Category: linux

I use Vim almost exclusively for my text editing. Every now and again I need to get the contents of the file into the clipboard so I can paste it into something, like a browser window maybe. Highlighting with a mouse is fine for occasional use, but if you’re doing it frequently or if you need to select more than is visible on the screen it’s annoying.

There’s a handy command called xclip that lets you put things directly into the clipboard. For pasting into a browser with Ctrl-V you need to specify the right clipboard (there’s more than one), but something like this:

What I’ve found particularly useful is to write content directly to the clipboard from Vim:

Of course you can be more specific, and put ranges like numbers in if you like (this writes the six lines from line 5 to 10 into the clipboard):

It’s worth remembering that xclip needs to be able to talk to your X session to get the data in there. Not a problem locally, but if you’re running Vim remotely you need to make sure you’ve got X11-forwarding enabled over your SSH connection.

In work we use LTSP to boot up thin clients. Nothing runs locally on these thin clients, they’re used for either VNC or rdesktop access. One problem we had was that if the LTSP server was rebooted, the NBD client would lose its connection to the server and never re-establish it. This mattered because we want to be able to remotely shut down thin clients overnight.

So, we came up with a quick and dirty way of copying the root filesystem image locally to the thin client. Your thin client needs to have enough free RAM to store it all (these are diskless), and in our case the image is about 290MB while the thin clients have 1GB RAM. We don’t need much RAM for the actual system just to run X and VNC/rdesktop.

So, run ltsp-chroot, then add the following contents to a new file called /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/z_nbd :

 

It’s very simple. We’re adding a small script to the “INITial RAM FileSystem” that Linux uses in the early stages of booting up. It uses dd to pull the entire root filesystem from the LTSP server, which in practice only takes a few seconds. Then it stops the nbd-client, and moves our new local copy into the place where the rest of LTSP expects to find it.

When you’ve create the file, and still within the ltsp-chroot, run:

to rebuild the initramfs.

Finally, exit from the ltsp-chroot and from the main server run

to copy the new initramfs in the TFTP server’s path.