Tanguy Ortolo

For sharing multiple files, it is often convenient to pack them into an archive, and the most widely supported format to do so is probably ZIP. Under *nix, you can archive a directory with Info-ZIP:

% zip -r something.zip something/

(When you have several files, it is recommended to archive them in a directory, to avoid cluttering the directory where people will extract them.)

Read more Bad support of ZIP archives with extra fields

A strange problem

Yesterday, I was reported a funny problem with the dokuwiki Debian package's postinst script, which contains a piece of shell script similar to that:

# Check the destination does not already exist
if [ ! -e /the/destination ]
then
    ln -s /some/file /the/destination
fi

It was failing with that message: ln: failed to create symbolic link '/the/destination': File exists. Even though I had just tested it did not exist!

Read more Beware of symlinks when testing a file existence

The blog engine PluXml is now available as a Debian package:

Package: pluxml
Version: 5.2-2
Description-en: Light blog engine using XML files
 PluXml is a light and simple blog and CMS engine that uses simple XML
 files to store its data and requires no database. It has all the usual
 features (static pages, comments, categories, tags, medias, RSS
 feed...) and supports multiple users, customizable themes and plugins.
Homepage: http://www.pluxml.org/
Section: web
Priority: extra

Read more PluXml, a file-based, database-free blog

FAT

USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.

exFAT

Good news: someone addressed that problem. Bad new: that someone is Microsoft. So as you could expect, exFAT, the extended FAT, is a stinking proprietary, secret and patented file system. There are free implementations of that shit, but it is safer to stay away from it.

Read more Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks

Installing an operating system

When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.

Read more A desktop file managers failure: writing an USB stick image