Pixelhum

Anybody that uses Terminal.app on Mac OS to regularly connect to Linux servers — particularly those that use screen — will be aware of the issues with backspace. The following terminal one liner seems to resolve the issues:

$ defaults write com.apple.Terminal TermCapString xterm

I’ve just moved this website over to a Linode VPS. The experience so far has been brilliant. The Linode control panel is excellent and provides all the facilities you could possibly need. I’d decided to move from shared hosting as I felt I was beginning to outgrow it. I needed more flexibility and what better way to get that flexibility than with a virtual machine!

Add the following to the end of your ~/.bashrc file and you’ll always be in a screen session when you SSH into your box.

#======================================================================
# Auto-screen invocation. see: http://taint.org/wk/RemoteLoginAutoScreen
# if we're coming from a remote SSH connection, in an interactive session
# then automatically put us into a screen(1) session.   Only try once
# -- if $STARTED_SCREEN is set, don't try it again, to avoid looping
# if screen fails for some reason.
if [ "$PS1" != "" -a "${STARTED_SCREEN:-x}" = x -a "${SSH_TTY:-x}" != x ]
then
    STARTED_SCREEN=1 ; export STARTED_SCREEN
    [ -d $HOME/lib/screen-logs ] || mkdir -p $HOME/lib/screen-logs
    sleep 1
    screen -x && clear && exit 0
    if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
        screen && clear && exit 0
    fi
    # normally, execution of this rc script ends here...
    echo "Screen failed! continuing with normal bash startup"
fi
# [end of auto-screen snippet]
# ======================================================================

Replace screen with byobu if you use that.

Remember to use ^a-d to disconnect from your SSH session.

There’s quite a few posts of this type around the web, I just thought I’d document what seems to work best for me. The main thing this fixes is font rendering in Firefox, now it looks just as nice as it does in Epiphany!

Put the following in ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
            <const>none</const>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
            <const>hintmedium</const>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
        <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font">
        <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
            <bool>true</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

I have decided to start writing a small series of posts based on things I have learnt over the past few years. I run a small group of Linux servers — mostly web application servers running PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL — with a variety of different distributions; some of them are running Gentoo Linux, a couple of others are running Debian or Ubuntu, and I’ve installed Fedora Core 6 on my home server, but the majority of what I’ve learnt (and will talk about here) is universal and will apply equally to all Linux distro’s.

In this article I’m going to cover disk space.