When "justified" is not justified

While using Microsoft Office, "justified" alignment is not properly implemented.

System-wide accessible gems

As I was configuring my system for my friend's rails project, I found that when I install gems are root, they are available only to the root user and system-wide. When I install something as root, I expect it to be accessible system-wide. So, I dug into the issue and found that it was happening so because /etc/gemrc was configured to install gems for root user only. Getting system-wide installation of gems was achieved by commenting out the following line in /etc/gemrc

gem: --user-install

Now, instead of getting installed in /root/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/gems/ gems were installed to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/ and were available to all users. Previously installed gems had to be uninstalled and re-installed so that they were available to all users.

Boot message: Unable to register miscdev on minor = 130

On my new Arch linux installation I was getting a line saying "Unable to register miscdev on minor=130 (err=-16)". In /var/log/errors.log, I was getting the following lines:

Mar 28 19:37:16 localhost kernel: [13926.292770] watchdog: error registering /dev/watchdog (err=-16).
Mar 28 19:37:16 localhost kernel: [13926.292771] mei: unable to register watchdog device.

A comment on Archlinux forum clarified that it was caused because the kernel supports only one watchdog. The solution is two blacklist MEI driver. That can be done using the following line.

echo blacklist mei > /etc/modprobe.d/mei.conf

You read more about IMEI here.

Reusing packages from one system in building a new one

While installing Arch linux on my new Dell Latitude, I wanted to reuse packages on my existing Arch installation on my old laptop. As soon as I was through with the initial install using the net install image, I put all packages from /var/cache/pacman/pkg to a folder called repo on a USB stick. From the command line I mounted the usb stick on my new installation to /mnt/usb.

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
 
Now, all I had to do was to tell pacman to look for packages in the repo folder in the USB stick. I achieved this by setting CacheDir variable in pacman.conf to /mnt/usb/repo.

#DBPath      = /var/lib/pacman/
CacheDir    = /mnt/usb/repo/
LogFile     = /var/log/pacman.log

Actually, you can also try creating a local repo. It is there in the pacman manual pages. However, this seemed easier and faster to me and worked on first go.

After this setting, when I tried installing Xorg it told me that there is no extra.db and community.db; but I had those repos enabled and therefore it failed. I realized only core.db existed in my system and I had not synced the repo databases even once. I could have achieved that by pacman -Syu; but for my internet connection to work I needed to install wvdial and usb_modeswitch as I use a 3G USB internet card. So, I just copied extra.db and community.db from my old system into the new one and things worked fine.