Although it might sound odd, creating your own distro from scratch makes sense in certain situations: you want to create a small self-contained (eventually read-only) system that delivers only those components that you want it might be, for instance, a…
Distributed compilation with distcc (x86 vs R-Pi)
With the todays performance of our computer, the speed of compilation has been improved to the point that distributed building could be slower than local builds (it would take much more to throw your files and their dependency over your…
Transparently download from Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service provided by Google which enables user cloud storage, file sharing and collaborative editing. The storage limit for the free accounts is, at the time of writing, about 5GB. If you have…
Boost Linux kernel compilation for Raspberry Pi
I do a lot of experiments with my new RPi nowadays. It's like in the old days, in the early of '90s, when I've got my HC-91, the Romanian ZX-Spectrum clone. There is one small difference, though: the HC-91 has…
The true price of Raspberry Pi. The cheapest setup
After getting the long awaited Raspberry Pi board I started to google for the required equipments in order to boot-up the board: the Raspberry Pi board, it cost me ~40$ from the local distributor SD(HC) Card I use a 2G…
Disk usage in bash
I run several headless systems and sometimes I need to know the disk usage of a particular directory. We have several choices, from the ls command to the ncurses ncdu utility. For what I need 'ls' does not provide support…
*nix tip of the day: what Linux version am I using?
How to tell the Linux distro version you are using? Since Linux is not exactly the whole ecosystem of computer programs that you are using on your desktop/server but rather the kernel that allocates the physical hardware resources for the…
Screen is overlooked
Yes, screen is overlooked! I'm not talking about your cathode ray tube nor your computer monitor but the GNU Screen application that, if you are a computer geek or just an everyday system administrator, it's kind of busybox of virtual…
Bring back the root
Bring back the root is not the title of a movie, it is the name of an usual issue that we encounter while working on Linux (hopefully not so often). For those who don't share the passion for Linux the…
Gentoo on Raspberry Pi
Few weeks ago I received my long awaited Raspberry Pi board. For those that (yet) don't know what a Raspberry-Pi is, "The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It's a capable…