Linux

Introduction After (again) suffering under KMail’s recent sluggishness when dealing with my email spool and general Eclipse slowness when run with many plugins (such as the excellent Android ADT or the still-to-mature Scala plugin), I decided that the best update for my Lenovo Thinkpad X201s laptop would be a solid state disk (SSD).

USB sticks become increasingly common to carry around. When one keeps confidential data on such an USB medium, it should be protected against loss (and it should also be possible to use it for transferring files to and from an untrusted machine, just for convenience).

Introduction After some work on getting the Austrian Bürgerkarte to work under Linux, I have now decided to acquire some know-how about using more general smart cards under Linux. After some quick research, the Aladdin smart cards seem to be supported fairly well, so I ordered a bunch of different types.

Howto create a Debian chroot on an Android phone (HTC Desire and Motorola Milestone) This page will grow once I have everything running, but this is a starting point:http://www.android-hilfe.de/anleitungen-fuer-motorola-milestone/26870-ho… [HTC Desire, unbranded, European version]: Flashed (pre-rooted and with busybox included) firmware from http://android.

With Kubuntu Intrepid 8.10, I can delightedly say that installing Linux in form of a Debian variant - my kernel/operating system of choice for most tasks - on a new Dell Latitude XT went flawlessly and got most of its hardware to work out-of-the-box.

To get an encrypted home directory under Debian Linux, only a few steps are necessary. The performance hit for the encryption is, at least for current processors and normal (i.e. slow compared to all other PC components) harddisks, negligible.

Here is another small thing to make working with Linux more convenient: auto-mounting of hotplug-able devices. This is again specific to Debian GNU/Linux, but might be applicable to other distributions with only slight changes.

Imagine the following setting: there is some (possibly 802.11a/b/g wireless) network, which can range from a single access point to a complete backbone network of access points working together via WDS, or even a wired network infrastructure.

I, as many others, have been bitten by Cyrus’ strictness when it comes to RFC-compliant email headers. Although it cost me about a full day, I still appreciate that Cyrus interpretes the RFC strictly and thus forces email to be syntactically correct.

USB sticks are really useful. Not only for transferring files between computers, but also also rescue media, or more generally, to boot from. However, making a USB stick bootable can turn out to be tricky.