I spend quite a lot of time on Super User( my rep is a testament to that I guess 
) – both on the site as well as the mindblowingly awesome chat (if you haven’t been here, you *must* drop by).
Today a user dropped by and asked a very nice question - which went like -
I have some files that have some text in the notes fields(the tab where you put notes in the properties dialog box)… so can I output those texts with using the ls command.
Quick tip – if you use the Terminal as much as I do, ever been in a situation where you’ve written a particularly long command, and then want to issue that command again but can’t recall it ? Use the history command, and pipe it to grep to search it!
history | grep -i <search-term>
This will give you all commands with the search term and the corresponding line number.
To reissue that command, type
!history <line-number>
Simple, easy & effective. CLI ftw.
Here are our key findings:
GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC
- While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
- Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
- A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.
Company Commits Percentage Volunteer 101823 23.45 Unknown 73558 16.94 Red Hat 70790 16.30 Novell 45349 10.44 Collabora 21684 4.99 Intel 11160 2.57 Fluendo 10218 2.35 Lanedo 10090 2.32 Independent 8922 2.05 Sun 8862 2.04 Nokia 6183 1.42
via Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » GNOME Census.
Notice a missing company ?
Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP. Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up.
The problem most likely to hit you with one of these drives is very slow write performance. This is caused by improper logical-to-physical sector alignment.
via Linux Not Fully Prepared for 4096-Byte Sector Hard Drives | OS News.
If you’re going to grab some new hard drives, the above article is worth reading. The article dates to Feb, 2010 – so I’m not sure if this situation still exists. Further more,
These drives are on the market now. We’ve known about this issue for a LONG time, and now it’s here, and we haven’t fully prepared. Some distros, like Ubuntu, use “parted”, which has a very nice “–align optimal” option that will do the right thing. But parted is incomplete, and we must rely on tools like fdisk for everything else. But anyone manually formatting drives based on popular how-tos that pop up at the top of Google searches is going to cause themselves a major performance hit, because mention of this alignment issue and how to fix it is conspicuously absent.
A quickie:
I wanted to change the default application from Banshee/Totem for my media files to VLC ( since I didn’t have proprietary codecs installed, and VLC does). Searched all of YaST/Settings and couldn’t find where to change the default application.
We have temporarily closed the Labs program of Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux, as we are making significant architectural changes to the 64-bit Linux Flash Player and additional security enhancements
Uh-huh.
I’ve owned couple of mobile phones now, all in increasing number of features. But the one thing that remained common amongst all of them, was the ability to use a tethered Internet connection in both Windows and Linux. Until I got the iPhone, that is. With the iPhone, I could no longer use the iPhone as a modem in Linux. Not anymore.
I was recently researching about claims that Ubuntu could sync with the iPhone, even the non-jailbroken ones. I was a little skeptical about this. What I found was libimobiledevice, and the iPhone Ethernet driver for Linux. I’ll write on libimobiledevice at a later day.
More @ techie-buzz
Seems like lot of openSUSE Gnome users don’t like the new Gnome panel, which is radically different interface from the traditional Menu bar with Applications/Places/System entries. Personally I prefer the new style, perhaps because I’m used to the openSUSE Kickoff panel, and I really dig the search feature
Been a while since I posted For some strange reason, recently I got an urge to try out ArchLinux. After much deliberation finally decided to try out ArchLinux again, in VirtualBox. My little install guide I compiled as I was reading through the Official ArchLinux Install Guide + Beginner’s Guide.
Please note: This is highly customized according to *my* requirements and nowhere as thorough /generalized as the official guides. Still, it might help you. Here we go -
READ MORE »
I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye -Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full) time – I read the article with great interest.
Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(“Amarok Classic” self) – and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 – primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers – and as for visualization – well don’t use that either.
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