Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

Some time ago, i wrote a
post in greek of how easy is to use hibernation on linux desktops.

For some time now, i didnt use hibernation and in between i upgrade my laptop a lot of times.
For some strange reason the previous tested (kernel) solution didnt work perfectly.

So i just implement the second hibernation solution: uswsusp

This method provides a userspace suspend program that uses a lot of
scripts to hook your running modules, programs and memory data to a swap partition.

Simple as that in theory, i did small changes on my laptop.

1. Installation

sudo pacman -S uswsusp

2. Kernel HOOKS

Change the resume kernel hook from /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
to uresume (userspace resume)

HOOKS=”base udev autodetect pata scsi sata uresume filesystems”

Save the above file and then run this command:

mkinitcpio -p kernel26

3. Configuration

Edit /etc/suspend.conf, so that the resume device is linking to your swap partition:

resume device = /dev/sda2

sda2 is my swap partition, just add your swap partition!

4. Hibernate

sudo pm-hibernation

PS: I read in a lot of HowTos that you have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst
to add resume path of swap partition, but believe me, thats not necessary!

On January i wrote a personal script to keep my package list and latest conf files on a backup-snapshot mechanism: abs4snap . Page on wiki: abs4snap for archlinux.

Today i wanted to delete some libraries from /usr/lib/ folder path!

And i did a little mistake :(

I wanted to write:

rm -f /usr/lib/libjsp*

but i wrote:

rm -f /usr/lib/lib*

Simple as that my distro (archlinux) becomes a jigsaw puzzles !
Just pieces here and there !

What the f@#$% i could do to save my distro ?

I am using archlinux, so my package manager is: pacman, but pacman uses libraries from /usr/lib folder path !

The solution was to reinstall my distro of course.

Or there is another way ?

A couple days before, i wrote a post how to build a static binary with: statifier. So i had my pacman package list and a pacman static binary file !

The solution was in front of me.

awk '{print "pacman-static -S --noconfirm " $1}' package-list | sh 

And with in a few minutes my distro and /usr/lib was in perfect mode again !!!

So remember:

BACKUP your data.

A nice (but not perfect) tool to create a static package is: statifier

Here is a simple but useful mini how to:

(as root)

# echo -n 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space

# ldd /usr/bin/pacman
    linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7fe1000)
    libalpm.so.5 => /usr/lib/libalpm.so.5 (0xb7fa8000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7e5d000)
    libfetch.so => /usr/lib/libfetch.so (0xb7e4f000)
    libarchive.so.2 => /usr/lib/libarchive.so.2 (0xb7e0f000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fe2000)
    libssl.so.1.0.0 => /usr/lib/libssl.so.1.0.0 (0xb7dbd000)
    libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 (0xb7c43000)
    libacl.so.1 => /lib/libacl.so.1 (0xb7c3c000)
    libattr.so.1 => /lib/libattr.so.1 (0xb7c37000)
    libexpat.so.1 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 (0xb7c11000)
    liblzma.so.0 => /usr/lib/liblzma.so.0 (0xb7bef000)
    libbz2.so.1.0 => /lib/libbz2.so.1.0 (0xb7bde000)
    libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7bc9000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7bc5000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7bab000)

# statifier /usr/bin/pacman /tmp/pacman.static-3.4.0

# ldd /tmp/pacman.static-3.4.0
    not a dynamic executable

# ls -l /usr/bin/pacman /tmp/pacman.static-3.4.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4530176 2010-07-30 20:47 /tmp/pacman.static-3.4.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   70708 2010-06-21 15:54 /usr/bin/pacman

A simple python script to deduplicate a mailbox (mbox format).

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Created by Evaggelos Balaskas on Thu Jul 29 21:22:41 EEST 2010
# Remove duplicate mails from mbox using message-id
 
import sys
import mailbox
 
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
        mid = []
 
        for message in mailbox.mbox( sys.argv[1] ) :
                s = message['message-id']
                if s not in mid:
                        mid.append(s)
                        print message
else:
        print "Usage should be: " + sys.argv[0] + " mbox > new.mbox"

You can take a look, also, on my other python script: How to remove specific mails from a mbox by subject