Another shell snippet I'm looking for regularly...
To resize a block image file (like those that are used as virtual disks in Xen) from 2GB to 10GB you need the following. The used filesystem is ext2/3.
dd if=/dev/zero of=<image file> bs=1M conv=notrunc count=1 seek=10000 losetup /dev/loop0 <image file> e2fsck -f /dev/loop0 resize2fs /dev/loop0 e2fsck -f /dev/loop0 losetup -d /dev/loop0
I always want this screen configuration at random places, so here it is.
Place this in your home directory as .screenrc
# ~/.screenrc
# use visual bell
vbell on
# set a big scrolling buffer
defscrollback 1000
# Set the caption on the bottom line
caption always "%{= kw}%-w%{= BW}%n %t%{-}%+w %-= @%H - %LD %d %LM - %c"
Sooner or later almost any Linux admin feel the need for a history of configuration changes. May it the X server configuration which got corrupted while you experimented with the Composite extension and OpenGL or may it the apache configuration you jumbled while updating the popular web server.
Gentoo Linux brings some powerful tool's (dispatch-conf, etc-update) out of the box to manage and update those configuration files. dispatch-conf is even able to store older versions inside of /etc/config-archive with RCS, but dealing with this ancient VCS is't that much fun and self written config files are not included by default.
SVK is the answer.
For a half year I own a ThinkPad X60s, my fifth ThinkPad and my smallest but fastest laptop I ever had. The first time after installing Gentoo Linux on the new machine I was surprised that suspend to RAM was instantly working, I just had to stop my WIFI card (ipw3945) and woops, it went to sleep and it even resumed well. Using the hibernate-scripts a perfect setup inclusive locking of the KDE session was easy to configure (just uncommenting the right lines). In the need for more hard disk space (this digital SLR camera is by far a greater space killer than my (growing) ogg vorbis music collection) I bought a new 160 GB SATA hard disc. Migration was easy, I just connected the second disk with an external USB to SATA bridge and rsynced the partition content.
I updated the firmware of my digital SLR camera Canon EOS 400D to the newest version 1.1.1 and now I can download the images from the directly connected camera with Digikam 0.9.2. This is possible because Canon added support for the new Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) USB protocol. Before, only the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) was available which was not well supported under the Linux/Digikam combination.
The next version of KThinkBat has just been released and comes with an overhauled internal battery handling. This will be visible only for those users which have more than one battery in their Laptop. Calculations of summarized remaining time was improved a lot. A new translation into Czech was added (thanks to Martin Samek). Harald Sitter of the Kubuntu team requested me to add some missing license files to the tarball, so that they will be able to include KThinkBat to the next Kubuntu release.
There are still some fuzzy or untranslated messages in some translations. Please update them as soon a possible, that I can provide a message update release for inclusion into Kubuntu (currently, only English, German and Spanish are complete). Hope that my wife can translate it to French after she finished her exams on Wednesday. But native translators are always welcome.
I'm proud to anounce the next stable release of KThinkBat. There are a lot of changes in the usability area of KThinkBat, esp. in the configure dialog. Based on a patch of Luis, I reworked the configuration dialog and decided, to make more internal parameter configurable to fix an issue with uncommon ACPI implementations. The dialog has now three tabs and all options were reordered to fit one of three categories: General, Appearance and Advanced. Users unsure about their concrete ACPI setup can just let the override advanced settings checkbox unchecked and should be fine with KThinkBat's internal default settings.
You can donwload KThinkBat from its homepage. A Gentoo ebuild can be found in my overlay.
KThinkBat 0.2.5 is out and brings more complete translations for more languages and a polished icon set (thanks to Luis Guillermo Sobalvarro). The remaining time is now in hour:minutes format instead of just minutes, because it is more readable.
In the next release I have to fiddle with laptops with broken or incomplete BIOS/ACPI implementation which reports no current power consumption. On those laptops, KThinkBat displays no remaining time which makes a graphical battery applet (besides the visual recognition) almost useless. Hope, I can close Ticket #13 and make Luis happy, as he contributed since KThinkBats beginnings nicer and nicer icons and a Spanish translation. 
So, finally, I got Xgl running on my IBM ThinkPad R50 as well. The R50 has a Radeon Mobility 9000 (M9) based on the R250 chip. Xgl is a nice toy, really usefull are the exposé like window switcher and the over all speed gain when switching windows and desktops. Another hot feature are the ongoing animations while switching apps, in semi-transparent exposé view or while rotating the Desktop cube. A great surpise was, that the GPU stays colder than when running glxgears on normal X. At least, the fan of my ThinkPad remains on slow (and therefore quiet) speed. 
Sorry, but I'm to lazy to take screenshots, there can be found thousands of them already in the net.
A long outstanding issue in TWiki peeved me lately so much, that I decided to write a patch for the current stable version of TWiki 4.0.1. In TWiki there is the possibility to include other pages, not only from the wiki itself but also from completely foreign URIs, as long as they a accessible through the http protocol. What I never understand is, why https is not supported. It turns out, that in terms of speed, the TWiki developers decided to implement the URL/website fetch routine themselves. Doing the same with https was not managable and a discussion was fought about depending on just another CPAN library. Today, more than ten month later, TWiki lacks still this feature.
Based on another patch for TWiki Cairo, I created a patch that allows you to include all kind of https:// URLs. User authentication is currently not supported, but can be added easily. Please test it and check the code before you deploy this patch to a production system. I didn't proof read the code a second and third time.
Download: twiki-4.0.1-include-https.patch
The second patch (twiki-4.0.1-statistics.patch) I will announce, fixes a problem with the statistics function in TWiki 4.0.1. Pages that contain dashes and/or underscores will not be recognizes correctly. The patch extends the corresponding regular expression to fix the issue.
