This tutorial shows how to fix the backlight issue in Acer Aspire 5336 notebooks.

When booting your Live/Installation DVD add the following boot options to the grub menu :

acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux

Press enter to let the boot process continue.

When the screen turns black press the Fn key along with the brightness button.

Once installation is complete verify your grub configuration (/boot/grub2/grub.cfg) to see if the acpi options have been added. The grub entry should look like this :

If not, add them and update grub.

Now, to eliminate the need of pressing the fn combination we can add the following lines in the /etc/init.d/boot.local file.

while [ true ]; do sleep 1
sudo setpci -s 00:02:0 F4.B=0
done

Thus every time the system boots, the brightness setting will be triggered and backlight is switched on.

They do make my laptop look great (:

openSUSE ones I still have some. Will bring them in the next event.

They say it’s the “swiss army knife for TCP/IP”. They say it right!

I’ve seen netcat or we should simply say nc, in action a lot many times. When you can’t move files through the traditional SSH or FTP for “various” reasons, nc comes as a great savior.

It’s easy to create a socket server listening on one port.

$ nc -l 17000

The above command will start a server listening on port 17000. Let’s imagine the server’s ip address being 192.168.0.10. To connect to the server we have to do :

$ nc 192.168.0.10 17000

A server-client connection will be established and anything we type will be visible on both consoles. We can take things further and use netcat to transfer files. This time we start the server in receiving mode :

$ nc -l 17000 > openSUSE-12.3.iso

Yeah … I couldn’t take any other file as example (:
To send the iso file from the other end we do :

$ cat openSUSE-12.3.iso | nc 192.168.0.10 17000

You can combine several utilities together and the most done using netcat.

xargs is a nice utility that works in conjunction with pipes to construct argument lists and pass the same to other utilities.

Here’s how I’d search and remove all HTML files :

$ find . -name “*.html” -print | xargs rm -f