blog.mfuchs.org

A few days in Paris

Markus — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:09:24 +0000

From the end of december till beginning of january we spent some time in Paris, which has been a nice experience.

There is so much to see, so I just pick out a few things we have visited.

The Louvre with a huge amount of art from the last centuries has been our first objective. With its four wings each offering thousands of exhibits we decided just to have a look at the old stuff from greece and egypt. It is nearly impossible to see everything in a few hours but we made great fotos and saw a lot. It was really impressive how big some of the paintings were. And the best thing at all: it was free for european citizens under the age of 26. This is the case for most of the museums in Paris.

Our second sightseeing obejctive brought us to the Arc de Triomphe from which I made several nice shots including Champs Elysee and the chaos at the roads of Paris.

I could continue, but it’s best if you have a look at the photos

What I find really worth mentioning is Centre Pompidou. There, we also entered for free and experienced what “modern art” is about. In my opinion it is really crazy. For example there was a video showing a naked woman with a chicken next to a man just slipping with a chair. If this is art, I must admit that I just don’t understand it. The other possibility would be that people doing this have all gone mad (I think one could argue about that). There was so much other crazy stuff so that I recommend everybody going to Paris to visit Centre Pompidou!

Finally the catacombs is another “must have seen” objective. We were lucky to be the first in line at 9.30am and had a great experience facing the death in the 18th and 19th century. There are about 6million skulls and bones stacked squemishly. It was a very spooky atmosphere.

If you ever go to Paris, do not miss these things and as a last tip I suggest you to buy an online ticket for the Eiffel Tower to avoid 2 hours of waiting

P.S.: Unfortunately this year there was no fireworks at New Year’s Eve which not only confused us but also the other thousands of tourists at Sacre Coeur. A native told us that it was forbidden because of troubles and chaos the year before.

Fix stanby with ubuntu on a notebook

Markus — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:39:04 +0000

After setting my ThinkPad to standby mode it never woke up as I expected. In most cases I had to poweroff the whole machine, which is very ugly. I am using Ubuntu 8.04 (because it runs stable) and discovered the issue has not been fixed in the new 8.10 release.
In these days I read somethin interesting in the Ubuntu Forum

There was somebody who expected the problem arising from the multi core processor management. He suggested to disable one core before going to standby mode (suspend to ram). I tried it and it works perfectly!

So here’s the command to disable one core:

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

to enable it after wakeup, type

echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online

Of course, these actions have to be done as root

Get 1920×1200 resolution with intel 945GM

Markus — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:54:49 +0000

I had some trouble to get the maximum resolution for my monitor, using the VGA output of my Thinkpad. I’m running Ubuntu Hardy which uses the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver by default. This can be combined with xrandr to manage all your monitor/resolution settings without restarting all the time.

First of all I had a look at the possible resolutions:

asdf@fatalii ~ $ sudo xrandr -q Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1200, maximum 2048 x 2048 VGA connected 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 518mm x 324mm 1280x960 59.9 800x600 56.2 640x480 60.0 LVDS connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 1024x768 60.0 + 50.0 800x600 60.3 640x480 60.0 59.9

I couldn’t believe 1280×960 to be the highest resolution for my 24″ Monitor (even my 8-year-old GeForce 2 MX 400 supports 1920×1200!!).
After having a look at the Xorg.log I found a Modeline for my desired quantity of pixels. The trick is: just add the modeline to xrandr’s “database”.
Here are the three relevant lines to fix the issue

xrandr --newmode "1920x1200" 154.00 1920 1968 2000 2080 1200 1203 1209 1235 +hsync -vsync xrandr --addmode VGA 1920x1200 xrandr --output VGA --mode 1920x1200

Important: Set the Virtual Resolution in your xorg.conf to the maximum of 2048×2048 if you get an error like “xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1600×1600 (desired size 2624×1200)”
Here is an excerpt of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Screen" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1024x768" Virtual 2048 2048 EndSubSection EndSection

Finally you could add the relevant mode changing lines to /etc/rc.local or something like this to adjust resolution automatically.

HINT: Open URLs from xterm (rxvt)

Markus — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:02:38 +0000

While using the terminal based IRC client “irssi” I faced the problem that I always had to copy and paste URLs to my webbrowser.

After a little research I found a way to open URLs just by clicking the mouse wheel. It’s quite easy: you need a special terminal: rxvt-unicode (urxvt).

Add the following lines to your ~/.Xdefaults file:
URxvt.perl-ext-common: matcher URxvt.urlLauncher: firefox
Then apply the new settings with
xrdb .Xdefaults
and enjoy!

HINT: Reduce CD-ROM Speed

Markus — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:30:29 +0000

Have you ever asked yourself why your DVD Player is much more quiet than the CD-ROM drive in your PC. It’s because playing audio/video just needs a reduced reading performance which calms down your drive a lot.

In Linux you have two possibilities: eject or hdparm

Eject can read out and set all possible speeds for your drive: To read it out use eject -X(capital X!)
Set your desired speed variable with
eject -x n
where n is a number like 2,4,8 or so on.

For hdparm you just type
hdparm -En /dev/cdrom
where n is the desired speed like 2,4,8 and so on and /dev/cdrom is the propriate device.
Of course the speed must be set before playing a medium

HINT: Concatenate multiple pdf files

Markus — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:55:31 +0000

Some of you are familiar with the situation when you have got a bunch of pdf files you want to print. Especially at university there are a lot of different lecture notes waiting to be put on paper. Printing every single file can be annoying and cost too much time (and money if you pay an extra charge for the print job). Facing this problem I found out that there is a way to put multiple pdf files together using ghostview (which should be included in every linux distribution)

You need just one command to assemble file1.pdf, file2.pdf, file3.pdf… to one file (here: output.pdf):
gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf
For easier use I’ve written a small script, you must only copy to a file called “pdfconcat” and save to a folder that’s included in your $PATH
#!/bin/sh # # pdfconcat - a script to put multiple pdf files together # # Author: Markus Fuchs # Last modified: 2008-05-29 # License: GPL ########################################################### if [ $# -lt 2 ] then echo “Usage: $0 output.pdf input1.pdf [input2.pdf] … ” exit fi OUT=$1 shift IN=$@ gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$OUT $IN
Perhaps you have to adapt the PAPERSIZE (e.g. ‘letter’ in the US).
Try it out and feel free to post your comments!

HINT: SSH Tunnel

Markus — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:07:31 +0000

Sometimes you’ve got the problem that some websites are just reachable in a particular network or you want to connect a service from another computer. No problem if you have SSH access to an external computer:

ssh @external-computer.net -L 1234:badwebsite.com:80

This simple command on your terminal (executed as root!) will take you directly to badwebsite.com port 80, when you enter localhost:1234 in your browser. This means that port 1234 of your local machine is bound to external-computer.net and leads directly to badwebsite.com. This website thinks you connect from external-computer.net.
You can even try to establish secured SSL connections, but this is not allowed by all remote servers. Therefor you just have to replace 80 with 443
As you can see, every port can be tunneled, not only the HTTP port. For example try port 6667 for IRC connections.

HOWTO: Special keys on your keyboard

Markus — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:04:10 +0000

In order to use the special keys on your keyboard or laptop like audio control or the “ThinkVantage” Button it is sometimes neccessary to do some tweaks on your system. Not all window managers directly know how to deal with these keys.

This article is written because of my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad I installed Ubuntu on. First of all I am a fan of the fluxbox window manager which doesn’t offer a feature to configure the special keys. While the volume control in the upper left worked fine, the ThinkVantage Button and some other Fn- Keys like hibernate or suspend didn’t do what I expected. So I found out that there is a way through the XServer.

The keyword is “Xmodmap” which binds keycodes coming from the hardware to particular key “names” you can use in the Xserver Environment. To define these patterns you must first find out the keycode of the given button. This can be done with xev. If you start xev in a terminal it opens a little window and produces some messages in the terminal itself. To find out the key codes focus the external xev window and press the key on your keyboard. In the terminal will be something like this:
KeyRelease event, serial 32, synthetic NO, window 0x2200001, root 0xa1, subw 0x0, time 1355270960, (119,75), root:(164,143), state 0x10, keycode 67 (keysym 0xffbe, F1), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: XFilterEvent returns: False

As you can see the keycode here is 67 (it was the F1 key as you can see, too ). Now take it and open the file ~/.Xmodmap. This file is used to declare the keynames in the Xserver Environment. Type

keycode 67 = XF86Launch1

for every key you want to bind, where XF86Launch1 must be different for every single keybinding. Here is a list of XF86-Keys you can use:

XF86AddFavorite
XF86ApplicationLeft
XF86ApplicationRight
XF86AudioMedia
XF86AudioMute
XF86AudioNext
XF86AudioPause
XF86AudioPlay
XF86AudioPrev
XF86AudioLowerVolume
XF86AudioRaiseVolume
XF86AudioRecord
XF86AudioRewind
XF86AudioStop
XF86Away
XF86Back
XF86Book
XF86BrightnessAdjust
XF86CD
XF86Calculator
XF86Calendar
XF86Clear
XF86ClearGrab
XF86Close
XF86Community
XF86ContrastAdjust
XF86Copy
XF86Cut
XF86DOS
XF86Display
XF86Documents
XF86Eject
XF86Excel
XF86Explorer
XF86Favorites
XF86Finance
XF86Forward
XF86Game
XF86Go
XF86History
XF86HomePage
XF86HotLinks
XF86Launch0
XF86Launch1
XF86Launch2
XF86Launch3
XF86Launch4
XF86Launch5
XF86Launch6
XF86Launch7
XF86Launch8
XF86Launch9
XF86LaunchA
XF86LaunchB
XF86LaunchC
XF86LaunchD
XF86LaunchE
XF86LaunchF
XF86LightBulb
XF86LogOff
XF86Mail
XF86MailForward
XF86Market
XF86Meeting
XF86Memo
XF86MenuKB
XF86MenuPB
XF86Messenger
XF86Music
XF86MyComputer
XF86MySites
XF86New
XF86News
XF86Next_VMode
XF86Prev_VMode
XF86OfficeHome
XF86Open
XF86OpenURL
XF86Option
XF86Paste
XF86Phone
XF86Pictures
XF86PowerDown
XF86PowerOff
XF86Next_VMode
XF86Prev_VMode
XF86Q
XF86Refresh
XF86Reload
XF86Reply
XF86RockerDown
XF86RockerEnter
XF86RockerUp
XF86RotateWindows
XF86RotationKB
XF86RotationPB
XF86Save
XF86ScreenSaver
XF86ScrollClick
XF86ScrollDown
XF86ScrollUp
XF86Search
XF86Send
XF86Shop
XF86Sleep
XF86Spell
XF86SplitScreen
XF86Standby
XF86Start
XF86Stop
XF86Support
XF86Switch_VT_1
XF86Switch_VT_10
XF86Switch_VT_11
XF86Switch_VT_12
XF86Switch_VT_2
XF86Switch_VT_3
XF86Switch_VT_4
XF86Switch_VT_5
XF86Switch_VT_6
XF86Switch_VT_7
XF86Switch_VT_8
XF86Switch_VT_9
XF86TaskPane
XF86Terminal
XF86ToDoList
XF86Tools
XF86Travel
XF86Ungrab
XF86User1KB
XF86User2KB
XF86UserPB
XF86VendorHome
XF86Video
XF86WWW
XF86WakeUp
XF86WebCam
XF86WheelButton
XF86Word
XF86XF86BackForward
XF86Xfer
XF86ZoomIn
XF86ZoomOut
XF86iTouch

After editing the file, type
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap
Now you are able to use the keys in your preferred Desktop Environment or window manager.

To give you a little example here is a part of my ~/.fluxbox/keys file:
None XF86Launch1 :ExecCommand xterm -vb -fg grey -bg black -fs 9 -fa "Lucida Console" #notebook extras None XF86Standby :ExecCommand sudo /etc/acpi/sleep.sh

Finally if we follow our example the F1 key would now open an xterm with the given options.