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Blog
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Firefox + TabMixPlus and the case of lost session
Firefox 20 came with a handy feature of having parallel “private” windows a-la Chrome. Hurray. Now while playing with it I ended up with 2 Firefox windows and while closing them I did something out of sequence and lost my “last session” saved by TabMixPlus. While there was no definitive information on how to restore it – I did find useful piece:
$ killall firefox # or do it gracefully $ cd $HOME/.firefox/blahblah/ $ cp session.rdf session.rdf.orig $ cat sessionbackups/tabmix_sessions-2013-04-08.rdf > session.rdf $ firefox
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Linux and MBR
Today while installing another RedHat box via KickStart ended up with KickStart flaw which installed MBR onto my USB installation disk. While the rest of the data remained intact I did want to get rid of the unwanted passenger on my USB disk. Solution turned out to be simple:
# dd if=/dev/sdX of=/tmp/mbr count=1 bs=512 # file /tmp/mbr /tmp/mbr: x86 boot sector; GRand Unified Bootloader, stage1 version 0x3, boot drive 0x81, 1st sector stage2 0x62c02, GRUB version 0.94; partition 1: ID=0x7, starthead 32, startsector 2048, 209715200 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x5, starthead 32, startsector 209717248, 767055920 sectors, extended partition table, code offset 0x48
From here on you can either save that copy (/tmp/mbr) in case things go wrong, and launch
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=446 count=1
This will zero the MBR and get rid of grub (or other unwanted stuff you dropped there).
Note that we zero only 446 bytes and not whole 512 to preserve the partition table.
That’s it, done.
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64bit Fedora + NVidia + Wine + 3D Games = WTF
I’ve been running Fedora for a while now with NVidia drivers packaged by rpmfusion folks. However only recently my Wine games quit working. Note: it’s a 64bit box and if I were running 32bit box probably wouldn’t have been a problem as it turns out, but all in it’s own time… First I though my ageing F16 was at fault so I have upgraded. While Nouveau drivers becoming better they are still not suitable for 3D gaming (at least under Wine).
What I have discovered is that:
- NVidia drivers are really picky about certain parameters
- For unknown to me reason they throw display DPI in the garbage so I’m left with elephant-sized fonts
- You have to practically tiptoe around NVidia configs, while it’s own configurator (nvidia-settings) will gladly screw it up for you.
Certain combinations leave you with no 3D acceleration and crashing apps, like Chromium browser, glxinfo etc. After some experimenting and tinkering I’ve finally got something “close to normal”:
Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "nvidia" EndSection Section "Monitor" # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Samsung SyncMaster" DisplaySize 510 290 HorizSync 26.0 - 81.0 VertRefresh 24.0 - 75.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" Option "UseEdidDpi" "False" Option "ConstantDPI" "True" Option "TwinViewOrientation" "DFP-1 LeftOf DFP-0" EndSectionHowever that wasn’t the end of it. Now glxinfo was happy but Windows apps won’t see acceleration. Snooping around found the culprit: missing package:
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686
that was enough to bring 3D in Wine back. Now we’re back to playing Hitman 2, courtecy of gog.com 🙂
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Jelly Bean, multiuser and lost security patterns
Finally got my N7 setup with multiuser goodness from JB. However my son in attack of curiosity locked himself out with security pattern. Well… I didn’t 😉 Thanks to always helpful XDA: [GUIDE][HOW-TO]Crack android pattern lock! solution was really quite simple:
# find / -name gesture.key # mv /data/system/users/11/gesture.key /data/system/users/11/gesture.key.bak