Tom's Blog

In Linux you can easily make a backup of a whole disk, including MBR (partition table) and different types of filesystems with dd. While this is very useful, how can you access individual partitions later without "extracting" them from the image? "kpartx" is the command you need.

Problem: you've configured a conference call room with the MeetMe application in Asterisk, but when you call it, a voice says "That is not a valid conference number, please try again".

This is something that I found out by installing Funambol 7.1.1 on an Ubuntu 8.04.3 amd64 (virtual) machine:
Funambol uses it's own packaged sun java 5, but it's a 32-bit version. The service doesn't seem to start with /opt/Funambol/bin/funambol start, and strace seems to give the error "/opt/Funambol/tools/jre-1.5.0/jre/bin/java: No such file or directory". But the file is definitely there! The problem is that this java is compiled against 32-bit libraries. You can either force every script in Funambol to use a 64-bit java, or you can install 32 compatibility libraries with

If you have a notebook or pc with HDMI output and a big LCD TV with HDMI input, you might want to connect those. Unfortunately, this doesn't work out-of-the-box with the Dell Studio 15 notebook, neither with Vista nor with Ubuntu.
Now I got it working both in Vista and Ubuntu (8.10 - Intrepid Ibex).

Saturday January 26th (last update April 15th, new firmware: October 3th 2008)

I've finally bought a DVB-T receiver. I'm going to write down my first experiences here, hoping to
give some useful information for the people who bought this stick, or are considering buying it.

Trying to install Enemy Territory - Return to castle Wolfenstein on a 64-bit Ubuntu installation? I ran into 2 problems, and this is how I solved them:

This article describes how I installed a dedicated setupbox, based on Elisa, running on the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

This file contains the key parts of a Bind9+DHCP3 configuration with DDNS (Dynamic DNS), it adds hostnames of dhcp-clients to your Bind9 dynamicly. Comments in the file are in Dutch. I'll bother to translate if someone asks me kindly :)

My digital camera (a Canon Powershot A550) has the nice feature of saving the orientation of the picture in the EXIF information (it has a sensor to detect this at the time you take a picture). Some software, like Eye Of Gnome seems to automaticaly show the picture in the correct orientation.