Cinepaint feels intuitive and relatively easy to use given the awesome manipulative power you have at your fingertips. If it seems familiar to you, that might be because it’s a fork of GIMP 1.0.4. Although it’s intended audience is video editors, you can use it for anything from gif, jpg, and tiff to cineon, hdr, xwd, xcf, and a long list of other formats. Cinepaint is for editing and touching up individual frames, not working with video files directly.

I hate configuring things like GPS devices that run super restricted verisons of linux or some other OS. They never seem to deal with error handling very well. For example, here’s the oddball command for fetching ntp.conf and ntp.keys from a ntp server onto a Symmetricom GPS receiver. This is what you want to see, it just works. But in the many failures leading up to this configuration, it was finding problems fetching the files or having the correct access but it was happily coasting right along, overwriting its own configuration with jibberish and rebooting it self only to find the configuration was bollocks.

Instead of storing whole dd images, even if they’re just backups of small partitions, you can save space and bandwidth by piping dd into a compression utility like gzip. You can then unzip the files straight into sha1sum to get a checksum of what you just backed up.

ATI allows xorg.conf to have the normal customized settings you’re used to for X, but it relies on this little PCS database at /etc/ati/amdpcsdb for driver configuration. If you have a customized amdpcsdb, or a binary installation from your favorite package manager is screwing up your X when using the fglrx driver, try reverting back to the default ATI settings.

Rpmbuild’s RPATH feature is used to search libraries outside of standard paths. They are given to the linker at buildtime. If the developers of the code you’re trying to turn into an RPM did not take any of these considerations into account when they write their programs then you may be forced to skip check-rpath.

Here’s a short bash script to parallelize your jobs. There are utilities already written for just this type of thing, but forget xargs. Check out xjobs instead.

For Linux it’s a simple shell script, nothing fancy is needed. If the script ends with a 0 exit value, the commit will work, if it exits non-zero, the commit will fail. In Windows the syntax is different because you don’t have a real shell. Instead, you use batch file commands to accomplish the same thing. The logic is pretty much the same because it’s simple.

Here’s how to use svn propset with single or multiple dependencies along with the pre-revprop-change hook setup. It was a pain in the butt at first because it just didn’t make sense, but now I get it.

Udev creates and removes device nodes in /dev, based on events the kernel sends out on device discovery or removal. In other words, Udev is the system that maps hardware devices to files you can interact with in the /dev directory. Udev runs in user space and creates points in /dev when the kernel detects and recognizes new hardware as it’s attached. It’s only been around since 2003/2004. All modern distributions use udev instead of the now depreciated hotplug.

Install the prerequisites noted in the README file if you’re building swfdec and swfdec-mozilla from scratch. I found I only needed to install liboil-devel and gstreamer-plugins-base-devel in order for it to build without complaint. When installing from binary on my 64-bit os, I found I was missing a lot of 32-bit packages needed by the plugin, so my dependencies needed by swfdec-mozilla.i386 rpm was long.