and use the nvram utility to set the boot-device variable to the above value (hd:x,yaboot)

Its the time. Its the time...

If you are installing Linux over a network and you see strange things happening, its time to set your system clock. The easiest way to do that is to synchronise with a time server.

The first thing to do is to set your local time zone. Do ls -al /etc/localtime This will be a symlink pointing to a different file which indicates the current time zone. Change this symlink to point to your local time zone.

Next, find out the time zone in which your hardware clock is being maintained. To do this, type hwclock --show and see what time zone the shown time corresponds to. Usually, hardware clocks are set to the UTC (Greenwich) zone. and chances are that yours is too. If not, then it is probably set to your local time. If your hardware clock is neither in UTC nor in local time, then you have to reset it to one of these from the BIOS (Firmware for Macs) of your computer. Refer to the BIOS instructions for your computer to do this. Assuming that your hardware clock is either in UTC or your local time, it is now time to synchronize your system clock and hardware clock.

First, synchronize your system clock with a time server by doingrdate -s time-b.nist.gov. Next, you have to synchronize your hardware clock with your system clock. If your hardware clock is in UTC time, then do hwclock --utc --systohc. If it is in local time, do hwclock --localtime --systohc.