jeltsch's blog

The BIOS Password of Macintosh computers (Open Firmware)

Macs don't have a BIOS. They have something called Open Firmware instead. So the BIOS password is called Open Firmware password. You boot into Open Firmware by pressing the command (=apple), option, O and F keys simultaneously during system boot. To set the password type password To enable the protection type setenv security-mode full An then reboot by typing reset-all Apart from the full security mode you can also set "none" (= don't ask password during boot) and "command" (=gives you only limited access to Open Firmware without the password.

The Debian Package manager (apt-cache, apt-get, install, search)

Search for packages containing the word emacs in their name or description:
apt-cache search emacs
Install package emacs21:
apt-get install emacs21
Remove package wine including all configuration files:
apt-get remove --purge wine
Reinstall a package:
apt-get --reinstall install wine
Sometimes, you need to use dpkg to reconfigure a package, e.g. here the bittorrent sync package:
dpkg-reconfigure btsync

Keyboard layout under xfce (Debian Testing, XF86Config)

We installed Debian Testing onto our old 333MHz/128MB Compaq M300. We had Suse Linux 9.2. It worked well, but was quite slow. Suse, RedHat and Mandrake are nowadays like Windows: bloated. Debian Testing was much faster and we changed from KDE to xfce. No problems, we just had to adjust the keyboard layout in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 from us to fi Section "InputDevice" Option "XkbLayout" "us"

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