Angelo’s Notepad

This will work with other filesystems, not just ext2, so you may want to choose a filesystem that is similar to what you currently run (if you care). The idea is that instead of creating an ISO image that is very flexible (can be read by Windows), you create a filesystem image and burn it to disc. The advantage of this is that you can preserve filesystem properties such as permissions, ownership, etc. The disadvantage is that the straightforward approach (everything on one disk) only gives you about 4.5 G of space to work with (depending on the media size).

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This is an example of customizing Mandriva 2008.0

First copy the contents of the CD to a directory

auto-boot/
|-- VERSION
`-- isolinux
|-- alt0
|   |-- all.rdz
|   `-- vmlinuz
|-- boot.cat
|-- custom.msg
|-- isolinux.bin
|-- isolinux.cfg
|-- memtest
`-- target.msg

To change default auto configuration file, edit:
isolinux/isolinux.cfg

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Did you know that Windows also has equivalent to /etc/hosts where you can set IP addresses for domain names? It’s a plain text file in the same format, and it’s typically found in one of these two places:

• C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

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OpenOffice.org distributes their binaries as rpms. That’s great for a majority of the people who can install them, but in a couple of situations I’ve found myself wanting to use the most updated version but didn’t have root access to do the install of the package properly.

Here is how I installed it for my own user. You will need the cpio utilities installed including ‘cpio’ and ‘rpm2cpio’ which are installed on many rpm based systems. (more…)

I got my XO laptop from laptopgiving.org today. I plugged it in and waited the whole day, but I think it was already charged. There’s no way to tell if it’s done charging or not (I think).

It’s interesting. The keyboard is exceedingly small, and the keys are like those flexible keyboards. But I guess it wasn’t meant to teach typing skills. Also it has a touchpad mouse with two mouse buttons: X and O (of course). It has 3 USB ports, a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a rotating screen, built-in speakers, a built-in microphone, and what appears to be a built-in camera.

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… except of course any involving requests I’ve made.

One of the rules for not being considered a spammer is to let people unsubscribe from your mailing list. I have tried to unsubscribe from Priceline’s list(s) three times now (a generous allowance only because I actually signed up with them). From now on, every unsolicited email I get from them is going to be marked as spam.

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I was off in some corner of the world wide web when I found OpenSVN. It’s a free service provided by some students in Taiwan to host subversion repositories. It’s a good solution for people who don’t want to set up a repository locally, and they say it is supported with RAID to ensure that your files won’t get lost. (more…)

This is nothing new. But I think it needs to be posted from time to time on the net to remind people the culture of being a hacker in the free software/open source sense.

The tutorial is here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

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