GNU/Linux

How to open a magnet link with the Chrome browser on GNU/Linux

Prerequisites: xdg-utils

When clicking a magnet link, the Chrome (or Chromium) browser will launch an external application to handle the link (remember it’s a URI, hence the external protocol request message). Anyhow, if your system doesn’t have an application associated with magnet links, then the result will be no action at all.

Slackware Linux is moving to eudev

Some big news was revealed through the Slackware Current (pre-release) changelog today as the switch from udev to eudev was finally announced.

And this is a big deal because?

udev, which is a device manager for the Linux kernel was absorbed into systemd back in 2012 with a notion of fully supporting systems not running systemd.

As a response to the merging of udev into systemd, the Gentoo eudev project (an udev fork) officially launched a few months later. Their goal was to provide better compatibility with existing software, older kernels, various toolchains and anything else required by users.

WordPress on Raspberry Pi 2, six months down the road

So the last report from my Slackware based RPi2 hosting project ended on a cliffhanger (pun intended), as I was just recovering after suffering data corruption, the occasional kernel panic and random errors. Suspecting the instability might be caused by my overly optimistic approach to overclocking and overvolting, I decided to turn things down a few notches.

How to split a wallpaper for multiple monitors on GNU/Linux

So I wanted to split a 3840×1080 wallpaper in two halves for my dual monitor based KDE 4.10.5 setup. Obviously there are several applications that would do the job, but why bother when ImageMagick can do it with a one-liner. The “magick” is achieved by using a geometry argument:

BlueOnyx 5107R - make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80

Recently, I became aware that Apache’s access and error_log on a BlueOnyx 5107R server were both zero byte files. Restarting Apache to correct the issue resulted in the following error message:

(98) Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

Fixing the issue was a simple matter of issuing the following commands:

killall -9 httpd
service httpd start

It seems that during logrotate, Apache was not able to get new file handles to write to the new log files.

Arch Linux - Failed to start Verify integrity of password and group files

The shadow.service unit reported that it had failed and threw the following error message: “user ‘colord’: directory ‘/var/lib/colord’ does not exist”. I had no recollection of housing such a user, but by issuing the command below there was hard proof (image to the right) that colord was indeed a homeless user on my system, and her home was supposed to have been /var/lib/colord.

How to reverse a shortened URL with a single command on GNU/Linux

Remember that old saying: if you don’t know the source, don’t click it? With all these new URL shortening services, that advice seems to have been thrown out the window. As a result, evildoers are embracing the technology to disguise their malware sites behind shortened URLs.

This is obviously effective as an URL like hxxps://goo.gl/3BSi65 would have a much easier time getting past your spamfilter than say something like hxxp://h4x0r.tld/inject.aspx