Felipe Alvarez's blog

openSUSE was released on July 15th. I downloaded the 32-bit DVD today, because I wanted to try the new LXDE Desktop that is included with the disk (thanks to Andreas for making that effort!). It is currently being test driven on VirtualBox on openSUSE 11.2, and MAN is it ever FAST! It’s probably the 1.5GB [...]

I have always found GNU find to be a little bit tricky to use. It is indeed quite a powerful program. It allows you to search anywhere, for anything! With the output, you can use the -exec option to run a command on each and every file find finds.

There is a great thread about endianess, Unicode, BOM (byte order marks), and other interesting topics.

Today, the jury in the District Court of Utah trial between SCO Group and Novell issued a verdict. Novell is very pleased with the jury’s decision confirming Novell’s ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux. Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on [...]

UPDATE: I changed ‘>’ (erase file, then write to file) to ‘>>’ (append to file). This avoids you overwriting your, or other peoples’, public keys. Setting up password-less logins is both dangerous, and mighty. It allows one to authenticate to an OpenSSH server without typing in a password. Authentication is gained via knowledge of a [...]

For this setup, I used 4 320GB sata 300 hard drives. This array is not configured for booting, just for redundant storage. My four drives are: sdb sdc sdd sde 1.  Ensure all partitions on the drives are erased There are a few ways to do this. I just overwrite the first million bytes with [...]

I will never again buy a RAID Controller card from Promise again! They claimed to support GNU/Linux, and they don’t. They said they didn’t have drivers for Windows 7, and then suddenly they magically appear on their Downloads page. We weren’t even notified. I’m going to go with mdadm and try my luck with software [...]

I just ripped some of my CD’s to MP3, but I was just curious what OGG would do for me. I had never actually compared the two encoding formats, side-by-side, but today, I was simply stunned. A song compressed with MP3 (VBR 128Kbps Normal Quality) was around 5.1 – 5.8 MB. It sounded good, but [...]

I’ve been having some problems with charsets (character sets) when using FreeNAS, rsync, deltacopy, and cygwin. The filenames on a Windows box are either in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 (Latin1). The FreeNAS uses rsync to backup the files on the windows box, and saves them to a RAID array. I wasn’t sure if it was rsync, [...]

I must say I found openSUSE 11.2 to be a major disappointment. I’ve come to expect better, much better, from Novell. If it weren’t for the stability issues with KDE and relatively poor netbook support this distribution would have been a keeper for me. There really is a lot to like. Perhaps the results will [...]