Back in the Windows/Mac days, I used the wonderfully easy to use Miro Video Converter to convert videos I have into either the more open and Freerer Theora or WebM formats. Two problems: (1) No Linux binary that I could use. (2) No advanced options that let me control the conversion process, su...

I don't use Windows all that often, but I've found my self in a position where I'm stuck in front of one quite a bit temporarily. So I've been investigating Cygwin. My question is dpkg available for Cygwin? My Google searches seem to show that it was at least at one point, but I can't find a pack...

My .bashrc was getting a little long, so I decided to break it up into smaller files according to topic and then call these files from within .bashrc as so #my long .bashrc file bash .topic1rc bash .topic2rc but, within one of these sub-scripts, I had created a bash function. Unfortunately it...

The manufacturer recommendfs RH9 (ugh) and many of the google search hits come up with comments from 2006/7 which detail xorg problems with the amd driver and I'm hoping someone here has had recent experience. I have two questions: 1) Which Linux distribution (I'm going use gtk/boost/wxwidgets/c...

As per the question I am thinking it is either two or three. mkdir ~/a 1 entry for the dir it sits in (~/a) 1 entry for itself (cd a && ls .) and/or 1 entry for itself again (cd a && ls ..) Could someone clarify if this is two or three? Thanks

I have been using UBUNTU 10.10 and the major problem was the wifi which was not working at all. It worked in Ubuntu 9.10. So after many futile attempts i decided run a 'Live CD'of UBUNTU 9.10. The Wi-Fi worked. Then after restarting i was amazed to see that the Wi-fi was even working in ubuntu 10...

How can I find out which wifi driver is installed and running on my system? I know about lsmod, but how do I figure out which driver does what? I am running ubuntu 10.04.

Don't ask why, but is there a Unix command that takes no arguments?

New to vim and and I want to be able to compile code from within vim without running a new terminal and calling the compiler. How do I go about doing this? Note that this requirement is not restricted to gcc only, I sometimes need to call python also on the current script I am working on, so you...

How can I split a line matching a known pattern with a single character delimiter into an array, e.g. convert "token1;token2;token3;token4" into a[0] = token1...a[3]=token4. ?

Hi, I am trying to backup my linux webserver to our local windows sbs 2003 server in the office. I have set up ssh and cwrsync on the windows server and have confirmed that the linux server can reach the windows server via the command: ssh RemoteUser@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx It asks for a password and ...

Is there any way I can get the current 15 minute interval using the date command or similar ? e.g. something like date %Y.%m.%d %H:%M will give me 2011.02.22 10:19 , I need something that yields 2011.02.22 10:15 in the time span from 10:15 to 10:29.

I create an alias as my current user in the bash shell, which I can see using the alias command. When I switch user without the '-' i.e. su testuser the alias is not carried into the new users environment. Any idea why ??? Thanks

Hello! I am writing an application that needs to create a special file and write a magic cookie into it. I can’t write the file directly from the application, the system security model requires me to launch a helper tool with elevated privileges to do the trick. I can supply any number of argumen...

I am in the process of creating a lightweight yet full-featured Linux disto and don't want to include a whole bunch of unnecessary or bloated software. It is supposed to run off a USB flash drive. I want to have it be somewhat user-friendly, hence the necessity of a graphical login. I really hop...

This is probably a REALLY stupid question. But anyways, lets pretend we had a *nix rather powerful system... Now Obviously I know you can set up multiple users to login to a system.......but how exactly do you do that? Like....how would all the monitors connect and such, or would you need a small...

I have an apple keyboard and I had to do some remapping of the keys to make the mod-4 key the first key to the left of the space bar for when working with Emacs. The below script worked fine when I was using the dwm window manager, but after switching to openbox I have found that instead of swap...

Is/does using *nix, un*x, etc, as a euphemism for unix: purely a matter of personal taste, let'em call it “John” if they like purely a matter of personal taste, it's perfectly comprehensible a quaint historical tradition, why not preserve it hurts legibility (and newbies might not get it) and s...

Brace yourselves, this question will likely appear naive and/or foolish, seeing as I am relatively new to the inner workings of unix like systems, and programming in general. Ready? Ok! I will go through about 3 levels of ludicrosity, increasing as I go along. We have two systems with similar h...

I was having some serious network troubles, and now running sudo apt-get update gives this error: ... Hit ftp://ftp.is.co.za experimental/contrib i386 Packages Reading package lists... Error! E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/ftp.is.co....