Some unrelated thoughts

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Tag : linux

Restore a SSH public key

I recently had the problem that I had on a system the private part of the SSH key but its public part got lost. Generating a new key pair wasn't possible as the public part was still installed on other systems for proper public key authentication and I could not change this.

So, I needed to restore the public part of the SSH key. After a bit of using my favourite search engine, I noticed that it is way easier than I expected:

ssh-keygen -y -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

This command will print the public part of the key in ...

Build GIT version of Xfce4

This is a little build script for Xfce4 to fetch and compile the sources from GIT (master). Short instructions:

You should start with an empty directory, where you put this script. Edit the script and modify the list of packages or modules, you want to install.

Then run the script with:

./xfce4-build.sh init

this fetches the sources from the Xfce GIT server and:

./xfce4-build.sh build

configures, builds and installs the sources. For more information read the script (it's really simple). The script can be downloaded at http://files.uvena.de/xfce4-build.sh.

About distribution bugtrackers, delays and rays of hope

We all know the fancy bugtrackers of the various distributions. I don't have a doubt the idea behind was good and for distribution specific bugs they are great.

But when it comes to concrete application specific bugs, it often happens that users report them to the distribution bugtrackers instead of to the specific software project. At this point, it depends how deep is the relation between the distribution packager of the relevant software package and the upstream authors.

Based on my personal experience, the conversation between down- and upstream is not always as good and intensive as it should ...

Show or hide the mouse cursor

hide_cursor.c is a small tool, to hide or show the mouse cursor on an X display. The source code is based on a tool from Nevrax (www.nevrax.com). To compile it, just type something like:

gcc -lXft hide_cursor.c -o hide_cursor

Run it with "hide" to hide the cursor:

./hide_cursor hide

Run it with "show" to show the cursor again:

./hide_cursor show

The source code can be downloaded at http://files.uvena.de/misc/hide_cursor.c.