Category: Linux

  • Raspberry Pi 4, WS2801 & Apple HomeKit

    Raspberry Pi 4, WS2801 & Apple HomeKit

    Intro In this post, I’m going to explain how to connect a WS2801 RGB-LED-strip to the RPi 4B and Apple HomeKit. I’m writing this during the 2020 Covid-19 quarantine. I had lots of time to spend, obviously, so I started this project. It started as a simple wood project and then I wanted to add…

  • Linux VNC xstartup

    Covid-19 makes us do crazy things. Work from home for example. I hade some trouble configuring VNC. Especiall the VNC server config turned out to be very tricky, when it comes to the window manager. I usually use gnome. It took me hours to figure out how to start gnome from a vnc session. This…

  • Postfix and SASL

    Motivation Postfix and SMTP authentication can be a very time intensive issue, I had to cope with twice. The second time I had to reread all the documentation, because there were almost 5 years between the first and second attempt. This is what motivated me to write this documentation. Introduction Given a running postfix mail…

  • Modify an initial ramdisk (initrd)

    Hi out there! Because modifying an initial ramdisk is something I had to do every once a while and I am pretty oblivious when it comes to “exotic” commands, I will persist the knowledge at this point. First of all, modern linux kernels (like everything above 2.6 or so) use an initrd that is a…

  • UDEV, USB and permissions

    Hi peeps, I’ve been stumbling on this so many times, so I decided to dedicate this post to the following issue: If you connect an USB device to your computer, trying to access it under Linux, you might run into permission issues caused by the UDEV daemon. In my case, I was trying to connect…

  • Linux and itunescompilation id3

    I was looking for a tool to set the itunescompilation (see here) ID3-field of certain mp3-files. This is necessary for iTunes to recognize that imported files belong to a compilation (or not). Most of the (decent) Linux tools for id3 tagging are not able to perform that task (including EasyTag). Fortunately, I found eyeD3 (see…

  • Convert FLAC to MP3

    These days I needed to convert some FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio files to mp3. As usual when dealing with audio/video formats, there are lots of (useless) tools available on the internet, most of them being shareware or even voruses (windows). Fortunately, this is a strength of Linux … at least if you are…

  • Window Buttons in Ubuntu 10.04

    With Ubuntu 10.04 alias “Lucid Lynx” the new “Ambiance”-theme was introduced. Furthermore, the designers of Ubuntu decided to change the location of the window buttons from the right to the left, which in my opinion is really unusual. Fortunately, Linux is very customizable and this behavior can be changed in order to move the buttons…

  • SMBackup

    This Script was designed to backup a database onto a backup-server that (only) provides SMB-Shares. If there are already more than $CYCLE files present within the destination directory, the oldest file will be overwritten. You might get the impression that I am abusing my blog to host scripts. Well, you’re right 😉 There you go:…

  • Mount/Unmount ISO images in nautilus

    Hey, I figured out that nautilus, the file browser of GNOME, has a nice feature of adding scripts to the context menu (right click). For instance, you can place the following two scripts in ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ and make them executable (chmod +x). Then you will be able to do a right-click on iso-images for (un)mounting them.…