I have lots of computers in my house, all of which receive regular software updates. I get tired of waiting for all of these to download the same data, sometimes at the same time! I decided to use nginx to cache this data on my router to save time.
A little while ago I upgraded Samba from 3.14 to 4.1. I’m using Arch Linux on the client and server. This upgrade broke the ability for the client to access files containing colons, that is I could not read files with names like 2016-01-01 10:42.txt.
Once upon a time there was a tool called deborphan. It finds orphaned packages which could be removed from the system. You can maintain a list of ‘keepers’ to stop it suggesting removal of things that you want.
I wanted to extend this to work with the builtin “auto-installed” flag that aptitude stores for all packages. I also wanted it to work with Arch Linux.
A small Python script to connect to the internet over Bluetooth DUN (dialup networking) using my Nokia Symbian phone and my Linux laptop.
This was written on Arch Linux but should work elsewhere too. It uses bluez5 to enable bluetooth, rfcomm to create the serial port and wvdial to create the PPP connection and manage routes/DNS. Many newer phones use Bluetooth PAN instead of DUN so this method won’t be applicable.
Once upon a time this all worked automagically with NetworkManager. Since bluez5 it fails with this error:
Method "Connect" with signature "s" on interface "org.bluez.Serial" doesn't exist
Apparently we’re supposed to use the new Serial.ConnectFD DBUS API instead.
My latest project was to have wireless audio streaming from my Symbian mobile phone over Bluetooth to a a new set of speakers. I used PulseAudio, Bluez5 and Arch Linux running on a Raspberry Pi. It all works really well. I can connect/disconnect from the phone and everything is automatically started on boot. I’m enjoying it now as I type this.