Changing a symbolic link in Linux

Symbolic links are great.

I need to swap out local Maven repositories for the project I'm working on.  I created a symbolic link, "maven_repo" in my home directory that points the current local Maven repo.  When it came time to change the "maven_repo" link I realized that changing a symbolic link to a directory requires an extra command :

ln -sfn DESTINATION_DIRECTORY LINK_NAME

It wasn't so obvious from the man page.  This blog post saved me a ton of time.

PAE kernel

I use virtual machines a lot and really need more memory (more than 3.7GiB.)

Unfortunately I'm still running 32 bit Fedora 14.  I tried the 64 bit version, but had some problems with Firefox and Eclipse.



I've put off upgrading because of Gnome 3.  I tried out the Live Disc for 15.  It didn't convince me.

Since then I've heard enough good things about Gnome Shell that I'm willing to bite the bullet.  But just to play it safe I've been waiting until I have a few days with no meetings.  So meanwhile...

I added memory and installed the PAE kernel.

sudo yum install kernel-PAE

Pretty simple and my machine immediately recognized the extra memory.

xlcip or How to copy past from the command line to x-windows

Brain Ashburn, my colleague in the Atlanta Red Hat office, introduced me to the xclip utility today. It copies output from the command line and puts it into x-windows.

For example, to copy the current directory :

 pwd | xclip -i -sel "clip"

There are of course more useful things that can be piped to it. To try it out create a file, add some text and :

cat newfile | xclip -i -sel "clip"

Its available through yum :

sudo yum install xclip

Gnome Do

A Mac user by choice I am completely addicted to Quicksilver.

I've used Launchy on Windows. Launchy is okay, but it requires a lot of babysitting. Searchable folders have to be tweaked to get decent results.

I've recently started using Fedora 13. Naturally I wanted a launcher. Wikipedia has a nice comparison of launchers. I installed Gnome Do from yum :

sudo yum install gnome-do

Its fast and returns meaningful results quickly. Its also written in Mono which I find marginally interesting.

Ubuntu slow internet connection

I'm running Ubuntu Karmic Koala on a Dell Latitude D620. I've had a pretty tough time with wireless. Broadcom's support for Linux is terrible.

Yesterday my browsers became ridiculously slow. Running "ping" or "host" from Konsole showed that the problem wasn't networking.

I found a few posts suggesting that I disable IPv6 and reboot. I created a file "/etc/modprobe.d/bad_list", added "alias net-pf-10 off" and rebooted. Much better.

I was on another machine and don't have links to the actual posts from Linux forums and Ubuntu's forums. My apologies to the solution's authors.