The script edits itself to increase the timer, but by increments so tiny that they should not be noticed right away. Depending on how addicted to “ls” the victim of your practical joke is, it may go on for days or weeks before they start to notice the delay.

Choice is one of many reasons why I really like this distribution over the other popular flavours right now. I share the same dissatisfaction for Unity and Gnome 3 with most of the community. While this is the main reason for jumping ship and crashing the Mint party, there are some really simple things I like, like Dropbox.

The only problem i’ve had with LXDE and Mint is that running as a guest in VirtualBox, the guest additions will not install properly. I tried mounting the additions from the host and installing them, no dice. I tried installing from the software repositories using the aptitude update manager, no dice. So it didn’t work out of the box for me, but a quick recompile did the trick. No moving around files or manipulating configurations are necessary, just recompile for the running kernel and you’re in business.

There are multiple ways to do it. Some are platform dependent.The best way is probably through socket, but you can use platform and os too.

What I don’t like about Gnome 3 desktop is how it hides everything from you under multiple layers of mouse clicks in order to try to simplify. But what it does is over categorize everything! This would work just fine on a tablet pc, but I’m on a desktop or full laptop and I consider myself a power user!

Instead of killing the process in order to run dhclient to get a new lease, just release it. See? No need to kill it. Now you can ask for another lease.

If you’re running an older distribution of Linux or you just find that the kernel module is unavailable because your RealTek RTL series PCI-Express Ethernet card is just too new, then you’ll need to install the driver manually.

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.

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.

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.