Rubénerd!

For those of you with existing student cards wishing to embark on a grand quest to update your transport concession sticker:

1. Enrol into at least one semester of subjects.
2. Go to this form site and enter your student details.
3. Log into My Student Admin and click the ID Card tab.
4. Click "Email my enrolment details for ID card".
5. Wait five minutes or so, then check your student email.
6. Print the PDF attachment, tick the boxes and sign your name.
7. Hand the form into Student Services on campus and get your sticker.

Clear as mud!

The easiest method (from experimentation this evening!) is to use the e2label command. For example, to set the label of the first partition on the /dev/sdc drive:

# e2label /dev/sdc1 yournewlabel

At this rate, I'm thinking I should just start another site for just Linux tips. Nah ;D

Getting this error in Red Hat's Palimpsest (Disk Utility)? Use gdisk to define partitions first, then you'll have no problems :).

The problem

Starting with their larger capacity, multi-terabyte/tebibyte drives, Seagate and Western Digital have moved from a 512 byte sector size to 4 kb. The benefits and tradeoffs of this new low level format is beyond the scope of this post; suffice to say it wrecks havoc with certain drive formatting tools!

If you attempt to format one of these newer drives in Palimpsest, you may receive an error similar to this:

The partition is misaligned by 3072 bytes. This may result in very poor performance. Repartitioning is suggested.

Technically the drive is completely usable in this state, but you'll pay a hefty performance penalty.

The solution

At the time of writing this post, both GParted and Palimpsest have trouble with these drives, but gdisk can handle them. Gdisk is a command line based disk editor that works on GUID GPT drives.

I shouldn't need to tell you to back up your data and quadruple check you're performing operations on the right drive. Please be careful!

1. Install from your package manager (no, really?)

2. Launch gdisk as root with the device path of your new drive; you can find that out from Palimpsest's "Device" label. It'll look something like this:

   # gdisk /dev/sd[x]

3. Type n for new partition, and accept the defaults, assuming you want a partition that takes the entire drive.

4. Type "w" to write the changes.

Now you can format the drive with any tool you wish!

In response to my previous Java post, I got a DM on Twitter from another university student asking if I'd come across the above error before. Often I do, when I'm programming in a dazed stupor at 3am, and I've done this:

% javac Something.java
% java Something.class

Instead of this:

% javac Something.java
% java Something

The error can be caused by any number of factors, but 99% of the time it's because of this. Much hair ripping has resulted from it!

(It turns out this was the problem. Glad I could help ^^)

I've had a surprising number of emails and tweets from people asking about my move to SeaMonkey, so I've decided to write a few posts about how I tweaked it to work for me. This is the first, on messing around with the interface :).

Simplifying the interface

Despite its modern core based on Firefox, SeaMonkey's user interface is still derived largely from Netscape Communicator. It can be easily tweaked to resemble contemporary browsers such as Firefox and Chrome though if you prefer.

1. Right click the Navigation toolbar and choose Customise...
2. Click Use Small Icons
3. Choose Icons from the Show listbox.
4. Drag the Search button off the toolbar
5. Drag on the Search box
6. Boom!

If you're a Chrome user, you can skip step 5 and use SeaMonkey's shortcuts for search! You can either type "g [terms]" into the navigation box for a Google search, or enter any terms and choose the "Search Google for [terms]" that appears.

Modern theme

Aside from having retro appeal that you'd be a fool to not take advantage of, I think SeaMonkey Modern it still has real class, particularly in the mail application.

1. Go to the View menu
2. Choose SeaMonkey Modern under Apply Theme
3. Restart, boom!

Using userChrome.css

Many of the userChrome.css tricks I blogged about for Firefox back in 2010 work with SeaMonkey too. If you haven't made a userChrome.css file yet and really want to customise SeaMonkey to an extreme:

1. Open your SeaMonkey profile folder
2. Create a folder called chrome (ironically enough!)
3. Create a file within chrome called userChrome.css

Below is my file. I err on the side of minimalism, so you may want to adjust to your own tastes!

/* RENDER PRIMARY FONT MORE COMPACT */
* {
    font-size: 10px !important;
}

/* MONOSPACE FONT FOR LOCATION BOX */
#urlbar {
    font-family: monospace !important;
}

/* MERGE STOP AND RELOAD BUTTONS
   STOP MUST BE PLACED BEFORE RELOAD TO WORK */
#stop-button[disabled="true"],
#stop-button:not([disabled]) + #reload-button {
    display:none !important;
}

/* HIDE SUPERFLUOUS ELEMENTS */
.autocomplete-history-dropmarker,
.search-go-button,
#star-button,
.tabs-closebutton,
.tabs-newbutton,
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-dropmarker,
tooltip {
    display:none !important;
}

All done!

Part two I'll be tacking importing and extensions, stay tuned! ^_^