Tags: linux March 22, 2010    

I haven't posted in a while due to being busy with finishing my degree. Therefore a large amount of little items have accumulated.

Freeing Hard Drive Space

First, sometimes virtual machines will be tight on space, which will cause problems with keeping linux up to date. To alleviate that, I had to clear data from Firefox and Thunderbird. Unfortunately, just clearing the caches, history, etc. did not actually free space.

To free space in Firefox, I went to ~/.mozilla/firefox, and deleted the profile. To get Firefox to start again, the directory needs to exist though. So if the profile is abc.def, then two commands are needed:

rm -r abc.def

mkdir abc.def

The result is a loss of all information, including bookmarks. Oh well.

On a side note, if the machine goes down while linux goes down, Firefox may not start up until its lock files in the profile directory, lock and .parentlock, are erased. The latter can be seen when using ls -a. And to show the file when using a file filter, the . must be specified (i.e. ls .*lo* works and ls -a *lo* does not).

To clear hard drive space for Thunderbird, I went to the feed folder and deleted and touched the rss files that do not have an extension. The result is that the files are empty. Old messages are lost, but if Thunderbird is set to delete them, they're not displayed anyway. For example, with the profile def.geh and rss feeds abc and def, the commands would be

cd ~/.thunderbird/def.geh/Mail/Feeds

rm abc

touch abc

rm def

touch def

Weird Apache Behaviour

Apache password protection seems to work when www is present and does not work when www is missing. I see the same pattern for certificates and Firefox. For some websites, Firefox complains that the website is not trusted when www is not added to the front. Something to keep in mind.

Preload on Ubuntu

I enabled preload on Ubuntu to try to improve performance of starting applications multiple times. I haven't seen much difference between using preload and not.

Graphics and Common Lisp

Some (mostly cffi) bindings and libraries: buclet for the bullet 3d physics library, okra for ogre, clois-lane for ogre's input system (ois), ogreoggsound, open dynamics engine (ode), lispbuilder-sdl, and horde3d.

Copyright © 2010 Borys Bradel. All rights reserved. This post is only my possibly incorrect opinion.