INIT: cannot execute “/etc/init.d/rcS” (or rc)

PROBLEM: The Linux init process gets an error that looks like this (in the stderr output): INIT: cannot execute “/etc/init.d/rc” Several things may cause this error but in my case it was happening because the rc script had #! /bin/sh on the first line, and /bin/sh was missing. SOLUTION: In /bin provide a link called […]

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How to use emacs to replace Mac carriage returns (the ^M line endings, and that includes even the “stubborn” ones!)…

The below information was shamelessly copied, word for word, from http://mike.kruckenberg.com 🙂 Changing end-of-line Mode in Emacs (replaces ^M line return) Every now and then I run into this. I export CSV data from Excel and find that when trying to use it in other places the line-returns aren’t quite right and unix tools like […]

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Help! Unable to automount my usb flash disk!

PROBLEM: On certain Linux distributions removable media (USB flash drives, CD’s,…) are auto-mounted by default and all users can read and write to them (if media is writeable of course). On others, inserting a removeable media results in an error message similar to Failed to mount “200GB Volume”, e.g. an error message from your file-manager […]

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How to make ‘man’ or ‘less’ paged text not disappear from screen after exit?

Problem: Depending on your Linux distribution, the text displayed by the ‘man’ command  (or any other text piped into ‘less’ for that matter) may stay on your screen upon exit from man/less or be cleared from your screen upon exit. Many people find it useful to have the man page text stay on the screen, […]

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