Przemysław Pawełczyk
Realist and pragmatist. Strong-willed and strong-minded. Sometimes taciturn, sometimes loquacious. FLOSS enthusiast but still using Windows. Stuck in the endless process of becoming a Linux wizard.
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Tips - bunch of updates
Vacation ended, new semester started and wiki comes to life. My beloved Qt Creator slowly reaches 1.3 point. There is a rumor about releasing final version before the end of the year. Meanwhile I trialed the latest snapshot - Qt Creator Crew definitely doesn't sit around doing nothing. They even introduced color schemes, so I had to update my dark theme. Afterward I fixed description of making SOCKS proxy transparent, because previously used transocks_ev often stalls, but its replacement, redsocks, works flawlessly. Lastly, three days ago I added MinGW gcc related tip/workaround for problem of __declspec(dllexport), __stdcall and lacking leading underscore in Export Table.
Qt Creator in the dark
Do you remember Alone in the Dark? Great game, isn't it? But it's not a good time and place for such reminiscences.I created first version of Qt Creator dark theme few months ago, I put it on my wiki few weeks ago and today I updated it for version 1.1 RC (1.0.90). Qt Creator definitely keeps getting better with every release. Evidence? Ctrl+LMB works now and that is only one of many improvements available in current version. Go and test it, really.Happy Easter!
Using sfdisk on VDI fixed-size image
Almost half year ago I wrote a tip how to mount VDI fixed-size image with common *nix tools. Back then I thought about writing script for automation of described steps, but it didn't come off. No, it's not that hard, rather everyone can do it. Problem is with the partition table. First block of disk is enough to get information about primary partitions. It's often sufficient knowledge, but often doesn't mean always. Information regarding logical partitions can be found in extended one. So?Writing program/script for all this stuff would be like developing streamlined sfdisk. Possible, but not necessary. Second solution is patching sfdisk to support skipping VDI header. Easy one, but sfdisk is not a stand-alone application. It's part of util-linux-ng and intelligently removing all non-related stuff would require some time, which I don't have now. The third and the last one option is what I actually did - I made special shared library for use in conjunction with sfdisk to skip VDI header. I named it vdiwrap and the source code is accessible at my C snippets page. Of course Mounting partition from VDI fixed-size image was also updated.
Making SOCKS proxy transparent
During the last two months I probably set up more SSH tunnels than in my whole life before. At some point I was so disgusted about using FreeCap or tsocks, that I started looking for something better, i.e. unobtrusive. Making SOCKS proxy transparent is probably the best available solution. Read about it if you are interested.
Mounting partition from VDI fixed-size image
Recently I was searching for VDI (Virtual Disk Image used by VirtualBox) fixed-size image resizer (expander exactly). I haven't found such a tool (creating another image and copying content between them needs more disk space), so I wrote one. Unfortunatelly it's not even ready to be published as alpha version. But this post is not about it.Today I needed to mount partition from VDI image (without running virtual machine). With knowledge gained from above experience I was able to do it easily. Read more...
GRUB reinstallation and setting processor affinity
Sometimes there is a need to reinstall GRUB and if you do this really rarely, then you can forget the fastest and the most simple way or just google more complex solution.Multi-core CPUs are common nowadays, so it's good to know how to set processor affinity for processes.There are also other linux tips.
