Errata

Tech Notes And Miscellaneous Thoughts
 
Debian, Linux

How to set the application icon for chromium

This has been a minor annoyance for the last few months, and I've finally figured out how to fix it: Sometime within the last few months, an upgrade prevented Chromium from finding its application icon…with the result that when minimised (or displayed in the panel window list or Alt-Tab) it used the default application icon. It looks to me as if the problem is that Chromium is now looking for chromium-browser.svg but chromium.svg is what's on my debian system. To …

Linux, ZFS

one of the reasons i like zfs…

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I got home from work tonight and zfs had reported that one of the disks in my main pool was dying. no great problem. insert a disk i had spare, and run zpool replace like so: ganesh:~# zpool replace -f export scsi-SATA_WDC_WD10EARS-00_WD-WMAV50933036 scsi-SATA_ST31000528AS_9VP16X03 and now it’s just a matter of waiting until the data has “resilvered” and i can remove the old dying drive. ganesh:~# zpool status export -v pool: export state: ONLINE status: One or more devices is currently …

Linux

problems with Linux and Aten CS1784A KVM switch

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Dear lazyweb, I bought an Aten CS1784A DVI+USB KVM switch a couple of months ago. I’m pretty happy with it except for one annoying problem. It has a Dell multimedia USB keyboard plugged into it (picked it up from a swap meet for $15 – nice. it's a pretty good keyboard in its own right but i mostly bought it to match what I use at work), and a Logitech MX518 mouse connected. Also two computers – one runs Linux …

Gnome, Linux

some more reasons to hate gnome shell

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Non-resizable configuration windows.  I have a 1920×1200 screen but the window manager provides no way to resize windows like the System Settings window.  Result is that the window is quite small and, worse, has a scroll bar for no good reason when another hundred or so vertical pixels would easily display everything. Even another 30 or so horizontal pixels would allow more icons per line under Hardware, reducing the number of lines, and again allowing the entire list of available …

Linux, Xen

Xen VMs won’t start: “Cannot plug VIF”

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I've been unable to solve this problem for a few weeks now, so i'll try posting it to my blog – maybe someone out there knows the answer.  Would very much appreciate a clue on this one. I've got a VM on a citrix xenserver 5.0.0 machine that won't start. it was running fine until it was rebooted on a Fri afternoon, a few weeks ago. Starting it from the (windows-only) xencenter GUI results in: "This VM cannot be started, …

Geek, Linux

Introduction to Linux Signals 101

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or ^C doesn’t kill processes, SIGINT does On the LUV mailing list recently, the perils of tty handling when booting with “init=/bin/bash” came up, and somebody asked why running ‘ping’ (without remembering to run stty or openvt first) will result in you having to reboot. i.e. “why doesn’t ^C work in emergency mode”? I wrote a fairly detailed, but comprehensible to a novice, answer and a friend suggested i should have written it as a blog post – which was …