Natural Order Development

The last terminal to exit wins the "who's history is saved" game. Unless you pull a cute Linux stunt or three.

Shell history is of major use as a memory jogger, short cut finder, and how did I do that answerer. However, the bash linux shell has one annoying feature and that is as each shell exits it overwrites the .bash_history file with its history buffer contents. Meaning only one shell's session command history is saved.

In Ubuntu there are a number of ways to get upgrades. There is the update manager which is configured to run automatically. There is using the command line approach with apt-get ('sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade'). Finally there is the GUI utility called Synaptic ('sudo synaptic').

So what happens when something gets updated and introduces a bug, or breaks another applications behavior?

Table of Contents

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From Red Hat to Ubuntu

* Rosetta [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromLinux/RedHatEnterpriseLinuxAndFedora switching to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Centos]

Disable Blank Console Screens

I grew up using vi. Never got into emacs. Then along came vim. I ignored it of course. Then suddenly vi was gone and vim was quietly mapped to vi. Oh well, had to learn sometime.

.vimrc

au FileType * set tabstop=4|set shiftwidth=4|set noexpandtab
au FileType python set tabstop=4|set shiftwidth=4|set softtabstop=4|set expandtab
au FileType make setlocal noexpandtab|set softtabstop=4

" Make backspace a tad more friendly
set backspace=indent,eol,start

I have a number of Ubuntu servers that boot up in text mode (both VMs and physical boxes). Once they boot I usually access them via ssh sessions so almost never try to type to console directly. However, it is rather annoying to want to see what is being sent to the console because I have to click and hit a keyboard key. So I had to find a way to permanently disable the blank screen feature for the consoles.

Now when you are logged in this is simple to do just enter the command:

$ setterm -powersave off -blank 0

Ubuntu guest instances in VMware from v8.x to the current v11.x sometimes come up with the boot error message:

piix4_smbus 0000:00:007.3: Host SMBus controller not enabled!

I still haven't figure out why this only happens with SOME of my instances. I think it has something to do with the magic mix recipe of installed packages. At any rate the error is being caused because VMware doesn't actually provide that level interface for CPU access. From Kernel documentation for "i2c-piix4" (<kernel source>/Documentation/i2c/busses/i2c-piix4):

Today, I was attempting to upgrade my installed packages using yum on Centos Linux. Except that yum spun off into 404 land. The command looked like this:

$ sudo yum -y upgrade
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * addons: centos.mirror.netriplex.com
 * base: mira.sunsite.utk.edu
 * extras: repo.genomics.upenn.edu
 * updates: centos.aol.com
http://centos.mirror.netriplex.com/5.5/addons/i386/repodata/repomd.xml:
[Errno 14] HTTP Error 404: Not Found
Trying other mirror.

I work on a beefy Linux box with multiple desktops & monitors. I also have a windows laptop to do office junk and some testing. If my computers are side by side things are pretty sweet and I use Synergyc / Synergy2 (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/) to make all my monitors flow together.

But, I also have another beefy Linux development box in a shared team space where again I have multiple desktops & monitors. No problem I just use rdesktop (http://www.rdesktop.org/)to make one of the monitors turn into my windows screen. All is fine in the world.

About once every 6 months or so I end up needing to do a recursive search and replace across a whole bunch of files. Every time I need to do this I turn to SED as it is just so good at doing the work. But of course there is the problem of multiple actions.

The secret to this is using the SED file. This works across thousands of files on the local box and even more interestingly can be wrapped in a SSH script to walk hundreds of remote boxes.