Arkham’s Eyrie

Yes, it’s broken.

arkham ~  $  ettercap-gtk 
ettercap-gtk: error while loading shared libraries: libltdl.so.3: 
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

ABS Solution:

mkdir -p ~/builds

cp -r /var/abs/extra/ettercap-gtk ~/builds

cd ~/builds/ettercap-gtk

makepkg -c

pacman -U ettercap-gtk-NG_0.7.3-2-i686.pkg.tar.gz

Today, out of the blue, my system freezed.
So, once for all, I decided to enable Magic SysRq keys.

echo "1" > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq

If my system would ever freeze again, I will start raising elephants…

R -> put the keyboard in raw mode
E -> terminate all processes gracefully
I -> kill all processes
S -> sync the disk
U -> umount all filesystems and remount them read only
B -> reboot the system

In a sentence:

Raising
Elephants
Is
So
Utterly
Boring

If you are terminal vim users, I’m sure you have tried to copy/paste text into a file and thought “Wtf, this is pretty damn wrong” seeing something like this:

void
randomize (void)
{
       struct timeval *tv = malloc (sizeof (struct timeval));
            struct timezone *tz =
                  (struct timezone *) malloc (sizeof (struct timezone));
                 gettimeofday (tv, tz);
                      srand (tv->tv_usec);
                           free (tv);
                                free (tz);
                            }

That’s called vi staircase effect.

The solution is to type:

:set paste

before pasting and

:set nopaste

after finishing.

Alternatively, just add to your ~/.vimrc:

nnoremap <silent> <F12> :set paste!<CR>

to press F12 for toggling between paste and nopaste conditions.

Download the source here.

Now open a root terminal and create the folder:

mkdir -p /usr/src/modules

Move the package to the new folder and move into it:

mv <gspcav1_package> /usr/src/modules

cd /usr/src/modules

Extract and move into it:

tar -xzvf <gspcav1_package>

cd <gspcav1_folder>

Compile and install:

make && make install

Remove eventually previous version of the module and load the new one:

modprobe -r gspca && modprobe gspca

Plug-in the webcam, and you should see something in dmesg.
Now you can just test with

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l:width=352:height=288:device=/dev/video0

or using programs like xawtv, camorama, amsn or skype. Have fun

I’ve installed the Nvidia driver from the binary package and when I restarted, X couldn’t start and gave me a nice blue welcome screen; the X log told me that my kernel module version was 1.0-7184 and my nvidia driver version was 1.0-9755.

I tried with

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-kernel-common

but the fine ubuntu hugemetapackages&&weirddependencies system suggested me to remove all my restricted kernel modules.

So I ran

sudo vi /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common

and added nvidia to blacklist the restricted nvidia module.

Everything works fine now, btw.