Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

Blog

Category: sysadmin

Gnome/Metacity keybindings and other customizations

I never really liked Gnome because I couldn’t make Metacity act the way I like it. I’m used to WindowMaker, and it has very configurable keybindings for managing windows. For instance, it’s quite easy to map a keybinding like <Control><Alt>-; to an action that maximizes the currently focussed window horizontally. Another keybinding maximizes the window […]

Linux 2.6 and iptables

Well, since my server was dead as a brick anyway, I decided to put Linux 2.6 on the new machine during the reinstall, mostly for the ext3 support (yes, I know they also backported it to 2.4) Being used to ipchains, I was always too lazy too find out how the new netfilter stuff worked. […]

Alternative debian sources

If you’re familiar with Debian GNU/Linux, you probably already knew about this internet page (apt-get.org). There you can find complete lists for alternative debian package sources. But did you also know about this one: http://www.backports.org/? “Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will […]

MTek K371 Power and Office keys under Linux

I’ve got this MTek K371L mini-ergonomical keyboard. It’s got 7 buttons on the top of the keyboard for automatic copy-pasting, opening files, etc. They simultate Control-O and those kind of keybindings. These are pretty Windows specific, so I always thought I couldn’t use them under Linux. On the top right of the keyboard are three […]

Ode to Sharky

For the fun of it, I wrote an Ode to Sharky. Sharky is my server who has been the trusty keeper of all my files, sourcecode, webpages, etc for the last six years. Sometimes people laugh at Sharky’s hardware because it’s old and outdated. But Sharky still managed to perform an enormous ammount of tasks […]

Inferno 4

Slashdot and OsNews both report that a new version of Inferno is Available for download. Inferno is meant to be the follow-up OS to Plan9 which, for it’s time, was pretty neat I think. Since Inferno is licensed under a Semi-free license and it runs in a virtual machine on Linux, I decided to give […]

RPM Packages

DevChannel has a link to an article on Linux Magazine about RPM package creation. The article is more of a plug for the package format than an unbiased introduction. But it’s interesting non the less. I’ve been working on a new build enviroment which will also support creating RPM’s, so this article was posted at […]

VFS

I’ve been looking around for a good user-land VFS (virtual file system) library to include in my file manager Nimf. So far no luck. It seems every VFS library out there sucks. So far, I’ve looked at Gnome VFS which is unusable since it’s so annoyingly slow. Gnome-commander uses it, and it takes that file […]

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