ditoinfo in english » linux

Scrolling on GNU Screen

Dante Regis — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:57:13 +0000

Interesting tip for those using GNU Screen. If you need to scroll up and see output already hidden from the screen, just press

Ctrl + A , [

This will get you into “copy mode”. I didn’t look around for how to actually copy, but you can scroll with the arrow keys.

To get out of copy mode, just press “[” again.

Notebook HD problems with linux

Dante Regis — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 04:44:08 +0000

This post has alerted me of a big problem on laptop HDs that apparently happens to Linux users (according to other post from this same author, Vista has the same issue). It seems that the power-saving technologies keep telling the hard drive heads to sleep, while Linux keeps telling the drive to read or write something down. This wake-sleep-wake process consumes the life-time of the drivers to the point of failling hardware within an year.
The current workaround is to shutdown power management to hard disks with hdparm “hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda” (or /dev/hda, depending on your configuration).
More detailed info can be found on Ubuntu Bug at Launchpad.

How to tell which Linux distro you are using?

Dante Regis — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:53:36 +0000

If you ever managed more than a few Linux servers, you may have found yourself in a situation where you don’t know which distro a particular server is using. I used to cat /proc/version to get a rough idea. But a friend of mine from work just gave me this tip:

cat /etc/issue
Simple, easy and objective!

Hope this help you out!