ispell with ngerman and Umlaute öäü

Problem: My ispell with ngerman package recognizes words with an Umlaut like hinüber as two words hin and ber and doesn't even sense the Umlaut

Solution: Check the coding system of the checked file. Ngerman Ispell should work on Files with ISO-8859-15 encoding. (Emacs Command: C-x RET r or M-x revert-buffer-with-coding-system to change the current buffers encoding)

Thanks to: Gentoo Forums

CIFS/SMB mount problem on Debian

Situation:

//10.0.0.1/share /mnt/sharemount cifs rw,noexec,nosuid,password=,username=someusername,nodev

in my /etc/fstab for mounting a CIFS network share.

Problem When trying to mount (with mount command)
Command lines output:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //10.0.0.1/share,

missing codepage or helper program, or other error

(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might

need a /sbin/mount. helper program)

In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try

dmesg | tail or so

dmesg output:

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

Reason:Seems like its missing the mount.cifs script/binary or somethine else that comes with the smbfs package.

Solution:

aptitude install smbfs

This installs mount.cifs and probably more. It resolved it in my case.

appletviewer does nothing / exits immediately

Problem: When calling appletviewer file.html it exits immediately, does nothing, outputs nothing

Solution: Use verbose applet tag format:

< applet param=value > < /applet>

instead of

< applet param=value />

.

Furthermore this format doesn't even work with XHTML.

LaTeX tabular

Problem:

! Missing # inserted in alignment preamble.

during LaTeX document compilation.

Reason: Missing alignment fields in a tabular environment:

before: \begin{tabular}{|||}
after: \begin{tabular}{|c|c|}

Auto luksOpen and lvm mounting

It won't ask for the LUKS passphrase during startup and have some problems with mounting the LVM volumes afterwards correctly, though I had setup /etc/crypttab correctly.

Adding this:

/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/cryptroot:
target=LUKSVOLUME,source=/dev/sda2,lvm=MYVOLGROUP-ROOT

with the correct UPPERCASE values and copying those scripts:

cp /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/cryptroot
cp /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptroot /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/cryptroot

and regenerating the initramfs with update-initramfs did the thing finally!

So my LVM on top of luks is now working on the laptop too, yeeha.

Thanks to this guide.

bash: ELF: command not found

Problem:

 [methos@methos ../mjc/svn/trunk]$ . env 
bash: ELF


: command not found

So source'ing a correct file (even with the #!/bin/sh shebang entry on top) doesn't work. Note the space between the dot and the env filename - thats equivalent to calling the file as argument to the source command.

Solution: explicitly specifying the current file to be in the current directory:

 [methos@methos ../mjc/svn/trunk]$ . ./env 
 [methos@methos ../mjc/svn/trunk]$

Real solution: Thou should know, that env is a programs name and thus name lookup rules resolve the env to the env binary file. Therefrom comes the ELF - the unix executable format - string in the error, as bash tries to "execute" the binary, but in a line-wise bash manner.

Thus: Don't use command names as file names or make sure to use the ./ prefix to securely refer to the current directory.

Grub Error 17

Interestingly 0x17=23 hehe, but let's leave that aside. If you follow those guidelines, make sure to have at least backup copies of all changed files. Note that I use initramfs and a crypted partition with a containing lvm and therein root and swap.

Problem:
Even before the GRUB boot menu is displayed: Grub error 17
What I did was using the Windows built-in repartitioning tool to merge the second into the first partition, like here:

Previous Setup: 4 partitions:
1 - Vista
2 - Encrypted
3 - /boot
4 - encrypted lvm root and swap

Current Setup: (Changed with Vista) 3 partitions:
1 - Vista (merged purged Encrypted)
2 - /boot
3 - encrypted lvm root and swap

Okay, I booted from Debian Install/Rescue CD, mounted /boot and changed the device.map's root entry to match the now second instead of third partition. But that didn't do anything. (But should be done anyways)

My suspicion is that Windows Vista somehow messed up the MBR or the partition table. So I mounted all my partitions and chrooted into my system to have the grub command available. Then started grub and ran root (hd0,2) and setup (hd0) to reinstall grub into the MBR.

That gave me my boot menu back (and Windows Vista, but haven't tested it yet). Still I couldn't boot, due to other references to the previous partitions 3 and 4. So again in my chrooted system, I adapted the /etc/crypttab entry to refer to sda3 instead of sda4 and the fstab to refer to sda2 for /boot.

So the root system was setup to work, but the initrd files (I use initramfs) still contained the old settings. That was done with update-initramfs -k 2.6.23.1methos -u -t. I had to specify the kernel because I was still running from the rescue cd, so the version of the currently running kernel was not the one I wanted to create an initrd for (my normal current kernel). -u means update, change/replace the initrd. And -t means with force :) as it told me image altered, cannot update due to some reason.

So with the new initrd and reinstalled grub everything is working again. Wonderful!