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Published: 17 July 2012

Almost everybody who is using SSH knows Putty well. If you have multiple servers to administrate putty lacks of the feature to easily administrate these. Of course it's possible, but not very easy to use.

On Windows I an using the "Putty Connection manager", a pretty nice tool thats doing the job. It has some minor bugs, is not supported anymore, but works well on any flavour of windows.

After (already mentioned several times) moving to Gnome, I needed some kind of substitute and stumbled upon a incredible good piece of software called "Gnome Connection Manager". After using it for several weeks, I can say it is so simple and powerful that I just can just recommend it to everybody working on Linux.

As you can see in this screenshots, you can easily define connection details, tunnels, startup commands, X11 forwarding.

Also more advanced features, like the sending of host-commands to multiple connections is supported.

Heavily recommended, get it!!!

P.S. Screenshots taken directly from kuthulu.com

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Published: 28 May 2012

Recently I needed to split a delimited string with PL/SQL. I just did not want to write the xx version of a "parse delimited string" package, and so I stumbled upon Alex Nuijtens Blog. This solution was not the least complex, but so beautiful I almost wanted to cry ;-). !Thanks for sharing your solution at this point Alex! It worked perfectly and so I implemented it in my programs. After a few more tests with larger string (~5000-10000) I noticed huge performance issues. So I did a fast check with using a "normal" loop and not the hierachic query Alex is using. Same result, terribly slow (~30s). After thinking a bit (...happens from time to time...) it was clear, normally if you parse a delimited string, you always cut the part off the front, that you parsed and put it somewhere else (collection....), what did not happen by using this solution. So I rewrote the pure SQL approach to a PL/SQL function. So The code looks now:

vParseString := pParseText;
FOR i IN 1..length (regexp_replace (vParseString,vRegExp))  + 1
LOOP
            vToken := REGEXP_SUBSTR (vParseString,vRegExp);
            vCutPos := REGEXP_INSTR(vParseString,vRegExp,1,2);
            vParseString := substr(vParseString,vCutPos);
            DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(vToken);
      EXIT WHEN vCutPos = 0;
END LOOP;

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Published: 31 March 2012

I use Icedove (Thunderbird) since years, and think it's really a good piece of software, in my opinion it's much better than Outlook, I was using for several years too. After splitting up my data into "OS" and "real data", I also moved the .icedove folder from my home directory by symlink to my data-harddisk. Mails worked fine, but lightning would display any evens, you also could not even create any new calendar, events. After I while I saw the following error in the error-console:

Error: Components.classes[This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it./calendar/datetime;1'] is undefined
Source File: chrome://calendar/content/calUtils.js
Line: 78 

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Published: 05 February 2012

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Published: 19 November 2011

I setup my Laptop with Gnome3 and was suprised that the printer was not automatically added, I know for sure that it was added automatically with earlier version... Guess that has nothing to do with gnome itself, sometimes there is some other kind of trouble. My Printer is a old multi-functional Canon (scan/print/fax) MP780 the scanning with simplescan (standard program from Gnome3) works pretty well. If you look for drivers in the Inet, there is just commercial software, like Turboprint. I tried it but had some issues after a while, and don't really want a kind os software suite just for printing... I looked further and noticed that there are free drivers called gutenprint, already available in Debian. Basically the steps you need to configure the printer were

 apt-get install cups cups-driver-gutenprint

• go to configuration page (local on port 631) http://localhost:631
• choose option from “Adding Printers and Classes”
  Done! Pretty good quality of the printouts!

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Published: 08 November 2011

I have two servers with KVM running, on both I use preseeding to install the guests. It's amazing to watch a guest install automatically by using virt-install and passing some parameters on command line. Basically you need to pass further preseeding parameters in a file. When converting this script to wheezy I ran into a problem. In squeeze, the parameter that defines the disk was named vda (why vda??? however) in wheezy its sda now (more like its in every debian install). Means I had to change the config parameter from

d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/vda

d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/sda

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Published: 06 November 2011

Still not finished with my Gnome-Desktop, what I can say that there are some great features that I really missed on Windows for years, however I want to use my Thunderbird and Windows parallel and decided to use dual-boot with the same thunderbird-profile-directory. Wheezy still has a 3.x icedove (=thunderbird) client, and my Windows installation already has a 7.0.1, so I needed a new client, and could not find any distribution out there. Means I was forced to build it by myself. There were two guides that helped my with that topic the one was from Mozilla, the other one for an Ubuntu-build. Here is my step-by-step guide:

get sourcecode

wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/7.0.1/source/thunderbird-7.0.1.source.tar.bz2

tar -vxfj thunderbird-7.0.1.source.tar.bz2

cd comm-releases

get build-backages

apt-get install build-essential libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev libxt-dev libiw-dev mesa-common-dev autoconf2.13 yasm

apt-get build-dep icedove

create .mozconfig file

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/thunderbird-7.0.1
ac_add_options --enable-application=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-calendar
ac_add_options --disable-crashreporter

workaround for bug with 3.0 kernel

cd mozilla/security/coreconf
cp Linux2.6.mk Linux3.0.mk

start the build

make -f client.mk

cd thunderbird-7.0.1

create the deb-package

make -j4

checkinstall -D --install=no --pkgname=´thunderbird-fairtec´ --pkgversion=´7.0.1´

dpkg -i thunderbird-fairtec_7.0.1-1_amd64.deb

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Published: 06 November 2011

Last week I setup dual boot on my Laptop for giving Gnome on Debian a try. Worked without any problems, except the sound, the driver was installed correctly, but still had no sound. After reading loads of docs I found the hint of using the Realtek Code-Software here. Here step-by-step what I needed to make it working:

get_build_packages

apt-get install linux-source linux-headers-3.0.0-1-all-amd64 build-essential

get file from realtek - choose your kernel

become root

su root

uncompress file (example!)

tar -vxjf LinuxPkg_5.17Beta.tar.bz2

change to new dir (example!)

cd realtek-linux-audiopack-5.17

do the installation and reboot

./install
reboot

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Published: 11 September 2011

Today I tried to restore a full backup of an old DB to a new database with

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Published: 10 September 2011

I am using sqlplus and rman on linux a lot, and one very annoying thing is that there is no history (key-up) as it is on windows. Reason is that in sqlplus/rman is running in a dosbox and the dosbox has the "key-up-history" feature implemented automatically.

But also in Linux it's easy to achieve. The tool you need is "rlwrap". Just install it (example for Debian)

and call sqlplus with "rlwrap sqlplus" or rman with "rlwrap rman".

Nothing more to make it run? No, nothing more!

Have fun!