Skype little hack

As we all know, all of the sudden Micro$oft stopped to support old version of Skype. But new Linux version of skype client is buggy and glitchy.
I was able to make the skype work. Do the following. Open the file /usr/bin/skype in a hex editor (I used the Midnight Commander viewer) and search for the version number. In my case it was the string 4.2.0.11
Replace the string with 4.3.0.37 and save.
Run skype now and enter the credentials. Should connect just fine.

Speed up virtual android

To run the android emulator fast and smooth - use an x86 image with hardware visualization enabled.
To enable the virtualization: on windows, simple just install the "Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAZM)". The install package could be downloaded using the Android SDK Manager.

On Linux (Debian) make sure the following packages are installed:
qemu-kvm, libvirt-bin

To run the emulator as a kernel-based virtual machine, execute:

emulator-x86 -avd -kernel android-sdk-linux_x86/system-images/android-16/x86/kernel-qemu -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm

Pulse

In Debian squeeze videos played in the Adobe flash player had no sound.
A solution - activate the virtual "Pulse" audio driver and make it to be the default.
To do that, create file /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc with the following content:

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}

Samba server setup

Micro HOWTO.

1. Install package "samba"
2. Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf
3. In [global] add "security = share" if you want access to everyone
4. Add a section for each share by an example in the file
5. Section [homes] for autocreation a share by username if it exist in the system
6. smbpasswd creates a copy of user password. The new password must be entered and be the same as the system password.
7. Restart daemon /etc/init.d restart
8. Use testparm to monitor effective parameters

Refresh partition info

If you changed the partition table using the fdisk utility, you don't need to reboot the machine. Just enough is to run the partprobe utility from the "parted" package.

debian crashes the hard drive

On my home server which I built on an old laptop the hard drive constantly made some noises. Sad thing it's the hard drive head's parking noise. Debian parks the heads every few seconds. smartmon-tools shows, the hard drive was almost at the death door. To tell the hdparm turn off the aggressive power saving behaviour, using the following command: hdparm -B 254 /dev/hda
The noise has ceased. But I still don't know why the system access the HD so often.