I recently started a new job where IRC is used internally. I installed irssi and configured it to “beep” when my nick is mentioned, but nothing would come out of the speakers. Even the beep command would fail. I have a theory that it’s due to the Macbook I use not having a “PC speaker”, but I’m not 100% sure as I managed to fix things pretty quicky using this train of thought. Here are the commands that fixed it.

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The Macbook Pro 13″ (otherwise known by the codename MacbookPro12,1), has pretty good Linux support for a Macbook. The hardware is beautiful and everything works now that the camera is supported. Here are the steps needed to make it work.

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Today I came across the following issue after an upgrade of libvirtd:

[root@karma ~]# service libvirtd start

Oct 19 17:48:43 karma kernel: libvirtd[4469]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f38f342ccf7 sp 00007f38efb5cf88 error 4 in libvirt_driver_qemu.so[7f38f33c3000+133000]
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service: main process exited, code=killed, status=11/SEGV
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: Unit libvirtd.service entered failed state.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service failed.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: start request repeated too quickly for libvirtd.service
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: Failed to start Virtualization daemon.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: Unit libvirtd.service entered failed state.
Oct 19 17:48:43 karma systemd: libvirtd.service failed.

It looks like libvirtd is segfaulting immediately, leading to systemd restarting it over and over, eventually failing due to it failing so quickly.
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I ran into a problem with the GitLab installation instructions on SL6. I’m a CentOS person, but they were extremely late in publishing CentOS 6. While I waited, I used SL as a stop-gap. Unfortunately I still have many SL machines I need to take care of. Here’s an explanation of the problem and what to do about it.
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1. Connect to the share with credentials (connect as)
2. Hold down option, command and drag the share to the desktop
3. Open System Preferences, go to Users & Groups
4. Click on Login Items
5. Click the plus icon and add the folder that was just added to the desktop

Now choose the share in Time Machine!

It’s so easy to get RHEL based operating systems to work as an RDP server these days.

1. Install the EPEL repo

2. For CentOS/SL:

   yum install xrdp tigervnc-server

   For RHEL:

   rpm -i http://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/centos/6.5/updates/x86_64/Packages/tigervnc-server-1.1.0-8.el6_5.x86_64.rpm
   yum install xrdp

3. service xrdp start

4. chkconfig xrdp on

For RHEL:

Simply run this command, substituting ${array} with the name of your array (for example md0).

echo idle >> /sys/block/${array}/md/sync_action

If you want to resume it, run this command:

echo check >> /sys/block/${array}/md/sync_action

I have a rather large raid array at home and it takes a couple of days to run a check. Unfortunately, SL is configured to check the array every Sunday at 1am. While this may be convenient for business users that have fast CPUs and fast HBAs, it’s really inconvenient for me. So I decided to change it.
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The judder on my MythTV frontend has been driving me crazy for a while now. There was a very simple fix for this: RTFM.

The MythTV team have put together an entire manual on avoiding judder.

It turned out that my judder problem was due to a few problems:

My Nvidia settings was set to enable PowerMiser. This tells the video card to back off whenever it thinks it’s not under enough load.

I was missing the following line in my Xorg conf:

Option "FlatPanelProperties" "Scaling = Native"


I didn’t have proper playback settings in the following menu:

Setup -> Setup -> Appearance Go to the “Video Mode Settings”

I set everything to 1080p and auto.

I don’t know which setting fixed the problem, but it’s nice and smooth now!

I’ve had many frustrating moments trying to put GVimPortable on Windows systems. The biggest difference is that GVimPortable doesn’t follow the normal vimrc conventions for Windows.

Simply put your settings in GVimPortable/Data/settings/vimrc . Notice that there’s no underscore or dot as is the convention with the normal Windows binary. Also note that it ignores _vimrc files in your home directory, but it will happily display that file if you try and edit the settings via the GUI. All in all, this is extremely confusing and frustrating. The documentation does make this clear however, but I’d rather the normal conventions be followed.