First of all, from my experience, raspberry needs to be powered by an ( at least ) 1A power source for the dongle to work as expected.

No drivers needed if your using RC4/Rc5. Since its a realtek chipset you can update the firmware drivers by typing:

sudo apt-get install -y firmware-realtek

Prepare your raspbmc by installing some helper packages:

sudo apt-get install -y wireless-tools wpasupplicant

Raspbmc uses NetworkManager to manage all your connections, the easiest way i found to configure the dongle was:

• Install the Network-Manager XMBC plugin
• Go to main menu and enter “Programs”
• Start Network-Manager program
• Select your network

Since i have a strange setup on my router this didn’t work ( authentication with the AP failed ) so, here is an alternate manual method:

Create a file a new file called /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/Wireless

Paste the following as content of the new file

[connection]
id=Wireless
uuid=de997907-591e-11e2-8e39-359453556e75
type=802-11-wireless

[802-11-wireless]
ssid="YOUR NETWORK SSID"
security=802-11-wireless-security

[802-11-wireless-security]
key-mgmt=none
wep-key0="YOUR WEP ASCCI PASSPHRASE"

[ipv4]
method=auto

[ipv6]
method=ignore

Edit according to your wireless network setup, you can find settings reference here: http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/developers/settings-spec-08.html

Important: the uuid setting must be unique amongst all your connections, choose an unused one

Restart your raspberry and then:

$ tail -F /var/log/syslog

Check if the interface is connecting.

If its failling just edit the config file ( /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/Wireless ) and adjust your connection settings. As soon as you save the file NetworkManager will update the connection and tries to reconnect.

I came across iperf, its a client-server command line utility that sends data between the server ( one of the machines of the pair you want to test ) and the client ( the other machine of the pair )

The usage is pretty simple, in one of the machines ( that will work as server ):

iperf -s -p 65000

On the other machine ( the client ):

iperf -c <ip of the server> -p 65000

After a few seconds:

...
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.1 sec  8.88 MBytes  7.34 Mbits/sec
...

I used several visuall-diff-editors whit the several version-control software and i currently use Meld: it’s gtk, has in-line edition ( let’s you change the working copy with a real-time diff computing ) and its “command line diff” and diff3 compatible which makes it work smoothly with version-control software.

So, for the both version-control systems that i use currently here is my setup

SVN

For a quick diff using meld just run:

$ svn diff--diff-cmd meld

For a permanent setup edit ~/.subversion/config and set the diff-cmd to meld

GIT

Write a small wrapper:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
meld $2 $5

and the just configure svn to use the wrapper as diff tool

git config --global diff.external /path/to/wrapper

For the information sitting in my laptop i don’t want traditional disaster and recovery backups, i want to be able to, quickly, search and restore any version of ( virtually ) any file.

Tthe problem? i don’t own a mac.

The principle of the thing:

Incremental backup of all the files that changed in a short period of time ( let’s say 5 minutes, apple’s time machine does it every hour ).
Create a snapshot of your laptop at the backup time, this implies being able to browse the laptop the exact same way that you browse your current file structure

My current setup:

BACKUPDIR="/backups"
DIRSTOBACKUP="/home /data"
date=`date "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"`
rsync -aP --exclude-from=~/backup.exceptions \
     --link-dest=$BACKUPDIR/current $BACKUPDIR/back-$date $DIRSTOBACKUP

cd $BACKUPDIR; rm -f current ;ln -s back-$date current