Michael Pfeuti

With Linux the naming of the NIC’s isn’t fixed. So it might be that it changes after every reboot.

With udev rules  one can fix the naming based on the MAC address of the NICs.

With ArchLinux simple add a file exp 10-network.rules containing text as follows

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ATTR{address}=="00:30:4f:1c:ec:5f", NAME="eth0"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ATTR{address}=="00:30:48:9c:63:26", NAME="eth1"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ATTR{address}=="00:30:4e:9c:21:17", NAME="eth2"

to the /etc/udev/rules.d directory.

IMPORTANT: Make sure the letters in the MAC address are lower case.

I always keep forgetting these things. So here are some facts about the shared libraries.

• use the ldd command to see the dependencies of an executable.
• LD_LIBRARY_PATH hold the paths to the directories of the shared libraries. For testing you might change this for an application execution like this: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<path to shared library>:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH <executable>

Most information about library handling is covered here.

The University of Bern provides calendars, folders, address books and mail with the Microsoft Exchange solution. Since I’m an Arch-Linuxer I couldn’t use Microsoft Outlook. The webinterface to the exchange server is also tiresome because without IE you only have a “light” version.

After some time googleing for a solution for liunx I came along novell’s evolution mail. It should provide exchange capabilities but somehow I couldn’t get it to work.

The nice little tool that solved all my problems was DavMail. It is a wrapper that allows you to access all your exchange data via standard protocols.

For instance, you can access you calendar via the standard caldav protocol and thus you Mozilla Sunbird or Mozilla Lightning.

TWM is a rather simplistic window manager that is suitable for managing the windows of a media center. However one annoying thing is that you have to give it the initial placement of new windows. To avoid this use the following option:

echo RandomPlacement >> ~/.twmrc

and to get rid of the window titles use

echo NoTitle >> ~/.twmrc

The last few days I was setting up my new desktop PC. Since I like playing some games once in a while, I decided I install Windows 7 next to my Arch Linux. Installing Linux went, as expected, without a hassle. Even my drawing tablet worked out of the box. Since I equipped my PC with an SSD for the root, I used regular hdd to store /tmp /var and /home. So I used more the 4 hard drives. All in all I have 6 drives, four drives are connected via a ATA-133 PCI card, one via SATA and last one via the motherboard’s ATA-133.

As I said, I had no troubles at all configuring Linux for using multiple hard drives. Now, Windows 7 on the other hand, is not even capable of detecting all my hard drives in the setup phase. Of my 6 hard drives only two were detected, all drives connected over the PCI card didn’t show. Unfortunately, Windows wasn’t even able to install the system onto all drives it detected. As it turns out Windows 7 can only access the harddrive that is chosen to be the first in boot order.

So much for Windows being simpler to install…

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