Hell Labs

Old stuff not announced before: these are a couple of small and simple GTK+ tray applications to help hobbyists installing alternative operating systems in the Eeepc and similar netbooks to show capslock or numlock status (in case the hardware lacks the appropriate LEDs) or to logout or shutdown from GUI if you’re running finit with a light desktop environment. Get the code from the git repository with git clone http://helllabs.org/git/tray.git. (You may also be interested in Metalshark’s kbdstatus, which a Xlib-based version of the original Eeepc keyboardstatus application.)

You’ll need to supply a shutdown helper script and allow it to send signals to the init process if executed from the console (registering it with pam_console, for example). The applications are GPLed, so please consider contributing back your enhancements, fixes and changes.

The traditional method of dealing with filesystem images is to mount them as loopback devices, and that is a simple, elegant and universal way to change its contents in any way you feel fit. It has the disadvantage, however, of requiring superuser privileges — which you may not have in every host you frequent, or you wisely don’t wish to grant to anyone using your machine to develop filesystem images. Christian Hohnstädt’s e2fsimage solves the problem allowing one to copy an entire subtree into a image file, but what if you want to extract, examine or manipulate arbitrary content?

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Strange things you do amidst a depressive crisis when you brain doesn’t act quite the way it should act under normal circumstances.

• You write code quickly and obsessively. (In a few days I started to write two small utilities, one to manipulate partitions in a hard disk image and other that allows userspace access to filesystem images without loop-mouting them. These can be useful for some in-house projects, so this forced recovery gave me the much sought-after time to implement them.)
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