Author Archives: Mikael Ståldal

Using AAC music files in Android

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Mikael Ståldal

If you have an file with .aac extension, it is AAC encoded audio in an ADTS container. If you want to play such file on an Android device, you have problems. Android 2.x does not support this file format at … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, Linux | 1 Comment

How to design a RESTful protocol

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Mikael Ståldal

What is REST? In most cases, it is sufficient say that REST is a way to design a network protocol based on HTTP. I perfer to call it a RESTful protocol, but it can also be called RESTful API or … Continue reading →

Posted in web | 1 Comment

How to add password protection to GRUB2

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Mikael Ståldal

These instructions are tested with Ubuntu desktop 12.04, but will probably be useful in other Linux distros with GRUB2 as well. The goal is to block everything except booting the default system. In paricular, it should not be possible for … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, security, Ubuntu | 1 Comment

Bachata Linux

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Mikael Ståldal

Based on what I have desscribed in the two previous posts, I have now made a Linux distribution with an install CD. It is called Bachata Linux, check it out here.

Posted in Linux | 7 Comments

How to roll your own bootable Linux CD-ROM

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Mikael Ståldal

When booting a regular Linux system, it just mounts some partition with a nice file system (such as ext4) on your HDD on / read/write and there you go. When booting from a CD-ROM, it’s not that simple. The CD-ROM … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux | 1 Comment

How to roll your own Debian based Linux distro

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Mikael Ståldal

Goal To build a minimal Debian based Linux system with a fully functional bash shell, TCP/IP networking with DHCP client and apt setup to be able to install any package from the Debian repositories. The resulting system will use about … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux | 17 Comments

How to move MySQL data directory in Ubuntu Server

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Mikael Ståldal

By default, the MySQL data is placed in /var/lib/mysql, which is a reasonable default. However, sometimes you want to place it somewhere else, such as on an other file system. Using a symlink doesn’t seem to work, so you have … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Using ZTE Blade Android phone with Ubuntu 11.10

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Mikael Ståldal

Using a ZTE Blade Android phone connected with USB is a bit tricky with Ubuntu 11.10. First you need to apply the patch in this bug, after doing that you should get USB storage to work. After doing that, it … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux | 6 Comments

How to disable activity logging in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ozelot

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Mikael Ståldal

Ubuntu has mechanism to log user activity such as used documents. This is used to facilitate searching, but can also be intrusive to your privacy. Here is a way to disable this logging without breaking Unity or any other part … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Ubuntu | 5 Comments

Backup your mobile phone in Linux

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Mikael Ståldal

To backup data from a non-smart SonyEricsson mobile phone (such as W890i) in Linux, use the gammu utility. Install gammu, it is available as a package in the standard repositories for Debian and Ubuntu, just install the gammu package. Create … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux | 2 Comments