After the upgrade to Ubuntu 9 I was unable to use the numeric keypad on my external keyboard that’s connected to my laptop. I’ve switched every possible option in the keyboard preferences on and off and found out that you have to disable the Pointer can be controlled using the keypad option. That’s under System, Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse Keys.

I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest Ubuntu 8. The upgrade process was easy and quick however after the reboot I was unable to access my home-directory. I have a separate partition on which /home is mounted. This partition is encrypted with cryptsetup.

When I start the cryptdisk daemon it returns an error: /etc/init.d/cryptdisks start * Starting remaining cryptodisks… mount: special device /dev/mapper/cryptohome does not exist Enter passphrase: Checking the status with cryptdisk doesn’t … Read more.

I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest Ubuntu 8. The upgrade process was easy and quick however after the reboot I was unable to access my home-directory. I have a separate partition on which /home is mounted. This partition is encrypted with cryptsetup.

When I start the cryptdisk daemon it returns an error: /etc/init.d/cryptdisks start * Starting remaining cryptodisks… mount: special device /dev/mapper/cryptohome does not exist Enter passphrase: Checking the status with cryptdisk doesn’t … Read more.

Screen is a nice little nix-utility that allows you to leave a command running on a remote server even if you have disconnected.

The utility has a site at http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/.

Use is easy. Start screen with screen. You can exit an existing screen by tapping CTRL-A, d. Re-attaching to a screen is done with screen -r id. You can retrieve a list of ids by tapping screen -ls.

DICOM is a format used by medical devices to exchange images. DICAM stands for Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine. Last week I had some pictures taken from my left knee. The CD with the different was delivered today. Unfortunately the installer / viewer is Microsoft Windows only.

A Google search returned “kradview” as the most promising alternative. It’s QT-based and should run fine. I’ve tried to install it both from source and from … Read more.

Install the kio-plugins

sudo apt-get install kdebase-kio-plugins

Get a list of all the installed packages / applications in Ubunto or Debian Linux with

dpkg –get-selections

You can get the contents of one package with

dpkg -L php5-gd

Occasionnly you have a process that’s been running for a while and you decide that it’s time to log out. Of course, you’ve forgotten to use screen so when you log out, the process dies. The post by Rusell Coker shows that it is still possible to redirect the output of a running process. The process for doing so involves looking up the file handles used by the process (in /proc//fd) and then run gdb. … Read more.

Dag Wiers provides an excellent repository for Red Hat flavored Linux systems. Adding them to CentOS 5 is easy.

First download the “rpmforge-release”-rpm. For CentOS 5, I choosed rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm. The rpm’s are available at http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/. Then install the rpm.

cd /tmp wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm