Tech notes

April 4, 2007 • 1 min read • Technology

ksubtile, subtitles and subtitle format (srt, mplayer)

There are heaps of subtitle editors for Windows, but I found only one usable for Linux: ksubtile.

April 4, 2007 • 1 min read • Technology

Kill and defunct (zombie) processes (kill, pstree, xkill)

Sometimes you cannot kill some processes via the regular command kill -9 PID When you list them with ps -aux you will see the entry defunct Those defunct processes are apparently still hanging around mostly because their parent application is waiting for them to receive something.

April 4, 2007 • 1 min read • Technology

Keyboard layout under xfce (Debian Testing, XF86Config)

We installed Debian Testing onto our old 333MHz/128MB Compaq M300.

April 4, 2007 • 1 min read • Technology

Installing source rpms (rpmbuild –rebuild)

In order to install source rpms .src.rpm you need to rebuild the package (as root): rpmbuild rebuild package.src.rpm This results in a binary rpm.

April 4, 2007 • 1 min read • Technology

How to take screenshots in Windows XP without any additional software

Press the PrtSc button (somewhere near PageUp/Down) to capture the whole screen and Alt PrtSc to capture the active window only.

April 4, 2007 • 1 min read • Technology

How to back up hidden files

tar cvf backupfile.tar .[a-zA-Z0-9]Any better ideas?

April 4, 2007 • 1 min read • Technology

How much disk space do I have left (disk usage du and disk free df)

To see how much disk space you have left use df -h The h flag is for "human readable".

April 4, 2007 • 2 min read • Technology

Hardware (harddisk) failure (dma timeout error, dma_timer_expiry)

A while ago our server seems to have a hard disk failure as the following error messages kept coming up: hda: dma timeout error: […] hda: dma_timer_expiry: […] We exchanged the 20 GB HD against my old Mac's 4.7 GB HD and reinstalled the system.
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Biochemistry/Molecular biology researcher and teacher