Source management tool

Recently I got Linux From Scratch book in my hands and I've built my own distribution. It was a great experience and I've learned a lot about core Linux system. Either way one simple question came to my mind: how can I manage all those packages from source archives?

This topic is mentioned in the book where a few methods are briefly described. Based on this knowledge, I've created a simple package manager.

Creating a self-signed certificate with own CA

This post is a short howto for creating own certification authority (CA) and generating and signing certificate with this CA.

Clonezilla UEFI boot

Clonezilla is awesome tool to backup your data. It has also released images able to boot from UEFI loader. This post shows how to create bootable USB from iso.

Howto: join mp4 files

To join two or more mp4 video files you can use ffmpeg utility, just follow this simple steps:

1. convert mp4 to ts (transport stream) format

ffmpeg -i file.mp4 -c copy -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -f mpegts file1.ts

2. join several ts files into one mp4

ffmpeg -i "concat:file1.ts|file2.ts" -c copy -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc file12.mp4

•  conversion from other formats to mp4

ffmpeg -i fileOLD.webm -strict -2 fileNEW.mp4

Dynamic shell prompt

Dynamic shell prompt can change it's form according to some events going on on terminal. It can change e.g. color, if the previous command execution was unsuccessful, or it can display various information.
In this post, there is an example of such a prompt. It displays information, when you enter specified working directory.

The picture below shows my configuration:

This is achieved with setting a variable PROMPT_COMMAND which is evaluated every time you run a command. In my case, there is a condition, which looks for matching path.

# dynamic PS prompt
export PROMPT_COMMAND='PS1="$(if [ "$(pwd | grep /mnt/storage/backup_git)" ]; then echo "\\[\\033[32m\\]backup_git "; fi;)\[\033[01;31m\]\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] "'

HA-HeartBeat on Raspberry PI

High Availability HeartBeat is a clustering daemon. It allows to setup virtual IP addresses on network interfaces in order to provide redundancy in service availability. (It can also be used to automatically start/stop services)
In this post, we take a look at the basic HA usage, with two nodes.

mpd console player and ncmpcpp

For long time I've searched for a good music player. I've settled with mpd (music player daemon) and as a graphical frontend I use ncmpcpp. This post shows how to install and configure mpd and ncmpcpp.