In most modern Linuxes, if you look in /etc/fstab you will see something like: UUID=27fb9d06-8122-4a53-9930-97bd9fa57221 /usr ext4 defaults 1 1 This is not very helpful if you’re trying to figure out where your /usr directory is mounted… So how can you convert the UUID of a drive partition to the good old familiar /dev device […]
Linux administration
Pages related to maintaining your linux box, managing devices and users, installing, upgrading and keeping it secure.
How to disable Linux FC graphical boot (start in text mode)
For those of you wondering how to make Fedora Linux boot into text mode – here’s how to disable the graphics boot/login screen: If you are running an older distribution you need to edit the file /etc/inittab (must be root) and change id:5:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault: If you are running a NEWER distribution can […]
Linux clock shows invalid time (UTC vs Localtime problem)
In a Linux multi-boot system it often happens that one distro shows correct system time and another does not. The problem is in how the startup scripts interpret the hardware (BIOS) clock when setting the OS time (the so called System Clock). If you want to learn more about this (and fix this problem PROPERLY!) […]
No sound on my Linux box and alsamixer gives error in function snd_ctl_open failed
On my newly installed Fedora box (I said “newly” but this may be a bit misleading as I installed FC9, which is an old distribution but I have to use it for compatibility reasons with other software…) I had the following problem: I had no sound (e.g. YouTube plays a clip and there is no […]
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 […]
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 […]
Help I can’t write to my windows disk/partition from linux!
There may be several possible causes why one would not be able to access their Windows hard disk or windows partition. If we assume that obvious human errors are out of the question (e.g. permissions errors due user not having write permissions to the directory of the mount or user not specifying the ‘-o w’ […]
How to find out where is wine’s C: drive
How to disable selinux
Without going into a lengthy discussion as to why this may be a bad idea – sometimes you just need to do it! Some of the earlier distributions to include selinux could literally tick you off with constant SE Linux security warnings, pollute the logs with them, render certain apps unusable. I myself remember several […]