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Linux Mint: Broken

Paul — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:53:51 +0000

Here’s a nice little note to all you aspiring Linux n00bs: Avoid Linux Mint.

I tried out linuxmint-11-gnome-cd-nocodecs-32bit and linuxmint-xfce-201104-dvd-32bit today, and was not impressed. Ok, I was actually impressed once I got it to run, but only before the launcher crashed and asked to be restarted. And then it was all down hill. I couldn’t even get the installer to run the first time around. I tried again with the Xfce DVD version. This installer ran just fine, but then 800 updates required (ok, no biggie, very common). I click to apply updates, but then I’m confronted with a package dependency error, and told to resolve dependencies first. Next, I try to install just one thing at a time. First up: the mint-welcome package. Does that install? Click -> Apply -> ok. Looks like it was fine. Next up, some other mint package, I don’t recall. Anyway, this one caused the updater to crash. Reboot, try again, crash again. You know what? I don’t have all day.

Let’s try out the internet… open firefox, head to youtube for the obligatory flash test. Video starts playing… it’s an ad. Well, about 4 seconds before the ad finishes, the video freezes. Page refresh: Replay the ad, and that 4 second video freeze problem again. Ok, that means that flash support is buggy. Well, remember how I can’t update anything with the updater software? That means I’m stuck. I don’t feel like wading through individual packages to get this thing working. I want a Minty out-of-box experience. What I got was roach infested.

LSS (Long-Story-Short), save yourself the effort, just go xubuntu (for the xfce type).

Periodic Tarballs: Find and Awk

Paul — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:43:04 +0000

I have a gang of directories. There’s a new directory each day! Each directory stores about 20k files. Over time, the performance of the directory hierarchy degrades, and it’s best for me to tar up old stuff.

In linux-land, there’s always more than one way of doing things… even if it’s not the right way. Today, we’ll explore find piped to awk piped to the shell.

touch . ; find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -mtime +60 | sort |
awk -F"/" '{print "tar czf " $2 ".tar.gz --remove-files ./" $2 "; rmdir " $2 }' | sh

Basically, make sure the current direction has been recently modified, so it’s not returned by the find command. Then, find all sub-directories in the current directory — don’t go recursive. Sort for a predictable sequence of operations. Extract the file name portion (lots of ways to do this). Generate a shell command tar czf {{dirname}}.tar.gz --remove-files ./{{dirname}}; rmdir {{dirname}} to build the tarball and remove the empty directory when done. Finally, we just tell sh to execute it all… one directory at a time. Bam!

Linux Commands for System Information

Paul — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:44:51 +0000

Need to remotely troubleshoot a machine? Don’t know what’s inside? Want to know what’s enabled in BIOS?

Let’s keep it short and sweet (details from our reference):
man biosdecode
man dmidecode

Ref: Linux System Information Decoded, Hess, Ken. 2010-04-23.

STDERR redirect into STDOUT redirect into file

Paul — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:00:08 +0000

When you want to redirect stderr to a file, you have choices. Either redirect only stderr to a file, or redirect both stderr and stdout to the same file.

The right way:

Redirect stderr and stdout to [[file]]:

[[command]] > [[file]] 2>&1

Redirect stderr to [[efile]] and stdout to [[file]]:

[[command]] 2> [[efile]] > [[file]]

The wrong way:

Doesn’t do anything useful:

[[command]] 2>&1 > [[file]]

Summing a list of numbers

Paul — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:00:40 +0000

awk '{sum += $0} END {print sum}'

Example:% find . -type f -exec wc {} \; | tr -s " " | cut -f2 -d" " | awk '{sum += $0} END {print sum}'

What’s going on? I want to recursively count the number of lines present in all files contained by the current directory. Why? Sub-directories => namespaces, and I want to know how many lines of code exist in the entire project, namespaces and all.