Zulus Tips

In next few days i will go to business trip to Amsterdam. Flight time is about 3.5 hours, so i will have chance to test my new PDA Battery. I have a few ideas how to spent flight time, and i descided to watch few movies. Following short how-to will help you encode movies for your PDA.

To encode movies you need mencoder (from MPlayer package) and at least xvid and mp3 codecs. I have this codec packages installed on my desktop:

libavcodec0d
libxvidcore4
w32codecs

Before start encoding you need to note few parameters:

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Here is easy way to find all broken symlinks:


for i in `find / -type l`; do [ -e $i ] || echo $i is broken; done

Some time ago i have found very interesting patch for FreeBSD kernel. Patch was originally posted by Andre Oppermann in freebsd-current maillist. That patch allows dynamically change TCP send and receive buffer sizes. However Andre posed version only for FreeBSD CURRENT, so i have make note to try patch as soon as i have chance to install CURRENT. But today, my colleague told me that he found version for 6.x, and i have spent last few hours for patching & testing. As i wrote before, patch allows dynamically change TCP buffer size. Using that patch you can save a lot of kernel memory, because you don’t need to set big values for socket buffers. TCP session will start with a small buffer size and grow to match network conditions. Andre showed about 1000% better performance in his tests.
Below you can find my test results.

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Good news! FreeBSD 6.2 just released. I have a lot of systems with RELENG_6, FreeBSD RC1/RC2. I have use 6.2 in production last few months, and has only few problems with Broadcom NetXtreme II (bce) and DELL PERC 5.

Please note, RELENG_4 and RELENG_6_0 is near EOL now, so time for upgrade is come ;-)

Here is official announce:

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My Windows Server experience is less than average. Basically yesterday was a third time when i see Win3k installed on server, and first time when i have install/configure it.

Everything goes fine until I’m try to enable logon screen. Default installation haven’t logon screen, so after windows boot up, i has Administrator UI without entering any password. I’ve spent 30 minutes trying to find where i can enable logon and i didn’t find anything. Only after 15 minutes of googling i have found solution. That is unreal, i’ve spent about hour to find solution and only 2 minutes to implement it. So, here is commands you need to enter to enable logon screen:

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Ubuntu Dapper was my desktop OS for a last half year, and I’m totally happy with this OS. I’ve use a lot of Linux distributions, and I’m sure what Ubuntu is best for desktop.

I’m start thinking about update as soon as Edgy was released. I have read a lot of unsuccessful stories about upgrades. But i should try, because KDE 4 is coming soon, and upgrade from Dapper to next Ubuntu release with KDE 4 will be much harder. So i need some intermediate release to have chance to get fresh KDE on my desktop.

Below i will post brief how-to, but please note, that is not 100% recipe, and this can not work for your system, and I’m not responsible for any data loss ;-)

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