http://elijah.mirecki.com/categories/linux/ Recent content in Linux on Sylvia Mirecki Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 02 Jul 2018 10:22:46 -0400 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/atari-mod/ Mon, 02 Jul 2018 10:22:46 -0400 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/atari-mod/ Many moons ago, I bought a broken Atari 800XL from a used electronics store for about 10CAD. I wanted to bring it back to life in some form - even if I just slapped a Raspberry Pi inside and ran an Atari simulator. After letting it collect dust for about 6 years, I decided to finally finish this project. To get the full Atari experience, the keyboard needs to work, of course. http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/397/ Sat, 28 Jan 2017 22:57:26 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/397/ A couple months ago, I made the switch from Vim to Emacs. However, I’m using Evil mode, so I still have all the nice Vim keybindings. One of my biggest complaints about Emacs is ergonomics - “Emacs Pinky” is a legitimate concern: One solution is getting foot pedals or a fancy ergonomic keyboard like the Ergodox or Keyboardio, but I didn’t want to commit to the investment just yet. Thus, PinkyCtrls was born! http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/hello-world-using-only-c-syscalls/ Mon, 29 Aug 2016 22:06:21 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/hello-world-using-only-c-syscalls/ I’m currently working on implementing system calls in BlarbVM (see my previous post on it), so I am trying to get comfortable using only syscalls. In Linux, you can change the heap size through brk (syscall #12). To write a string to standard output, you must provide a pointer to a location on the heap. The following code: Get’s the end of the heap address Increments the end of the heap address by 6 bytes http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/gdb-basics-stack-traces/ Wed, 16 Mar 2016 20:51:24 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/gdb-basics-stack-traces/ C beginners are often very lost when their program crashes from a segmentation fault or similar issues. Most of them know about GDB but are pretty intimidated by it. Here is a super simple example about how to find a stack trace from a program crash. #include <stdio.h> void bar(int *var) { printf("%d\n", var[100000]); } void foo(int *var) { bar(var); } int main() { int *a; foo(a); return 0; } Of course, this will result in the console simply printing “Segmentation Fault” which doesn’t help very much, especially in more complex programs. http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/how-to-change-login-shell-without-chsh-permissions/ Fri, 05 Feb 2016 23:08:25 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/how-to-change-login-shell-without-chsh-permissions/ On the University of Toronto servers and Linux lab computers, the default shell is tcsh, and we don’t have chsh access shakes fist. If you are in a similar circumstance, plop this in ~/.cshrc: # Run zsh only if we are in an interactive shell if ( $?prompt && -f /bin/zsh ) then exec /bin/zsh # Run bash if we are in an interactive shell and if zsh isn't found else if ( $? http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/switching-from-arch-to-ubuntu/ Mon, 09 Nov 2015 16:11:34 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/switching-from-arch-to-ubuntu/ Last night was a sad night. After 5 years of using Arch Linux, I decided to leave it for Debian. While I learnt a lot while using Arch, it was often disruptive to my work when it required maintenance. I woke up last night to work on a Physics assignment, and sure enough, my kernel panicked. I don’t blame Arch per se. If I retained a legacy kernel, it would have been fine. http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/btrfs-research-paper/ Tue, 13 Oct 2015 19:33:46 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/btrfs-research-paper/ So I was digging through some of my old work while working on my résumé and ran into a research paper I wrote about BTRFS. Ever since writing this paper, BTRFS has a special place in my heart, so I wanted to share my research with the world :] By now it is likely out of date, so posting it here should be fine. BTRFS: Investigation of several aspects regarding fragmentation http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/rm-rf-roulette/ Thu, 25 Jun 2015 18:26:14 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/rm-rf-roulette/ So at work, I recently migrated over from my Linux box to an OS X box, and the old box will soon be formatted… so I decided to have a bit of fun with it! I present you with rm_rf_roulette.sh!! #!/bin/bash directories="boot/* bin/* etc/* lib/* opt/* root/* run/* srv/* sys/* usr/* var/*" files=($(ls --color=never -d $directories | egrep -v "(:$|^$)")) fileToDelete="${files[RANDOM % ${#files[@]}]}" echo "Deleting $fileToDelete" rm -rf $fileToDelete I plan to run this in a loop until it no longer has the capability of running :) http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/setting-up-a-btrfs-and-rsync-backup-server/ Sat, 23 Aug 2014 18:50:15 +0000 http://elijah.mirecki.com/blog/setting-up-a-btrfs-and-rsync-backup-server/ Who is this for? This is for people who came across the following issues with current backup solutions: You have multiple computers, but you want to sync all backups onto one of them. You want the benefits of rsnapshot - daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots. You want the efficient COW (copy-on-write) benefits of BTRFS. You want to back all of this up onto a single, designated backup disk. Syncing from remote nodes to the server.