Engineering and technology notes

Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often known by his initials, rms,[1] is an American software freedom activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.

Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to create a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software.[2]With this, he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project’s lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including, among others, the GNU Compiler Collection,[3] the GNU Debugger[4] and the GNU Emacs text editor.[5] In October 1985[6] he founded the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.[7]

In 1989 he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users’ freedoms. This has included software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats and binary executables without source code.

As of 2016, he has received fifteen honorary doctorates and professorships (see Honors and awards).

Source: Richard Stallman – Wikipedia

WD HD TV Live Hard disk Sharing through network – Community Archives / WD TV Live Networking – WD Community

I’m thinking of buying a WD HD TV Live player and I want to check a feature if available I will go for the purchase. I have a 1 TB Hard disk and I want to access my hard drive through my home network while connected to the WD player through USB. In other words I will connect the WD player to my Router through Ethernet, Can I access my hard drive while it’s connected to the WD player?

Source: WD HD TV Live Hard disk Sharing through network – Community Archives / WD TV Live Networking – WD Community

How could I shutdown a remote host, in my network thru ssh, with a local host? – Ask Ubuntu

The question is simple.
What would be the script I would have to use to shut down a computer in my network thru ssh.

Normaly i would go to command line and:

ssh desktop

delik@desktop's password: 

delik@desktop:~$ sudo shutdown -P 0

To power on I created a file and wrote:

wakeonlan xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

And gave it the executable bit

That way to power on it requires only a double click. Would i be capable of doing the same to shutdown?

Source: How could I shutdown a remote host, in my network thru ssh, with a local host? – Ask Ubuntu

DriveImaging – Community Help Wiki

This article is dedicated to documenting methods of performing drive imaging (also called bare metal backups, or disk cloning). Drive imaging is a complete copy of all information on a drive, necessary to restore all of the data or entire operating system on a drive to the same state it was when the image was created. This is different from imaging a partition, where one is making a copy of an individual partition that resides on a drive, or backing up individual files and folders.

Warning /!\ Please ensure you are comfortable with the information discussed before proceeding. Improperly executing a command may result in partial or complete data loss. Please double- or even triple-check your target device to avoid such catastrophic loss.

Source: DriveImaging – Community Help Wiki

Mount an external drive at boot time only if it is plugged in – Ask Ubuntu

I’ve got an entry for an external harddrive in my fstab:

UUID="680C0FE30C0FAAE0" /jgdata ntfs noatime,rw

But sometimes this drive isn’t plugged in at boot time. This leaves me half way through a boot, with a prompt to “Continue Waiting, press S or press M” but no keypress has any affect at this stage (including CtrlAltDelete, not even caps-lock).

Short of writing a script to check the output of fdisk -l, how can I mount this drive at boot time only if it is present? It would be handy to have an fdisk entry for this drive, so I can just type mount /jgdata instead of needing a device name.

Source: Mount an external drive at boot time only if it is plugged in – Ask Ubuntu

[ubuntu] [SOLVED] External usb drive is sometimes sdb, sdc, sdd

I want to upgrade to Ibex. I should copy /home to an external usb 2.0. Everytime I boot with this usb device attached sudo fdisk -l shows the device with a different /dev name, for example, at the moment, (this session) it’s mark@Lexington-19:~$ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000080 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id

Source: [ubuntu] [SOLVED] External usb drive is sometimes sdb, sdc, sdd

InstallingDebianOn – Debian Wiki

DebianOn is an effort to document how to install, configure and use Debian on some specific hardware. Therefore potential buyers would know if that hardware is supported and owner would know how get the best out of that hardware.

The purpose is not to duplicate the Debian Official Documentation, but to document how to install Debian on some specific hardware.

If you want to contribute, you should read HowTo Contribute and see also Rating

Source: InstallingDebianOn – Debian Wiki