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Category Archives: Tip and Tricks

A simple offlineimap tip with some mutt goodness

12-Jan-11

A few years back I switched away from a GUI email client for work and back to ‘mutt’.  While ‘mutt’ can handle doing an IMAP connection directly, I wanted to gain from the speed and portability of having fully local folders.  (This is more feasible, I think, since encrypting hard drives became so much easier; […]

How to install Moblin on Fedora 12

24-Nov-09

Moblin is a feature of Fedora 12 as an easy to install desktop environment. The below how-to information is copied directly from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_install_Moblin, and is used here thanks to the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported it is licensed under: Moblin is a lightweight Linux desktop environment especially suited for small form computers (netbooks et al). […]

How to become a docs contributor – video

13-Nov-09

This Wednesday I was helping Mel with the POSSE class in Singapore.  Basically, I covered what open source content in Fedora does (technical docs, process docs, community self-knowledge docs), the common tools and styles we try to propagate, and then walked the class through how to contribute to the release notes.  The exercise was focused […]

Updated technique for seeing git and directory status in bash prompt

12-Nov-09

Just working with a git directory and noticed that whatever trick I was using to get the current git branch visible from my $PS1 variable in bash … stopped working.  In discussing if a man page for git(1) was incorrect on #fedora-devel, tmz pointed out to me why it worked that way (short version: refer […]

Small things that matter more than you realize

10-Jan-09

This morning the first smile I had was when I looked back over my shoulder at the Boston Cambridge Marriott to see not only my own Fedora window sign, but the signs of many others.  (There is a small cluster of folks on the 19th floor.) The signs are a small brilliancy that came from […]

praise git

07-Nov-08

We’ve been working with git as a distributed version control system (DVCS) for Fedora Documentation this release. All of these documents (Installation Guide, Release Note, and various README files) are authored in DocBook XML, so they work great within a VCS. Sure, it’s cool to work entirely offline, do granular commits, and merge perfectly with […]

Partition /dev/sd* namespace FAIL

08-May-08

Just as I zipped my backpack closed to head home from JavaOne, I overheard a conversation. One of the JBoss booth staff had been trying to find something on a media for an attendee. I inquired, and it turned out they were looking for Fedora media; one of the fellows had a laptop to resurrect. […]

Running fsck on a LUKS encrypted partition in LVM

04-Mar-08

Coming back from a reboot yesterday afternoon, I ran into some bad attribute blocks that fsck couldn’t handle in the boot space and shelled me out to take care of it. Since I was not in the office or staying there for much longer, I powered down to take care of when I got home. […]

Counting words in Emacs

08-Feb-08

It’s long hassled me that Emacs doesn’t support word count by default. This morning I got tired of using wc to count words and did a little search via Google. Right at the top of the list is DJ Delorie’s “Programming in Emacs Lisp”. This page teaches how to create this function, with a bug-free […]