Weblog Archives

You are currently browsing the archives for the Tips tag.

RPM and Initscripts compatibility between SUSE and Red Hat Linux

When it comes to business – despite the recent Microsoft-Novell deal -, interoperability and maximum compatibility between two major Linux distributions are of significant importance, as they can lead to less maintenance time, effort, trouble and costs. Having written that, I consider this article, which describes how to create RPM packages and initscripts that are [...]

The hole trick

This is an excellent article that describes in detail how P2P applications can bypass the firewall and accept incoming data without opening any ports in the firewall configuration. This trick is used by the majority of VoIP software. In this article, the author not only describes how the popular internet telephony software Skype manages to [...]

Optimize and Compress CSS Files

Usually, when writing or modifying a CSS file, the author adds comments and excessive indentation to the code in order to preserve its readability and to simplify maintenance. Although this might be a good habit, all those extra bits stored into the CSS file increase its filesize, often resulting in unnecessary waste of bandwidth, especially if such a file is used in a production web site. Today, I decided to search for tools that can perform compression and optimization of a CSS file.

Turning off window animations in GNOME

Well, it took me several months, but, finally, I found out how to turn off those animations when minimizing windows in the GNOME desktop. I intended to set Metacity as the window manager in a VNC session to see if it’s usable and accidentally, while checking its options in the configuration editor on my current [...]

Check Server HTTP Headers with CURL

As you may have noticed, I’ve changed my web site’s domain recently. Therefore, I had to redirect all requests to the new address. This has been done and it works as expected, but how about taking a closer look at the HTTP responses the web server returns to the client if an old URL is [...]

How to integrate seaudit-report in logwatch

Today, I revised my logwatch configuration and I decided to use an external parser for the SELinux audits. Logwatch includes such a parser (/usr/share/logwatch/scripts/services/audit script), but i tend to prefer seaudit-report, part of the setools-gui package in Fedora. Don’t let the package name confuse you, seaudit-report is a CLI tool.

Logwatch and Dovecot 1.x series in FC5

Logwatch is the preferred tool in order to get summaries of the various service logs in Fedora Core 5. It needs very little customization, which mainly summarizes in overriding some of the log file locations. The only issue I have encountered so far is that it cannot parse the Dovecot log entries correctly.

Use Python to get the web page data in Epiphany

Sometimes, things are not that straightforward as one might think. Yesterday, I spent over two hours on the Epiphany Python Console checking almost all of the available functions in order to find a way to store the displayed page’s HTML data in a variable. Before quitting, I decided to get some help over at the [...]

GRUB background image

Tweaking and customizing visuals in my system is not actually one of my topics of interest, but a tutorial about changing the GRUB boot screen’s background image has caught my attention. I don’t really like Fedora’s GRUB background – too many bubbles -, so the time has come to change it. The author writes in [...]

Kernel 2.6.17 and lirc_gpio driver

I use an old bt878-based TV capture card, whose remote control needs the lirc_gpio driver in order to work. I remember that this specific LIRC driver could not be compiled after upgrading to kernel 2.6.17. I investigated this problem a couple of days ago and it seems that the cause of this issue is the [...]