Archive for April, 2008

I was at Kelantan a while ago, and have uploaded photos of my visit to my online photo gallery. Find them here.

Line numbering is a very useful feature in a text editor, especially for programmers. Being a full feature text editor, Vim also have it supported, but not enabled by default.

To enable it, simply add this line to /etc/vim/vimrc or ~/.vimrc

set number

or just type

:set number

while you’re already in Vim.

Enabling syntax color highlighting will add colors to the editor when editing in vim, but that’s not all as there are actually many color schemes to choose from.

The scheme can be changed by issuing :colorscheme <color> while in vim’s command mode. <color> can be rotated and autocompleted by pressing the tab key.

To permanently enable blue colorscheme for example, add the following line to /etc/vim/vimrc or ~/.vimrc

colorscheme blue

The tool to be used for creating the ISO image is dd, a low level raw data copying and conversion tool for Unix based systems. Obviously as in the command below, two options are needed for this purpose; if for the input file, and of for the output file.

sudo dd if=/dev/cdrom of=mycdrom.iso

To verify and probably to use the image at later times, simply mount the image with loop option.

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 mycdrom.iso /mnt

Though dd can also be used to burn ISO images (guess how easy could it be), the proper way to do it is to use cdrecord. The command below will verbosely show the burning process to the cdrom device with burnfree option enabled;

sudo cdrecord -v  dev=/dev/cdrom driveropts=burnfree -data mycdrom.iso

The steps above are actually helpful to backup OS / driver CDs and DVDs as there’s no need to worry of scratched discs, and to have everything organized in one place. Hard drive space shouldn’t be an issue nowadays, but if it is, try to apply some compressions to ease the problem.

I currently have the following books that I would like to just give away;

Anyone interested can contact me.