blog.johanv.org (Posts about linux)

Debian 11, XFCE and a bluetooth mouse

Johan Vervloet — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 20:15:00 GMT

Last week, I gave an old laptop a second life. It's an old ASUS, I think it came with Windows 8 back in the day, and I installed Debian 11 with XFCE on it. This looks very retro, but it works like a charm. I can now use the battery for serveral hours, while with Windows it would die after 5 minutes. And today I got my bluetooth mouse working.

Here is what I did:

Working around a Pop!_OS networking issue

Johan Vervloet — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 18:01:00 GMT

Update (2021-11-26):

The solution I describe in the original post, did work for a while, and then stopped working. Then I got it working again by removing the kernel modules iwlmvm and iwlwifi, and modprobing iwlwifi again. Worked for a day, and stopped working again. So I guess it just sometimes worked, and sometimes, it didn't.

I think it was just the router. It's a TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND v2, and I installed OpenWrt on it (v19.something), a couple of years ago. Now I upgraded it to v 20.02.1, and I think - hope - that that will finally have solved the problem. I was a little reluctant to flash a firmware update, but it turned out to be very easy. The page for my device on the openWRT wiki had a direct link to the 'upgrade firmware', which I could easily flash using the openWRT web interface (using another device than my laptop, of course).

How to use a tablet as a third screen for your Ubuntu system

Johan Vervloet — Sat, 01 Sep 2018 20:22:14 GMT

At work I have a docking station, that allows me to use two external screens with my laptop. And I find this extremely useful. I put a terminal window here, some source doe there, a similar source file over there, and I need to write a unit test while looking up things on Stack Overflow. So those three screens are easily filled.

Sometimes I work from home. I don't have a docking station at my place, and I can use only one external screen. This works as well, but often I miss the extra screen real estate. We do have a tablet though, mainly used by our children. Those are typically away or asleep when I code... So how difficult could it be to use the tablet as an external screen?

How to apply a patch?

Johan Vervloet — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 19:05:07 GMT

Suppose that you want to use e.g. a CiviCRM extension like CDNTaxReceipts , but you want some extra functionality, and someone told you that there is a patch available.

Now suppose you don't use git, and you don't have a clue about how a patch works. Then this is the easy way to apply it.

You download the patch file, and you save it on your file system, e.g. as ~/Downloads/39.diff
You use the command line. Supposing you unpacked the archive in ~/dev/CDNTaxReceipts-3.1
```
cd ~/dev/CDNTaxReceipts-3.1
patch -p1 < ~/Downloads/39.diff
```

Here you are. You patched the extension.

If you use Windows, the hardest part will be finding a patch executable. On almost every other OS, patch will be available by default.

The real reasons for using Linux

Johan Vervloet — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 20:35:09 GMT

I submitted this to HPR, see episode 1641.

I am a Linux user since the end of 1999. Which is 15 years already. I've also been trying for almost 15 years to convince other people to try Linux. And I must confess that I very often used wrong arguments doing this. After 15 years it is time to ditch some fake arguments, and to tell you the real reasons why you should switch to Linux. :-)

Linux in de klas. Wedden voor een pintje?

Johan Vervloet — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 19:43:59 GMT

Voor mensen die mij al langer kennen, is het geen nieuws meer. Ik ben een Linuxfan. Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat op de dag van vandaag heel wat PC-gebruikers beter af zouden zijn met Linux op hun PC, in plaats van Windows. Ik heb dan ook al vaak aan mensen aangeboden om Linux op hun PC te installeren, maar meestal zijn ze niet zo happig. Onbegrijpelijk eigenlijk :-)

In deze post wil ik het hebben over een bijzonder soort computers, waarvoor een installatie van Linux volgens mij een grote stap vooruit zou zijn: de computers in de Vlaamse lagere scholen en kleuterscholen.

De rust van een cleane computer

Johan Vervloet — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:44:29 GMT

Ik heb net een computer opnieuw geconfigureerd. En dat is leuk. Het geeft me altijd een soort van gemoedsrust als ik op een clean systeem kan werken. De PC die ik dagelijks gebruik op het werk, daar staan 1001 toepassingen op. Dat heeft te maken met mijn job en mijn interesses. Als ik dan eens op een PC kan werken waarbij de menu's niet overladen zijn, en het ziet er nog eens mooi uit ook, dan voel ik me helemaal zen :-)

Printing to a HP Laserjet CP1025 on a Linux print server with CUPS

Johan Vervloet — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 08:58:58 GMT

Printing to a HP Laserjet CP1025 on a Linux print server with CUPS

Almost 2 years ago, I bought a HP Laserjet CP1025. It was rather cheap. And it has crappy Linux support. Damn.

Every time I install a new Linux distribution, I have forgotten how to use this printer. So I might as well document it here.

Wireless networking on a Samsung Series 5 laptop with Linux Mint

Johan Vervloet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:19:19 GMT

Wireless networking on a Samsung Series 5 laptop with Linux Mint

Last weekend, I installed Linux Mint 15 (Olivia) on a collegue's Samsung notebook. (I did a lshw, and it showed me '535U34C, Samsung SENS').

At my place, everything seemed to work OK (WPA2 and all), but when I tried it at work, the wireless connection dropped every x seconds, and needed to reauthenticate.

So I guess the problem depends on the type of wireless router.

I did some googling, and often I read that I had to pass the nohwcrypt=1 option to the ath9k kernel module. Which did not work. So I cluelessly tried some more suggestions, and finally I found a set of options that do work: nohwcrypt=1 blink=1 btcoex_enable=1 enable_diversity=1.

To try this out, you can do the following:

rmmod ath9k
modprobe ath9k nohwcrypt=1 blink=1 btcoex_enable=1 enable_diversity=1

(Maybe you have to log out and log on again after this command).

If it works, you can persist the settings, adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/ath9k.conf

options ath9k nohwcrypt=1 blink=1 btcoex_enable=1 enable_diversity=1

That worked for me. So I hope this information is useful for someone else as wel.

Many thanks to Sergei Winitzki, who posted the comment that saved my day.

Sending e-mail from mutt using an Exchange server

Johan Vervloet — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:01:51 GMT

My favourite mail client is mutt. At work we have an Exchange mail server, and I wanted to use mutt for my work e-mail. Today it works. (I am using Fedora 19 beta)

Our mail server supports IMAP access, so reading mail is easy. But the difficult part, is sending e-mails.

In a first attempt, I tried this in the mutt configuration:

set smtp_url="smtp://mylogin@our.local.mailserver:587"
set smtp_pass="mySecretPassword"

I think this has worked for me somewhere in the past, but now I get the error message 'No authenticators available.' So I had to try something else.

Now I am using msmtp to send my e-mails. I installed it from the repositories:

yum install msmtp

I created a configuration file: ~/.msmtprc:

account myaccount
host webmail.our.domain
from my.email@our.domain
auth ntlm
tls on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
user mylogin
ntlmdomain MYDOMAIN
password "mySecretPassword"
port 587
account default : myaccount

In the mutt configuration, I removed the smtp-setttings, and added

set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"

And guess what. It just worked (TM) :-)