John's notes

About

These pages mostly contain rough technical notes of mine which I sometimes find useful to have hanging around the net, and which may hopefully happen to be useful to others as well. There's also a number of links throughout which I like to keep handy.

Almost all of these pages have to do with free software on Ubuntu or Debian GNU/Linux. They are not indended to be terribly pretty -- just useful. :)

I can be reached at jmg3002.71828 at gmail dot com minus approximately e.

Perl

Perl is handy. It's got some pointy corners, and dark recesses containing cobwebs, but you can't say it's not handy. See my perl page for sundry notes, links, and so on.

Text editing

Here's my notes (a "quick help-sheet") on using GNU Emacs. For a tiny Emacs-a-like, see Zile.

A nice GUI-only editor is Geany. It's a fast and lightweight editor written in C using GTK+. Here's some notes on using Geany.

For a small and very simple terminal-mode editor, here's some notes on using GNU nano.

Documentation and Text processing

Some info about various documentation systems, markup formats, conversion tools, and character sets.

Notes on GNU/Linux and Related Tools

Note that, when applicable, these docs are Debian-specific.

• Debian install tips
• networking notes
• Firewalls -- no notes yet, but aside from writing your own iptables script, the easy-config firewall-of-choice seems to be Shorewall.
• Commands related to system monitoring
• making backups
• cron and crontab
• using MySQL
• Remapping keys -- including changing your keymap between dvorak and qwerty.
• using the info command
• simple printing -- quick steps on setting up printing to a networked PostScript printer.
• setting date and time
• quick Bash tips
• using OpenSSH

Hardware with Debian GNU/Linux

• SCSI, RAID, and drive partitioning

Software development

• a short CVS tutorial
• notes on how shared libs work on GNU/Linux

On the desktop

Though I'm using Ubuntu with Gnome for my desktop these days, here's some older notes on using icewm.

By the way, here's two different ways to take a screenshot:

• install graphicsmagick, then do gm import -window root foo.jpg, or
• In the Gimp: File --> Acquire --> Screen Shot

Various Particularly Useful Bits of Software

• rsync -- An indispensable utility. You should already have this on your system.
• ncurses-hexedit -- Edit files in hex. Though, if you're a GNU Emacs user, there's hexl-find-file.
• graphicsmagick -- A great suite of image editing subprograms. After installing, run gm display <filename> to open a picture. Left-click on the image to bring up the menu of image editing functions. Very nice. Note, graphicsmagick is a fork of imagemagick.
• tkdiff -- Great X11 GUI diff program.
• aspell -- To check a file, it's just aspell check foo.txt
• html2ps -- html2ps foo.html > foo.ps && ps2pdf foo.ps
• MyPasswordSafe

Computer Hardware

• Some rough, old, and incomplete notes on mini-itx motherboards.
• I use the Contoured keyboard with the dvorak keyboard layout. Yes, I've indeed spoiled myself rotten. ;) Here's a tiny quick reference on a few of its features, including info on the keys I remap.

• I also use a Cirque Smart Cat USB trackpad (they call it a "touchpad" for some reason), which sits nicely atop the Contoured. It's quite nice. It works out of the box on Ubuntu, and you can do everything without even touching the mechanical buttons:

  • left click (tap), left double-click (tap twice)
  • right click (tap in upper-right corner)
  • click and drag (double-click-hold-drag) -- has a nice feature where you can drag to the edge, then pick up your finger and drag some more without losing hold of what you're dragging.
  • scroll (right side of trackpad)

  Currently, there's no middle-click. Sometimes Ctrl-click can stand in for for the middle button. For X11 pasting, I haven't set anything up yet. Though Ctrl-c and Ctrl-v work fine between desktop apps.

  Best of all, since it sits on my keyboard, there's very little movement required to move from the keys to the pad, then back. Add to that, almost no pressure is required to work the thing.

Simisen

I've been doing some work for Simisen lately, and hope to have some nice stuff to show off there soon.