SSH, backspace and UTF-8

Just great. If you use UTF-8 characters encoded on more than 1 byte (such as Latin diacritics, Armenian, Japanese etc. characters) and you attempt to hit [backspace] through SSH to delete them, you might be surprised to find out that backspace in SSH only deletes the last byte.

This can lead to a lot of unexpected results in your documents and it can generate a lot of confusion for any app you might be running via SSH.

mt-daapd / Firefly media server -- follow-up

A little while back I was talking very angrily about mt-daapd / Firefly media server.

It just so happened that it was 1) crashing and 2) apparently scanning outside of the directories I told it to scan in.

mt-daapd is not the answer

Depending on how lucky you are, mt-daapd / Firefly Media Server might or might not work for you.

The problem at hand is how to elegantly share media files in your LAN without resorting to NFS exports or Samba shares.

Migrating from KMail to Evolution

I've decided to give Gnome one more go (I've been a KDE user so far) so I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. What's more is that I decided to use only GTK applications, nothing Qt whatsoever. At least for a while, to see how it goes : )

So far, nothing but confusion. What was notable though was the painful migration of my e-mails from KMail to Evolution.

Asus Pro57Vr notebook (M51VR) and Linux

I bought this Asus Pro57Vr notebook (scroll and click "Specifications") about 10 days ago; it's reported as M51VR on Ubuntu.

It's very nice, for its price. Plus, I've grown fond of Asus over the past years, due to the great quality/price balance. After I've stuffed my desktop system with a lot of Asus components, I thought I'd buy a laptop from them as well.

svn bad commit?

Suppose you do a bad svn commit. Here is a quick hands-on.

Pidgin bug -- update

After more than half of year after noticing the issue and getting frustrated with the "can't set new Yahoo! avatar in Pidgin" bug, it seems that things have finally gotten a move on!

Midnight Commander transparent color scheme

Midnight Commander (or "mc") can have transparent panels instead of the ugly, dull default blue. So can "mcedit", its text editor.

Here's how to do it. Edit the file ~/.mc/ini and add at the end the following:

Postfix on FreeBSD - Maildir delivery

Suppose you have a clean FreeBSD install and you want to get Postfix as your MTA.

Current setup:

• OS: FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE
• SHELL: bash
• no previously installed MTA present on the system

Triple boot pain

Today I went at a friend's place to help him set up a triple boot system. The PC is brand new and bleeding edge (it will be used primarily as a gaming device), but the guy was still curious about Linux. So I told him about Linux in general and offered to install Ubuntu. He agreed and we went on with the partitioning scheme.


The HDD had 500 GB and we agreed to set up the partitions as follows:

* primary partition - 50 GB - Vista Business x64
* primary partition - 50 GB - XP Professional x64
* primary partition - 25 GB - Kubuntu 8.04
* extended partition - ~375 GB
- 4 GB - Linux swap
- the rest - big storage partition

OK, so when all this was settled, I started the Vista install. It went OK, no troubles whatsoever. Then came Kubuntu - all went fine. I used GRUB in order to be able to choose between the two operation systems.