David Luhman's blog

Remapping Mouse Buttons on Linux Mint

This worked for me on Linux Mint 19.

First, install “xbindkeys” and “xautomation” with :

$ sudo install xbindkeys
$ sudo install xautomation

Then see which mouse button to remap by running "xev | grep button" and press the button you want to remap in the xev window. For me, it was button '8'.

The above comes from https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/map-mouse-on-linux/, but that article references /etc/X11/xorg.conf which I had trouble making.

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Acer Aspire L5100 won't boot - black display only

My desktop Acer Aspire L5100 (purchased Jan. 2009) was having sporadic boot problems, and then finally wouldn't boot at all. Upon power-on, there was no display from the BIOS or any other feedback on the screen.

I had seen some problems like this after the machine went into hibernation, but I don't believe that was the case here.

Upon doing a bit of Internet research, I opened the case and checked the motherboard's battery. After pulling one screw holding the DVD/HD unit, I uncovered the battery. The CR2032 battery only had about 1.5 volts instead of its 3.0 volt rating.

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Network interfaces for Ubuntu VirtualBox guest on Windows host

To work effectively and relatively securely on a VirtualBox guest system, the guest needs two network adapters - a NAT and a host-only adapter. The NAT interface allows talking out to the internet, and the host-only adapter allows ssh and http in from the host.

However, it seems that Ubunt/Debian only recognizes one network interface on system installation.

So to get two interfaces on the guest, I found the following to work :

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Getting an entry-level job in computer programming

A young man who's studying computer science in college asked me for information regarding how to get an internship in the software industry. Here's what I told him :

There is great demand for programmers with a bit of experience. You just need to get a bit of the right (or desired) experience.

I think there are several ways to do this :

Upgrading Drupal 7 PHPTemplate-based themes to Drupal 8

I'm looking to start trying out Drupal 8. But I need some themes for display.

Here's a couple good articles on how to handle this :

http://www.undpaul.de/en/blog/2013/06/02/upgrading-busy-theme-drupal-8

http://www.undpaul.de/blog/2013/07/04/theming-drupal-8-conversion-themes...

For my current D7-based themes, looks like I have a couple options :

- Modify "slightly" the PHPTemplate-based themes and use them mostly as-is.

- Run the PHPTemplate-based theme thru "Twigify" at https://drupal.org/sandbox/forest/1974984

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Follow-up on Ubuntu apt sources.list in Amazon Web Services

This is a follow-up to a previous post where I was having trouble running apt-get as part of the initial boot process for a new AWS instance.

I actually never could automatically load packages using the recommended workaround of using apt_mirror :


#cloud-config
apt_mirror: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

When I'd check the cloud-init log at /var/log/ apt-get would just sort of silently fail.

Getting Ubuntu cloud-init to work in an Amazon (AWS) VPC

Ubuntu's cloud-init is a mechanism which can be used to provision a new instance upon initial boot. I imagine cloud-init can be used in many environments, but I'll focus on its use in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

You can invoke cloud-init in at least a couple ways :

- shell, with a lead line of #!/bin/sh
- cloud-init, with a lead line of #cloud-config

Amazon Web Services SDK for PHP 2 Documentation

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the new SDK for PHP 2 for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is kind of lacking in documentation. Since the PHP SDK 2 for AWS is pretty new (November, 2012), hopefully this lack of documentation will be addressed. However, here are some notes which will help me and hopefully others.

At least for now, I'll focus on EC2 examples and code as that's what I need at the moment.

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