Peter's blog

For exchanging my Brazilian driving license for the Swiss one I needed to do a street test. The entire process is straightforward and efficient(The driving license arrived 48 hours after I passed the exam). There are many pointers of how the process works, so I'm not covering that in details. I think the only relevant detail is the canton: Zug. I have 15 years and 500.000+ km of driving experience, and I consider myself a very, very good driver. My "auto"-esteem is not related to agressive driving skills, but my focus on safety, understanding of the car, environmental awareness, and traffic flow. Just as an silly example, when I get a new car, I adjust the mirrors and do some experimenting to "see" in practice where the blind spots are on that car before I feel comfortable with the mirrors. I'm also on a lazy path to become an airline pilot, so I'm the guy really interested in the rules and what motivated them. I got my Swiss driving license on the f...

I was a bluehost.com customer from November 2008 to November 2015. When I joined, they offered great service for the price, but the price is not interesting for at least two years now. Besides some minor technical issues, the company lost a lot when it was sold, maybe more than once. In 2008 there was a good feeling that they cared about me, and that they were always innovating. This has gone for a long time. I've been avoiding to move to another provider because I was expecting a lot of pain. I don't have anything complex: 7 domains, and about 400 MB of static content. How to choose my next registrar and hosting provider? Gandi SAS is a sponsor of the Kernel Recipes , a Linux kernel conference that happens every year in Paris. But, besides sponsoring the event, they go to the conference, which offers me the chance to meet people who works for Gandi, and I met them many times there. About prices, bluehost.com was asking me € 157.54 ($ 172.66) to renew my hosting plan for...

I have Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for playing Steam. Steam stopped working after upgrading to the 3.16 Kernel with newer X. I've upgraded Ubuntu following:  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack To make Steam work again, I just: $ sudo apt-get install --install-recommends libgl1-mesa-glx-lts-utopic:i386 libegl1-mesa-drivers-lts-utopic:i386 And then rebooted.

Fedora live images do not include the "Boot to RAM" option any more. This is not a big problem as the scripts needed to boot to RAM are still there. You just need to add rd.live.ram  as boot option. To do that, highlight "Start Fedora Live" using the keyboard keys and press TAB to edit boot command line. Add rd.live.ram and press Enter. Press TAB to edit boot command line Add: rd.live.ram  Press ENTER

I made a fork of a clone detection tool named CCFinderX . Two days ago I got a message from an user telling that the compilation was not working on Arch Linux. As some Kernel developers, such as Greg KH, has mentioned Arch Linux as being nice , I decided to try it. I prefer chroots over virtual machines due higher performance, and due the fact that I do not need insulation between my chroots. As for Debian, Fedora provides all tools needed to create chroots for Arch Linux. This is "very" nice, as one can setup the Arch Linux chroot in just a few minutes. The steps will cover installing Arch Linux tools on Fedora, creating the Arch Linux chroot, and configuring it with a new user and ssh server. Some data: Target directory for the chroot: /opt/arch Package groups to be installed: base base-devel (More groups available here ) User: peter ssh server port of the chroot: 2227 Note that the text refers to "[fedora] $" and "[arch] $", but this strings...

Toshiba R830-10P  is a nice notebook as it lightweight, and very powerful, but the Graphics are poor. The integrated LCD has miserable resolution of 1366 x 768, and as it uses Intel HD Graphics 3000 it do not officially support high resolution displays such as 2560 x 1440. See the problems I've faced to use high-res monitor here . I made a script to help people with similar problem. If you have a monitor that is not officially supported by your video card, you can try this approach. You need to tune the Hz parameter to find one value that is supported by the hardware, that is comfortable and stable. For comfort the higher the Hz the best. Please note that there is no warranty that this script works for you, and there is no warranty that this script is safe for your hardware. I'm quite sure that playing with Modelines can burn some old CRT monitors. I've never heard that you can burn LCD / LED monitors, but I'm not sure. The script is available at: https://git...

When I arrived at the office today there was a new monitor on my desk. Acer PB278Q 27” 16:9 2560 x 1440 WQHD LED-backlit Monitor . It is very nice monitor. My notebook uses the second generation Core i7 processor i7-2620M. The embedded Intel HD Graphics 3000 officially has as maximum resolution 1900x1200 for 60 Hz refresh rate. If using lower refresh rate, it is possible to use higher resolution. One good source of information is the page: http://www.notebookcheck.net/2560x1440-or-2560x1600-via-HDMI.92840.0.html I was not able to use more than 40 Hz as refresh rate when they say 55 Hz worked with Intel HD Graphics 3000. I can set modes up to 44 Hz but then the image is not stable and goes black for one second some times. What I did: $ gtf 2560 1440 40   # 2560x1440 @ 40.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 58.92 kHz; pclk: 200.80 MHz   Modeline "2560x1440_40.00"  200.80  2560 2712 2984 3408  1440 1441 1444 1473  -HSync +Vsync Then: $ xrandr --newm...